Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Thu 12 Oct 2006 02:53 PM PDT
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Brand worked off and on with USCO as a photographer and a technician between 1963 and 1966, living at the Garnerville church for short periods between his travels. Within USCO, he encountered the first stirrings of the New Communalist movement. Like Cage and Rauschenberg, the members of USCO created art intended to transform the audience's consciousness. They also drew on many diverse electronic technologies to achieve their effects. Strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters—for USCO, the products of the technocratic industry served as handy tools for transforming their viewers' collective mind-set. So did psychedelic drugs. Marijuana and peyote and, later, LSD offered members of USCO, including Brand, a chance to engage in a mystical experience of togetherness. And USCO's work did not stop at the end of each performance. Gathering at their church in Garnerville, and then again at performance sites around the country, the members of USCO lived and worked together steadily for a period of years. Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics. STEWART
BRAND MEETS THE CYBERNETIC COUNTERCULTURE [10.3.06]
INTRODUCTION When I first met Stewart Brand in 1965, he was sporting a button on which was printed: "America Needs Indians." We were at the headquarters of USCO ("US" company), an anonymous group of artists whose installations and events combined multiple audio and visual inputs, including film, slides, video, lighting, music, and random sounds. We were both wearing remnants of our US Army uniforms. We hit it off immediately and have been in touch consistently for the past forty-one years. USCO's mantra, "We Are All One," had already been altered to "We Are All One...except Brockman" in order to accommodate my involvement. In 1963, the group had erected a Psychedelic Tabernacle in a church half an hour outside of Manhattan, in Garnerville, New York. It became an obligatory stop for every seeker and guru passing through the area. Stewart lived there (in the steeple) for a while. Stewart was fascinated with the USCO community of artists—including painter Steve Durkee and poet Gerd Stern—and with Rockland County neighbors such as John Cage, all of whom were reading, studying, and debating Marshall McLuhan's ideas on communications. In fact, at one point USCO went on tour with McLuhan and provided an "intermedia" counterpoint to his talks. Brand, who preferred the term multimedia to intermedia, performed his "America Needs Indians," piece from 1964 to 1966 and performed "War: God" from 1967 to 1970. He organized The Trips Festival in January 1966 just as I was running "The Expanded Cinema Festival" in New York at Filmmaker's Cinematheque. In March 1966 he created the Whole Earth button (it read: "Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?"). This conceptual piece was the center of his 1968 campaign for a picture of "The Whole Earth", which led, in no small part, to the creation of the ecology movement. He is the king of initially obscure, ultimately compelling conceptual art. Call it reality. Brand is best known to my generation as the founder, editor, and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. I recall visiting him in Menlo Park, California, in 1968 while he was working on the original catalog. His wife at the time, Lois, a Native American mathematician, spent an entire day working on the catalog with a layout person while Brand and I sat together reading and underlining a copy of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, a book Cage had handed to me at a dinner in New York. I still have that copy. Several months later, the oversized catalog arrived packed in a long tube. The original Whole Earth Catalog captured the moment and defined the intellectual climate of the times. A subsequent edition, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1971, was a number-one best-seller and won Brand the National Book Award. During the '70s, he often talked about his vision for what he called the personal computer, a term he is often credited with inventing, although he is quick to point out that Alan Kay deserves credit for its coinage. "Alan credits me for being the first to use it in print in '74 in my book Two Cybernetic Frontiers" he says. "I don't recall others using it as a term, and I didn't think I was doing a coinage, just describing the Xerox Alto in an epilogue in the book. By '75 I did use it as the name of a regular section in the CoEvolution Quarterly, well before personal computers existed." In 1983, Brand sent Dick Farson and Darryl Iconogle of the Western Behavioral Science Institute to see me in New York about a piece of conferencing software called the Onion, which was being used on a bulletin board system called EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System) and run by Murray Turoff. When I demurred, Stewart told me I could be a player or I could choose to sit out the biggest development of the decade. I chose to sit it out. Stewart was right and wrong. It is the biggest development of the '90s, not the '80s. Inspired by EIES, in 1984 Stewart co founded The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area, considered a bellwether of the genre. Clearly, some of the interesting thinking about the Internet has its origins in ideas formulated by the artists of the '60s, which, wittingly or unwittingly, were carried forward by the enthusiastic young Lieutenant Brand. Considerations of form and content, context, community, and even the hacker ethic were all presaged in part by activities and discussions during that period. (Indeed a recent German feature-length movie—"Das Netz" by Lutz Dammbeck—makes this very point and does it quite well, until it melts down by putting forth the bizarre and absurd thesis that the motivating factor behind the criminally insane murderer Ted Kaczynski—"The Unabomber"—was his desire to stop the network created by Brand and myself. (See the trailer). In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a cover story: "Always two steps ahead of others.....