This Wednesday December 8 I am giving a special ‘Hollingsville’ presentation at Central St Martins for students on the MA Communication Design Course. An overview of the main themes and historical context of my recent book Welcome to Mars, ‘Lounge: Welcome to Disturbia’ looks at how space and sensory experience were profoundly altered with the rapid expansion of the Suburbs after World War II. Ranged in precise grids, connected to its own set of local amenities, suburbia became an isolated colony, a behavioural laboratory in which individuals were to be studied by a growing professional elite of social scientists. What they found was subsequently labelled by one psychiatrist as ‘Disturbia’: a place where audiovisual technology had invaded the already overheated environment of the modern home. Get ready for strange drugs, the even stranger tribal rites of the middle classes, flying saucers, radioactive mutants and teenagers from outer space! The lecture will take place in the MACD Main Studio on the Back Hill campus and starts at 10.00 am – admission is free.
Suggested reading:
Thomas Hine, Populuxe, Bloomsbury Press, 1989
Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music, A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong, Quartet Books, 1995
Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, MIT Press, 2007
Francesco Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica: Sounds Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation, Duke University Press, 2008
Pictured above: The 1956 Motorama ‘Kitchen of Tomorrow’
Posts
2 comments:
Love the idea of alternative Christmas Lectures, so many possibilities... in situ demonstrations of Alchemy would be a good one.
What a fabulous idea - I think I shall start planning now for a Christmas 2011 series, and Alchemy would definitely have to be a theme. Thank you once again, Dr Champagne, wild man of modern science!
Post a Comment