The Stanford University Libraries and the Stanford Institute for the Arts present an evening symposium in connection with the exhibition "Art Meets Technology: Core Samples from Nine Archives." The symposium will engage the humanities, science, and engineering communities in a discussion of innovation and interdisciplinary research, with a focus on the arts and technology. The event is free and open to the public.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

5:00–6:15 p.m. Exhibit reception: Green Library Rotunda, Stanford University

6:30–8:30 p.m. Symposium: The Bender Room, Green Library 

SPEAKERS

Fred Turner
Associate Professor, Department of Communication, and Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Stanford University.

In the 1960s, a wide variety of artists embraced systems theories and multimedia aesthetics as tools for the production of psychologically and politically liberating art. But why? How was it that in an era saturated with images of American military technology run amok in Southeast Asia, artists should have adopted the cybernetic theories and pro-technological orientation that lay at the heart of the military industrial complex? This talk suggests that the answer may lie not in the 1960s, but the 1940s. At the start of World War II, a leading group of American artists and intellectuals came to believe that multimedia technologies and environmental aesthetics could produce the sorts of democratic citizens that mass media could not. The talk returns to this long-forgotten moment and argues that it set the conceptual terms by which we have long imagined that art and technology can together produce a new and freer person.

Cathy Marshall
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley; Affiliated Researcher, Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL), Texas A&M University.

It's been over 20 years since Rich Gold began an experiment to pair Bay Area artists with Xerox PARC scientists. The vision of  PARC's Artist-in-Residence Program (PAIR) was not to create "wonderful art or exciting science," but rather to act as something of a collider: to bring together two groups who wouldn't normally work together and see what happens. In 1993, I was a hypertext researcher paired with hypertext fiction pioneer Judy Malloy; over the next three years, we worked together to produce a hypernarrative called Forward Anywhere that told a tale of two intersecting lives. I'll use my experiences in PAIR to reflect on the program and whether the experiment could be repeated in today's major technology companies.

RESPONDENTS

John Chowning
Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of Music, Emeritus, and Visiting Artist, 
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison 
Professors of Digital Arts and New Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

Lynn Hershman Leeson 
2013–2014 Hirshon Director in Residence, School of Media Studies, The New School for Public Engagement; Professor Emerita, University of California, Davis; and former chair of the Film Department, San Francisco Art Institute

Donald Knuth
Professor of the Art of Computer Programming Emeritus, Stanford University

Laura Cassidy Rogers  
Ph.D. candidate, Program in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University

Peter Blank 
Stanford Art Librarian, moderator

CONTACT: Becky Fischbach, Exhibits Designer
Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
tel: 650-725-1020