Experiments in Art and Technology: We Are, Ourselves, Information Processors (Bonus)

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Announcer: This is a Getty Podcast.

Zoe Goldman: Hi, I’m Zoe, the producer of Recording Artists. Welcome back for another bonus clip.

Until now, I’ve been highlighting archival audio, but we also have great interviews our hosts conduct. As with the archival audio, we only use a little portion of these tapes to help tell our stories, but the interviewees are deeply knowledgeable.

So today, I’m sharing a longer clip from Ahmed Best’s interview of Fred Turner. Turner is a Stanford professor studying media technology and its impacts on American culture since World War Two. Listening to Turner speak was like going to the best kind of college lecture.

Over the last year, I’ve found myself returning to his explanation of the way media and authoritarianism have historically been intertwined. He was talking about the media landscape in the 1930s and 40s that led to E.A.T. in the 60s and 70s, but it has striking parallels to our relationship with media and authoritarianism today. Here’s Fred Turner.

Fred Turner: A lot of folks think that the tech world that E.A.T. represents begins in the 60s and the kinds of issues that it takes up are really issues that come to us in the late 1930s. So in the late 1930s, we have radio, we have cinema, we have newspapers. We don’t yet have television, at least in any, in any robust way. And we have a problem: we look across the ocean to Europe and we see the Nazi regime rising in Germany.

And this makes no sense to American intellectuals—American intellectuals, political leaders—they thought Germany was the home of European high culture. World War One, notwithstanding, it really had been this place where, you know, they brought us Beethoven, they brought us Freud. How was it that they had suddenly, as a country, fallen for this kind of wacky mustachioed former clerk, Adolf Hitler. And the answer that a lot of Americans came up with at that time was mass media. Somehow Hitler had found a way to use radio, use newspapers to send a single maniacal message to every member of German society.

And the challenge then that Americans faced—this is Roosevelt and his circle, but it’s also anthropologists, sociologists, artists—as we entered World War II, sort of 1940-41, was how do we encourage our own people to resist fascism in a way that celebrates democracy and uses media, but without repeating the sort of fascist media that Hitler seemed to be using. If one to many media made citizens more authoritarian, what kind of media might help people become less authoritarian, more democratic? And so a whole group of thinkers are called the Committee for National Morale, they gather together in New York in the early 40s. They read a report for Roosevelt. They do all kinds of different things. They’re sociologists, art historians, and they, together with, a little bit later, a group of scientists at MIT, Norbert Wiener and company, begin to imagine a different way of doing media, a different way of doing technology, and a different way of doing democracy.

What they imagine is something that I’ve ended up calling, in an academic book, “the democratic surround.” They imagine a world in which rule doesn’t proceed from above. We don’t get messages from above and obey. Rather, we are, ourselves, information processors. We signal to one another our intentions and get feedback from one another and social and political order bubble up out of that process. And for that purpose, computers, which first come on the scene as digital computers about 1948, computers are both the tool and the emblem of making that world come true.

If the world is a world of information systems—and that’s an idea that bubbles up out of Bell Labs, where of course E.A.T. will come from in a little bit—if the world is an information system and we are information processors and signaling beings, then wow, the computer with its ability to manage digital signals is an emblem of the world itself, and how we use it is a way to make democracy.

So by the time we leave the late 40s and we’re into the early 50s, we’re in a world where engineers and artists are imagined as agents of democratic change, and it's—we’ve won World War Two. Now we want to fight communism. Communism is again, imagined just as a kind of hierarchical bureaucratic mass society. What we need to do is simultaneously individualize and unify our society. And the best way to do that, according to American intellectuals and political leaders in this period, many of them, is to build environments in which people can signal their intentions to one another and out of which order will emerge. And those environments are built by artists and engineers working together. And it’s those kinds of environments, ultimately, that E.A.T. will specialize in designing.

Goldman: Here, Turner is talking about cybernetic environments like the Pepsi Pavillion that E.A.T. designed for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka that we discuss in the episode on Fujiko Nakaya. This experimental space seems, in some ways, like it was a utopian techno-futurist experience, but in other ways it augurs a darker side of our world today where technology suffuses nearly every experience. Here’s Fred Turner again:

Turner:  If you go back to the 40s and to cybernetics and to these kind of exhibitions that emerged in the 50s, you see engineers, artists, political leaders, hungrily trying to find an alternative to mass society, to fascism, to autocracy, to top down management of people.

The solution they find, seen from inside the world, looks very free. When you’re walking around inside the Pepsi Pavilion, or the Family of Man exhibition, or other things like that this community has developed, you can choose what direction you move in, you can talk to your friends, you can find sounds, use machines.

You are exactly not a Nazi soldier in a row, in a line, acting like an automaton. You are a free being within the space that has been offered to you. But of course, there’s a world beyond the walls. And you don’t see that from inside the space. You are free in terms set by the engineers who have built the world for you. You may feel entirely free, but you are not.

And this is the great paradox of that cybernetic vision of democracy. You are free to choose, but in terms that have been set for you by others. And of course, I hope you’re starting to hear hints of Facebook here, hints of Google. This is the ideology that I think those companies thrive on. The notion that we will make you free, but in terms that we think are valuable.

Goldman: Not the most uplifting way to end…so I’ll leave with a few more thoughts by Fred Turner about why studying history is important, and fun, and how even sort of kooky art projects can inspire big transformations.

Turner:  And this is one of the most fun things about historical work, I think, and is that you come upon ideas and beliefs that people have that hit you very differently than they hit them.

Remembering now that Klüver and company are working 15, 20 years after the end of World War Two, a war that almost destroyed the entire planet. With nuclear weapons still hanging over their head, the Cold War still very fresh in mind, the Cuban Missile Crisis only a couple of years earlier. They’re working in a world where there seems to be a direct, palpable, almost unbearable threat from hierarchical autocratic nations. First the Nazis, Germany, now the Soviet Union, maybe China. That has to be resisted.

In that context, engineers, as unpopular as they will become during the Vietnam War, until that time, coming out of the 50s and 60s, engineers are the people who build the systems that let us resist. They are the people who set the terms for freedom. They are the people who build the systems that protect us from autocracy.

And so, I’m confident that they knew that they were building controlled environments, but I’m also confident that they did it with the best of intentions. They really did want us to experience freedom, to experience the probabilistic universe, to imagine ourselves giving feedback to one another and so becoming free.

I do think there's a deep paradox here. I don’t think that the work of E.A.T. necessarily freed anyone. I think it legitimized the art world and the tech world at a moment when the Vietnam War was certainly delegitimizing the tech world. Alongside which the art world might look pretty frivolous. So it gave everybody a little legitimacy. I don’t think it changed a lot. But, the notion of an individual centered, feedback organized society, empowered with small scale communication technologies transformed our world.

Goldman: If you’d like to learn more, check out season three of Recording Artists and look for Fred Turner’s book The Democratic Surround.

I’ll be back in a few months with more clips from the archive.

This episode was produced by me, Zoe Goldman. Mixing and sound design by Jaime Roque. Christopher Sprinkle is executive producer.