The Architecture Machine Group’s Aspen Movie Map

Abstract

This article considers Aspen Movie Map (AMM), its visual and textual records, and the sociohistorical context in which the Architecture Machine Group (ArcMac) created them. Rather than focusing on the well-known military provenance of AMM, this article shifts attention to how the work expresses politically specific ideas about the importance of the individual in human–computer interaction and how ArcMac formulated these ideas in response to the discourses of urban crisis and techno-paranoia circulating during the 1970s. The city in crisis provided a convenient metaphor for the staging of ideas about how human–computer interaction could dramatically extend the power of individuals to create and govern their own worlds without the assistance of any intervening social institution or government body.