Utopia, the 1964 New York World’s Fair and The Dialectics of Oblivion

 

To mark the launch of the recent release, Utopia or Oblivion (CN5) Constructive Music have created a website ‘which will serve as a focal point for a series of essays, articles, artists work and information resources that will be derived from the same broad remit offered to the musicians’ who have contributed to the project, inspired by the writings of R Buckminster Fuller.

 

Their website announcement continues:

 

‘Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. Humanity is in a final exam as to whether or not it might qualify for continuance in the Universe.’ (Utopia Or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity R. Buckminster Fuller) Constructive are pleased to announce a compilation of work by 10 artists inspired by and in response to the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, specifically from the essays Utopia Or Oblivion first published in 1963.

 

In response to their request, I have written an essay on the theme on Utopia and the Dialectics of Oblivion, inspired by the 1964 New York World’s Fair. This global event, better known for the US corporations drawn to it rather the nation states it sought to represent, has always fascinated me. It opened the same year that Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and McLuhan’s Understanding Media were published. It was also the year that Jonny Quest and Bewitched first appeared on American TV. ‘The Trip that’s Worth the Trip’ is a tribute to this unique moment in the history of progress. It is another in my series of occasional essays that take their structure directly from Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’.  I follow the same numbering and divisions of his original text and retain all of the extracted quotes with which he begins and ends some of the sections. I also try and keep the relative length of each entry to approximately the same proportions as those used by Benjamin, even though the overall length of the text itself might vary. I first used this approach in the essay ‘On The Concept of History, Brexit, Covid and the Paradise of Sovereignty: A fable in eighteen parts with two addenda and seven supporting quotations’ - which you can find in its entirety here. 

 

You can find The Trip That’s Worth the Trip: Utopia – the Dialectics of Oblivion on the Constructive website by clicking here.  

 

The Constructive album release details are as follows: CN5 Various Artists Utopia or Oblivion 2023 LP / DL

 

Pictured above:

The Pop Up New York World’s Fair

The General Motors Futurama pavilion

Jonny Quest gets his jetpack

From the Bewitched opening animation sequence

McLuhan, Mars and Me

This has happened entirely by chance, and I am sure that it the circumstances behind this phenomenon will never repeat themselves, but I find that I have two major features going out on the BBC within a week of each other.

The first was ‘A New Red World’ a literary exploration of Martian Utopias that was commissioned as part of Radio 4’s Martian Week. It went out on Tuesday March 7 at 11.00, which meant that I never got to hear the broadcast for myself. In amongst a number of interesting programmes, ‘Another Red World’ examined how Mars became the subject of intense speculation: was the Red Planet a cypher for humanity’s past or its future? Was it a dead or dying world – or did it offer the hope of new social and cultural orders? I found myself enjoying the Martian worldviews of Victorian curates, French psychics, American feminists and Russian revolutionaries. The programme ends with meditations from James Lovelock on the uselessness of terraforming Mars and from Kim Stanley Robinson on the colonising of Mars as a thought experiment. I may have started the programme with the confession that I want to be buried on Mars when I die; but it was a privilege to breathe the same planetary air as these people. The amazing sound design for the show was by Mark Burman who also produced my show about Forbidden Planet for Radio 3, which is still online.

To hear ‘A New Red World’, click here.

To download ‘A New Red World’ as a podcast, click

here.