(he) is the least recognized, most influential thinker in America." The story was about Stewart Brand. The story was absolutely correct: Stewart Brand is the most influential thinker in America. —JB ED. NOTE: The following is an excerpt (Chapter 2) from Fred Turner's new book: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner (University Of Chicago Press). Photos supplied by Stewart Brand. FRED TURNER is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory and From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. STEWART BRAND MEETS THE CYBERNETIC COUNTERCULTURE
In the spring of 1957, at the height of the cold war, Stewart Brand was a nineteen-year-old freshman at Stanford University, and he was deeply worried. Even though Europe lay more than six thousand miles to the east, Brand had begun to write at length in his diary about his fear that the Soviet Union would soon attack the United States. If the Soviets invaded, he wrote, he could expect
Some fifty years later, and more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Brand's fears might appear overwrought. But for Brand and other members of his generation in the late 1950s, the possibility of a Soviet attack felt very real. Brand was born in 1938 in Rockford, Illinois, a town not far south of Milwaukee, which specialized in making machine tools. His father was an advertising copywriter and a ham radio operator; his mother, a Vassar-educated homemaker and "space fanatic." In the Brand household, technologies of communication and travel presented vistas of individual and national progress. Both radio sets and rocket ships connected the Brand family to a universe beyond midsized, middle-class, midwestern Rockford. Thanks primarily to his mother, Brand became a space buff himself. He still keeps a well-worn copy of his childhood favorite, Chesley Bonestell's New Frontier primer The Conquest of Space, in his Sausalito, California, office. Even so, Brand suffered from a deep fear of technological Armageddon. "In [the] early '50s somebody compiled a list of prime targets for Soviet nuclear attack," he later remembered, "and we [Rockford] were [number] 7, because of the machine tools." For the young Stewart Brand, as for many other American children in the era, the possibility that the world might come to an end at any moment hung steadily in the air. As a child, he recalled, "I had a nightmare — one of those horrible, vivid, never forget nightmares—there was chaos and then I looked around and I was the only person left alive in Rockford . . . a knee-high creature. So I had an early allergy to nukes.'
By the time Brand reached college, alongside the dread of nuclear holocaust, another fear lurked as well: the fear of growing up to become the kind of adult who lived and worked in a hyperrationalized world. While he wrote extensively about the Soviets in his journals, Brand dwelled very little on the risks an invasion might pose to America as a nation. Instead, he focused on the ways that such an invasion might prevent his achieving personal independence and on how it would force him to become a member of a gray, uninspired, Orwellian mass. The Soviets of Brand's imagination were mechanical creatures who would stomp out every trace of individuality if given half a chance. In one sense, as symbols, they pointed backward, calling up the lockstep Nazis of American propaganda some fifteen years before. Yet they also looked forward, to an adulthood in which Brand himself might be compelled to give up his individuality. Both of these senses of invasion came to the fore in Brand's diary of 1957, when he wrote: "If there's a fight, then, I will fight. And fight with a purpose. I will not fight for America, nor for home, nor for President Eisenhower, nor for capitalism, nor even for democracy. I will fight for individualism and personal liberty. If I must be a fool, I want to be my own particular brand of fool—utterly unlike other fools. I will fight to avoid becoming a number—to others and to myself.' For Stewart Brand, the national struggle to save America and the world from Soviet assault and nuclear holocaust was intimately entwined with his individual adolescent struggle to become his own person. And Brand was not unique in this respect. For college students of his time, the imagined gray mass of the Soviet Army was a mirror image of the army of gray flannel men who marched off to work every morning in the concrete towers of American industry. The soldier in his uniform was simply another form of what sociologist William Whyte called the "Organization Man." Cut off from his emotions, trained to follow a chain of command, the Soviet soldier and the American middle manager alike seemed to many to be little more than worker bees inside ever-growing hives of military-industrial bureaucracy. In the 1940s and 1950s, that bureaucracy had brought forth nuclear weapons; in the 1960s it would lead Americans into the Vietnam War. As they came of age, Stewart Brand and others of his generation faced two questions: How could they keep the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons or by the large-scale, hierarchical governmental and industrial bureaucracies that had built and used them? And how could they assert and preserve their own holistic individuality in the face of such a world?
