Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics

✍ Scribed by John Beck and Ryan Bishop

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 321
• Series: Technicities
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Systems analysis, cybernetics, information theory - form the late 1940s through the 80s, these shaped military, business, government and academic thinking. Their influence on the arts is obvious, form the 'systems novels' of the 1960s and 70s to electronic music and from conceptual art to electronic media. 0The end of the Cold War did not end systems thinking; indeed, given the explosion of computer technologies into every aspect of contemporary life it can be argued that we are living in a world imagined and engineered by the Cold War. This collection connects Cold War material and conceptual technologies to the arts, society and culture.

✦ Table of Contents

List of Figures
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction The Long Cold War John Beck and Ryan Bishop
I Pattern Recognition
Chapter 1 The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to Know
Chapter 2 Simulate, Optimise, Partition: Algorithmic Diagrams of Pattern Recognition from 1953 Onwards
Chapter 3 Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts
II The Persistence of the Nuclear
Chapter 4 The Meaning of Monte Bello
Chapter 5 Deep Geological Disposaland Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo
Chapter 6 Shifting the Nuclear Imaginary: Art and the Flight from Nuclear Modernity
Chapter 7 Alchemical Transformations? Fictions of the Nuclear State after 1989
III Ubiquitous Surveillance
Chapter 8 ‘The Very Form of Perverse Artificial Societies’: The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family from its Cold War Nuclear Bunker
Chapter 9 The Signal-Haunted Cold War: Persistence of the SIGINT Ontology
Chapter 10 ‘Bulk Surveillance’, or The Elegant Technicities of Metadata
IV Pervasive Mediations
Chapter 11 Notes from the Underground: Microwaves, Backbones, Party Lines and the Post Office Tower
Chapter 12 Insect Technics: War Vision Machines
Chapter 13 Overt Research
Chapter 14 Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems
Index