Hippie modernism: the struggle for utopia / [First Edition.] 9781935963097

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Walker Art Ce~tPr Andrew Blauvlt

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Haight Ashbttry District of this city, Hippie, devoted son of

Mass Media Friends are invited to attend services beginniag at sunrise,

October 6, 1967 at

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Walker Art Center, H1nn eapol1s Andrew Blauvelt

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HIPPIE MODERNISM

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THE STRUGGLE FOR UTOPIA

W1th contr1bu t 1ons by

Andrew Blauvelt Oreg Castillo Esther Chol Alison J. Clarke Hugh Dubberly

Ross K. El01ne Adam 01ldar t.iz Glass David Karwan Paul Pangaro

Craig J. Peariso Catharine Rossi Tina Rivers Ryan Simon Sadler Jeffrey T. Schnapp

Pelicity D. Scott Susan Snodgrass t.orraine Wild

4

lltPele N oOernlem~ Th& St.ruul• ror Ut.oplft 1• organtted by the Walker Art Cen ~er. and eeae•bled wtt.h t.he A•el~tftnce or t.h• Untveralty or Call rornJa , llerkelny Art. Hu11eu11 and Pac1na f'tlm Arch tvo .

Valker Art Cent.er. Hlnne1pot la OoLober 2•, 201~-Pebru•rY 28, 2016

The e1h l blt.ton 11 ••de poeelble by goneroua aupport. rro• Mart.hft end Oruae A~water. t.ho Mart.tn and Brown Poundnt.ton, ano Audroy nnd Zyg1 w11r . Support. ror the e1htbttlon c~t.alogue 11 prov i ded by th~ Orah•• roundat.ton ror Advanced Sludle• tn the rsne Arte 4nd a grant. rro• t.he Andrev w. Mellon Poundat.lon tn a\Jpport. or w11kor Art. Cont.er publtoat.ton•.

UntveraltJ of Calttornsa, B•r•el•J Art Hu1eu• and Pactnc Pll• Archive ~obruory 8- H•y 21 , 2017

Publlahed on tne occaalon or tne exh1b1t1on Hipple Hoderni••i The Struaale ror Utopla, curated 'Oy Andrew Blauvelt ror the Walker Art center. Pirat Edition 12015 Wal ker Art. Center All rights reaorved under pan-American copyright convent.tone. No part or thl• publtcatton ••Y be reproduced or ut111~ed in any rorw or by any •eana vtthout peraiaaSon ln writing rro. the publtaher. Inqu1r1ee should be addreaaed to : Publicattone 01rcctor . Walker Art Center. 1750 Hennepin Avenue. Mtnneapolta. KN 55'03. •Advertisement• ror a Counter Culture• ta repr1nted rro• the July 1970 lasue or Prograeatve Archttectur&. CHanley wood Every reasonable 1lleapt hae been made to identify owners or copyright. Errors or om t aatone w111 be corrected in eubaequent edtttone. Available through O.A.P./Olatrlbuted

Art Publishers, i5S Sixth Avenue, New York. NY 10013. www.ortbook.com

Cranbrook Art Huaeua. 81oomneld Hllll, Mloh I gan Juno 19-0oLobor 9. 2016

Library or Congreaa Catalogulng-ln· Publlcatlon Data H1ppl• modernl•• : the elruggle ror utopta I Edited by Andrew Blauvelt Testa by Andrew Blauvelt, Oreg Caatillo, Esther Chol , Allaon J. Clar~e. Hugh Dubberly , Rote K. EIOlne , Ada• Olldar, Llz Olaae, Davtd Karwan, Paul Pangaro, Craig J. Pearteo. Catharine Ro1at. Tina Rivera Ryan. Simon Sadler. Jerrrey T. Schnapp, Peltelty o. Scott. Susan Snodgrass , Lorraine Wild ; Interview• wlth Ken I1aac1 [and 11 othera]. -- P1ret llclltlon. pa,ea c• Include• index. ISBN 978 - 1-935963-09·7 l. Hoaernl1m (Art)--Exhlbltlone. 2. Arts. Modern- -20th cent.ury-£1hlbttion1. 3. Counterculture-H1atory--20th century--!1hlbitton1. •. ArLe ana eoclety--Hletory-20Lh cenLury--Exhlbltlone . I. Blauvelt., Andrew. 196~ - author. editor. IJ. Caattllo, Ores. author. lit. Chol. lather, author. IV. Walker Art Center, organizer. hoat tnstttutton. v. Berkeley Art Hueeu• and Paclnc Pllm Arcn1ve. hoot 1n1tttutlon. NX•56.5.M6 ..157 2015 709.0•'607•776579··dc23 2015030230

Ht pple Modernism

Senior Curator. Deaign, Research. and Publ1oh1ng : Andrew Blauvelt oeelg.n Dtrector: Em~et Byrne Editor: Paaela John1on S~ntor Jaaglng Speclalta~: Oreg 8eckel Design Studio Manager: Aahley ourralo Curatorial Research Aaelatent: Anna Renken Photographer: Gene Pittaan Dealgn Atalatance: Hant Albornoz. Logan K~e ra Vl aual Arta Pellow: Jordan Cart•r Indexer: Candace Hyatt Printed

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Ole Keure. Belglu•

Tif P• tacee:

Cooper BT Plea 10 Pitch Holvetioa Neue Paper•: HultlOttaeL Pcdrlgonl ConotelleLlon Jade (Riccio) Magno SL or (Olou) Cover: US Pavilion tor Expo 67. deatgned by R. Buck•ln•ter Puller and ShoJ1 Sadao, erupts ln nemea, Hontroal , May 20, 1976 Back cover: Cheater Anderson (Co•/co) . " Hipple• In Halght·Alhbury,• 1967

CONTENTS 7 Acknowledgments Andrew Blauvelt

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Colophon/Credit•

Port"lword

Olge Vlao

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Prefac(.' Andrew Blauvplt

ESSAYS 15 The Barrtca~c!!l nnd~ l l i Dance Ploor: AcntheJ,.1£ Rad I ca 11 sm and--1J!!: Countercu l tur: Haus-Rucker-Co's Pneumotlc Temporality Esther Cl1ol

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"!¥''•" #"1 rll9 Although no examples were shown I could not help but conjure an arresting image in my mind. Perhaps she was thinking of a poster that documented a road trip in 1973 by fifteen students and faculty undertaken in a Winnebago from Detroit to New York..... •••• >~6> The black-and-white broadside mapped their route and a lexicon of design terms surveyed the terrain of ideas they encountered along the way. Certainly, the piece was the product of a collective process and a self-conscious method. The poster's orderly modern grid exemplified what one historian has labeled the International Typographic Style.m However, with its typewriter typography used to define terms such as architecture machine, software, "democratic" design, and design freaks, and a map masterly collaged with the cignc and symbols of the roadside vemacular-a gesture right out of Venturi and Scott Brown's Las Vegas playbook m -the project also embodied a hippie otherness. The poster, like the air inside that packed van, exuded some kind of funk. Trtled "The Cranbrook design trip,• the double entendre spoke for itself. After all, what could be more hippie than a collective road trip inside a recreational vehicle transformed into a nomadic design studio for eight days? Despite the clarity that this example o ffered, the term still contained an unre· solved dissonance: were the hippie and the modem opposing concepts or corn· plementary ones? Why does the notion of the hippie seem so estranged from mod· ernism? At first glance, the culture of the hippies evokes not the modern but the premodem and the preindustrial: an affinity for nineteenth-century pioneer dress and its agranan way of hie, v1V1dly captured in photos of rural communes; • the stylish period clothing of the V1ctorian·e'9 Wild West said to have emanated from the vln· tage clothing stores of San Francisco and the Red Dog Saloon in Nevada, an earty site o f acid rock; or its counterpart. the recurring figure of the Amencan Indian as a countercultural touchstone representing a more authentic sp1ntual connectl()ll be-

tween man and nature. «61 In these ways, the hippies anticipate the postmodern search for historical symbolism and Identity. But the hippie scene also embraced modernism's fascination with new media, materials, and technologies-taped music, synthesized sound, feedback and distortion, light effects, shde projectors, portable video cameras, television, plastics. reflec· live Mylar, and computers. ' 1 > But unlike the technocratic impulse that viewed sci· entiflc advances as intrinsically progres· sive and socially good, the hippie modern sought alternative uses for such technol· ogles. which were increasingly adapted for personal creative effect and collective betterment. For instance, video and televi· slon could fulfill its democratic potential, 8 computing could be for personal use and no longer the sole purview of military and corporate elites, 191 technology could be made appropriate for local contexts and more environmentally sound, oo> the urban environment could be rehabilitated rath· er than euphemistically renewed, < 11 1 and man and nature could be brought Into ecological balance. These ameliorations and alterations typify a reconditioning of modemity through encounters with its hippie other. In a larger context of the countercul· lure, the hippie modern sought a recuper· ation of the avant-garde's utopic dream of integrating art into everyday life. ti did so by fusing art and politics and by creating alternat111e ways of living and thus produc· ing the artifacts, rituals, and experiences that were necessary for this new life. Hippie modernism marks the tension between the modern characterized as universal, timeless, rational, and progressive, and its countercultural other, which adopts a more local, timely, emotive and often irreverent, and radical disposition. I argue that hippie modernism was a momentary reconclhatlon of these seemingly opposed values as a way of resolving the Impasse that laced postwar cultural modernitycaught between the proverbial rock of technocratic progress and a hard place of impending social disaster 1 that erupted in crisis In the 1960s and would later be very differently reconciled under the rubric of postmodernlsm In the 1970S and 1980s. The path forward In art-historical terms was split between those art1st1c movements more aligned with deeper Investigations into the increasingly essential properties of a particular medium or reductlve practices (e.g.. Abstract

ExpressK>llism, Color Field painting, M1rnmahsm) and those movements that actively sought an expanSIOO of the arts into a plurality of new forms, hybrid media, and Interactive experience (e.g .. expanded cinema. intermed1a, installation art, perlormance). I) Of these choice$, hippie modernism would follow the lat· tar course through experiments that drew upon the theatrical qualities and the participatory actions of the Happening, embraced Flux us 's democ:t"atlc spi.rit rn rts e11eryone-1s-an-artist phdosophy, explored the work of experimental filmmakers seek· Ing to expand cinematic experience, and experimented with the fluid nature of hght and sound as well as the interactive Qua!· ities of kinetic art. From Pop art rt drew its lessons about popular culture as a source of inspiration and entertainment as well as its potential for social critique and the dan· gars of market cornmodification. Despite these influences, the fate of most countercultural production was that it would be undertaken outside the disciplinary bound· arias of art-beyond its studios, galler· ies, and museums-and enacted in the public spaces and places of popular fife: in streets. parks, plazas, discos. and theaters. While advanced industrial society at mid-century continued its forward march, the 1960s' counterculture embodied a deep skepticism about modernity's technological progress in a postwar SOCtety. Seeking a promised liberation from sti· fling social conventions and oppression, it looked back to seemingly ancient or non-Western examples for spiritual and ethical guidance, explonng open SOClal networks and experimenting with collective actions in life and work. It demanded an expanded social conseienoe for alt, while pr$8Ching enlightenment and human potential through expanded forms of consciousness one person at a time. The hippie modern is not invoked to delineate a style, but rather to denote a h1stoncal moment -the creative eruption of the countercuttural period that I bracket between the Merry Pranksters' cross-country acid trip In 1964 and the OPEC 011 embargo of 1973 to 1974. which brought into dramatic relief the hmrts of Western SOC1ety's progress and geopokt· real power From the thnlhng promtse of a post-scarcity society to the sobenng real· lty of a stalled economy. the decade unfolded With dramatie speed but concluded

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like so many kfed cars queued at the gas pump. By evoking the word hippie, I do not m.ean to suggest that all or even any of the artists In the exhibition setf·ldenUfled with the tenn or would have descnbed them.selves as one. The hippie was and re· molna a highly mediated figure, one used rhetorically within this project as the same kind of empty signifier to which accreted many different agendas. Or, as the Diggers once said, the hippie was Just another con· venlent "bag" for the "ldent1ty·hungry to climb ln.· 11 • I adopt the term hlppJe mod· emlsm as a convenient art·hlator1cal bag with which to gather and Identify various countercultural remnants. By doing so. I risk a slmllar co-option that the Diggers tried to burn and bury In their "Death of Hipple" event to cleanse Halght-Ashbury of Its Insipid cornmerclallsm. " .. " ' " >1• 1 However, my objective Is to contest that t ote by draWlng attention to this llminal period between an lncraaslngly Insular high n'IOCl«nlsm that furtherec;I the cause of art's autonomy In society and an emergent nipple modernism that engaged new fonms and experimental practices that drew upon the early modern avant·garde'a desire to dissolve art Into life. The period under consideration Is a nlstoncal transition from one epoch to an· other. from an 1ndustnal to a post1ndustri· al society and from a culture of an ossified nigh modernism to a nascent postmodernlsm. Because of this transitory status and Its rejection of disciplinary bound· arias. the counterculture. until very recently, existed in the margins of so many art, architectural, and design histories. 11 ~ This project foregrounds such practoc.s and excavates such h1S1orles.

The modern conjures the figure of the machine as its preferred metaphor-a creation of man but with no trace of the hand, all smoothness and refinement, an abstraction of labor and en efficient, if 1nchfferent, labor·saVlng devtce-sorneth1ng apart from nature By contrast, the hippie evokes not the machine but the body-sensual and emotive-connecting man to nature. a direct rather than a distant connection wherein man and na· lure are part o' a snared cybernetic sys· tom. If the modern was the hardware, then the hippie was the software-offering o now oporohng ayatem for "$paGe,.h1p Eortn.""'' It Is the colhsJOn of these ph1losophoes aid aesthetics that defines the project's center of gravity, the ten· ~Ion between the hippie ond the modern.

