This course examines contemporary gnostic mythologies of technology and paranoia, focusing on Vannevar Bush as a self-embodied allegorical emblem of information perversity. Bush's famed "memex" and the modern UFOs are both hypothetical machines -- devices which use association and performativity to spin information out of noise. In modern techno- myths, this process is often represented as an alchemical self-destruction resulting in god-like power. Not coincidentally, all these issues are illustrated with disturbing density and prescience in the 1981 Disney film "Tron.

Suggested Reading

Jason Brown is Technical Director for the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He has presented extensively on the perverse and conspiratorial nature of networked information at venues such as SCI-Arc, CalArts, UC San Diego, and a small damp basement in Los Angeles Chinatown. He is a founding member of the c-level arts cooperative where he has has helped organize numerous events and performances including MemeFest. He is the editor of a forthcoming book documenting the millennial death rattle of net.art. and is the founder and co-founder of BlebNet.