Handmade films and artist-run labs. The chemical sites of film’s counterculture

This article addresses handmade films and especially artist-run labs as sites of hands-on film culture that reactivate moments and materials from media history. Drawing on existing research, discourses and discussions with contemporary experimental filmmakers affiliated with labs or practicing their work in relation to film lab infrastructure, we focus on these sites of creation, preservation and circulation of technical knowledge about analog film. But instead of reinforcing the binary of analog vs. digital, we argue that the various material practices from self-made apparatuses to photochemistry and film emulsions are ways of understanding the multiple materials and layered histories that define post-digital culture of film. This focus links our discussion with some themes in media archaeology (experimental media archaeology as a practice) and to current discussions about labs as arts and humanities infrastructure for collective project and practice-based methods

The parallax view: the military origins of holography

The title of this piece is meant to evoke at least three sources. The first – and perhaps the only obvious one – concerns the ability of holograms to display parallax, a shifting of visual viewpoint that allows a three-dimensional image to reveal background objects behind those in the foreground. This parallax view is a unique feature of holograms as visual media. A second allusion is to the American film The Parallax View (1974, director A. J. Pakula), a rather paranoid thriller focusing on conspiracy theories concerning government and corporations. To a casual observer, the bare details of the military origins of holography suggest just such cynical and centrally-directed development, although I hope to dispel such simplistic ideas here. And a third passing reference is to the book The Parallax View (2006) by Slavoj Zizek, a wide-ranging and deep exploration of duality in political views, ontological interpretations and scientific methods, among other topics. Zizek’s theme, as well as Pakula’s, is relevant to my approach, which focuses on a parallax of both practice and intent. During the first successful decade of holography, conflicting viewpoints developed between distinct communities: the militarily-guided engineers who invented practical holography, and the later imaging scientists and artisans who stressed three-dimensionality and other attributes instead of the original goal of optical image processing. I argue that distinct groups of users had different perceptions of what holography is and what it is for

Shifting perspectives: holography and the emergence of technical communities

Holography, the technology of three-dimensional imaging, has repeatedly been reconceptualised by new communities. Conceived in 1947 as a means of improving electron microscopy, holography was revitalized in the early 1960s by engineer-scientists at classified laboratories. The invention promoted the transformation of a would-be discipline (optical engineering) and spawned limited artist-scientist collaborations. However, a separate artisanal community promoted a distinct countercultural form of holography via a revolutionary technology: the sandbox optical table. Their tools, sponsorship, products, literature and engagement with wider culture differentiated the communities, which instituted a limited ‘technological trade’. The subject strikingly illustrates the co-evolution of new technology along with highly dissimilar user groups, neither of which fostered the secure establishment of a profession or discipline. The case generalises the concept of 'research-technologists' and 'peripheral science', and extends the ideas of Langdon Winner by demonstrating how the political dimensions of a technology can be important but evanescent in the growth of technical communities

Thanks for coming: four archival collections and the counterculture

The early to mid-1960s bore witness to the birth of the Underground, a loose collection of writers, artists and activists who were united in their opposition to mainstream culture, and in particular to consumerism and war. Beginning in the United States, where the Vietnam War galvanized youth protest, and building on spirit of Beat Generation, who rebelled against the conformity of life during the previous decade, the Underground spread across the Atlantic to the UK and Europe, later becoming a global phenomenon. During the 1960s, editors, artists and activists forged extensive networks across the globe through letters, underground newspapers and little poetry magazines, much of which was printed on cheap paper, with little regard for posterity. By the late 1960s, there was a burgeoning international underground, which is underscored by the life and work of the artists, writers and editors discussed in this collaborative article. Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004) was based in the UK but created networks across the globe through the editorship of his little poetry magazine; Dave Cunliffe (1941-), based in the north of England, published works by US activists and poets in his poetry magazines and books; Jim Haynes (1933-), an American based for many years in Edinburgh and London, connected writers and artists across the world through the Arts Lab and as an editor of IT, Europe’s first underground newspaper; and Harvey Marshall Matusow (1926-2002), worked in underground newspapers, first in New York, and then London. As the archives of these underground participants attest, the counterculture was a vibrant international phenomenon, albeit one that was slow to recognise the importance of women in the counterculture

The cybercultural moment and the new media field

This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the regenerative “belief in the new” in new media culture and web history. I begin by noting that discursive constructions of the web as disruptive, open, and participatory have emerged at various points in the medium’s history, and that these discourses are not as neatly tied to economic interests as most new media criticism would suggest. With this in mind, field theory is introduced as a potential framework for understanding this (re)production of a belief in the new as a dynamic of the interplay of cultural and symbolic forms of capital within the new media field. After discussing how Bourdieu’s theory might be applied to new media culture in general terms, I turn to a key moment in the emergence of the new media field—the rise of cybercultural magazines Mondo 2000 and Wired in the early 1990s—to illustrate how Bourdieu’s theory may be adapted in the study of new media history