Despite any differences, both movements shared a similar desire to sweep aside convention and to "start from zero.· In this way they both can be said to be In search of a utopia: whether technological, social, or political. In the modern. the new wants to be Invented without history, ex nl· nllo--out of nothing-zero. With the hippie It must be recaptured, relearned, r&bool· ad-a return to renewed beginnings-a different kind of zero. As Tom Wolfe, who had famously chronicled Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' escapades in The E:tectric Kool·Ald Acid Test of 1968, atfinms In his essay "The Great Relearning":

ing up recipes for modern hVlng strucn.es. whether plasbe and inflatable or wooden and modular. 101 1try to deetpiler the message of the acid rock poster, hs vibrating palette a Josef AlberS color e>.ercise ~· 10 Quote Dave Hickey. "backwards- inside out, too much. and eKactly wrong.""" I read the paperbacks of Marshall McLuhan, Buckmlnster Fuller. and Jerry Rubin, whose countercultural Ideas are not locked up in dutiful text blOCks on GlAenberg's press bed but releaSed onto Quentin Fiore's fluid, cinematoc pages-an ironIC testament to the fact that the revolution wasn't televised as much as it was printed. t111 1au·

The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside al codes and re· stralnts of the past and start out from zero. At one point the novet1st Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pll· grim.age to Stonehenge with the Idea ot returning to Anglo-Saxon clvlhza· lion's point zero, wnlch he figured was Stonehenge, and needing out all over again to do It better.... This process, namely the relearning-fol· lowing a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero-seems to me 10 be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in Amenca. .,,, It is this utoplc Impulse that gives the countercuhura Its radical edge and avant-garde position. The Interplay of the hippie and Iha modern can be gleaned in various ways throughout the exhibition- through tts process, appearance, and politics. I see the hippie in the patchwor1< assembly of Drop City's handcrafted "zomes• and the mod· ern in their avant-garde notion of creating a community to Integrate art and life. I recognize the concept In Victor Papanek and George Seegers's "tin can radio," a dung-fueled receiver for the developing world - which fascinated the faculty at the Ulm School In Germany, successors to the Bauhaus. but who W8111 nevertheless repelled by It s antl-aestl!etic form and the decorative cozies knitted by Its local owners. ' "• •••• ,.., I'm reminded of today's networked culture In the powerful collag· es of Superstudlo's Supersurface-a cybernetic grid of modernism enveloping the world, Its hippie lnhablants living happily In a •world without objects.• 1111 1... •••• " " I can 1.-m through doing-a f11v01• 1te trope of the count81Culture that aought to free education from the tyranny of schoolfng ot 1-by making my own apaoea from the plethora of "oookbooks" offerH1ppte Hodernt••

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wondrous images of John Whrtney's tech· nlcally sophisticated films, whose micro and macro compositions evoke the sacred geometries of a more 11melesS cosmolog· teal order. ••• t••• 1 I wander ttvough Helen and Newton Hamson's sensuous cybernetic orchard of fruit treeS under grow lights, While recalling Rk:llard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over by Mac/'unes of Loving Grace."1'1> 1"• •••• l"' In these and In other projects in the exhibition, unplicit and eKpllcit critiques of modernity are made manif est in the work and 1n our shared experience of them decades later. "Tum On. Tune In, Drop Out" Using Timothy Leary's famous dictate to "turn on, tune in, drop out." the exhibition is loosely organized around these concepts. Attributed to Marshall McLuhan, the phrase is both a counterctJtural clich6 and a handy, but rough, chronicle of the period's evolution. As sueh, the first section explores the notion of expanding indMdual consciousness ttvougn aherad states of perception-whethef through the pharmacologlcally Induced aCld tnp or its drugless approximation via technologlcal or spiritual means, for instance: the psychedelic canvases of Isaac Abrams. the optical apparatus of Haus-RuckerCo. or the mechtatlll8 quality of USCO. 1118 second section, "tune in." explores the notion of socaal aWlnneSS

and COiiective COOSCIOUsness and BC· lion, wrth particular attention paid to the role of books, magazines, posters. and prints as more dernocrotlc modes of cul· tura.I production and objects more easily circulated through society, lnckJding: the weaponlzed Pop graphics of Corita Kent or In the tlmety missives 01 En-ory Douglas, the Black Panther Patty'• fTlllllster of culture; the immerawe media chamber of Ken lsaacs's Know1edge Box. wrth Its projected Images culled from popular maga-

zines of the postwar image bank; or one of the most widely circulated and successful books of the counterculture, Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, which served to connect a far-flung community in common purpose and purchase. m' Third, the "drop out" is addressed through a diverse range of refusals, which often explore the pitfalls and potentials of technology and nature, such as: Drop City, the Iconic artist colony turned countercultural commune; the proposed nomadic community of Ant Fanm's Truckstop Networl< and their roaming Media Van, 12~1 which refused the destiny of networ1< television in favor of portable video; or the recycling of Evelyn Roth, who wove new environments wholly out of the detritus of society's discarded videotape and thrift store sweaters. Radical architects and anti-design proponents refused the high modernism of 1960s and design's conventional practice and lack of social engagement. In the words of Adolfo Natalini, one of the founders of Superstudio: "If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of bourgeois model of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities ... until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then, design must disappear. We can live without architecture. • 1>61 Victor Papanek harbored equal disdain for product design that only served the wants and desires of consumers rather than the real needs of all people: "It is about lime that industrial design, as we have come to know it, should cease to exist. As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial ' toys for adults,' killing machines with gleaming tail fins, and 'sexed up' shrouds for typewriters, toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to exist." 127 1 In Stuart Hall's discussion of Leary's famous phrase, he rightly points out its mechanistic metaphors: one turns on a device like a TV or a radio and we tune in a channel or a program . Tuning in is channeling one's inner-self while being attuned to the lives of others. As Hall relates: "There is, as the phrase suggests, more than one 'channel of perception' through which we experience the world. The trouble with straight society is it that it is tuned in to the 'wrong station' and thus getting the wrong message or signal." 1281 To "drop out" is to refuse to participate in the or-

ganlzed rituals of nonmalive society-its schools, its military, its economy, and so on-in essence, ils way of life. This kind of nonparticipation, however, is too often seen as socially passive and politically apathetic. This project seeks to counter this common misperception of the counterculture's slacker ambiance, preferring to understand its disengagement as an active form of disavowal. Because it looked beyond modern industrialized Eurocentric viewpoints In matters of spirituality, healing, and technology to other places such as India or Africa, or back In time to the American West of nineteenth-century pioneers or to fin de siecle Vienna in matters of style, the counterculture harbored the kind of tendencies that would later de· fine the stylistic eclecticism and historical nostalgia of postmodernism. For the most part, the search elsewhere was not a matter of reviving ear~er historical styles as it would be for postmodernism, rather it was a spatial and temporal displacement In the present day to a contemporaneous world of agrarian peasant practices, vernacular building methods, "third world" technologies, and the like.:m In other words, one did not have to look back into history for premodern, non-Western precedents but rather could find them coexisting alongside advanced industrial society in the present-not at its center, but at its margins. Utopia Now If the exhibition is about a relatively brief moment in time, it is not ultimately limited to this era. For every historical example, there seems to be a contemporary corollary. In fact, so much contemporary art and culture can trace its roots to the themes and movements of this period, whether the pedagogical experiments of a socially practiced art, the speculative and open-ended nature of a more participatory and socially impactful design, the discourses of sustain· ability and resilience in architecture and design, or the harvesting of once radical and visionary Ideas Into the image banks of contemporary practitioners. Hippie Modernism is a Janus-faced figure, one side facing forward and looking ahead and the other side facing backward and looking behind. But looking at what? Conventionally, we would say that one sees the future and the other the past. However, they both see the future not simply projected from the current reality forward but one shaped and altered by this backward and forward looking glance-a transfigured vision that holds a utopic poH1pple Hooern 1am

tential. It seems unlikely though as the fu· ture is always ahead of us, or so we are told, just on the horizon. It challenges, among other things, the idea of that which is in front of us is Intrinsically positive and progressive, while that which is behind us is inherently negative or regressive. Technology Is constantly presented as a future proposition, one that Is In front of us but can also appear as if out of nowhere, out of the blue, beyond our field of vision-even from behind us.ooi Technology is portrayed as within our grasp, Just as Andre Lerol-Gourhan conceived that evolution coincides with technological evolution: as humans stand upright on two feet, they free their hands for grasping and their faces for communicating.CJ• l Thus. humans are free to fabricate extensions of their bodies and senses through the tools and technologies that remake them and project them forward. In this historical moment of the hippie modern, the Janus figure sees the future both in front of him and behind him. However, in the hippie modern every step forward recalls a turning backnot a step backward, but a return to that moment when humans originated their technological selves. It is this forward and backward glance that bends or alters the seemingly inevitable trajectory of a relentless forward-facing, technocratic progress. Utopia, like any tool, is conjured from a future but it is destined to remain just out of reach of the technological self. This unresolvable conundrum defines the struggle. Nearly a decade before those fifteen Cranbrook students and faculty piled into their Winnebago, Ken Kesey and his acid-fueled Meny Pranksters drove their wildly painted school bus across America. Their bus was named Further, which describes a position beyond one's current location but without directional bias. Even a half-century later, we still ask: are we any further? Such is the question of a hippie modernism. Notes

( l ) Looaine Wild. "Transgression and Deli ght: Graphic Design at Cranbrook, • In The New Cranbrook Design Discourse, ed. Hugh Al9i "*'I on Ito v u l - - ,_.,es of air and soil. .. c:orrmltod

for our safely foots security and peace,"'_...., lrom enn1h~atooo onty by the care, the work, Ind, f W>I My, the love we g"'e OU' lreglle etalt • Alb&-! Roland RoChotd W11$on, and MICna.I RahlH. eds • Nila/ St..,.,._,oflheUnnectNations. f900-11165(Manola.

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( 26 ) Adolfo Nltllono. lectl#e at the Atchotect\nl Assooat.on. l.cndon. 3, 1971. t - · e d . JuUan Nagel (London ~n Press. 1969), 173. ( 29 > For one - . i of such eJeec:t1 {Cambridge. MA. Mff " ' - . 11193)

... The Barricade and the Dance Floor: Aesthetic Radicalism and the Counterculture

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In HjOfVatdur Harvatd Amason's sweeping sutvey History of Modem An. first published 1n 1968. a bnef entry on psychedelic art completes his six-hundred-page tome. It seems a fitting way to conclude the book's march through modernism, focusing as it does on the au courant style of the moment. As Amason explains, "The recent appearance of paych.clolic nrt m3y be accounted for on several ways· the easy ava•labohty and enormously increased use or psychedelic drugs: the m1 Larsen concludes, "However non-conformist and immerslve these were, the counterculture was generally indifferent towards the art concept and reified art in its aesthetlclsation of everyday life." 1• » The counterculture was too preoccupied inventing a new world of cultural experiences and social ntuals-acid rock music; guerrilla or street theater; anarchic literature; Eastern-infused spintuality; freestyle dancing, "de-schooling" and the free university; androgynous fashion and hairstyles, including flying the long hair of one's "freak flag"; gathenngs

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rock and fashion scenes." " " For Larsen, who has since written extensively on the subject, psychedelia marks a limit con· d1t1on for art In its rejection or exclusion from both the "art market and academ· le dogma." " Unlike Pop art, which was steeped 1n the gallery and museum systems for promotJon and sales and drew upon popular culture as its point of reference and departure, psychedelia developed its own subcuhure and thrived In the commercial marketplace of Its own fashioning, eventually generating enough useful symbolism to be exploited by mainstream sciciety. Unlike M inimalism and Conceptualism, which were Virtual· ly fO In this seemingly awkward yet poetic conflation. Marcuse merges acts of political resistance and cultural pleasure. It is a contradictory set of circumstances but one that sutures the larger rift between the era's New Left political commitment-those manning the barricades. marching in the streets-and the hippie's commitment to •make love. not war." The barricade defines a point of contact between opposing parties. a marker of competing physical forces and a symbolic political act to either build one or topple one. It conjures indelible pictures of civil rights marchers facing down fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, helicopters d ispersing tear gas onto students on

Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, or the overturned cars on the streets of Paris. e• t The dance floor by contrast is a commons. a mingling or mixing of bodies, a mass choreography of individuals moving to a common soundtrack, and in this era, against a liquid light show pulsng in sync

m,..

wrth the fluidity of the crowd. It evokes the hallucmatory chaos of the Trips Festival, the disco-cum-radical architecture program of Space Electronic in Florence, " ' • · •> or the jubilation on the muddy fields of Woodstock. Barricades define a disci· ptlned urban battlefield while the dance floor defines an anti-disciplinary hedonistic playground. These distinct conditions and spaces appear irreconcilable. However, in a spirit of the age that will presage the postmodern, it is not about reconciling opposites but rather comecting disparate notions: not this or that, culture or poli· tics, but rather this and that , culture and politics. This would seem to contradict the received wisdom of the era that saw the activities of the self-professed freaks of the counterculture as essentially nonpolit· ical from the perspective of the New Left. The two major factions of the countercul· ture, the politicos and the hippies, would eventually be joined In the figure of the yippie, whose most prominent spokes· persons Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman adopted theatrical antics such as trying to elect a pig for president, tossing dollar bdls onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange causing the traders to scramble for the cash, organizing a protest against the Vietnam War staged as an attempted levitation of the Pentagon, or handing out copies of the Declaration of Independence when subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. • 01 The creation of the Youth International Party and its yippie events and actions was a self-conscious manipulation of the media, ciever1y staging dissent in ways that would gamer press attention, with the ultimate goal of radicalizing the hippie. The same impulse to inject a critical dimen· sion and social consciousness into the hippie scene guided the San Francisco's Diggers, who rejected the increased commercialization of the Halght·Ashbury community through pronouncements such as the "death of hippie, son of media," while at the same heralding the "birth of the free" with their distribution of froo food and meals or the creation of a free store as tangible examples of modeling what they called a "post-competitive" society. ••• ,., .. 2u-21· The merger of politics

and culture can also be gleaned even earlier 1n Amsterdam's anarchist Provo movement (1964-1967), who in their series of "white plans," for instance, called for free bicycles painted white and the elimination of cars In the city center (White Bicycle Plan); 1rt1 101 argued for squatting rights to unoccupied properties, which would be painted white, to solve the city's housing shortage (White

Housing Plan); and proposed to fine and stigmatize air polluters by painting factory smokestacks white (White Chimney Plan). ... • • •• " 81 The success of the Proves In leveraging public sympathy and me· die attention would prove Influential to the counterculture In the United States. These groups and others such as the Black Panthers espoused not only a radical politics but also embodied an aesthetic radicalism, which pemieated all aspects of their lives: language, cloth· ing, hair, ways of living, ways of coming together, and a theater of social actionsin effect, they performed polltlca, not at the ballot box but in the street . Marcuse recognized the revolutionary potential In the aesthetic radicalism of the counter· culture, noting in a lecture In London: There is in the Hippies, and especial· ly In such tendencies In the Hippies as the Diggers and the Provos, an inherent political element-perhaps even more so In the U.S. than here. It is the appearance indeed of new instinctual needs and values. This experience is there. There Is a new sensibility against efficient and insane reasonableness. There is the refusal to play the rules of a rigid game, a game which one knows is rigid from the beginning, and the revolt against the compulsive cleanliness of puritan morality and the aggression bred by this puritan morality as we see it today in Vietnam among other things. Ste JenckS""' cr..uun. Artl>tec'"'9

221

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I 3• l SM Ptltt Bomttton and Mble has become the symbol par excel ence of the •1mmunolog1cal project" 1n

the history of Western metaphysics. The critical operation of the sphere, Sloterd11k argues, lies precisely in its ability to remain isolated, incubated, and hermetically sealed from its surroundings; immunity in the form of the interior is our most "natural" state. J > This position would reinforce the dominant associations and interpretations of the bubble's closed recalcitrance as a countercultural symbol of utopia. But if we were to engage in a closer reading of the bubble's material and technical operations, might we extract other interpretations of the inflatable's critical operations? By probing the soft yet pressurized logic of their bubbles, domes, and lungs within institutional contexts, this essay will propose that Haus-Rucker-Co's inflatables elided the negational model of rebellion we have come to associate with the avant-garde, producing, instead, a more nuanced and pliant framewor11 for resistance that positioned novelty and tradition, ephemerahty and monumental-

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By 1968, the motif and matenal1ty of a1t had pervaded the fields of art, armtecture, and the popular 1mag1nahon at large. The June 1968 issue of Architectural Des.gn titled "Pneu Wor1d," which catalogued a vanety of pneumatic appltca!Jons spanning from the aeronautics 1ncustry and manna technologies to nomadic satet ·te structures and inflatable fJmlture, underscores how the aesthetic d 1mens.ons of this technology weo.~ond-1163-llM

boned as an "isolation chamber" for visual and acoustic stimuli; Drizzler, a rotating disc affixed to a PVC visor, created the effect of perceptual displacement; while a patterned lens called the BlfckzerstlJuber (Viewatomlze" operated as a Claude glass to soften the impressions of one's surroundings. These sensory experiments continued at the scale of air-supported Strve1ures resembling lungs, eggs, and ventncles. In Ballon fiir Zwei (Balloon for Two) (1967). Connexion Skin (Connection SJan) (1967-1988), and Ge/bes Herz (Yellow Heart) (1968), 1o. . ••c• 18>1 human-scale pods and womblike enclosures functioned as catalysts for the production of social relations based on. shared

bodily experiences. Like living organisms, these inflatable structures responded to participants' movements In real time. The political potential of these aforementioned projects stemmed from their ability to effect a rapid rate of change through physical and sensory interaction, which ran counter to the sedate, monumental edifices of modern architecture they so despised. Institutional Airs

