Heaven’s Gate Event Poster, 1975
This poster appeared in the San Francisco Bay Area in the summer of 1975 and advertised an upcoming visit from the UFO group “Human Individual Metamorphosis,” or H.I.M….
HEXEN 2.0 Tarot Deck by Suzanne Treister, 2009 – 2011
The HEXEN 2.0 Tarot deck was designed by artist Suzanne Treister as an exploration of the postwar/Cold War cybernetic consensus, its antecedents, and its descendants. Inspired by the meeting of the minds at the Macy Conferences on cybernetics from 1946-1953…
Ganzfeld Test Subjects, 1972 – 1973
With the popularity of psychic experimentation and testing on the rise in the early 1970s, new methods attempting to verify the existence of ESP were devised. The Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York City grew out of that institution’s dream research division…
King Vitaman Hologram Ring, 1972
The possibility of recording a three-dimensional image for later reconstruction through a hologram was developed out of early progress in X-ray and electron microscopy—notably by Hungarian-born Dennis Gabor, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics…
Telstar Commemorative Plaque, Circa 1962
The development of the Telstar satellites marked the dawn of the era of worldwide satellite communications. Telstar 1, launched in July 1962, and Telstar 2, which came ten months later, were engineered by a team at Bell Labs headed by John R. Pierce…
‘The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’, 1947 – 1984
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was instituted as a newsletter to circulate among the nuclear science community in the aftermath of World War II and the Manhattan Project as a service and a warning to the world about the weapons they had created and unleashed…
“Without the Products There’s Nothing”: The Life and Death of Educational Public Television
For people of a certain age, the synthesized tones of the ident above and the animation of the “P-head” logo of the Public Broadcasting Service is indelibly marked in our memories of childhood. We can recall the educational programming that PBS brought into our homes: stalwart institutions like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood…
Rubik’s Cube in ‘Scientific American’, 1981
In the early days of 1981, a new toy made its way to the West over the Iron Curtain. A few years earlier, a Hungarian architecture professor named Ernő Rubik had developed a “Magic Cube” while tinkering with ways to express rotation in 3D space in a single object…
ESP Teaching Machines, 1971 – 1973
In the early 1970s, the Stanford Research Institute received funding and support from a number of sources (including the Central Intelligence Agency, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences, and est leader Werner Erhard) to look into psychic phenomena such as clairvoyance, ESP, and precognition…
‘The Vietnam Experience’ Television Commercial, 1985
This two-minute television spot from 1985 promoted the Time-Life book series The Vietnam Experience, which was released serially from 1981 to 1988, perfectly bookending the Reagan years. Each of the 25 volumes covered subtopics about the Vietnam War from the American perspective, from military tactics to culture clashes…
We Are the Mutants 