Possible Futures: Art and the Social Network before the Internet (1950-1979)

Decades before the invention of the Internet, artists used computers, cybernetics, and systems theory to envision and engender social networks in their art. This seminar will examine these creative and conceptual experiments with new media, from programmable objects that invite audience participation, to interactive installations accentuating viewers’ connection to the environment, to televisual and video works that illuminate how media structure identity and society alike. We will grapple with the extent to which this period gave birth not only to the technologies of the present but ideas about what society can and should be.