As an alternative to traditional modes of architectural practice enmeshed in the restraints of client demands, stylistic debates. and bureaucratic protocols, installaAtmoapherea or Instttutlonal Critique

hons in exhibition and event-based formats ottered the collective a means to ex.penment with novel constructt0n techniques. unorthodox matenals, and Impermanent forms. Their translation of architectural concepts and expenences into more compact spatial formats was symptomatic of the increasing populanty of Installation art and total environments at this time, not only for artists but also for architects-a development that, for architecture, evolved from its history with exhibition design. r"' By extension, as formats which typically rehed on support from institutional platforms, these young architectural collectives often leveraged channels of cultural funding, gallenes, 1nstrtutions, and media otherwise available to artists, 1n order to sustain their unconventional practices. Yet in contrast to the libidinal excess of this pneu world, an atmosphere of discontent with social and political constraints had become an unrelenting situation and unavoidable topic for artists and architects alike. For many conceptual artists during this period, the networks and operations of the art Institution, which provided the necessary "running room" for architects, became synonymous with hegemony. Their appraisal of the art Institution's unmet promise since the Enlightenment to unite aesthetics with the public sphere formed the basis of inst itutional critique, an artistic practice which challenged the Institution's commitment to public exchange by drawing attention to the reality of Its social relations. 5> A number of artists associated with institutional critique Including Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, and M ichael Asher, participated alongside HausRucker-Co in the factious fifth installment of Documenta, organized by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. The outpour of hostility from participat ing artists directed at the museum's protocols and Szeemann•s own curatorial infractions resulted in artistic expressions of discontent articulated through a variety of site-specific interventions. Climate 3: Sleep, and Climate 4: Sterilization Room. Nested within these areas was a control room for acoustics, a conservatory. and conference rooms. Mhough Haus-Rucker-Co had already coffered the building from its environment, human-scale inflatable structures further bagged and shielded spaces 1nSlde the museum from pathogenic elements. Climate 2: Breathing Zone, for example, consisted of a transparent, inflatable rectangle suspended above a platform base. Participants entered this "atmosphere" by Inserting their heads 1n holes placed in the underside of the structure, which recreated the altitude and chmate of a mountainous region. Llkewise, subjects could partake in business conferences In individual plastic capsules with audio transmitters. consume meals in amniotic pods, and have sex In oxygenated bags. Despite the symbolic association between spheres and wombs. the recreation of

Fig. 12

39

these virtual atmospheres was not the birth of a new, radical vision; instead, the bubble's conjugal power was replaced by its ability to vacuum and sterilize. Just as the bubble's formal pleasures were encumbered by its immunological imperative, any amusement produced by this spectacle was canceled by the threat of entrapment. An earlier drawing entitled The Undertaker (c. 1970-1971) presented a dramatic postscript to the suffocating limits of insulation: an architectural space, submerged underground, usin9 an air filtration system as its only connection to the oulside world. "If people don't take Cover seriously, maybe we'll have to go underground to get away from the mess we've made, after all," pondered Burns. "Build buildings deep below the surface, with powerful service Installations close by to filter air, bring some of the things we remember and probably need to keep from getting spaced out from claustrophobia . ... Can all this happen?"CJ' > Through HausRucker-Co's forceful immunization and encapsulation via the bubble-turned-bell

jar, the sterility of the museum environment was equated with self-entombment.ert

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article suggests that at least some local "kids" had found inner peace, through a visceral antimaterialism that echoed his Asian discoveries-an appropriate connection given Beat culture's own interest in Eastern spirituality. "~> This Janus-faced interest in Eastern and Western alterities was central to Sottsass's practice for at least the next

own immediate Western present. He

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identified the East-h1stoncally potent to the West's onentallzing gaze-as an "other" that was located 1n a more authentic, earlier existence. ' This cojomed geographical and temporal displacement and Onentahst gaze expresses a prim1tiv1sm that was persistent throughout the Radicals-and the whole modern avant-garde.' Published in November 1962. Sottsass's article on Indian temples has a particular resonance. It was written from a hospital bed in Palo Alto, California, where he was receiving treatment for nephritis, a serious kidney illness probably contracted while travelling . His friend and employer Roberto Olivetti paid for his treatment,0 21 which was at the time Incurable in Italy. Sottsass's sickbed contemplations were clearly colored by his Eastern experiences: "the city of the bay, full of anxious kids searching for that same idea of life ... that same all-round calm, that , perhaps, the India of collapsed stone temples found some centuries ago." '' It was during his convalescence that Sottsass visited the Beats' homes. encounters made possible through Pivano's translation of wnters 1nclud1ng Wilham Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. • Sottsass's Domus

From his sickbed came Room East 128 Chronicle, an independent magazine coproduoed with Pivano that featured an eclectic mix of articles on his illness, observations on Amenca's pop culture, weather forecasts, and puzzles. 16 " • While the magazine only ran to three issues, its lega· cy endured in East 128, a publishing house the pair established on returning to Miian at the end of 1962. Operating untll 1970, its output included translations of "ancient Indian texts," books on non-Western philosophies, poetry by Michael McClure and Philip Whalen, and in 1967 Pianeta Fresco (Coo/ Planet), a two-issue magazine based on the San Francisco Oracle with Ginsberg as "Direttore lrresponsablle" (Mis-chief Editor) and Sottsass as "Capo dei Giardini (Garden Manager), which was his version of art director. Plvano was "Direttore Resonsabile" (Editor-In· Chiel). m H "•· l > It would also appear in the prints and photographs that Sottsass would increasingly focus on in the 1960s and 1970s, such as 1972's The Planet as Festival series of lithographs, which depicted a work-free wor1d of reawakened consciousness, a liberated existence fueled by unlimited supplies of incense, drugs. and laughing gas. ••• , .,. a

It first manifested in publishing.

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These countercultural vibrations weren't just felt on paper. Sottsass marked his illness and subsequent recovery through designing two ceramics collections, 1963's somber Ceram 1che d1 Tenebre (Ceramics o f Darlcn ess) and 1964's bnghter hued Ceram1che d1Shiva (Ceramics o f Shiva ) Made by Italian form B1toss1. their pnmary forms. elemental patterns, and strong colors are more restrained versions of the Raymor ceramics As Jan Burney describes 1n her biography of the architect, the latter should be seen as symbols ·not only (of) his f1beration from illness but also the social freedoms embraced by the h1pp1es and the freedom from Western materialist Ideology that he had found in India • Sottsass not only saw the East as more authentic and origlnary but also as a more sensu al culture. This was most explicit in 1968's phallic Tantra ceramics. named after AJit Mookerjee 's 1966 Tantra Art. a copy of which Ginsberg had given the architect. ' 1 Sottsass 's search for a more meaningful design language d idn't exclude the language of mass culture. This was evident in furniture such as the Superboxes, a series of totemic wardrobes on temple like plinths, their surfaces covered in culturally cheap plastic laminates 1n Pop art colors - the architect admired both the material and movement tor their democratic associations. ' The Superboxes first appeared as small-scale modets in Domus m 1966, photographed tn the mod die of miniature rooms that were eitne' empty or accessonzed with doll hou,~ props- to suggest a full-size ex1s· tence-h1s versions of the trashcans uf the San Francisco homes. ' " ' • Sottsass and P1vano promoted cross-countercultural connections m oth er ways. In December 1966 they moved into a flat together in central Milan. where they hosted visitors including writers Kerouac and Ginsberg, poets, anarchists, and artists. By now, Sottsass even looked suitably countercultural . "Long hair, earrings, bells on his feet" was how fellow Radical Andrea Branzi recalled Sottsass on their first encounter: "he and Nanda (Plvano) were perfect hippies." 2 J 1 They typified the cape/Ion/ (longhairs). or hippies. who had started appearing alongside Beatniks In Italy at this time. • Although marginal in comparison to the American context, this emergence of Beats and hippies spoke of the nse of the counterculture 1n Italy. The year 1967 saw the first large anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Milan and Rome. ' By 1968, uprisings. factory and university occupa-

• Superarchitecture

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ng a ·cns.s of the object" cllaractenzed by a •growing SUSptCtOn ol the object tor oonsump!IOl'I • Instead of designing IP"Oducts. they were design structures And goods for communal 11$41 or creating uto-

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p1an visions that were •cntoe1sms o f, and alternatives t o, the present Cond•tions • Here M enna pins down what was specific about Radical Design's utoptas they W«e what he and Ambasz called •negatrve• utop1Bs. which exaggerated end so l)OSlted the eradoeation of what was problemat. ic on then ex.ISiing sooety as a necessary step 111 ordet to bu Id II anew Nomad1sm, No Objects, and Superstud10

llOl\S, stnkes, and protests had spread

throughout Italy's maior urban centers, a pl1nlostte antiauihoritarianism that culmi· nated 1n 1969's explos.ve ca/do autunno (hot autumn). • Italy experienced a Ion· ge.-. deeper, and more extens.ve social movement than rts European and Amertean counterpartS, an extremism that would de· scend Into domestic terrorism on the anni d1 prombo (years of lead) of the 1970s. •"" The impact of this broader conies· tatory climate on the Radicals was most evident on the shifts that occurred In the avant-garde by the 1970s. This second wave of Rad1Cal1sm saw a d1verstftea· bon of the "other" cultures that they weasl, the two-part show document·

ed Italian design's postwar ascendancy, celebrated both for its commercial prow· ess and what Ambasz called il$ architects' •cntlCal consctOUsness, •which he saw as lament abfy absent 1n America's post ·Ulopt· an architecture. Sottsass's Superboxes were shown 1n the "Objects• sec1ion, a display of furn1sh1ngs and products from the previous decade organized by their degree of criticality towards conven· tional design forms and functions."" Sottsass was also present in the " Environments• section, which consist· ed of built prototypes and designs on paper for future domestterty, comm1s·

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utopia people "live with ... and not for objects,· whose magical, mythical, and sacred functions so enabled a more "direct experience of reallty.•O» With this two-fold negative utopianism Superstudlo offered a return to what French literary theorist Roland Barthes called a "degree zero," the Idea of a clean slate ripe for renewal that was popular among the Italian avant-garde more broadly.'l8> The Installation's visuals most strongly communicated Superstudio's vision. Tiiied Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on Earth, the film combined footage of actors frolicking in the Italian countryside with animated photomontages that were also printed in the catalogue. '••• •••• 110 The latter have a strong family resemblance. Most consist of a photographic cutout of an individual or group, pasted over a perspectival grid superimposed over passing pastel clouds. In most images the grid recedes into another cutout - of mountains, cliffs or other natural barriers. This was not only a "life without objects• but, without work and buildings too; in their "alternative model for life on earth," architecture would gradually d isappear and be replaced by an ever~xpanding grid for a world in which •nomadism becomes the permanent condition:cm There was significant interest in nomadism among experimental architects internationally in the late 1960s and 1970s. 1••> It was so strong in Italy that Radical architect Ugo La Pietra even suggested "nomadism" as an alternative name for the movement. 1" 1 Superstudio's appropriation of the motif can be divided broadly along design and architectural lines. On the one hand it expressed a particular relationship with material things. As designers James Hennessey and Victor Papanek described in their two volumes of Nomadic Furniture, published in 1973 and 1974, and which

the overcrowded and oppressive reality of Italy's housing. Eventually though even this architecture would disappear; only the grid would remain, conceived here as a network to evenly distribut e energy and information throughout the environment " The grid was a persistent SuperstuplBnlSm was d•rected at redesigning thw architectural selves. They beloeved that thecr crea\lve skills had been "atrophied in our work-dorected society" and thus they were unable to Imagine or expenence real alternatives to their existing society In this turn mward, Global Tools ewiced the Radicals' 1ncreas1rig desperation, seeking t o implement the societal renewal that they had Slll not achieved. ' As recounted 1n the two issues of the Global Tools &J/lerin published 1n 1974 and 1975, they proposed a number of activities to rernew themselves and their profession. 1 ••• • . , . ' ' They spllt 1nto five groups (the body, constructJOn, commuNCBtiOn. survival, and theory) to conduct research and cxganize actMties ranging from SuperstudoO and Gruppo 9999's "self-anttvopology" prof8CI and a boat tnp down the Rhine River to worlatt Sttssss Jnr. ~. c1) "Nuove Ceramlcte," Oomus (March 1957): ~9; see also Sparke, ErtM Sottuss Jnr. 37. C8) Ettore Sottsass, 'Vloggio o Orietlte: Prima puntata, Birmania," Domus (June 1962}: 37-38. ( 9) Ettore SottMs.s, "Viaggio a Ooente: Ill puntata: templi In India.· Domus (November 1962): 45.

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•I - - Tofurt, Hostoty ol Ulll>lltl Ne,......... lt The SDO's symposium audience and speakers consisted of a varied and interdisoplinary crowd, drawn from corollary design disciplines such as engineering and pedagogy, with the intention of carving out the possibility of a design practice that looked beyond the paradigm of the profit-driven market. With around twenty-five local and international speakers, lectures shifted from presentations to infonmal open-ended discussions and heated debates, some continuing into the early hours of the morning and others consciously Inverting the student-expert power relation through their lnfonmality. Divisions among design, research, technology, architecture, and pedagogy were suspended. The UK-based Design Research Unit (a user-oriented design consultancy) spoke, for example, alongside architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, who addressed the audience with his lecture titled "The Organization of Design Pattern." Engineer Graham Whitehead considered the issue of "System Ergonomics: The Human Factor in Complex System Design," alongside world-renowned Finnish designers such as Kaj Franck and Antti Nunmesniemi, keen Altaon J. Cl arke

to support a transdlsciplinary agenda. The choice of Fuller and Papanek as keynote speakers for the SDO internatlonal event was undoubtedly Inspired by intellectual curiosity, but it was also a calculatedly provocative gesture aimed at the Cold War sensltMlies of "the establishment." Fuller was already established as a Visionary thinker and inventor of the blosphen!, while Papanek was familiar among the organizers as an advocate a social design due to his attendance of FiMish cultural events in the mld-1960s. Most significantly, as a duo, Papanek and Fuller offered the dual advantage of representing the United States Qn the formal sense of their citizenship) while simultaneously undermining their nation's standing through their critical oratory stytes and social, humanitarian, and ecological agendas. c6 1 Thay had also both attended the founding SDO event in Helsinki in 1967, addressing the issue of "Working Environment," so were strong allies of the cause.c7 1 Fuller held forth for three hours on his "Wor1d Resources lnventOty" project, ' "•· 1 >while Papanek addressed issues such as the "Human needs and [the] Designer" and "The Needs of the Underdeveloped and Backward Areas,• railing against the crimes of corporate design and weaving in to his discussions condemnation of the Vietnam War 111 ms n Papanek's inflammatory tone chimed with a youthful, feisty audience: I would like some day to have a knife, a pwkko [traditional Finnish belt knife]. and meet the gentleman who decided in some advert.islng agency twenty-five years ago that soap and detergent should make a lot of foam. Because that man is responsible for a great deal of pollution in our rivers and streams and even our oceans by now, the fact of the matter is how much foam you get has nothing to do with how well something washes. So when you make major design mistakes, you make them on a global scale."> The creation of a portable reindeer abattoir encapsulated the audaciousness of the organizers' ambitions. The result of an on-site transdlscipllnary workshop led by Finnish student Esko Miettinen and oveiseen by Fuller, the prototype addressed socioeconomic issues head-on: adopting design as an overtly political tool. The structural principles of Fuller's ExPO 1967 geodesic dome were crudely applied to a scaled-down model of a mobile slaughterhouse with the effect of resembling a

Fig. 2

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Joseph Beuys-style radical eco-sculpture rather than a socially useful design. Recent top-down government policy devised m hne with the Increasing industrialization of meat production in Finland forced the Sarni people (whose semi-Nomadic reindeer herding underpinned their livelihood and traditional way of life) to adhere to unfeasibly stnct regulations based on static methods of cattle slaughter. The design. a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempt at designing for social purpose. respo nde By the 1960s, technological revolution and global communication stood at the forefront of Cold War d scourse. Despite the United States' victory over the USSR in the so-called Space Race, international focus on the student protests against the Vietnam War and US racial segregation Intensified; the need for soft diplomacy aimed at a liberal cultural elite, occupying the crucial geopolitical site of Europe's nearest Soviet neighbor, intensified. In his exploration of Cold War 1960s political activism, historian Nick Rutter has described the importance of understanding how the "internationalist sensibilities" of youth movements were mediated and made

complex by national specificities. "The youth" of 1968 are too often understood as a "collective noun, oriented against the state, the parents, the Cold War but not against itself," he argues. 118 > Comparative and transnational histories have more recently begun to address the complexities of Leftist and progressive counterculture movements of the 1960s, commonly described by historians as a dissonant decade. The rise in youth activism and youth movements across Europe shared common threads of discontent purportedly borne of intergenerational conflicts, but were nevertheless deeply entrenched In the specifics of localized and broader macro-politics. It is perhaps no coincidence then, that the Suomenllnna activists arranged their design symposium four years after Helsinki had served as a "neutral" venue for the 1962 Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students. The festival had rendered the city and Its youth the focus of lntonso Cold War International relations. Along with KGB and CIA presence, Helsinki In 1962 saw the strongest presence of US citizens and representatives of developing nations In its history; it Is also this period that is broadly recognized as defining the beginning of youth radicalism In Finland.1191 In an attempt to appeal to the Finnish youth and intellectual vanguard, and banish critiques regarding racial segregation In the United States, the CIA covertly sponsored artists and musicians of African American and Hispanic origins to travel to

