Perceptual Machines: Communication,Archiving,and Vision in Post-War American Design

Abstract

This article examines historical transformations in the relationship between the image, time, and knowledge after the war. One site to investigate these changes in representation is at the locus of science, design, film and architecture in the works of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes for the Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT and in the interests of science education. In these works, including many science education and pedagogy films, the nature of the image, the materiality of vision, and the relationship between documentation and communication were being aggressively rethought. All these projects were deeply invested in the emergent terms of cybernetics and electronic media. Ontology, documentation, and representation were seemingly replaced by discourses of communication, performance, and modularity; the world as interface for the mediation of ongoing, lively communicative exchanges. The work of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes provides evidence of a more global reformulation of the work of the document, the relationship between abstraction and materiality, and among science, aesthetics, and visuality.

Keywords

affect archive Charles and Ray Eames communication theory cybernetics Gyorgy Kepes information design pedagogy science education visuality

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bacsó

(2011) Gyorgy Kepes and the Light Art. Available at: http://kepes.society.bme.hu/art-science/light-art.html (accessed 2 April 2011).

Benjamin

(1974[1969]) lluminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Arendt

, trans. Zohn

. New York: Schocken Books.

Canales

(2009) A Tenth of a Second: A History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Colomina

(2001) Enclosed by images: The Eameses’ multimedia architecture. Grey Room 2(1): 5–29.

Colomina

(2007) Domesticity at War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cotter

Young

(2011) 1964 New York World’s Fair. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_New_York_World%27s_Fair (accessed 2 April 2011).

Daston

Galison

(2007) Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

Eames

(1974) Language of vision: The nuts and bolts. Bulletin: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences XXVIII, October: 13–45.

Eames

(1977) On reducing discontinuity. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 30(6), March: 24–34.

10.

Eames

Gingerich

(1977) A conversation with Charles Eames. American Scholar 46(6): 326–337.

11.

Eames

Nelson

Girard

(1953) Brochure for ‘A Sample Lesson’, UCLA, Charles and Ray Eames Manuscript Collection, Library of Congress, Box 230: Folder 1: Publicity Files (27–29 May).

12.

Edwards

(1997) The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

13.

Golec

(2002) A natural history of a disembodied eye: The structure of Gyorgy Kepes’s language of vision. Design Issues 18(2): 3–16.

14.

Goodyear

(2004) Gyorgy Kepes, Billy Klüver, and American art of the 1960’s: Defining attitudes toward science and technology. Science in Context 17(4): 611–635.

15.

Hamilton

(1964) Films at the Fair II. Industrial Design, May: 36–41.

16.

IBM (1964) Press Release: IBM Pavilion at World’s Fair Features ‘Information Machine’. Armonk, NY: IBM Corporate Archives.

17.

Kepes

(1944) Language of Vision. Chicago, IL: Paul Theobald and Co.

18.

Kepes

(1956) The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago, IL: Paul Theobald and Co.

19.

Kepes

(1960) The Visual Arts Today. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

20.

Kepes

(1965) Education of Vision. New York: G Braziller.

21.

Kepes

(1966) Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm. New York: G. Braziller.

22.

Kepes

(1969) Language of Vision. Chicago, IL: P Theobald.

23.

Kepes

(1978) The MIT years, 1945–1977. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

24.

Kracauer

(1995) The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

25.

Kracauer

(2004) From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

26.

Lee

(2004) Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960’s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

27.

Lemov

(2009) Towards a data base of dreams: Assembling an archive of elusive materials, c. 1947–61. History Workshop Journal 67(1): 44–68.

28.

Leslie

(1993) The Cold War and American Science: The Military–Industrial–Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press.

29.

Lupton

Miller

(1991) The ABC’s of [triangle, square, circle]: The Bauhaus and design theory. New York: Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

30.

Lynch

(1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

31.

Martin

(2003) The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

32.

Masco

(2010) ‘Sensitive but unclassified’: Secrecy and the counterterrorist state. Public Culture 22(3): 433–463.

33.

Rosenblum

(ed.) (1989)Remembering the Future: The New York World’s Fair from 1939–1964. New York: Rizzoli.

34.

Samuel

(2007) The End of the Innocence: The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

35.

Scott

Moholy-Nagy

Kepes

(1942) Civilian action goes into action. Civilian Defense 5: 7–12.

36.

Sekula

(1992) The body and the archive. In: Bolton

(ed.) The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

37.

Shannon

Weaver

(1949) The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana-Champign: University of Illinois Press.

38.

Stoler

(2009) Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

39.

Tagg

(1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

40.

Vrachliotis

(2009) Popper’s mosquito swarm: Architecture, cybernetics and the operationalization of complexity. European Review 17(2): 439–452.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.01 MB