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In the mid 1950s, a growing concern with “automation” came to define this term against earlier understandings of mechanization, Fordism, and Taylorist scientific management. However, the effects of automation on the art of the period have been largely overlooked in terms of the systems, mechanics, and logics that make automation a reality. This opens a productive space for thinking through the impact of automation on visual culture at large, asking questions like: How did technical and scientific literature, training manuals, and patent/trademark documents visualize new technologies? How was the shift from mechanization to automation conceptualized in popular culture? How did ideas of automata, the automaton, and animacy interface with these technological changes and the notion of the human worker? How were anxieties about automation expressed across class, gender, sexuality, and race? And, what role does the historian play in articulating the processes of automation that undergird the production of consumer goods, art, film, and media? Automation, in an expanded definition continues to play a critical role in our world today, from the exploitative labor of factories to the workings of Artificial Intelligence. This panel critically examines the rise of industrial automation across the long-sixties (roughly, from the mid-1950s to the late-1970s) and its intersection with the visual culture of the period into the present. The goal here is to consider how automation has been aestheticized and how the labor of people and machines has been articulated, conceived, and visualized by artists, corporations, activists, and industrial product design.