As he sought to answer those questions, Brand turned first to the study of ecology and a systems-oriented view of the natural world. Later, after graduating from Stanford and serving several years as a draftee in the army, he found his way into a series of art worlds centered in Manhattan and San Francisco. For the artists of those communities, as for Brand's professors at Stanford, cybernetics offered a new way to model the world. Even at the height of the cold war, many of the most important artists of this period, figures such as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, embraced the systems orientation and even the engineers of the military-industrial research establishment. Together they read Norbert Wiener and, later, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; across the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, they made those writings models for their work. At the same time, both the artists he met and the authors they read presented the young Stewart Brand with a series of role models. If the army and the cold war corporate world of Brand's imagination moved according to clear lines of authority and rigid organizational structures, the art worlds of the early 1960s, like the research worlds of the 1940s, lived by networking, entrepreneurship, and collaboration. As he moved among them, Brand came to appreciate cybernetics as an intellectual framework and as a social practice; he associated both with alternative forms of communal organization. Ecology as Alternative Politics Brand first encountered systems-oriented ways of thinking at Stanford in a biology class taught by Paul Ehrlich. By the end of the decade, Ehrlich was famous for predicting in his book The Population Bomb (1968) that population growth would soon lead to ecological disaster. In the late 1950s, however, he was concentrating on the fundamentals of butterfly ecology and systems-oriented approaches to evolutionary biology. These preoccupations reflected the extraordinary influence of cybernetics and information theory on American biology following World War II. At the level of microbiology, information theory provided a new language with which to understand heredity. Under its influence, genes and sequences of DNA became information systems, bits of text to be read and decoded. In the 1950s, as Lily Kay has pointed out, microbiology became "a communication science, allied to cybernetics, information theory, and computers." Information theory also exerted a tremendous pull on biological studies of organisms and their interaction. Before World War II, biologists often focused on the study of individual organisms, hierarchical taxonomies of species, and the sexual division of labor. Afterward, many shifted toward the study of populations and the principles of natural selection in terms modeled on cybernetic theories of command and control. Ehrlich's research and teaching in this period strongly reflected this shift. A preoccupation with systems-oriented models of the natural world informed both his lectures and the 1963 textbook The Process of Evolution in which he and coauthor Richard Holm summarized much of Ehrlich's thinking in the period. Ehrlich and Holm deliberately "de-emphasized taxonomic ideas such as species and subspecies." Instead of a world arrayed in Linnaean hierarchies, they offered a vision of life as "a complex energy-matter nexus." Individuals, populations, and the landscapes they inhabited were entwined in constant exchanges—exchanges so pervasive that, as in the case of algae and fungi, individuals were sometimes hard to distinguish from whole populations. For Ehrlich and Holm, the classic dualities of mind and matter, actor and action, masked a series of more essential truths: individuals were elements within systems and were systems in their own right. As such, they both responded to and helped shape the flows of energy that governed all matter. This was also true for humans at the cultural level: according to Ehrlich and Holm, culture had grown out of man's biological evolution and had become a force through which humans could recursively influence their biological development. For Ehrlich and Holm, and the young Stewart Brand, cultural activities such as politics, art, conversation, and play took on a deep significance for the survival of the species. At a moment when humans threatened to destroy themselves with nuclear weapons, concrete expressions of culture offered a way to help them move forward and escape annihilation. For Brand, Ehrlich's systems orientation offered an intellectual alternative to the cold war dualisms with which he had been struggling. If hierarchical leaders such as those in the Kremlin ruled by applying force from above, and so squeezed the individuality out of their subjects, biological systems as Ehrlich described them maintained order by means of evolutionary forces at work in the life of every individual. With an analytical framework drawn from ecology and evolutionary biology, Brand could simultaneously explain the threat of the Soviet Union to the United States and the threat of hierarchies to the individual. That is, he could imagine both the Soviet Union and bureaucratic hierarchies more generally as monocultures, systems devoted to reducing the individual variations that helped ecosystems evolve. Brand