Finland for the festival. In 1962, Howard Smith, an African American artist from Philadelphia, traveled to Finland as a member of the Young America Presents Group and remained there, initially supported by his work at an art-oriented advertising agency.m > By 1963, Smith, who was unaware of the origins of the grant that had supported his original travel to Finland until the post-Cold War period, presented a private exhibition of his designs in Helsinki and went on to design textiles for major Finnish design companies. Smith later became an ex-pat friend to Papanek during his visits to Finland in the 1960s, most of the trips supported by Finnish cultural organizations and the American-Scandinavian Society. Framed by these wider national issues and politics, Finnish activists also drew on a groundswell of d issent across Europe that bolstered the ambitions of the pan-Scandinavian progressive designers. Just two months prior to the Suomenlinna symposium, protesters at the May 1968 Milan Triennale had ransacked the annual exposition, railing against its amoral celebration of overt consumerism and the hypocrisy of its choice of theme: "The Greater Number." With police intervention and the abandonment of the Triennale, crisis befell the design profe.ssion. cm In light of the Milan protests, the organizers of the "Industry, Environment, Product Design" symposium had striven to avoid the power dynamics and nepotism associated with corporate design events, such as the world-renowned International Design Conference Aspen QDCA) overseen by prominent US design figures Eliot Noyes and Charles Eames. Instead, they redefined design as a participatory practice, whose role was critical, provocative, and distinctly pan-Scandinavian. On returning to his native country, Papanek aided the SDO's cause by promoting the radicalism of cutting-edge Scandinavian design activism in the pages of the mainstream US design press, vociferously bemoaning the lack of design counterculture in his own nation. In a late 1968 edition of Industrial Design, the acknowledged mouthpiece of corporate design, Papanek taunted the American design establishment and its apathetic students, with a thinly veiled critique of the Aspen-style design conferences: "Too many martinis, slight morning hangovers, overheated hotel rooms( ...] Boring dry-as-dust-speeches(...] with one or two topics, 'Is Industrial Design Moving towards greater Professionalism?' or

'Do We have an Identity?'; all of these combined with a degree of back-slapping bonhomie, spell 'design conference:• 1231 Victor Papanek and the "Copenhagen Map" In April 1969, Finland's leading public radio station featured a hall-hour program focused on Papanek under the title "Prophets of Our TI me,• led by Olli Aho, one of Finland's most prominent left-wing cultural personalities and a key figure in the Finnish Broadcasting Company.12» The discussion expanded the concerns of those first flagged by the SDO, with the host introducing the three discussants as "experts who have on many occasions opposed the so-called cult of personality when it concerns famous architects or designers." These included Yrjll Sotamaa (cofounder of the SDO and lead organizer of the Suomenllnna event), Harri Moilanen (leading architect-designer, cultural radical) , and Juhani Pallasmaa (Finnish architect and educator). mi The twenty-six-year-old Sotamaa proceeded to dispel the narrow-minded nationalism that had defined postwar Finnish design. "I haven't come across many students of design who think in national terms," he declared. "There may still be some who do but, in general, values now are completely different from those that existed when the present leading names of Finnish design-Sarpaneva, Wirkkala-were students, and now it is felt that the designer should participate in other social activity rather than designing alone." Papanek appeared at the conference in his new position as dean of the Design School at CalArts. ,,.. P•&• 2 63> But more significant ly, he was the author of an exceptionally timely intervention, honed in the context of Nordic Cold War design activism of the 1960s that would act as a handbook for radical design for a US counterculture audience. Design for the Reel World opened with the apocryphal statement: "As socially and morally involved designers, we must address ourselves to the needs of a world with its back to the wall while the hands on the clock point perpetually to one minute before twelve." 138 > In 1972, a Time magazine review of Design for the Real World featuring a photograph of Papanek holding an ethically designed cloth book for infants, argued that it was perhaps Papanel< himself, with his utopian vision of design, who had "lost contact with the real world." Despite the critiques of alternative design, Design for the Real World has never fallen out

of print, and it has been translated into multiple languages. While commonly considered a product of North American consumer-critique (e.g., in the mold of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders or The Waste Makers), in the forty-five years since its inception it has carried forth in its pages the influence of pan-Scandinavian design activism, and the significance of design as a fonn of social speculation. The Fuller-inspired portable reindeer abattoir of 1968 proved less durable but ultimately just as significant to the history of design and to the counterculture. Notes

(2010): 387408( l 7 l Nick Rutter. •LOOk Left LOOk Right: Internationalisms Bl the 1968 WOl1d Youth Festrval,. In The Sociali$t Sbrt>es.: O'ossing Borders 11'1 the Second World War, ed. IWwJ E. Gorsuch and Doane P. Koen!1 r11. 11 Schreier appropriates balloon diagramming from corporate Informatics, subverting its establlshment vibe with humor and grit. Rubbor-Glomped lettering Imbues a hippie handicraft aesthetic. Evoking the struts and connectors of another counterculture icon, the geodesic dome, network spokes converge upon nodes that, on closer inspection, reveal themselves to be the circular labels of rotary-dial telephones: the everyday electronic communication devices of postwar America. The chart doubles as a phone directory: a dial labeled "Arch Frat• bears the number of the San Francisco chapter ol the American Institute of Architects, for example. Captions Inscribed along the rectangular border

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clarify graphic representational conventions. Different line configurations indicate various topics of mutual Interest , such as shelter, education, "enviroecology," and social design. Instructions tell users to •cut the border into strips and paste on. Correct errors: Add more people. Make a new one.~ Two blank circles on the right bear the caption: "YOUR NAME HERE." 111 1 With Its explicit program for ongoing amendment by users, Schreler's diagram anticipates open-source Information systems before the advent of their enabling technology. the personal computer. If that claim seems hyperbolic - then consider after all, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) first launched its work t o create the personal desktop computer in 1972, two years aher the pubh cation of •Advertisements for a Counter Culture"-note the diagram's rotary dial labeled "Aug Hum Int." It lists the telephone number at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) for the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center: ·a small band d1stingu1shed by their long hair and beards, rooms carpeted with oriental rugs,

women without bras, jugs of wine, and on occasion the wafting of Marijuana smoke," according to John Markoff, a historian of digital technology. c 11 > Headed by Doug Engelbart, who Invented and named the desktop •mouse" In the mid-1960s. the SRI group produced breakthroughs crucial to the development of personal computing at Xerox PARc.1n1 The argument that Silicon Valley traces aspects of provenance to Bay Area counterculture, flrst made by Theodore Roszak In 1986, has been fully substantiated by Fred Turner, a historian of cyberculture.11 • > The cross-fertilization of cyberculture and counterculture was not mere serendipity. SRI associate David Evans organized the 1969 retreat he named "Peradam," a term coined by novelist Ren6 Oaumal for an object revealed only to those who seek 11. m The event drew representatives from six nodes on Schreler's chart: Brand's Whole Earth catalog, Ant Farm, Zomeworks, the Hog Fann commune, Pacific High School, and Berkeley's Ecology Center. Evans sought to open a dialogue between "those working within establishment research Counterculture Terro1 r

and academic worlds, and those living in intentional communities and working in so-called 'underground' enterprises," echoing the grand alliance of inlaws and outlaws called for two years eartier at the "Death of Hippie" ritual. 116 Similarty, the knowledge network charted by "Advertisements for a Counter Culture• suggests that hippie modems grasped the revolutionary implications of digitally augmented human intellect far In advance of most members of the "Arch Frat.• A hidden cartography of Bay Area h1pp1e enterpnses lies within Schreier's diagram. Because landline telephones are fixed to specific sites, their numbers establish physical coordinates. These reveal Freestone affiliates scattered pnmarity through Berkeley and Siiicon Valley. The chart does not place a single representative in the Haight-Ashbury distnct: a seemingly minor detail bearing major implications. As the Day·Glo epicenter of the rock music scene, the Haight nurtured the most prominent and profitable of hip· pie cultural expressions. Rock muSIC and h1pp1e environmental design, after a bnef

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Institute of the Am: and the maverick defense lawyer Tony Seml. Equally In· terconnected was People's Architecture, a commune that coalesced with the founding of People's Pari< in Berileley and agitated against local slash-and-bum ~..., das$IOOll"l liberation lnvrte redevelopment Affiliates of ~to the relonnlSt p!Ogf8mS of these self-oescribed "dropout designers pttMOUS modem mo11e1nents. In oon1T11st and architects, community action freaks, to lterabonS of modernism founded upon a and pick and shovel soldiers" included ~philosophy of eestl'lettwo other residential collectiveS COPS ic totllity. the countercutture erntnoed (Committee on Public Safety) commune, hoksrn and Its mimebc arnbltiol 1 to -see which ran a "food conspiracy• (a nonprofit things \\1'ole. • as commemorated in the community pn>vislonef) and an under· title n gniphic ard1itech.n of the Whole ground pnnt shop; and the Bert future of Bay Area hippie culture: as Tom Revenue from each class publication, rather Wolfe observed in The Electric Kool-Aid than enriching individuals, funded new Acid Test, "the Haight·Ashbury era betgan that weekend.•m> It also marked the experiments: a venture capital paradigm characteristic of the freak enterprise system. divergence of two alternative modes of counterculture enterprise: market transaction and the hippie gift economy. Brand Ludie Producti-.ity from and electronic music composer Ramon Trips to Transformer Sender Baray6n conceived the festival as The creative output of Freestone hippie a melding of the "acid tests" conducted moderns refutes portraya:s of the counterby Ken Kasey's Merry Pranksters and culture as a precursor of 'slacker" culture, the performance art of USCO, a comor a "refusal of work" amenable to Marxist mune in rural New York. USCO traveling or anarchist theorizing. Hippies demanded shows deployed various electronic and ludic returns on investment, making their pharmacological technologies-peyote,

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Berkeley's Department of Architecture, Sim Van der Ayn conducted design studios as experimental counterculture laboratories, each generating its own undeiground publication. A node at the bottom of Schreier's chart labeled "Arch 284" refers to the first of Van der Ayn's •outlaw builder" studios. Its graduate school participants designed dolt-yourself interventions that invited children to transform their own schoolroom using recycled materials. Van der Ayn's homespun document of the project, the F8!8llones Sctapbook, became a profitable objet trouv6 for the Manhattan publishing giant Random House, establishing the counterculture as a hot commodity when marketed thorough a new genre of West Coast "lifestyle" publications. To fill three nights of programming at San Francisco's Longshoreman's Hall, Brand recruited the San Francisco Tape Music Center, artist and avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner, the Open Theater cabaret, Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead and other local rock bands, a stroboscopic trampoline artist, and an array of light show pioneers. Among the latter, Ashby was unique in having honed his audiovisual skills at the Eames office, where he had worked on Glimpses of the U.S.A. , shown at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, and Think, a twenty-two screen display for the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Light Matrix, Ashby's light show for the Trips Festival, bore a related provenance. For a planned IBM pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, he had proposed a wall-mo1Jnted grid using light and form to convey the workings of a data system, with "1" represented by a lit bulb and "O" by an unlit one. Turned on and off in various configurations, patterns would flicker across the grid: complex information rendered as binary code. Ashby pitched the concept to his corporate client with a slide show mock-up that made clear and colored dots dance across a black screen when projected in rapid succession. Ultimately, IBM decided not to participate at the Montreal Fair, presenting Ashby with an opportunity to recycle the Light Matrix demo as psychedelic spectacle. The eve of the Trips Festival found Brand and Ashby at a local J. C. Penney department store buying out the entire stock of white shower curtains so that they could be taped together as a projection surface. On the night of the event, however, Conner's film fluttered across the ad hoc screen instead. Projected directly onto the venue floor, Light Matrix flashed its binary patterns across Trips Festival celebrants, dissolving the distinction between performers and spectators: a move consistent with Brand's broader aesthetic goals. The Trips Festival advanced performance art well beyond territory explored previously by USCO. Brand abandoned the alpha-male shamanism of his USCO colleagues: artist-technicians who subjected audiences to avant-garde stimuli in order to gauge human response. Brand and his co-conspirators seeded the venue with electronic paraphernalia to be discovered and played with; microphones in one location sent disembodied voices to speakers placed elsewhere on the floor. "Everything was going on at once," musician Jerry Garcia recalled: It was a great, incredible scene, and I was wandering around. I had some sense that the Grateful Dead was supposed to play sometime maybe. But it really didn't matter.... That was the beauty of it. People weren 't coming to see the Grateful Dead. So we didn't feel compelled to perform.

ture's premiere commodity. Hailed as an outlaw art form, rock music conformed quite profitably to postwar mass consumption's newfound " attention to smaller or fringe market segments," as codified by marketing consultant Wendell Smith in 1956. 1' 61 Catapulted out of the hippie gift economy, Garcia and company became celebrities delegated to craft fields of amplified sound while planted securely onstage, not • wandering around" eroding distinctions between performers and spectators. At the Trips Festival, hippie moderns realized the avant-garde dream of shattering the proscenium wall. It took an astute outsider to recognize the market value of keeping it intact. Seeing Things Whole

A festival manager, who Garcia described as the only person there who wasn't high, and the Pranksters remembered as " this asshole with a clipboard," brushed aside Brand 's performance art paradigm. Bill Graham, the promoter of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, managed festival ticket sales. Exhilarated by the $12,500 ($78,000 today) grossed in festival entries over three days, he turned his attention to a run-down Fillmore district theater, turning it i nto a national brand, and its performances the counterculCounterculture Te rro1 r