The second programme is my long-anticipated Sunday Feature on Marshall McLuhan for BBC Radio 3. ‘Watcha Doin’, Marshall McLuhan’ is personal reflection on the life, career and theories of this important media theorist. It was recorded and scripted over the summer and early autumn of 2016 and includes some fascinating interviews with contemporary writers and academics, such as my old friends Tom McCarthy and Rathna Ramanathan, as well as number of McLuhan acolytes from the 1960s. There are still some surviving members of the ‘priesthood’ of students that seemed to have followed McLuhan the Catholic scholar around from the late 60s into the 70s and up to his death in 1980. This seemed like a vital time to record their impressions of, and reflections on, this remarkable mind. Most generous of all with their time and enthusiasm was the writer Tom Wolfe – while not a member of the inner circle, he probably brought more insight to his relationship with McLuhan than anyone else. Wolfe’s agent had told us firmly that the celebrated author was ‘only doing one interview in the UK and that was with Peter York for the Sunday Times.’ Fortunately my brilliant producer Dan Shepherd managed to track down Wolfe down to his summer home in Long Island. Wolfe was gracious in the extreme – answered all of our questions with his usual urbanity and even gave us the recipe for a perfect Tom Collins ‘although’, he added, ‘there’s only a few barmen old enough to know how to make is properly.’ I came to the end of the programme still loving McLuhan for all of his flaws and prejudices: his media fame was based upon a dense and interlocking series of misunderstandings – but then whose isn’t?

‘Watcha Doin’, Marshall McLuhan’ goes out on March 19 on Radio 3 at 18.45. You can find the details here.

Pictured above:

KH posing with the Curiosity Mars Rover at Imperial College London, April 2016; Mars circa 1875 by French illustrator Étienne Trouvelot; Marshall McLuhan and Professor Frank Kermode on BBC TV’s Monitor in January 24 1965; Tom Wolfe going all-out Global Village August 11 2016

Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics

I have an essay in a new collection of essays published by Edinburgh University Press. Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics is edited by Winchester School of Arts's Professor Ryan Bishop and Professor John Beck of the University of Westminster. The book connects Cold War material and conceptual technologies to 21st century arts, society and culture. From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, the contributors to this book shows that we live in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War.

I am particularly pleased with this collection, not just because it includes contributions from the likes of Ryan Bishop, Jussi Parrika and Neal White, but because it contains the very last essay to appear in print that was composed while I was still undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer back in the summer of 2014.  The drugs they were giving me at the time had a strange way of enhancing my powers of concentration, meaning that whatever I wrote under their influence remains special to me. There is still some material from a larger project to be published at some point, but that can wait for the moment. In the meantime, here is the abstract for the essay, plus some key words to get you started:

‘The Very Form Of Perverse Artificial Societies…’

The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family From its Cold War Nuclear Bunker

Abstract

Just as the ‘nuclear family’ was seen as a strategic element in the Cold War, dispersed into suburban enclaves of self-contained domestic units, so the ‘network family’ of today, distributed across social media now finds itself defined as a strategic element in a warring online community. This paper seeks to examine the shift in domestic security from its deep roots in the nuclear family under threat of nuclear destruction to the network family of today whose elusive and fragmented presence is experienced as both a threat and a defence position. Delueze and Guattari’s ‘desiring-machines’ are examined in terms of the impact Norbert Wiener’s theory of Cybernetics upon both popular culture and the theoretical models proposed by Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Marcuse. Even as the mass media communicate today’s moral panics over online security, antisocial ‘trolling’ and whistle blowers – which already seem a quaint piece of media archaeology – actions are depicted and explained in terms of a domestic instability, first perceived during the Cold War 1950s and 1960s, from ‘slacker’ Ed Snowden to Anonymous adolescent hackers and Julian Assange’s displaced national status.

Key Words

Cybernetics, networks, ‘desiring-machines’, science fiction, media archaeology, Cold War politics, defence strategies, suburbia, Hollywood, popular culture, war machines, hacker collectives, portable devices, interactivity, marginalization, Watergate, Anonymous, Wikileaks, Oedipus, ‘Molecular Revolution’

And here are some more details about Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics from the Edinburgh University Press:

Key Features

Makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and culture

Draws on theorists such as Paul Virilio, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Bernard Stiegler, Peter Sloterdijk and Carl Schmitt

The contributors include leading humanities and critical military studies scholars, and practising artists, writers, curators and broadcasters

234mm x 156mm

320 pages

20 colour illustration(s)

Technicities

ISBN

Hardback: 9781474409483

eBook (PDF): 9781474409490

eBook (ePub): 9781474409506

Alive and Well and Walking on Mars

I have been making return trips to hospital over the past couple of months for routine tests and examinations. These including a follow-up colonoscopy a year on from my surgery for bowel cancer and a CT scan plus tumour marker tests six months after I completed my course of chemotherapy. I am happy to inform you that Mistress C seems to have packed her bags and ended our affair for the moment. I feel now as if we barely brushed against each other, although I am also aware that from this point on she will never be that far away from me.

