Crafting Counterculture: Analog Aesthetics in the Cybernetic Age

Following the second World War, technological innovation ushered in the Information Age. By the 1960s, new media and communication practices had spread widely across the globe, seeping into the art world and all around it. Calling this nexus of hand-built and high-tech a “harbinger of things to come” that “uniquely fused two spheres of thinking, both newly born,” Glenn Adamson’s recent work regarding the Whole Earth Catalog inspires this session’s integrative charge. Emerging from a foundation of intermedia collages, funk aesthetics, astral projections, this session seeks to examine how artists reckoned with the postwar era’s shifting technological landscape through unconventional craft practices across technophobic and technophilic frameworks, as well as in the spaces between. Building on the work of communication scholar Fred Turner and film historian Gregory Zinman who argue that hands-on tinkering with new media could alter collective consciousness, this session highlights how countercultural uses of craft and technology leveraged art toward the goals of futuremaking, social change, and perceptive transformation during the 1960s and 1970s. Panelists may consider all mediums including ceramics, textiles, print, sculpture, photography, intermedia, and performance. This session seeks papers that, for example: examine artistic process as technological intervention, materialize a subject otherwise dematerialized in existing scholarship, and/or study the nebulous relationship between new media and analog craft techniques. Papers that engage with broader sociopolitical subjects of the era including cultural appropriation, technocracy, and ecological issues are encouraged, especially as they pertain to marginalized makers and underrepresented mediums.