Ant Farm's call for hippies to "actively patch up their environmenr and • maintain an earth awareness" while embracing a regimen of "minimum needls ... provided by the waste products of Fat City" announced t he advent of the "ecofreak," a novel subjectivity determined to invent environmentalism's everyday material culture.•g• 1oo1 and promptly contravened IDCA rules by pl anting their vinyl inflatable atop a sacrosanct landscape designed by the Bauhaus luminary Herbert Bayer. Denied access to many of the subsequent conference presentations, the Ant Farm contingent lurked at the margins of the event as self-proclaimed "rabble-rousers." Over the next few days, members of What Banham dubbed "the Berkeley/ Ant Farm / Mad Environmentalist coalition" would try to persuade the design establishment to join an ecological crusade to save the planet: an audacious goal that threw the IDCA into chaos.mi The 1970 conference theme and Invitation list virtually guaranteed an epochal clash of values. The IDCA board used its IBM International Fellowship program to fund a delegation from France that included industrial designers Roger Tallon, Claude Braunstein, and Eric Le

as an object lesson in oonsumer waste; Comte; design journalist Giiies de Burre; instead he collected garbage generated and an architect, a geographer, and an by IDCA participants and displayed it in economist. Two representatives of the a pile during his formal presentation. By Paris-based Utopie Intellectual circle-the far the most disruptive mode of counterMarxist sociologist and cultural critic Jean culture expression, however, was hippie Baudrillard and the architect and Inflatperformance art. A Happening conducted ables enthusiast Jean Aubert-rounded by the Moving Company, captured on film out "the French group." 16 ~ 1 Concerned In /DCA '70-S documentary by Eli Noyes that US student radicals would use an (the son of the IDCA president Eliot Noyes) available Graham Foundation grant and his partner Claudia Weill-chronicled to stage events that would constitute the hazard of moving street theater out of "almost as a counter-conference, or an urban space and onto a proscenium. ' " '· 10 • anti-conference," in the words of IDCA Stripped of their plein air setting and impresident Ellot Noyes, the IDCA board contacted Sim Van der Ryn a month before promptu audience, the Moving Company's ad-libbed rants, shtick, and slapstick the event to organize an environmental ritual lost their camivalesque bite, coming action group. 1m If the board thought off instead as amateurish theatrics. m> that deputizing a university professor The agitprop techniques of hippie street would ensure a supply of docile, studious theater, unsurpassed at rallying counterparticipants, they were badly mistaken. culture initiates, proved utterly unsuited to From hairstyles and attire and to forging bonds with design profession insocializing style and mode of discourse, a chasm separated Bay Area hippie laws: an outcome crucial to the long-term moderns from Aspen's establishment impact of Bay Area ecofreaks at Aspen. modernists. The 1970 IDCA theme, More conventional presentations on "Environment by Design," also was sown ecology were provided by Cliff Humphrey with potential misunderstandings. For Bay of Berkeley's Ecology Action "life house,• Area ecofreaks, the terms environment and Stuart Udall, a pioneering environand ecology were synonymous; for the mentalist and former US Secretary of conference organizers, as design historian the Interior. Challenging the techno-fuAlice Twemlow points out, "envlronmenr turist "euphoria" pervading earlier IDCA was simply the context in which designed conclaves, Udall acknowledged his objects existed.1671 Among the "French "pessimistic role" in describing the dire group," the term brought to mind the st akes of status-quo inertia. "If you're not Unite d'enseignement et de recherche de part of the environment movement already l'environnement {U.E.R.E.), a successor to ... you're part of the problem in 1970.• 1101 the Ecole des Beaux Arts "charged with Humphrey contended that "pessimism teaching art and environment, 'environhas no survival value,• but othefwise ment' rather in the Bauhaus sense. • 1681 restated Udall's message in even stronger For hippies, Environment by Design terms. He proposed that the IDCA conferimplied ecological affinity; for others at ence topic, rather than "Environment by the conference, the phrase conjured an Design,• should have been "Survival by aesthetic effect of total design. By 1970 Design." "The urgency, the calamity that Bauhaus-inspired modern design had beis confronting us has not been transmitted come the high style of corporate America. to you," he asserted. Gesturing to garbage At Aspen, Bay Area advocates of ecoheaped beside him .as an instructional aid, loglcal functionalism, trash bin funk, and Humphrey decried the role of designers (Jpater le bourgeois insolence confronted "lubricated with a profit motive" in "ruthe devotees of an embalmed avant-garining our life support system." Closing de, its hackles long since gone flat. the •survival gap• between throwaway Disparate modes of communication mass consumption and the biosphere's also separated hippie and establishment carrying capacity demanded that designmodernists. Interaction at the IDCA coners renounce their collaboration with the ventionally consisted of formal conference former and ftght for •a new economic presentations and informal mixing over system" in which profits were not acmeals and cocktails: a socializing formula crued "by destroying our environment.•1711 rejected by members of the Bay Area enviHumphrey's plea received novel ronmental action group. 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balance of the atmosphere,• he noted. lions, one aesthetic, the other political, were Indeed, atmospheric data indicated that it among those who rejected ecology's radical already had. "A striking change that many ideas. Reyner Banham, an impresario of of us have tried to explain has been the avant-garde movements past and present, warming trend that occurred in the northpeppered his address, "The Education of ern part of our continent, and particularly an Environmentalist" with insults aimed at in the Northeast of the United States, Berkeley's ecofreaks. Disparaging "Sim between about 1900 and about 1950.• A Van der Ayn's tribes." Banham stressed the subsequent slowing of the trend confound- importance of not repeating what he called ed scientists. Roberts believed that carbon "The Great Berkeley Disaster," stating "The dioxide absorption by oceans accountCollege of Environmental Design up at the back of that war-torn campus is to my ed for the difference between predictive mind, simply a modish monument to an calculations and the measured data. idea that never got off the ground." A workAccumu'ating atmospheric carbon, while ing environmental education, according to a matter of record, defied the capacity of Banham, would be founded on "non-utopian scientists to predict "whether in Aspen, propositions• to avoid "producing envior New York, or Rio de Janeiro, or Sofia, ronmental know-alls who are no use to or Moscow, this is going to produce drier what we humorously refer to as 'the real climate or wetter climate, warmer climate or coldef climate." Much about the "fragile world outside:•m Proposing "the actual intellectual content of an environmental gaseous envelope around our earth" eludcourse," Banham ranted against the most ed scientists, but Roberts suspected "we radical proposition In circulation among may have engaged in global scale weather Aspen's sc1ent1st and ecofreak contingents: modifications experiments without know721 ing it."' Thirty years before the term We will certainly have gone below Anthropocene first appeared in the Global Change Newsletter, an unlikely assembly the threshold of what is educationally tolerable If we produce people who of industrial designers and hippie activists heard evidence of humankind's launch into think carbon dioxide Is a pollutant. ... an unprecedented geological epoch.17J 1 You live on carbon dioxide: it's the key Ecology and its whole systems link in our Ille cycle. Yet we talk about perspective defied conventional thinkit as though it were some kind of ing, Udall wamed. "If you're not ready to dangerous pollutant. It's no more danentertain new ideas or concepts-some gerous [a) pollutant than water is.1161 of them are quite radical-you can't be an environmentalist.• " At Aspen, Banham re1ected any possibility of agproponents of two avant-garde tradigregate human irrpact on global climate, Counte rcuHu re Terrol r

insisting: "We're already talking here [at Aspen) as if we and nature were equals or we were Jehovah creabng the world again. We are very small environmental operators.· •• A profound ahenation from ecological values tnggered Banham's screed. His advocacy of a pop utopia, as enviSIOOed by the British group Arctugram, glonfied structural evanescence and by extension, as Twemlow observes, an ideal of inexhaustible resources begging to be consumed. ·• Confronted with a h1ppte avant-garde hostile to the hypertrophied mass consumption and the unspoken inequ1t1es of "Second Mach ne Age" mod· ernism. Banham found himself outflanked by a new avant-garde and threatened with cultural irrelevance. prompting a vitnohc reaction to "the Berkeley I Ant Farm / Mad Environmentalist coalition." The design establishment had adv1C0 for ecofreaks. and a professor of geography and urbanism, Peter Hall, took it upon himself to deliver 11 In an address that seconded Banham's disdain for ecofreaks who were •getting preachy," Hall demanded that they •stop talking about the coming apocalypse." alleging that Bay Area envt· ronmentalists were simply hypocrites: You've all worn metaphoncal halr shirts, even if they look impeccably styled in the West Coast idiom from where I stand, and you're all beanng crowns of thorns, and self-flagellation has been taking place all over the tent, and the wailing and the cries of woe must have been heard all the way down to Denver. ... You're cleansing yourself, you re purg· ing yourself of sin, and then you'll emerge into the weekday again and start sinning all over again. "9 Ecological activism proved equally repugnant to the New Left radicals of the French contingent. Jean Baudrillard applauded Banham for illuminating "the moral and technical limits and the illusions of Design and Environment practice.• In a closing statement Baudrillard proclaimed that •environment, design, the fight against pollution, and so on• were "pure social manipulation" and ·a new 'opium for the people.'" 180 > He continued: "In the mystique of Envtronment this blackmail toward apocalypse and toward a mythic enemy who is in us and all around [us) tends to create a false interdependence between individuals. Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes, except perhaps a witch hunt (the mystique of anti-pollution

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being ~ but a variation al it).•ie: Accocing to BaucHlard. in protesti11g an ec:oi 1011ry premised upon erMronmeotal deg;ldation, Aspen's eoofl eaks were perpetratas of a coi IS?i'llCf hatched by 9'ot>e190'9iiMl1Sits and corporate capttaists "to mobilize people's conscienoe by shouting apocalypse.• cfl I As spokesman for the Hench ~. Baudtilard conflated the us miitary campaign against c::ormLrism in South East Asia and Latin America with the populist campaign against erMronmental polution, linking the two in a homage Czing anti-American poitical irnagii ta y that gatvanized New left tac:tions on both sides al the A!lanbc. IJ The Wc1Ye of 1960s environmentalism did in fact aeate alliances between eooll eai( outtaws and political inlaws such as US Senator Gaylord Neson, who sponsa ed national recogi itio11 al the first Earth Dray in 1970, an ewnt celebrated by an em 1oated 20 nWlion people in the lkjted States. Banilard's portrayal of

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New left '' IOpOty on radical politics. The French goup's attack on~ mei ltaisin came duTig a dosing session that left Banham, its ctm. 9psychoiogicaly bruised,• as he later coi1fideci. t!• l Representing the Bay Area contil igent. Michaef Doyle r1!ad out an 1.1 ICOmpl'()misSlg set of conference resolutions. Its e6eYerl points demai ided an immeciate US miitary withchwal from Vietnam; a mo.-atorlln on extractive industries pending enWOl i 111!1 llaf ir'l1JaCl regulation; recogiition of land claims by Native Americans; an encl to the persecution of btad6SS1"9 ArcM9clln 51, no. 6 (JUWI 1~86.

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( 691 IOCA 1970, directed by EN Noyes and Claudia w.;1 (New Yot1 The plan was for a •city" of services that would be physically fragmented with many neighborhoods In different parts of the country. To retain a sense of community throughout the system there were many common institutions and communication links via television and a central computer.... Access to the computer would tell him what services were unique to other Truckstops .... Citizens of Truckstop Network could move about freely within the system. I>•> If Brand 's networi< forums informed and haunted the project, I want to suggest Pellc1ty o. Scott

sensibility. To briefly outline these connections before turning to a few in more detail: as early as September 1969, Southcoast entered Brand's arena when they participated in Peradam. a three-day autumn equinox event staged near Santa Barbara and avowedly designed "to bring people from technological and long-haired worlds together." '"> The following month they installed a giant Inflatable wall for Brand's spectacular weeklong hunger game, Uferaft Earth. ,, .. ••&• m> Initially their contribution was to take the form of a giant plllowlike inflatable. a proposal developed during Peradam but rejected by local fire marshals. Instead, the wall contained those performing as starving hoards within an equally exceptional zone that also served as a mediatlc staging for the press. on In March 1970, having merged with Southcoast , Ant Farm appeared alongside Brand's Whole Earth Truckshop and a host of hippie celebrities at the Freestone Conference, a spring equinox event that was in many regards a Peradam redux, and in December that year the group provided a giant , and again highly mediatic, inflatable pillow to serve as a mobile facility for the production of a Whole Earth Catalog supplement in the California desert.Ill> "''· l> Shortly afterward, Ant Farm customized the Media Van during a wori Yet If Ant Farm entered onto Brand's platform and engaged its key figures to articulate the potentials of a technologically enhanced alternative community, and If they explicitly sought Information and tools from the corporate world, the lens through which they did so, to reiterate, ultimately deflected those networks otherwise, if only momentarily. This was less evident in Its early Iteration. In a preparatory sketch of the multiple systems comprising Truckstop Networl This connection was further evident in the TnJCkstop placemat that flagged Zorneworks, Pacific High, Media Access, Project One and its affiliate Project Artaud, CalArts, Arcosanti, Raindance, Videotreex, and Earth People's Park •••• P9&-299 1

108

Around its edges were Schreier's Cable VT and space travel-inspired characters. If Ant Farm's cultural Imaginary finds Itself in Intense proximity to Brand's • - · llltl· 1.:rentrepreneurial agenda, wherein cultural workers became networkers, experimental forms of life fodder for corporate Ant F.,.,,, Truclcslop--, 1871 (.......,, and mllltary R&D. a crucial distinction or tension emerges, one that I do not want own institutions, function as a new country, transfer would neither, of course, lead to overstate but which marks an important automatically to democratic forms of shelter its own citizens-the entry reads: departure. If Brand hoped to synchronize decision-making nor to a more comprehis libertarian Ideals with the mllitary-lnhensive form of political representation, how are decisions made? blah blah dustrlal apparatus, and if his media-savvy but rather to the extraction of data i don't know shit about this one cap events sought reform within the system, that might also serve those In power. T maybe government will be obsoAnt Farm's work sought, at least in part, A document titled " Media presenlete with a very efficient Information to facilitate counter-conducts, operate tation: videotape/slide show Truckstop" transfer system. no more politicians as counter-media, and provide an archioffers further clues: a script for an audiolaw? will there be pigs in truckstop? tectural infrastructure that served as a army? OJ> v isual presentation, it set out a three-part counter-environment for alternative media narrative detailing the emergence of networks that, In coupling mobile archiTruckstop's new form of life. Part one tecture and portable video. opened into If exhibiting a similar antigovernance presented the Image of "city death.• Wrth rhetoric to Brand, the question marks new terrain. Trvckstop Network sought not audio channels emitting "noise traffic." only to occupy the space of a truck stop perhaps speak to the realization that "ethereal space• and "loud buzz" sounds, or operate within media, but also within eradication of political, legal, police, and the three-minute opening sequence Institutional spaces of artistic practice military Institutions remained potentially included "views of empty suburban streets, forums wherein technologies could appear problematic. More efficient information Pe11C1~1

D. Scott

Fig. 6

like Brand, that media was a powetful force In contemporary society, Ant Farm rendered it instead a forum for launching new political strategies. Educating Tools

As noted earlier, Ant Farm returned from

rl ~ G«ahuny, Beryl Koo:>(, end lnl -· -~.vol t, no "Sutmw 1971, °'VO"'zed by Mioholl ~. wHh"""'.,, by Ant Fonn

within quotation marks and where a certain untimeliness or desynchronizatlon was possible. Such a situation would facill· tale a type of drifting into or grafting onto new contexts that did not leave images, technologies. or institutions untouched. Truckstop Network artifacts-ICE-9, Media Van, etc. - along with the visual documentation of their cross-country tnps were supposed to culminate In an exhibi· tion at the Corcoran Gallery In Washington, DC. » For reasons unclear this did not happen, but it left a mark on the conception of the work, as a work. In a letter to Manlyn and Alvin Lubetkin , wntten from Caiada during their return journey, Doug Michels scoffed, "of all the Institutions we have visited on our trip the Corcoran is the most up-tight." As evident In the very next sentence, the tour Importantly

c,,,,

furthered Ant Farm's connections to the video underground: "We are doing graph1CS for a book written about guerrilla televl· sion," he explalned.C 1'1 Written by Michael Shamberg and Ralndance, Guerrilla Television appeared In late 1971, presenting practices of using media as tools for the cultural and political Inversion of dominant networks. Even before the book appeared, Ant Farm's Truckstop Network placemat and a description of what they learned on the road appeared In the summer 1971 issue of Radical Software."''· 61 If, we might say, Brand sought media attention, staging seductive and media-savvy events and presenting himself as a countercultur· al celebnty in alternative garb, Ant Farm sought to Interfere with that apparatus and even to strategically redistribute its ale· ments. to refunction its tools. Recognizing. N•tworko and Apparatu101, clrco 1971

their Truckstop Tour just In time to collaborate on a video about Brand's next spectacle, the Whole Earth Catalog Demise Party, a theatrical extravaganza replete with belly dancers, trampoline artists, clowns, and music that took place in the Exploratonum at San Francisco's PalaceofFlneArtsonJune 12, 1971 . 16 ms » Casting the event as an "educe· tlonal occasion." Brand Invited "al makers" of the publicahon to attend - anyone who had worked for, contnbuted to, appeared In, subscribed to, or reported on 1t. along with participants of Liferaft Earth and Alloy-suggesting "you could come as a tool" and promising a surprise at ten o 'clock at night. H At about that ~me. the party was brought to a halt by the MC, Scott Beach, who announced that Brand had given him $20,000 in $100 bills and that the 1,500 revelers were being charged with coming to a consensus regarding how to use this " tool" (money)-itself key to founding the Whole E1Jlth Catalog-and that it would be grven to them rt they could come to an agreement. Putting the money quite literally Into people's hands, JUSI like other tools before it, but insisting on consensus and hence the suspenston of political disagreements, Brand announced, "We are into frontier territory here.• JI As detailed by Thomas Albnght and Charles Perry's Rolling Stone artide, "The Last Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth," until the early hours of the morning scores of guests stepped up to the microphone to make propositions regarding the money's use: some wanted 1t for their own projects, some advanced political and envuon· mental causes-such as returning the money to Native Americans who had been "ripped off• or to stop strip mining-others wanted 11 burned or flushed down the toilet. With the crowd dw1ndhng and failing to come to a consensus. Hog Farm led a "gong bong,· during which partygoers held hands In a circle and breathed heavily. This too proved unsuccessful In uniting the crowd, and at daybreak the re1T\81n1ng $14,900 (the rest having d 1sappelnd) was signed ovec to Fredenck L. Moore. who went on to found the Homebrew Computer Club, with the mlsplacect trust that late stayers would be invited to recon· vene to make a decision.' ''>

