Skywatch UFO Detector, 1977/1978
Following the huge success of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the West’s fascination with unidentified flying objects returned with renewed vigor…
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…
Technology Worship and Human Debasement in Erich von Däniken’s ‘Chariots of the Gods?’
By K.E. Roberts
The idea that alien astronauts visited the Earth at some point in primitive human history, endowing us with imagination and ingenuity—and possibly our genetic code—has become the cult religion of a hyper-materialistic Western world that consecrates nothing beyond its own egomaniacal gadgetry…
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…
Atari Computer Camp Documentary: ‘The Magic Room’, 1983
The computer camp concept was pioneered in 1977 by Dr. Michael Zabinski, a physics and engineering professor at Connecticut’s Fairfield University. Zabinksi had received several federal grants to train teachers at the University to integrate computers into their classrooms, and wisely thought of merging summer camp and computer training to reach young people…
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…
Adventures in Atari BASIC: Lesson Four – Manipulating Memory and Moving Players
In Lesson Three, we learned about Atari’s revolutionary Player/Missile Graphics and spent some time designing Space Assault’s players (or sprites), including enemy ships and the crosshair of the Fission Gun Tower. Now it’s time to make our players move…
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…
‘The Possibility of Life’s Destruction’ by Discharge, 1982
As worries about the possibility of nuclear war spiked in the early 1980s, anxiety and anger began to surface in many of the arts, including British punk music. Punk had been politicized since the movement’s inception and many of those involved were, initially at least, informed by the experience of the British art schools…
We Are the Mutants 