Dwelling in Strangeness: accounts of the Kingsley Hall Community, London (1965-1970)

This article explores archival accounts of the experimental community, Kingsley Hall (1965-70), established by R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist. The paper contributes to renewed interest in Kingsley Hall, R. D. Laing's radical psychiatry and UK counterculture. Archival sources enable not only the further exploration of already known figures but also let us hear previously unheard voices. Following a discussion of archival materials, the Hall is analyzed thematically and historically as (i) an inner spaceship; (ii) an embattled middle-class countercultural plantation; (iii) a site of spiritual renewal and development; (iv) a single-building arts colony; and (v) a countercultural experiment. Finally, it is argued that with re-evaluation of 1960s and 1970s counterculture now underway on the Left, the Hall’s experiment in Laingian countercultural psychiatry—as we may fittingly call it—may yet inform future radical projects (in mental health and beyond)

Hacking in the university: contesting the valorisation of academic labour

In this article I argue for a different way of understanding the emergence of hacker culture. In doing so, I outline an account of ‘the university’ as an institution that provided the material and subsequent intellectual conditions that early hackers were drawn to and in which they worked. I argue that hacking was originally a form of academic labour that emerged out of the intensification and valorisation of scientific research within the institutional context of the university. The reproduction of hacking as a form of academic labour took place over many decades as academics and their institutions shifted from an ideal of unproductive, communal science to a more productive, entrepreneurial approach to the production of knowledge. As such, I view hacking as a peculiar, historically situated form of labour that arose out of the contradictions of the academy: vocation vs. profession; teaching vs. research; basic vs. applied research; research vs. development; private vs. public; war vs. peace; institutional autonomy vs. state dependence; scientific communalism vs. intellectual property

Square Scientists and the Excluded Middle

The historiography on American science and technology in the 1970s is still small, yet there are already three distinct strands of work: studies of countercultural scientists, portrayed as enacting or advocating ‘groovy’ research; studies of the politically polarized debate pitting conservative and libertarian ‘cornucopianists’ against environmentalists and modelers forecasting resource scarcity; and studies of the early commercialization of technoscience (e.g., biotechnology) that took off in the 1980s. Left out,I argue, are a class of ‘square scientists’ with little sympathy for the counterculture, and yet open to (even eager for) a new kind of science oriented to the same problems activists said they wanted science to solve: pollution, mass transit, housing, biomedicine, disability technologies, pedagogical machines,etc. Square scientists at places like NASA and Texas Instruments adapted military-industrial-academic templates to a wide variety of socially ‘relevant’ topics in the 1970s. Yet square scientists still looked to the military-industrial complex for allies, rather than to countercultural colleagues. This potential middle ground remained excluded – contributing, in large part, to the failure of schemes to reorient US R&D to civilian social problems, and to the invisibility of the squares in today’s historical accounts

The relationship between literature and counterculture: the example of British and American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s

Along with being a frequent feature and theme in various forms of creative expression, the British and American counterculture of the late 1950s and 1960s has produced a significant body of its own cultural artefacts. Reflective of the aspirations and ideals championed by the diverse set of groups and movements partaking in the countercultural explosion, its cultural production sought to challenge conventions and explore new ways of both producing and experiencing art. In no field of artistic and literary work was this more true than in the world of countercultural drama and theatre. Examples from the American Off-Off-Broadway scene and British fringe theatre will be used to illustrate how radical theatres combined experimental art with political resistance, simultaneously devising a tool for political agitation, revolutionising and overturning traditional approaches and conceptions about theatre and, most interestingly, creating a microcosm of what the counterculture believed was the image of future society. Combining sociological insight and theatre studies, the analysis will rely heavily on theoretical explorations of the counterculture by Theodore Roszak and Herbert Marcuse, contemporaries of the tumultuous events of the 1960s. Beginning with a historical overview of the origins and early years of post-war experimental theatre on both sides of the Atlantic, the paper will examine the literary influences and social developments which helped set the stage for the subsequent rise of both the counterculture and radical theatre. The analysis will place special focus on the political aspects of performance in the fringe and Off-Off-Broadway scenes. Finally, after a brief account of the reasons which brought about the counterculture’s decline, as well as those which ultimately affected the very essence of radical theatre and re-shaped its image in the mid-70s, the contemporary legacy and impact of the radical theatre movement of the 1960s will be assessed