109

tlon.• c•o> If the scene was exemplary of the lost energy of which Brand spoke in " Spacewar,• the context was also a reminder that technologies that had so captivated the hippies were always and already part of the military-Industrial apparatus. Reporting on the event for the Washington Post Times Herald under the title "Whole Earth's Suicide Party,• Sany Lopez read the event as a cynical ploy by Brand to prove a point: that San Francisco's counterculture •were as crass and crude and unfocussed as the establishment that they rail against." c• 1 > Recognizing on Brand's face "the smile of a man who has always had a strong Intuition about something, and who is watching his intuition prove right," Lopez mused on Brand's evident pleasure regarding the crowd dynamics triggered by money, reproducing a photo of Brand In Monk's robe, watching " people getting the feel of his $20,000 in cash." Albright and Perry came to a slightly HOTIC,E HOTIC& All ~., 94 hWMOl J E EARTM CATALOG different conclusion, arguing that at stake y.,.,.""",., .... for Brand was fostering new attitudes Exctusfl~ Pony toward money, that embracing money was IOnWwll•rM DEMISE "the next lesson it [the community) has to learn, the next initiation rite, pemaps even Whole E.rthCat.aloC a new phase in the movement's continuing lttS..F~ on Frtdly, ./UM I I , n~ 1 pm, process of self-education.• Money was to ..,#41 be regarded not as a cause of exploitation M,,__, _.I-...,..,_ ti.....,"-" nw• ,,_. A11 ....... ....._ . _ . ..... ..., ................. ..., or inequity but as "srnply another tool," .,...,... CAT.tLOC .,,.,.,...__. A. ,.,......,_,_.....,......_. ........... ,_.,..,,,.,l,,.il' C• Brand's Whole Earth subjects Qnvited to (......,,. CMt ...._ ~ • ...__,,0 .. -4~ H_ .... .._._,, -'" a,.('ATALOC. Al ,.........._.t.f .. Uf'tltA n-M•rH•"-A LLOY, dress as tools) were now in training to A l •~- .... ._~ .,, ,..,W ....t lflf ~ ~.._.._,,.~ love it and to use it. Here lay his educac:.er.•u.oc.,, U fUlAFT u .-m •• CArALOC:• ~ tional experiment: under the rubric of an 0...- ..._,"'1111t/COl'rW#I.._ educational event he sought to inscribe ,,..l!OIM~·,., ~- ,.,..,« ......... DEMISE one-time hippies more firmly Into the An•1- Hiw1W1"-..,_.l tlh . - . _,,E..,,,C.tllot ,...,,.. 161SM.. ~tAw dominant apparatus without calling upon ''"""""""' ,, them to articulate a knowing relation to its """' operations. If the uses to which money Olke technology) can be put remain profoundly Whole E11t111 CN1og DotrWe Porty llwlUUon, 'Tho I.NI 8upplomenl lo die Whole EMlh C.Ullo;,' ambiguous, being neither inherently good n..-.ftO 19, Man:ll- ...... 1171 nor evil, this does not mean that money is somehow neutral , beyond politics: quite the monk's robe." they noted, "There were opposite. It suggests the need to take a poAlbright and Peny alluded to a transformascarcely any real costumes In the old tion that seems relevant here. "In contrast sition, to assume responsibility with respect Halght-Ashbury, Flower-Power sense of to how one entetS Into the playing field. to the San Francisco Trips Festival, which the word.• Moreover, the trippy electronic The thirty-two-minute video of the Brand co-authored with Ken Kesey five environments and outer-space accoutreevent by Ant Farm, Ralndance, and Media years ago to usher in a new era of weird ments that had blown so many minds In Access Center, Aspects of Demise: The drugs, hard rock and blinding stroboscopthe late 1960s were now simply Incorpoic light." they observed, " the Demise party Whole Earth Demise Party, spoke to the rated for mainstream consumption within belonged to another age- a future age more complex apparatus at play, within which often harks back to a past one.• The the Exploratorium•s science d isplay, amid which the partygoera were temporarily sus· which Demise Party guests wandered: pended. ma. ll The video presented Brand 1,500 attendees were, as he put it, percopies of The Last Whole Earth Catalog haps alluding to the impact of the Whole watching over and at times orchestrating Earth Catalog's neo-primitivism, " mostly appeared near a d isplay of model rockets scenes of bacchanalia-belly dancers; and spaceships and an exhibition "filled a quiet, sober, even saturnine crowd , like Irish Jigs; cash circulating, being counted , with an array of strobe lights, optical Illua group of Midwestern d irt-farmers who and stacked-along with Paul Krassner's sion boxes, abstract television screens and call for justice for Native Americans and had come to town on Saturday night to other things dedicated to the alliance of art visit a country fair.• With the exception of his reminder that Gut Oil sponsored Trisha and science and the expansion of percepBrand, "barefooted and clad in a black Nixon's wedding that day. The video later Flg. 7

110

nw,.....,.,. • ~

..,.,...,.........

....

Ae ~Httlf ,,._.,_

. ..

...

...........

_,.,..,CA 94025 .......,.., ...... ,,.,.,..,.

. ...... ,,......................... ......... .......... ....... .,...............

Poll c ltY D. Scott

Fig. 8

to tools, a powerful lifestyte Image, and with both, a profitable marketplace OVM which Brand ruled as if SOVMetgn. What appeared as a detemtonahzahon of normative modes of hie entailed a reterritoriallzat1on onto a narrative of the future, a reminder that feedback systMns are control systems, a logic well-known to computer scientists who by many accounts paid attention to this Instance of print media. The Demise Party and, in turn , "Spacewar" also share the desire to script coordinates of emerging subcultures overtly marking out new if unexpect' ed topological connections to money and computing. If the founding myth of Resource One attributed the scientists' departure from their onginal career paths to the US invasion of Cambodia, Brand told another story, stressing their ongoing proximity to the economic and military systems they once fought against. Another such synchronization of countercultural ideals and government was further staged later that year, when Brand took the Hog Farm commune to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in order to advance his "environment yes, politics no" approach to environmental issues.'">

111 Video Architectures

cuts to the Nixon wedding on lV in Ant Farm's warehouse - producing a potent juxtaposition of their funky refrigerator, ICE-6, and alternative abode with main· stream media - and in turn to Brand's appearances on lV in the wake of the event. Brand proudly announced to Dick Cavett that his guests had learned a lot from being confronted with the potential of money, that they went through real change, Fred Moore himself transforming from one who called for burning the money to recognizing the power of the "juice." Brand also appeared on San Francisco's KOED· lV (PBS) with fellow libertarian and former Chairman of Stanford's Young Americans for Freedom and Republican operative Harvey Hukari. Brand Insisted to Hukari that even for those whose ideas did not gain support, the process of Identifying with money's potential , of coming up with ideas, had left a mark, calling the Demise Party as a "strong seminar on money and responsibility." "I was there. Did not pick up any money." Schreier recently recalled .

If in the first instance it's simply a statement of fact, Schreier's comment suggests a certain hesitaticn regarding Brand's ploy. Some of those who d id receive money shared Brand's fascination with scripting the integration of computers and countercultural ideals, if not necessarily his political goals. As noted above, Moore went on to found the Homebrew Computer Club with Gordon French, a DIY personal computing enterprise from the ranks of which emerged Apple computers. Moreover, the final section of "Spacewar" not only folded Resource One Into a narrative and a network of corporate and military research but also symptomatically mentioned that the group received $8,000 from the outcome of the Demise Party and its "consensus money decid · ings," therein marking a connection to the Whole Earth Catalog and its legacy. We might recall that the Whole Earth Catalog, if encouraging a DIV sensibility and hence apparently veering towards individual participation and choice, constructed a seductive rhetoric of access Networks and

~pparatu1e1,

circa 1971

In the wake of the Demise Party, Ant Farm headed in a different direction, deploying alternative video as an integral part of networked space and as a tool that might facilitate a strategic redistribution of information. Video served not only as a form of environmental research and information exchange but also as an inexpensive, flexible, and decentralized weapon to intervene tactically within the heart of the mainstream media apparatus and hence within the dominant structures of power, or so it was hoped. As noted above, in 1972 Ant Farm cofounded lVlV with Allen Rucker and members of Raindance, the Videofreex, and other video activists, experimenting with half· inch Sony Portapak equipment and, in turn, three-quarter-inch video formats. TVTV famously produced altMnative coverage of the 1972 Republican a.n d Democratic National Conventions with the programs Four More Years and the World's Largest TV Studio, respectively, soon after launching "Prime nme,• an ironically titled project to infiltrate mainstream television broadcasting with alternative content. In 1972 Ant Farm also participated as video activists in an architectural initiative, Quick City, hosted at CalArts near Los

Fig. 7 While we Wete lay1ng this book up we left a space so that

we could

,.,

take some photos of Quick City. an event we described on pp. 28-29. So

here

~a....

Quick Clly 11

1.

QUICK CITY FLASH!!!

-eel

In~ of M • -· ~Ono, 1872

Angeles from May 26 through June 4, and organized by architects Peter de Brettevllle and Craig Hodgetts (then both teaching at the schooQ and a group of Berkeley 112 architects and artists called Village of Arts + Ideas. The event built upon the momentum of Whiz Bang Quick City, a temporary community organized by architects Lester Walker and Robert Mangurian and comprised of ad hoc, mobile shelters that bloomed for five days in April 1971, near Woodstock, New York. Quick City formed part of a bicoastal experimental network, the other node being a redux of Walker and Mangurian's experiment, Whiz Bang Quick City 2. In addition to reiterating the familiar array of geodesic domes, teepees, inflatables. alternative energy sources, and other physical trappings of hippie culture, both nodes were replete with media infrastructure and resident video and media collectives-Ant Farm and Vldeofreex, respectively. 1•s> Realizing, In part, Trvckstop Network's dream of a cross-country environment linked by communication technology, "comin' together" was sought through physical contiguity and in the articulation of virtual communities to be tested through simulation or gaming: video collectives not only documented activities and played them back to temporary residents but also tested cross-country media exchanges. 06> As Mother Earth News reported of this "mini-Woodstock Nation," "media freaks are circulating with lV monl· tors, video tapes and Radio WBQC-AM ... to document the whole happenlng: c•n

Quick City was conceived not only as an instant city but also as a "multi-media seminar,• the ambition being to "develop ourselves into fully operating/fully cooperating networks."Hoping to demonstrate how to "instigate a working network," the sites airmailed videotapes and transmitted "wirephotos" cross-country. Quick City relayed "over the Xerox telephone connection" to Whiz Bang Quick City 2, the following: "We put up a large red and yellow double-skinned inflatable, a red and blue nylon inflatable, three weird tensegrity structures, a tensegrity dome, five tipis, three zurt domes, a forty-foot spherical dome, a forty-foot elliptical dome, two or three additional spherical domes, and numerous tents." Despite what appears, In retrospect, as a minor act of communication, William Chaitkin read It In Mcluhanesque terms, as "global village medla:c so> Mother Earth News saw a flash f utopia realized, exclaiming In even more mystical terms, "And the atmosphere, the Incredible atmosphere of sharing and cooperation! Who could possibly gaze out over the mellow men and maids camped on WBQC's three amazing meadows ... and not catch at least a glimpse of Better Times ahead?•m> Truck Stores and Truckstops Countercultural engagements with computer research and communications media during the ear1y 1970s were often motivated by a utopian faith that science and technology heralded a better and Pellc l•Y D. Seo• •

more united wor1d, that such developments were necessarily in line with social progress and even social justice, that what was new was good for all. This belief was familiar from longstanding narratives of architectural modernism and its emancipatory claims, the effects of which, as evident In retrospect, touched down in different and sometimes violent ways in other locations and for other sectors of the wor1d's population. Hippie modernism continued to harbor such faith: motivated by powerful mythmakers such as Brand, the counterculture's libertarian ethos, embrace of Information exchange, and Whole Earth ideologies all too easily translated into a blindness or disregard for the political and even economic machinations at play, as though one could bracket out those who sought to govern them. The wor1d in which computers emerged was, of course, far from an even playing field, especially given the economic and geopolitical interests of powerful players at play. As evident today, access to information is neither simply tantamount to empowerment or liberation-even if sometimes that might come to pass-nor is it an absolute inscription within systems of control. Rather, such access situates subjects within complex apparatuses of knowledge and control: communication technologies mediate between subjects and a dispositif of power. The question remains how to render that apparatus and its forms of governance legible, how to strategically position oneself within an ambivalent apparatus, and to what ends? It is in light of this political ambiguity that Stewart Brand's networl< forums and his celebration of something as militaristic as Spacewar and Ant Farm's Truckstop Network emerge as two interconnected but distinct responses to the nexus of the counterculture and computers in the late '60s and ear1y '70s, mapping onto distinct tendencies within hippie modernism. As Brand noted in the opening passages of "Spacewar," at stake for him was weakening liberal critiques of the Imminent threat posed by computerization through foregrounding the dream of access to ever-more high-tech tools and its attendant myths. Hoping to offer an updated script to the Whole Earth Catalog, he even situated the ethos of computer heads as •surprisingly In line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J. C. A. Licklider, John von Neumann, and Vannevar Bush," each In different ways troubling forefathers but a reminder that we remain In the domain

of war-related research. If motivated toward different ends, Brand's tactical integration of key tropes from hippie subculture, such as access to toots and mind-expanding drugs, with computer research appealed to Ant Farm's desire for forging an alternative form of life, and their participation in his network forums Imbued Truckstop Networt< with shared coordinates. But, to reiterate one last time, Ant Farm encountered that nexus through another lens: If approprl ating technologies and citing agents dear to Brand, their deployment was refracted through distinct institutional contexts as well as political, economic, and artistic concerns, retaining a tense intersection with their mainstream and military functions and rendering visible moments in which aesthetic practice was not always a comfortable fit. Moreover, instead of seeking to institute new myths and new scripts, they sought to open up a space for conceptualizing and testing a networked.society otherwise-simultaneously harboring a self-consciousness that technology was not in itself the solution and that outcomes also depend on the political tendencies of those in charge of the apparatus. Notes

Unlventty Press of Kansas, 2007) and T........ From Countercuffure lo C)'ben::ullvre. ( 8 ) See Richan:! C. Kletter, Cable Televfslon: Making Public Access Effective, Preperesed planetary system powered by the sun The pubhcat1on's editor. Stewan Brand, later claimed as hos Inspiration Denis Diderot's Encyclop6cl1e (1751-1772). the touchstone of the European Enlightenment to which the modernist project can be traced. The Whole Earth Catalog's un1versahst ambition could not possibly be more expl1c1t "We are as !iodS and may as well get good at 11,• as ots contents page announced, explaining hos1011cal processes by way of the interplay of matter, mind, technology. self, and social organization. The Whole Earth Catalog's tagllne promised "Access to Tools," ranging from looms to computers. Among '.he supplies of moccasins, 011 lamps, and other h1pp1e accoutrements, ot listed resources pnnc1pally books, tor one's personal and cultural educ;lloon. for· matoon, cult.,allOfl, and maturatton Such a self-Improvement program constitutes whal ldeoflst Germon thinkers since Georg F. W. Hegel In tho oarly nineteenth-con· tury would term Bl/dung, a sense of clv1lizlng and dovelopmenlal totality thal had 1mpflc1t~1 undorwntten modernism 1n the first half of lhe twentteth century, lo< instance 01 tho Bauhaus But tho break woth lhe Bauhaus's machme age mOdernlsm 11s oosthet1cs and 11s pol1· tics - was ebundonlly clear by the 11mo of the notorious 1970 meeting of Aspen's

117

International Design Conference, when Bay Area eco·deslgn radicals faced off with the modernist design establfahment on one side and French Mandst lntellec· tuals on the other. Concomitantly, old machine age motifs of collectlve mechanical will and large capital were replaced In the pages of the Whole Eatth Cstalog by motifs of affordable single-operator tools. Though the accolade may not have been something the hippies sought, their candidacy as modernists nonetheless looks favorable, because they brought to the modern lfneage with which they engaged at Aspen something new and something old. Traces of Hegellanlslli had been seeded In hippie holism by the Transcendentalism of nineteenth-century New England.•~> By Insisting on the origin of consciousness In material and energetic Interactions, the hippies' understanding of mind shared a curious affinity with that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which supplanted Hegel's in the later nineteenth century. 16 • A passage from Engels's unfinished Dialectics of Nature (circa 1883) might almost be mistaken for a reading from the hippie canon, describing history and nature as: 118

an eternal cycle in which matter moves ... in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapor, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. m But hippie holism found in this natural condition less a thing to be overcome (the Hegelian and Marxist view), and more a partner in life on Earth. The hippies' revival (alongside assorted high-tech gewgaws) of tradition, primitivism. mysticism, and craft recalled that of the Arts and Crafts which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, conjectured that the merging of art with Ille and nature might reconcile the moral quandaries of Industrialization, a hope that was foundational for subse· quent modernism. Early modernism had also been affected by Theosophy, another striking precursor to hippie holism In Its bid to reconcile all religions and science into unitary belief; under its sway, for instance, the Austrian philosopher, reformer. and architect Rudolf Steiner attempted to make human power unlimited by accessing and examining the spiritual world through Inner development. m Clouded by their hedo-

nlstic love of the technologies of drugs. amplified music, and mobility, the political lacuna often noted about the hippies was resonant with not only early modernism but also the high-tech "9'8Cs1 The Panthet edition of the CoEvolutiol! Ouarterl)' had the effect, then of putting the Panthers and hippies in agreement that the reoroanliatlon of the world would begin bottom-up and lnsld&-out, from within "the system" and through self-reliance. Income from sales of the CoEvolutlOn Ouarterly, for example, would feed Panther "survival programs" ("model activities, tt seems to me."