could also begin to view the political confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States and its potential for nuclear holocaust in evolutionary terms. On the one hand, thanks to nuclear weapons, humanity found itself at a new evolutionary moment. Like other species, it had arrived at the brink of its own destruction. But on the other hand, unlike other species, it could recognize its predicament and choose to make changes. In this context, the choices that individuals made in the cultural realm became freighted with truly cosmic, evolutionary significance. In September 1958 Brand explained in his diaries that "the responsibility of evolution is on each individual man, as for no other species. Since the business of evolution for man has gone over to the mental and psychological phase, each person may contribute and influence the heritage of the species." For this reason, he wrote a month later, "the matter [of ] freedom—social, psychological, and potential—is of the highest importance." For Brand, even as a student at Stanford, the ability to think outside the dominant paradigm of cold war conflict both marked and made possible an advancement in human evolution. The liberation of the individual was simultaneously an American ideal, an evolutionary imperative, and, for Brand and millions of other adolescents, a pressing personal goal. Cybernetic Art Worlds The question was, How could that liberation be achieved in daily life? Brand's search for individual freedom led to a decade-long migration among a wide variety of bohemian, scientific, and academic communities. In the course of these travels, Brand encountered both communal ways of living and a series of technocentric, systems-oriented theories that served as ideological supports for communalism. Often enough, the theories themselves were not explicitly theories of social organization so much as theories of local social practices, such as how to make art or how to take LSD or how to run a business meeting. As he moved among these communities, however, and later, when his Whole Earth Catalog became a forum in which such communities met, Brand began to see how the systems orientation of Paul Ehrlich's population biology, combined with new, countercultural modes of living, might offer an appealingly individualistic lifestyle—not only for him, but also for anyone else who could abandon the halls of bureaucratic America. Soon after graduating from Stanford, Brand was drafted into the army, where he spent the next two years, first as an infantryman and later as a photographer. At the beginning, Brand took to military life and decided to become a Ranger. Midway through Ranger school, though, he decided to quit. "I wrote out every argument on both sides, knowing the conclusion was foregone, but comforted by the list," he told his diary at the time. "My vision widened, the Rangers looked admirable but wrongly zealous. And they wanting to be soldiers and I not." Although he liked the Rangers" parachute training and their camaraderie, Brand gradually come to loathe military regimentation. After leaving the Rangers, he became an army photographer at Fort Benning, Georgia; at Fort Dix, New Jersey; and briefly at the Pentagon. While stationed in Washington, he began to feel restless in his off-duty hours. "I was looking for the wrong thing," he wrote in his diary. "I was looking for San Francisco beauty, San Francisco people, San Francisco happiness—the bohemian style. . . . Therefore, Resolved—to go posh. To frequent the theaters, music halls, galleries, and homes not as an interloper taking all he can learn, but as a learning participant.' Brand remained somewhat isolated in Washington, but when he returned to Fort Dix, he found his way into a swirling New York art scene. In the summer of 1960, Brand had met a young San Francisco painter named Steve Durkee; by 1961 Durkee had moved into a lower-Manhattan loft, where Brand began to visit him on weekends from Fort Dix. As he did, he began to explore a social landscape at once deeply in synch with the systems perspectives he had encountered at Stanford and entirely out of synch with the relatively ordered, hierarchical world of cold war college and military life. Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s played host to a community of artists preoccupied with finding new relationships to their materials and audiences. When Brand arrived, the most influential members of the scene included musician John Cage, painter Robert Rauschenberg, and performance artist Allan Kaprow. These artists had inherited an essentially Romantic tradition, especially in painting, within which the artist struck a heroic pose. Art historian David Joselit has pointed out that the abstract expressionism that dominated American painting in the 1940s and 1950s celebrated painters as nearly mythic figures engaged in powerful acts of symbolic creation. Journalists for magazines such as Life, Fortune, and Harper's Bazaar amplified this mythology, depicting painters like Jackson Pollock as living emblems of the freedom of cold war American culture. Cage, Rauschenberg, and Kaprow worked to undermine this tradition. Since the mid-1940s, Cage had been exploring Zen Buddhism. Within Zen, he later wrote, nature was "an interrelated field or continuum, no part of which can be separated