Two years ago at Christmas, I parlayed a then-recent obsession with the weird, haunted media of 1970s Britain and the field of hauntology into an Amazon Wish List. When my wife and I were in the UK visiting family, I found most of that list waiting for me under the tree. A king’s ransom, for me the Yank, of barely-remembered and never-seen British television series…
Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani got her start in the staid musical conservatories of Wellesley College, but left for the West Coast in the late ’60s to get a Master’s at Berkeley, where she met synthesizer designer Don Buchla and began experimenting with electronic instrumentation…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