Brand mused, "for cities evet)IWtlere"). '"' Foremost of these was the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program, which re· l>Ol1edly enrolled ten thousand children in breakfast krtchens m cities across the Unrted Stales by late 1969, becoming "the moot well known Block Panther Porty program,• Panther editors of the CoEvolvtJon Ouarterly could boasl, though "actually only one of etas. to two dozen ongomg community-based activities end programs that the Black Ponthe< Party sponsors.""" These Included an lntercommunal Youth lnst11ute, the pivotal Community Leaming

Center and Son of Man Temple, the People's Free Medlcal Research Health Clinic, the Free AmblAance PIOgram, the Free Food Program, Landbank.ng, the Housing CooperatiVe Program, the Free Shoe and Free Clothing Programs. and the Free Plumbing, Maintenance, and Pest Control Programs. Core Black Panther Party members In effect lived communally •• ' Nutritional, educational, recreational, and spiritual nourishment-the heart of

the hippies' Whole &tth Catalog-was also, in its own Wrf, al the '-1 of the Panthers' CoEvolutlOn Ouarterly. then. With the waning of the New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society, inter· and postwar "big modembt" urban recreation, and welfare programs were being reinvented In the Bay Area as citizen products, or appropriated in the absence of government and market provision. But the detalls of Nppie and Panther self-reliance were at odds. The hippies prototyped the future in the here and now. as part of the great effort and the great game of hie. Holism ~1ke Hegelianlsm) was nonprogrammatlc-we recognize It as it &mef98S not In the negation of the old totality, but by the affirmlltJOfl and synchtontzation of what is always the immanent capacity of ourselves and our wond. People might simply turn up and tn4ke a patk, •• they did at the People's Pati010 Eorth C.ttlog (Now York: HatpeOIO E¥!h Cattlog wu an Enlightenment project In lnsplratlorl. SM S«oon Sadler, •Ari ArcMocton ol the Who49." JourMl o/ Nch/toctvral Eauc.tioo 81, no. 4 (2008): 10&-129.

t • I •1 bellevo 11111 tho Now M:1111octu"' Is destined to dorrinate a 111 more comprehensive sphere thin building meano today." announced Wall• Gropius in 1935. "ond 11111 from lhe lnvesugation of l1s delalls wa ahal ldvance 1owards an - ·wider and protoundar conoep!lon ol daslgn a one great oognata wfiolo.• W•"• Gropius, Thi Now Arch/loctunl and the Bauhaus (London: Fabe< and FabeOIO Eorth Cato/og mentcw Rlchord Buckmlnster Fuller wu a leading TransetndonUllisl, M - 1 Fuller.

16 l In the Gtundri!!e (circa 1857), Man< wu ing bourgaofs soci91)' u "lololi1y.• u an "organic wllote, • In which evlt)'lhlng ts lnteroonnactod. suggesting, hkanY, 1934i ~71 . On Geddes'& hollsm, IM llolker M. Weller, 8iopolis: Plrridr ~and the City of Life (Camllridga. MA: MrT Pless, 2003).

( 18) S.. Sigmund Fniud, CM/zalion and Its Dlsc:onttr>ts (1830), trona. ~ Su.ct>ey (New Yoric: W.W. Norton, 2005), 26,,

c 19 1 Tho f)hr9M was a motK, for lnstonoo, In Battoon's Mlrld NAIUtll. A Nor:esS¥y IJnlly (New Yot1Pttr9d ao lhe CoE~lon o..tttl)' (Ir. Panuw

ldrtlon waa lhe third In lho ..n.oi. Aa ol 1885. tho Ouortttl)'was 1 < - . d by tho - & r t l l -

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Beginning in the decade before WOl1d War II and accelerating through the war and after, scientists designed Increasingly sophlstlcated mechanical and electrtcal systems that acted as If they had a purpose. This wOl1< lnt9f'S8Cted other wOl1< on cognition In animals as well as early wont on computing . What emeiged was a new way of loOklng at systems-not Just mechanical and electrical systems, but also biological and social systems: a unifying theory of systems and their relation to their environment. This turn toward "whole systems· and •systems thinking• became known as cybernetics. Cybernetics frames the wor1d In terms of systems and their goals. This approach led to unexpected outcomes. Systems achieve goals through Iterative processes, or feedback loops. Suddenly, serious scientists were talking seriously about circular causality. (A causes 8. and B causes C, and C causes A.) Looking more closely, scientists saw the difficulty of separating the observer from the system . Indeed, the system appeared to be a construction of the obse.ver. The n:>lo of tho observer i:i to provide a description of the system, which is provided to another observer. The description requires language. And the process of obselving, creating language, and sharing descriptions creates a society.111 Suddenly, serious scientists were talking seriously about subjectivity-about language, conversation, and ethics-and their relation to systems and to design. Serious scientists were collaborating to study collaboration. This turn away from the mainstream of science became a turn toward lnterdisciplinarity-and toward counterculture. Two of these scientists, Heinz von Foerster and Gordon Pask, took an interest in design, even as design was absorbing the lessons of cybernetics. Another member of the group, Gregory Bateson, caught the attention of Stewart Brand , systems thinker, designer, and publisher of Iha Whole Earth Catalog. Bateson introduced Brand to von Foerster.Ill Brand's Whole Earth catalog spawned a do-it-yourself publishing revolution, including von Foerster's five hundred-page

The Cybernetics of Cybernetics, "'' J> futurist Ted Nelson's Computer Ub I Dream Machines, , , .. •••• n11 and designers Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall's

Universal Traveler: A Soft-Systems Guide to Creativity. Problem-Solving and the Process of Reaching Goals "'•· » -as well as several other books about design In this genre of visual and topical collage. In addition to being icons of counterculture, these works are also early (printed) examples of hypel1ext, a term coined by Nelson. In a sense, they anticipate the interconnectedness of the Worid Wide Web. Ho~ver. Bush wrote the article because ol his COOC1lm that through the growing specialization ol knowledge and ol wori\, the "inYeStlgator Is staggered by the findings and conclusions ol thousands ol other worlernetlcs, or the cybernetics of cybernetics. The Idea of applying cybernetics to Itself first appears In print In a story Margaret Mead told about attending the 1955 meeting of the Society for General Systems Th&OI)'. ·1 suggested that, Instead of founding just another society, they give a little thought to hOw they could use their theory to predict the kind and size of society they wanted. what Its laws of growth and articulation with other parts of the scientific community shOuld be.• Jn 1968, she repeated her suggestion. this time to the American Society for Cybernetics. "Why can't we look at this society systematically as a system7" 1 " 1 In a 1972 Interview with Stewart Brand, Mead added, ·1 went up at the end of [the GST meeting) and talked to [Ross) Ashby, and he said, 'You mean we should apply our principles to ourselves?' " In the same Interview, Bateson explained, "Computer science is Input-output. You've got a box,(...) and the science Is the science of these boxes. Now, the essence of Wiener's cybernetics was that the science is the science of the whole circuit. ... [E]ssentially your ecosystem, your organism-plus-environment, Is to be considered as a single circuit ... and you are part of the bigger circuit.• Brand sums it up: the engineer is outside the system, and Wiener Is Inside the system. In other words, Bateson's engineer Imagines the observer can stand apalt from the system, while cybernetics had begun to see ttle observer as part of the system. uo1 Von Foerster later encapsulated the shift dn this way: first-order cybernetics is "the science of observed systems,• while second-order cybernetics Is "the science of obs&N· Ing systems.•cw In 1975, Brand's Point Foundation used proceeds from the Whole Eafth Catalog to fund publication of von Foarster's Cybernetics of Cybemetics.tm In characterizing this new, "second· order" cybernetics, \IOI\ Foerster forefronts the dynamism of observation, which calls Into question the traditional model of sci· ence as "objective.· Humberto Maturana, the Chilean biologist whose aar1y career deeply Influenced both biology and cybernetics and whOse later career Is now Influencing our understanding of human social systems. says, "Anything said Is said by an observer:cm Mal\Jmna's start· Ing point Is deceptively obvious: anyttllng that Is said must come from a person saytng it. This means that what the person says can only oome from the person's

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self-organizing systems.•llSI The Idea of biological computing was not merely a metaphor. Beer. Pask. and others attempted to •grow· computers. Their approach had a practical basis. They reelized that some problems are too 00 Decades later, Steve Jobs famously summed up the Whole Earth

Catalog as, • ... one of the bibles of my generation .... it was ali made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback fonn, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic , and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." ' ''! Like the search engine giant, the Whole Earth Catalog acted as a kind of text-based browser or window onto an aggregated wor1d of products, books, devices, and ideas that were not for sale through the publication directly, but would in effect create a community or a network of subscribers-like-minded members of the counterculture. cso 1 Cybernetics and Design In addition to being a utopian counterculture toolkit and a self-published manifesto for a do-it-yourself lifestyle, the Whole EBlth Cstalog is also an Introduction to systems thinking and design. The catalog 's first section "Understanding Whole Systems" juxtaposes Buckmlnster Fuller and von Foerster's review of mathematician Spencer Brown's Laws of Fonn-followed quickly by biologist D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form side-by-side with architect Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form, with a sidebar on von Foerster's Purposive Systems thrown in. " ' ' 1•1 And then, cheek-by-jowl, are reviews of artificial intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Altificial and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Yearbook. On the next the page is a review of Wiener's Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro

Including works by John Chris Jones. Victor Papanek, Ross Ashby. Warren McCulloch, Nicholas Negroponte. Lawrence Halprin, Gyorgy Polya, George Miller, and many more. Today, it would still be a good reading llst for a graduate seminar on both design theory and systems theory. How did this happen? Brand says. "As an undergraduate 1 saw a talk by Charles Eames that got me.• Brand had studied magazine design at Stanford in 1959 and graphic design at San Francisco Art Institute in 1960 s• Turner argues that Buckmlnstet Funer•s notion of a •comprehensive oe signer" captivated Brand. For Fuller, th.. comprehensive designer was •an emerging synthesis o f artist, inventor, mechanic , objective economist and evolutionary strategist ."1521 By this definition, Brand 's life's work may be about as good an example of comprehensive design as one can find. The idea of multidisciplinary design was in the air-at the Eames Office (1941), George Nelson Associates (1947), Total Design (1963), Unimark (1965), Pentagram (1972), and with other practitioners. At the Ulm School of Design (HIG) in postwar Germany, where Wiener lectured in 1955, they called this holistic or universal approach "environmental design." Schools in the United States imported the idea and nomenclature. most notably University of California, Berkeley, which transfonned its Beaux-Arts School of Architecture into a modernist College of Environmental Design. In 1963, as part of the transfonnation, Dean Winiam Wurster hired two of the founders of the design methods movement. Horst Rittel and Christopher Alexander. Rittel had taught classes In operations research and cybernetics at Ulm. His first published work was a sertes o f lectures titled "Kommunikationstheorle In der Soziologie (Kybernetik)" ("Communication Theory in Sociology [Cybernetics)"} In 1958. At Berkeley, Rittel's design methods courses explicitly included concepts from cybernetics. His writings link cybernetics and design, and he describes design as a cybernetic process. What's more, Rittel saw this process as an argumentative conversation, and h is work on scaffolding this conversation launched a field of ongoing research known as design rationale (processes for making design decisions and software systems to support these

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processes and document them). Rittel's "design methods of the second generation" echoes second-order cybernetics. im Beer's ideas about exceedingly complex systems, their continuously shifting nature, and their ultimate unknowability are remarkably similar to Rittel's ideas about "wicked problems." or those that resist resolution because of their com· plexity and because stakeholders do not share a common frame of reference. In 1964, Christopher Alexander published his Harvard PhD dissertation in architecture as Notes on the Synthesis of Form. According to Pickering, Alexander made Ashby's Design for a Brain (which he repeatedly references) "the basis for"' his dissertation. is• 1 "The key concept he takes there from Ashby is precisely the notion of adaptation, and his argument Is that unselfconscious buildings are well adapted buildings in several senses: in the relation of their internal parts to one another, to their material environment. and to the social being of their inhabitants ... In the field of self-conscious design, at· tempts to fix misfits ramify endlessly." 1' '1 In turn, Alexander's work was the Hov

basis for Charles Owen's famous "struc· tured planning" courses at Illinois Institute of Technology"s (11n Institute of Design (ID), which for more than thirty years formed the backbone of ID's uniquely systematic approach to design. Owen reports that he "obtained Alexander"s computer programs on punched cards from MIT. After a month of work, we got tine programs running on llT Research lnstitute's mainframe computer." Owen also attended American Society for Cybernetics meetings. ts~> Conversely, Pask and von Foerster attend· ed meetings of the design community. Von Foerster gave several presentations to design groups, including the Industrial Design Education Association (IDEA) In 1962 and the International Design Conference at Aspen, also that year, as well as an address et North Carolina State University, titled " Cybernetics of Design" in 1963. Design critic Ralph Caplan, who also spoke at the IDEA conference, reports, "Far and away the best thing to remember about the conference was von Foerster's brilliant speech, which I loved but probably didn"t understand. As for what he was doing at an IDEA meeting, that was not such

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an oddity. Von Foerster knew plenty about design and everything else." As Caplan notes, Serge Chermayeff-who had been Director of the Institute of Design, taught architecture at Harvard, and collaborated with Alexander-also spoke at the same IDEA conference, and he and von Foerster became "close friends over the years:1s1 Design as Cybernetics Ashby and, in turn, Alexander framed design in terms of adaptation, fit, and evolution-that is, as a process of feedback. However. design is not just steering toward a goal (as In first-order cybernetics); design is also a process of discovering goals, a process of learning what matters (as in second-order cybernetics). Pickering contrasts design as problem solving with Ashby's evolutionary and performative approach: ·1 have always thought of design along the lines of rational planning-the formulation of a goal and then some sort of intellectual calculation of how to achieve it. Cybernetics, in contrast. points us to a notion of design In the thick of things, plunged Into a lively world that we cannot

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139

conlfol and that wil ~ 91."pr'ose us (CJybemeta serves boCh to f~ these ~ (rather ltWl ltea16IV Chem as un!~ side e'fecuJ and to make a Y01ue of them to er.,y them'" In 1962 boCh NexanOet and Pas!< anended the fQt Onogrl melhods con!•· ence at the 1mpena1 College in London Pask all h8d a~~ Ill the ~ ~llCXV'Ol .,, London. wt19re he colabor.lted Witt! at:htec:t Cednc Pnoe on the Fu-i Palace. an IRlu'lt but ~ ~ le space-a megaslruCt1n he and thea!« cJreaor Joan l.JtUl?wood aealed In 1969. Pask pubWled 'The~ ReW>auoe of Cyt.>emet.a." expic:rt!y tramng de5lgr18S cyt>emeta He .u;. ipates Donald SchOn'a notion of de991 as c:ornei sat.on (descnbed in his 1983 book The ReflectNe Practitioner) and goes fl6lher than Rtttel and others wtlo desc:ribed desagr\ as a cyt>emebc: process Wi1h its systems-based appioach. ~~context and nutioush1ps. pustq des91 beyood ds oqect~ ~oectl. The ongwaal cyt>eo •lebc: frame of systems and goab and then the seoonck>rder cyt>ernebc frame of Sl.qectMty and oonversabOn gve ,_ to aof de5lgr1 as 0011Ceo 1ied Witt! much more than the form of otJ,ec:ts Pask noted. •a buidng ca-W10t be vteWed smpt'/ in ISOlatiOi 1. It is ody 11iea • lgf\A as a tunan envrorment. It perpetually 11!.eradS Wlltl llS inhabllants. on the one hand serwig them and on the UCher hand OOl OcAil ig it_. beha'vlor. In oCher words. ~ make sense as parts of larger systems tha1 nilde tunan OOl i lj)Oi lei 4:s and the an::twtect IS pnmarily OOl IOel i ied wlltl these larger systems: tt-r (not JUSl the bndlnged the tnal-and-.ror, cyber"netlC approach that ~ champ!oned. Hrs Yl$ion was a new type ol lelmlfl!I for an age of SOCl8l expenmentabon, bt\ngrng together art and science to fostar an expenential understanding of phenomena In the world through inter11Cbon.