from or valued above the rest." In keeping with Zen tradition, Cage argued that the artist should not speak to his or her audience about the natural world, but should instead use art to heighten the audience member's sensitivity to experiences of all kinds. Neither the artist nor the audience should be cut away from or valued above the rest of nature; on the contrary, the process of art should work to integrate them both more closely into the natural systems of which they were already part. Whereas the high modernists of midcentury New York had become famous by making images of their own intentions, which were captured in brush strokes, Cage insisted that "the highest purpose [of an artist] is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation." For Cage, the rational, ordering mind that Theodore Roszak would later call "objective consciousness" had no place in art. Robert Rauschenberg agreed. "I don't want painting to be just an expression of my personality," he explained. "And I'm opposed to the whole idea of conception-execution—of getting an idea for a picture and then carrying it out. I've always felt as though, whatever I've used and whatever I've done, the method was always closer to a collaboration with materials than to any kind of conscious manipulation and control.' At one level, the work of Cage and Rauschenberg represented an attack on the hierarchies of cold war art and cold war artistic process. While emblematic artists of cold war American culture such as such as the abstract expressionists worked to demonstrate a mastery of the canvas and to create a product that could then be sold as evidence of that mastery, Cage and Rauschenberg offered up a view of artistic practice as a leveled collaboration among artist, audience, and materials. At another level, though, their work echoed and ultimately celebrated a migration toward the decentralized, systems-oriented forms of thought then occurring at the center of the scientific establishment. Writing in the Hudson Review at about the time that Stewart Brand was making his weekend forays into Manhattan, for example, art critic and professor Leonard B. Meyer described this movement and its effects on American art in this period. His view was that American artists had begun to work from the premise that "man is no longer . . . the center of the universe" and that the universe itself, as revealed by quantum physics, was an indeterminate system. In the work of Cage and Rauschenberg, he was right: for them, the making of art had become the building of systems of pattern and randomness, and thus, in Claude Shannon's sense, of information. For Stewart Brand, such insights echoed Paul Ehrlich's systems view of the natural world. They also offered new models for living. Starting in the early 1950s, Cage and his friends began to build artistic systems that would play out in real time. In 1952, for instance, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Cage created an event called Theatre Piece No. 1 in which audience members found themselves surrounded by Robert Rauschenberg's "White Paintings" and, among them, Merce Cunningham performing improvised dances, M. C. Richards reading poetry on a ladder, David Tudor playing piano, and Cage himself delivering a lecture. In 1958 Allan Kaprow christened these sorts of events "happenings." Kaprow had studied with Cage at the New School for Social Research. At the turn of the decade, he and artists such as Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Red Grooms blended Cage's systems orientation to artistic production with the abstract expressionist painters" focus on action. They developed a form of art in which artists, audience, and materials worked together to blur the boundary between art and life. Using materials gathered out of everyday life, they built theatrical environments inhabited by performers, objects, and bits of text, and invited audience members to wander through. On any given evening, art fans in jackets and ties might find themselves walking through a room hung with sheets of paper, a man on a swing swaying back and forth over their heads. They might watch artists roll around in chicken guts on the floor. Or they might visit a "shrine" made out of junkyard metal and paper trash. Like Cage's music or Rauschenberg's paintings,Kaprow and company's happenings brought to life a world of chance experience built out of everyday materials. Within that world traditional artistic hierarchies were leveled. The artist, the audience, the experience of theater, the experience of daily life—all were equivalent elements in a single complex system of exchange. To Brand, happenings offered a picture of a world where hierarchies had dissolved, where each moment might be as wonderful as the last, and where every person could turn her or his life into art. After his discharge from the army in 1962, Brand began to look for such worlds in earnest. Over the next six years, he traveled back and forth between the artistic bohemias of New York City and the emerging hippie scene in Haight-Ashbury. He visited Indian reservations in the Southwest, government-sponsored psychological researchers in Palo Alto, California, and, ultimately, a series of communes. Each of these settings provided a glimpse of a new way of living. Together, they began to supply the