Rob Klinge Center for Social Informatics presents Fred Turner

TALK 1
A Roundtable/Brown Bag Discussion [links to articles for discussion below]

Speaker: Fred Turner, Department of Communication, Stanford University
Date: Friday, April 23, 2010
Time: 11:00 am-12:00pm
Place: Department of Communication and Culture's Room C102 (media
lab), Classroom Office Building (COB)
800 E. 3rd St (between Woodlawn and Indiana)

Discussion articles:
http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at%20Google%20NMS.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Romantic%20Automatism%20Journal%20of%20Visual%20Culture.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20This%20is%20for%20Fighting%20in%20Pomerance.pdf


TALK 2
WHAT DO ART WORLDS DO FOR COMPUTERS?

Speaker: Fred Turner, Department of Communication, Stanford University
Topic: What Do Art Worlds Do for Computers?
Date: Friday, April 23, 2010
Time: 1:30pm-2:45pm
Place: C100 (Classroom Office Building) 800 E. 3rd St

Talk preceded by an informal gathering with cookies, tea, and coffee,
available at 1:15pm. There will be an informal meeting with graduate
students following the talk.


Abstract
Fifty years ago, when C.P. Snow published his canonical essay The Two Cultures, computer science and art might well have belonged to different social worlds. But today that’s no longer true. On line in Second Life, off line at Burning Man, and at state-sponsored art-and-technology research centers across the globe, high art and high technology are melding into one another. This talk will ask why.
It will return to Osaka, Japan and Expo ’70 in order to revisit the “Pepsi Pavilion” – an immersive computational and artistic environment – and explore the ways it brought together military planners, corporate executives, hippie artists and Bell Labs engineers. By doing so, the talk will examine the role computers played in the politics of perception toward the end of the Cold War and may be playing today. It will also analyze the tactics through which art worlds render particular affordances of computing machines culturally legitimate.
Together, it will argue, these approaches can help us explain many of the art-and-technology fusions we see today.

Biographical Sketch
Fred Turner is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University with extensive interdisciplinary affiliations through the university. His research and teaching focus on digital media, journalism, and the roles played by media in American cultural history. His most recent book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, traces the impact of the social upheavals of the 1960s on the technological innovation of the 1990s. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality television to engineering culture at Google. These essays and more information about him can be found at http://fredturner.stanford.edu and at http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/turner/

This series is designed to introduce faculty, students and staff across the university to research in social informatics conducted at IU and around the world. The Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics is jointly sponsored by the IU School of Informatics, School of Library & Information Science, and Kelley School of Business. For more information about the Center, please visit http://rkcsi.indiana.edu