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( • 81 Stewart Brand, The Last Whole &t1h C.tllk>g: Access lo Tools (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute. 1973). 1. ( • 91 Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commenoement Address. June 14, 2005, accessed Apnl 12, 2015, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/lobs061505.html. ( 50) Turner has chronicled the Influence of cybernetics on Brand, Ful~. and McLuhan, and how It led to •cybarculture. • For example, Alan Kay took the PARC frb What all these examples share, of course, is a fascination with image culture, composed, as they were, from pilfered pictures from tra~el brochures, Time magazine photo spreads, and other low- or middlebrow throwaway sources. These were projects never meant to be built; they were intended purely as rhetoncal figures. As images of a hypo-

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thetieal architecture, they relied on extant pictures from the seemingly endless archive of contemporaiy mass-media culture. Here they are recombmed, altered, and contorted to show an alternative future wood that may come to be, if we allowed the current state of affairs to continue on Its inevitable path. Multinationa.1consumerism, of which the then-aging International Style was one aspect, would lead quite seamlessly into a global monoculture: a wortd wrapped by a steely, cold monolith. composed purely of advertising images. The Introduction of images of hip· pies Into Superstudio's wort< maugurates a turn toward a more sincere attitude toward radical architectural production. If Continuous Monument and other wortAccounts of precisely inflation. Extending from the window of how the helmets functioned are scarce, an otherwise nondescript building, the though the primary purpose seems less pneumatic sphere contained a capsule for to actually communicate with far-flung individual users to experience the streets interlocutors than to enhance the expeof Vienna from a heightened perspective. rience of one's Immediate environment Hovering over the street and surrounded through the layering of different visual by a translucent, colored plastic dome, and audial signals over the wearer's one's familiar view of the city was altered. immediate field of perception. One The second important image appeared in was meant to see one's surroundings a subsequent page of the spread and doc· anew, with "fresh eyes," so to speak. umented one of Viennese Actionist Otto It may be Instructive to compare, Muehl's Materialaktion performance events briefly, these Viennese prototypes with from the mtd·1960s. From the camera's like-minded attempts to expand architecvantage point near the ground, one witture's mediums elsewhere. For instance, nesses a lateral spread of body parts along In England in the same year, Archlgram with dett1tus, strewn haphazardly. m s. &I developed thelr lnfo-Gonks, a pair of The two Images would seem to have spectacles-cum-television screens that little in common, initially. One focuses on also included a pair of stereo headphones. tile cybernetic possibilities of a mediated cue ••&• 1911 Here, though , the emphaarchitecture that forces the viewer, via the sis seems to be less an alteration of the erected prosthetic, into the city stieets. existing environment through the addition while the other shows the body In tatters. of visual and audio fitters than it was the Buckley interprets the latter saying, "Here creation of a whole new sensory environa fantasy of individual liberation comes unhinged, as desubhmation threatens a ment, divorced from the existing world into which It was placed. This model symbolic structure of containment and perhaps reached its ape>< with Archigram's coherence with disintegration and col· lapse.• However, I would suggest that Enviro-Pill of t970, in which the user pops a drug that allows one to imagine a new the "disintegration" that the image purarchitectural environment wholly unique to ports to document is not the whole story. The Actionists' performances did indeed oneself. c... ••• • ' ' ' > However, gone now is any sense of communal gathering to involve the symbolic damaging of the Ross x. ElOtne

body; however, as demonstrated by the numerous jail sentences that such artists served in violation of Austrian decency laws, the forceful deployment of the body in and as art was designed to shock. The performances. too, were largely staged enactments of the ritual destruction or the body, and so the photographs should not be seen necessarily as documentary evidence of bodily trauma but instead as calculated attempts to use the body as the means by which the artists could question restrictive social mores. This Is all to say that Holleln, Haus-Rucker-Co, and the Actionists all explored the limits of the body, and in so doing pointed toward the ways in which the body could be liberated , extended, and exceeded either through excessive materiality or by prostheses. It is worth remarking that all of these architects and collectives, whether north or south of the Alps, remained forever hopeful about the bodily emancipation that such projects would usher in, despite the growing literature bemoaning the alienating effects of mass-media communications apparatuses. Buckley notes, too, that Hollein's fixation on the body in architecture was conveyed in strongly gendered terms: the figures he features are primarily women. Likewise, in Superstudio's Supersurfaoe film, it was Cynthia, whose body writhed and danced, who demonstrated the architectural freedom of the new media environment. It is as if the introduction of so much wiring would lead, almost inevitably, to a

Batbare//a-like fantasy of wild women, all plugged in and unabashedly turned on. The same year that Hollein's "Alles ist Architektur• was published, the streets of Vienna were also witness to a far different take on the gendered Implications of new media and public space. VALIE EXPORrs Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema) was initially staged on November 11, 1968, at the Second Mara1siade Junger Film Festival in Vienna. There, and in other public venues in ten cities over the next three years, the artist wore a box-a scaled-down replica of a movie theaterover her bare chest while her collaborator, artlst Peter Weibel, encouraged members of the public to part the makeshift curtain and reach into the box. What was presented, then, was yet another thin architectural envelope, nearty coextensive with the body itself. This architectural venue-the movie theater-was not chosen innocently though. As Laura Mulvey noted several years after EXPORT's performance, the design of most movie houses, with their darkened spaces and isolated seats all facing the screen, encourages a sort of voyeurism in which the inevitably female body becomes the locus for male desire and defilement.crn In the image used most often to document the performance, we see a male member of the public reaching into the box; however, now his gaze is met by EXPORT's own cool stare and knowing smirk. ric. 11 I am lingering on EXPORT's expanded cinema work not only to reinforce the

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Viennese fixation with the body and rts deployment en the pubhc Sphefe but also to call attention to the latent deslres, Identifications, and injuries that attend any vision of emancipation through technology. What EXPORT forces us to reckon with is the enduring power dynamics of any purportedly hberatory design scheme. EXPORT herself noted, in a retrospective statement regarding Tapp und Tastlano, "For as long as the c1hzen is satisfied wrth the reproduced copy of sexual freedom, the state 1s spared the sexual revolution." ' And, utllmately, Is this not the case with so many of the "classic" works of Radical Architecture? Whether an activist proposal published in the pages of Casabella or an architectural manifesto in Bau, a hastily made film, or a shck prototype of a surround-sound helmet, the works of Radical Architecture are known to us pnmarily 1n and through representation, and as such they are subject to a politics of the image. Any actual sexual revolution, one in which both men and women rollicked freely, would have to wait. In the meantime, Radical Architecture was content to trade in a more tned and true notion of sexual freedom equated with the female body and its abandon, and it is important to note that these images were primarily made by and for male audiences. However, the seductiveness of the Images from this era also rubs against tlleir blunt materiality. For as much as these images are beholden to the politics of the image, they are also subject to the material constraints of their mechum. This is to say that before these projects are images of something, they are first and foremost pictures that are printed in glossy journals or makeshift zines, bound together with their kin, and sent around the globe in their mizomatlC dissemination. The architectural magazine of the late 1960s. then, acoompl1shed much of what Superstu1 Nevertheless. the fact remained that the journal, with its capacities both to unrte arid to dazzle, demonstrated the functional potential of media technologies to organize transformatlOn.

149

150

What sort of utopias, then, do these imaginings on either side of the Alps provide? As with most utopias, they are highly ambiguous. They tell us, first, that an abiding goal was for the individual to regain a sense of so-called "self-valori zatlon." in the words of the Autonomists, and that this self-valorlzatlon was both to be felt through one's whole body and to be broadcast by means of one's expanded mindset.ell.t 363, March 1972. cover and 1; and Superstudlo, "DlscOfSI per lmmaginV Speaking Through Images,· Domus 48 t (December 1969): 44-45.

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Although we must continue to muster manpower and nnanctng ror expansion to other worlds, a rundai:aental questions remains. At some point, man must order his relationship to the physical enviroruaent toward harmonious coexistence rather than the short-term, mindless piracy of the planet that has marked his history to this point. (H)

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SS: How do you see your vork in relation to other modernist architects, early figures such Moholy-Hagy, Mies van der Rohe, Puller, whom I mentioned earlier. They vere fundacental to the Illinois Institute of Technology (originally the Institute of Design), part of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, where you taught. Did you see yourself as a part of the larger modernist project? KI: Yes. I had a feeling of generality about life. But a lot of modernism was sad because people would do things and they would ... make it too complicated. I didn't want to do that. I suspected that the visual evaluation criterion was a built-in cultural defense mechanism to preserve the status quo. This cultural misdirection is so strong that I was certain it would not be possible for even the architectural giants of the early 20th century to beat the rap. Despite the devotion and coverage they showed, their work tended to result in a visual cleaning-up or existing artifacts. This kind of supernctality can never hope to cope with the conflicts and contradictions of the society. We needed new views in depth on way of life questions and artifacts vhich were responsive to objective challenges in the environment. ( 15)

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realm of art,• as they pointed out-alao circulated within the more rarlfied air or the contemporary art world, helping to pioneer the uae of electronic technologies as a medium for art.

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An Interview with Gerd Stern of USCO by T1na R1vers Ryan Pormed in 1963 by poet Gerd Stern, painter Stephen Durkee, and engineer Michael Callahan, the Company of Us, or USCO, was a p1oneer of "lntermedla" In the 1960s . Somet1mes used interchangeably with other terms like "multimedia,• and closely related to movements such as expanded cinema, intermedia is as protean as the movement it describes . The members themselves outlined its essential tra1ts: "Intermedia" refers to the simultaneous use of various media to create a total environmental experience for the audience. Meaning Is communicated not by coding ideas into abstract literary language, but by creating an emotionally real experience through the use of audio-visual technology. Originally conceived In the realm of art rather than In science or engineering, the principles on which intermedia Is based are grounded In the fields of psychology, Information theory, and communication engineering . (l) As this definition suggests, USCO's kinetic sculptures and multichannel environments used electronics to layer language, sounds, lights, and images. The resulting experience, marked by both sensory confusion and perceptual immediacy, is closely related to popular notions or psychedelic experience. In fact, USCO created the light proJ ec tions for Timothy Leary's Psychedelic Explorations show In New York In 1965, and the following year they designed

' 11 l

the audiovisual system for a L.ong Island discotheque, Murrey the K's Vorld, which ls often credited as the first psychedelic nightclub. Notably, the reproduction and discussion or USCO's work In publications such as Life and Harper's Bazaar Introduced the group to a mainstream audience. helping to define the psychedelic sensibility or the era. But Just aa l•portantly, USCO's lntermedla-•concelved In the

O•r:t $lern 1n rronl or 011e pant>l or Contact Ia Tne OnJy Lov•. c. 1'6)

Until recently. narratives or postwar art generally Ignored what we now call •new media art," or art made with electronic, and speclftcally digital, media. Yet In Its heyday, USCO-a high-tech hippie collective operating out of a former church In Oarnervllle, New York, which they referred to as the Tabernacle (Pigs. 4 & 5)-was positioned aa an Important avant-garde art group. Its reputation was built In part upon Its members• Individual careers: prior to forming USCO, Durkee was a painter whose works were included in Gene Swenson's seminal 1963 article on Pop art. while Callahan worked at the groundbreaking San Prancisco Tape Music Center. Not long after its Inception, USCO was invited to participate In the landmark Expanded Cinema Festival of November 1965, and to design an environment, along with sculptor Charles Ross, for the Architectural League of New York in early 1967. The group was also Invited to exhibit In galleries and museums, Including their oft-cited solo four-room show at New York's Riverside Museum In 1966. In which the group combined cosmic imagery and sounds to create a meditative space. (2) Around that time, USCO became a stalwart of surveys of kinetic and kinetic light art, most notably 1966's Kunst Licht Kunst at the Stedel1Jk van Abbemuseum in Elndhoven, 1967's Light/Motion/Space at the Walker Art Center In Minneapolis, and 1968's Light: ObJect and Image at the Whitney Museum In New York. The group was also featured In the landmark shows The ProJected Image, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 1967, and ~ More Beginnings, an exhibition of collaborations between artists and engineers that was Juried by Experiments In Art and Technology (E.A.T.) and held at the Brooklyn Museum In 1968. 1n conjunction with MoMA's show The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.(3) Stern-long the spokesman of the group-notes that USCO's connection to the art world was also social. Along with his fellow USCO members, Stern associated with the New York scene, counting as friends figures such as Mark di Suvero, John Chamberlain, and John Cage (to whom he was connected via his brief time at Black Mountain College, and whom he regularly drove Into the city).

375

376

,,, Thus, although the group never repudiated its countercultural underpinnings. they were equally embedded 1n the more conventional art world, where their reputation hinged less on psychedelia than on the exploration of new media technologies.(~) Their characteristic visual strategy was the use of electronically modulated strobe lighting, exemplified by their Strobe Environment for Light/Motion/ Space and by Pannashst1c, another strobe environment created for the exhibition Intermedia '68. (Notably, although 1t was not part of the lnterme.£.!._11 '68 touring schedule, MoMA sponsored a private presentation of USCO ' s Pantlast1~ic to c0lebrate the exhibition ' s opening.) In Strobe En_;'.1ronrnenL-w1dely reported to be the t1lt of Light/Mot1on/Spacev1s1tors were surrounded on three sides by metal l lc panels t11a1, rPllected the nash1ng light or a single strobe hanging from t,he ceiling. One reportPr notPd that some visitors Lossed around pillows 1n order Lo engage the strobe's ability to slice up continuous movement. These playful experimenters "were jumping up and down and laughing with the sheer Joy of so fantastic nn effect. If th1s 1s psychedelic, It Is the best k1nd," he wrote. "The happy iie strobeto mediate their perceptual effects.(9) T~e connectlon between the strobe and electronlcs , in particular, was expllclt: for exa:nple, when filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas interviewed USCO member Stephen (now Nooruddeenl O~rkee about it, he replied, •strobe is the digital trip. In other words, what the strobe ls basically doing, it's turning on and off, completely on and completely aff."(10) Similarly, Time magazine's article on • 1uminal ar•" called USCO's use of strobe •the visual equiv alent of the electronic scream at the end of the Beatles' record Penny Lane."(lll What are your thoughts on the strobe?

378

GS: Stroboscopic technology was something that was an intimate concern of ours . we did multimedia, and one of our biggest performances of our series of shows called Hubub (the title of which came from a quote of ~artin Luther's) was at Kresge Auditorium at MIT . We had the strobes going ; a motorcycle movie on three screens, with the movies going back and forth from each ~creen; fuur sounotracks; and this guy sitting on a big oscilloscope In the Buddha positions. Porty channels. The next

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