people and ideas whose interconnections would underlie the formation of the Whole Earth network in the years to come. Among the first communities into which Brand found his way was the influential art tribe USCO. Around 1962 Steve Durkee met up with a San Francisco–based poet named Gerd Stern. Within a year, Stern began collaborating on a series of multimedia performances with a young technician from the San Francisco Tape Music Center named Michael Callahan. By 1964 Durkee, Stern, and Callahan, together with a floating circus of friends and family, had taken up residence in an old Methodist church in Garnerville, New York, about an hour north of Manhattan. They christened their art troupe USCO—short for "The US Company." Over the next four years, they transformed the "happening" into a psychedelic celebration of technology and mystical community that found its way into the burgeoning LSD scene in San Francisco and the pages of Life magazine. Brand worked off and on with USCO as a photographer and a technician between 1963 and 1966, living at the Garnerville church for short periods between his travels. Within USCO, he encountered the first stirrings of the New Communalist movement. Like Cage and Rauschenberg, the members of USCO created art intended to transform the audience's consciousness. They also drew on many diverse electronic technologies to achieve their effects. Strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters—for USCO, the products of technocratic industry served as handy tools for transforming their viewers" collective mind-set. So did psychedelic drugs. Marijuana and peyote and, later, LSD, offered members of USCO, including Brand, a chance to engage in a mystical experience of togetherness. And USCO's work did not stop at the end of each performance. Gathering at their church in Garnerville and then again at performance sites around the country, the members of USCO lived and worked together steadily for a period of years. Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics. USCO was founded on a fusion of Eastern mysticism and ecological, systems thinking. Its members chose the name USCO in accordance with the teachings of Ananda K. Coomeraswamy, an early-twentieth-century scholar of Indian art then popular among Manhattan bohemians. Coomeraswamy had asserted that artists in traditional societies were as anonymous as tradesmen. The members of USCO saw themselves returning to a more traditional mode of tribal living and collective craftsmanship. The tribe would be bound together through various rituals involving drugs, mystical forces, and electrical technologies. As art critic Naomi Feigelson put it in 1968, "Collectively and individually USCO is hung up on light and its symbolic meanings, on the Kaballah and mysticism, on the divine geometry of living things and electrical phenomena." But USCO's founders were also steeped in the literature of cybernetics. Gerd Stern, a European Jew and a World War II– era refugee, saw Norbert Wiener as a child of European transplants like himself and was thoroughly versed in his writings. In large part for this reason, light, electricity, and mystical "energy" generally played a role in USCO's work very much like the one "information" plays in Wienerian cybernetics: they became universal forces that, functioning as the sources and content of all "systems" (biological, social, and mechanical), made it possible for individual people, groups, and artifacts to be seen as mirrors of one another. A promotional brochure for a 1968 USCO presentation at New York's Whitney Museum of Art described the group this way: USCO "unites the cults of mysticism and technology as a basis for introspection and communication.' Like Wiener's cybernetics, USCO's techno-mystical ideology emerged out of and supported multidisciplinary collaboration in a workshop setting. The group's productions ranged from three-dimensional poems, with flashing lights and bold-faced words, to multimedia slide, light, and sound shows and psychedelic posters. Each production required input by artists with a variety of technical skills, and the collaboration in turn required both a contact language in which the artists could speak to one another and a rationale to drive their production. Techno-mysticism filled both bills. "They have an artistic point of view," wrote Naomi Feigelson in 1968, "a critical, philosophical approach to life, and a goal beyond today. They are a group of individual artists, each disciplined in his own craft, and all together they are on a work trip." For the artists of USCO, technical work on multimedia projects offered a way to plug in to mystical currents that flowed among the group's members and within each of them. Like the anti-aircraft gunner operating Wiener's theoretical predictor, they could see themselves as parts of a techno-social system, serving new machines and being served by them. Such a vision did not mean that the members of USCO entirely escaped the questions of leadership and issues of gender politics that they ascribed to mainstream society. On the contrary: former members recall that Durkee and Stern served as alpha males to the group and frequently, if indirectly, struggled to control its direction. Although women (notably Durkee's wife, Barbara), played important roles in the group, leadership