Cosmic noise : Juan Downey and the postcolonial politics of Cold War communication
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- As colonial rule crumbled after World War II, a new imperial power struggle emerged with the Cold War, one waged with the science and technology of communication. In the past fifteen years, art and media historians have examined the impact of Cold War communication sciences -- cybernetics, computation, and information theory -- on dominant cultural production of the North Atlantic. They have been slower, however, to engage the aesthetic entanglements of these sciences with global processes of decolonization, modernization, and imperialism for artists hailing from the Third World. This dissertation examines the postcolonial politics of Cold War communication through a case study of artist and architect Juan Downey (1940-1993), a Chilean-born intellectual who pioneered artistic advances in architecture and communications alongside collectives such as Groupe International d'Architecture Prospective, Raindance Corporation, and MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Study in the 1960s and 1970s. Downey shared his international contemporaries' enthusiasm for designing communications architecture that could advance social utopian goals, yet he distinguished himself with the application of cybernetic principles such as feedback, systems analysis, and information transmission to artworks that interrogated and challenged colonial legacies and imperial projections in the Cold War Americas. Departing from the scholarly literature that explores his artwork in the context of the video medium, this first dissertation-length monograph on Downey contextualizes his wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice as an extension of his cybernetic view of the world. Surveying his drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, videos, installations, and performances produced between 1959 and 1979, it establishes an alternative genealogy of cybernetic and systems-based art in the formal, philosophical, and political concerns of the Chilean avant-garde of the late 1950s and 1960s and demonstrates how Downey's adaptation and application of cybernetic principles in his artworks of the late 1960s and 1970s came to dramatize the utopian ambitions and material struggles over technology and communication during the Cold War, particularly in relation to histories of imperialism and dependence and the possibilities of socialist revolution in Latin America. Positioning Downey within a field of tensions around aesthetics, techno-politics and cultural difference, this dissertation proposes the study of his work as a new perspective from which to rethink how Cold War communication technologies and discourses were mobilized to create visions of a more democratic participatory world inclusive of ways of knowing and being in the South.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Stephan, Natalie Kyle |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Lee, Pamela M |
| Degree supervisor | Meyer, Richard, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Lee, Pamela M |
| Thesis advisor | Meyer, Richard, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Levi, Pavle |
| Thesis advisor | Turner, Fred |
| Degree committee member | Levi, Pavle |
| Degree committee member | Turner, Fred |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kyle Stephan. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Natalie Kyle Stephan
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