fell to men. Nevertheless, with their mystical conviction of collective unity, the members of USCO could confront the hard-bodied, bifurcated universe of cold war politics and its potentially world-ending nuclear weapons with a vision of transpersonal and potentially transnational harmony. To bring that vision to life in performance, USCO operated on organizational principles that would have been quite familiar to Brand from his studies with Paul Ehrlich. Rather than work with a transmission model of communication, in which performers or others attempt to send a message to their audience, USCO events tried to take advantage of what Gerd Stern called "the environmental circumstance." That is, USCO constructed all-encompassing technological environments, theatrical ecologies in which the audience was simply one species of being among many, and waited to observe their effects. As Steve Durkee put it, they built artistic worlds just like "God created the universe." Early projects were relatively simple. In 1963, for instance, Stern developed a project called "Verbal American Landscape," in which three slide projectors showed, in random sequence, photographs— many taken by Stewart Brand—of individual words found on road signs and billboards. Viewers were left to piece the words together into meanings of their own. Gradually "Verbal American Landscape" was absorbed into more complex shows. In a 1963 performance entitled "Who R U?" at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Stern and Callahan added highway sounds to the mix, moving them from speaker to speaker in the showroom. They also had individuals placed in booths around a central auditorium, miked their conversations, and replayed them simultaneously in an eighteen channel remix. By 1965 this show had morphed into a program called "We R All One," in which USCO deployed slide and film projections, oscilloscopes, music, strobes, and live dancers to create a sensory cacophony. At the end of the performance, the lights would go down, and for ten minutes the audience would hear multiple "Om's" from the speakers. According to Stern, the show was designed to lead viewers from "overload to spiritual meditation." In the final moments, the audience was to experience the mystical unity that ostensibly bound together USCO's members. Comprehensive Designers: Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller By the mid-1960s, USCO's performances marked the cutting edge of countercultural art. USCO had built multimedia backdrops for talks by Timothy Leary (whose Millbrook, New York, mansion received regular visits from USCO members) and Marshall McLuhan. In 1966 they supplied multimedia designs for Murray the K's World—a huge discotheque created within an abandoned airplane hangar—that appeared on the cover of Life magazine. In May of that year, they built an installation they called "Shrine" at New York's Riverside Museum. Audience members sat on the floor around a large aluminum column. Around them, a nine-foot-high hexagon featured Steve Durkee's paintings of Shiva and the Buddha, as well as flashing lights and other psychedelic imagery. They inhaled burning incense and listened to a sound collage and stayed as long as they liked. USCO called the installation a "be-in" because of the ways audience members were supposed to inhabit and not simply observe the work. On September 9, 1966, Life featured USCO's "Shrine" in a cover story on psychedelic art and introduced the notion of a "be-in" to a national readership for what was almost certainly the first time. USCO's performances brought with them two important transformations of the earliest artistic happenings. First, they aimed not only to help their audiences become more aware of their surroundings but also to help them imagine themselves as members of a mystical community. Second, to bring about that understanding, USCO turned to the materials of everyday life and to new electronic communication technologies. These turns grew in large part out of USCO's engagement with the technocentric visions of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Each of these theorists depicted technology as a tool for social transformation. At the same time, both turned their backs on the bureaucratic world of mainstream technocratic production. In their writings and their speeches, each cultivated a style of orphic collage. To readers raised on the declarative sentences of Ernest Hemingway, McLuhan and Fuller offered a kaleidoscopic alternative. Words and ideas collided with one another across their texts, sparking insights, creating flashpoints, energizing their readers. What is more, McLuhan and Fuller seemed to live lives in synch with their prose. Even though McLuhan held a teaching post in Canada, both he and Fuller traveled constantly in the mid-1960s. For the young people who flocked to their lectures, their peregrinations offered a model of an entrepreneurial, individualistic mode of being that was far from the world of the organization man—and yet a mode in which they still didn't need to give up the stereos and automobiles and radios that industrial society had created. Ultimately, McLuhan, and especially Fuller, would offer Stewart Brand both ways of imagining technology as a source of social transformation and living models of how to become a cultural entrepreneur. By the time Marshall McLuhan came to the attention of the artists in USCO, he had been a professor of English literature, primarily at the University of Toronto, for nearly twenty years. He had edited a volume of Tennyson's poetry, converted to Catholicism, and spent most of his working life in Canada. Little in this work suggested that he would become the most popular media theorist of the 1960s. Yet, alongside his teaching and his work on poetry, McLuhan developed a fascination with technology and its role in psychological and cultural change. Most critics trace this interest to his reading of the Canadian economic historian Harold Innis. But McLuhan also drew extensively on the work of Norbert Wiener. As McLuhan's first PhD student, Donald Theall, has pointed out, McLuhan encountered Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics in the summer of 1950. According to Theall, who was studying with McLuhan at the time, McLuhan rejected the mathematical theory of communication that Wiener laid out in Cybernetics but was deeply influenced by the vision of the social role of communication outlined in Wiener's 1950 volume The Human Use of Human Beings. McLuhan began reading the work of other cyberneticians, and in 1951 he took up Jürgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson's Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. According to Ruesch and Bateson, the self that was the subject of psychiatry was enmeshed in and largely shaped by a complex web of information exchange. In keeping with Wiener's cybernetics, they viewed social life as a system of communication and the individual as both a key element within that system and a system in his or her own right. When McLuhan was engaging with cybernetics, he was also exploring tribalism and art with his colleague Edmund Carpenter, an authority on the Inuit. In 1953 Carpenter and McLuhan established a series of weekly seminars on communication and media and a journal entitled Explorations. Together, journal and seminar served as a forum for McLuhan to brew up many of the insights for which he became famous. The twin interests in cybernetic approaches to communication media and tribal forms of social organization that McLuhan developed in the early 1950s became key elements of his media theories in the early 1960s and important influences on the art worlds of that period. In 1962 and 1964 McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, which, together, argued that transformations in communication technology were bringing about the retribalization of society. The Gutenberg Galaxy asserted that mankind was leaving a typographic age and entering an electronic one. With its sequential orientation, its segmented letters and words, McLuhan claimed, the technology of type had tended to create a world of "lineal specialism and separation of functions." That is, he held type responsible in large part for the development of rationalization, bureaucracy, and industrial life. By contrast, he said, electronic technologies had begun to break down the barriers of bureaucracy, as well as those of time and space, and so had brought human beings to the brink of a new age. In The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan described the new age in tribal terms: electronic media had linked all of humanity into a single "global village." In Understanding Media, McLuhan linked both the new tribalism and its promise of a return to a prebureaucratic humanism to a more cybernetic rhetoric of human machine entanglement as well. "Today," he wrote, "we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned." In McLuhan's view, the individual human body and the species as a whole were linked by a single nervous system, an array of electronic signals fired across neurons in the human body and circulating from television set to television set, radio to radio, computer to computer, across the globe. This worldwide web of electronic signals carried a mystical charge for many. In McLuhan's work, the charge tended to invoke a vision of mystical Christian unity, but for the young bohemians of the 1960s, it did not need to refer to anything more dogmatic than the felt sense of generational togetherness. At one level, USCO's motto—"We Are All One'—echoed McLuhan's Catholic striving toward a universal humanism. When the members of USCO built their multimedia environments, they hoped their audiences would feel their own, individual senses meld into the global nerve system of electronic media. At a more local level, though, the "we" of USCO's motto referred primarily to the members of USCO itself, the vanguard techno-tribesmen who recognized the power of McLuhan's vision. Even as they labored to introduce their audiences to the notion that all humans were one, the members of USCO created a workaday world in which the members of USCO were themselves brought into a state of collaborative unity through their work with electronic media. In that sense, the "we" of USCO's motto reflected a turning away from the global humanism of McLuhan's vision and back toward a more traditional notion of a visionary avant-garde. Early on, the members of USCO painted two words over the doors to the Garnerville church that captured this mix of anti-authoritarian humanism and tribal elitism well: "Just Us." Attachment: |