Shortly after receiving this news I had the opportunity to travel up to Stevenage with the artist Aleksandra Mir to spend an afternoon at Airbus Defence and Space looking at their facilities and learning about their latest projects. This was part of some research Aleksandra and I are currently engaged upon – more of which will be revealed as events unfold.

Security at ADS is pretty tight: we had to provide proof of identity, agree beforehand not to take cameras with us and to refrain from using any social media while on the premises. Having been issued with special passes, we were shown by our host around the assembly and integration areas, the workshops and clean rooms where satellites are manufactured and painstakingly put together. We saw the thermal shield for a solar orbiter designed to keep extreme levels of heat away from delicate instruments that need to be kept at room temperature while passing closer to the sun than any other probe before. Few people will ever get to see the back of this shield, but Aleksandra and I are now among that small number. We also peeked in on fuel tanks milled out of solid blocks of titanium (welded ones could not stand the stresses involved in leaving earth’s gravity well), quartz manufacturing rooms and space blanket sewing workshops, all connected by long bright regular corridors that took my breath away.

The high point of our entire visit, however, was undoubtedly the ‘Mars Yard’, a large self-contained room with its own control room where they are replicating a stretch of Martian terrain for a new lander. Dubbed ‘ExoMars’, it is designed to navigate around the surface of the Red Planet using visual recognition software and stereoscopic cameras mounted at the front of the rig. Instead of travelling centimetres at a time, like previous rovers, because it constantly requires new coordinates on where to move to next, this one will be able to follow more general instructions – such as ‘head for that rock over there – then it will be left to make its own way there. In order to develop the software required for this system to work, the whole of Mars Yard is designed to replicate as accurately as possible the visual conditions as well as the immediate surface and terrain of Mars. There is a life-size photographic panorama of the Martian landscape taken from a previous lander, plus a wide expanse of sand studded with rocks, boulders and outcrops.  The rover stood over in the far corner ‘resting’ while we were there. People cannot be in the room when it is switched on, as their presence will only confuse its sensors – the whole space is painted a neutral shade of ochre so no sudden changes of colour can distract it. The overhead lights are set to replicate lighting conditions on Mars, and the sand has been specially selected as well.

It was like a large stage set waiting for a movie to happen – and then it did. ‘Would you like to take some photos?’ our host asked. Aleksandra and I were both genuinely surprised by this as we had been specifically requested not to bring cameras. ‘Is that really all right?’ Aleksandra asked. We were assured that it was okay.  I said I had one on my phone. ‘You can also walk out onto the surface of Mars if you like,’ the guide said. I could not believe what I was hearing. ‘Ken should go first,’ Aleksandra offered. ‘He’s always wanted to walk on Mars.’ I thought this was really a gracious gesture from the First Woman on The Moon. This is a proud moment, I murmured as I stepped out onto the sandy topsoil and walked across the surface of Mars. I turned, and Aleksandra took a couple of pictures – the sand was really loose and yielded easily under your feet, worse than beach sand. Soon I stepped back down again and photographed Aleksandra conquering her first planet and pointing towards the ExoMars rover in the far corner.

I really cannot express how thrilling the moment was – our host even took a photograph of the two of us together on Mars.  From experiencing a hospital cancer ward as a space station to walking on Mars seems to have taken less than a step, and yet I also find myself millions of miles from where I was a year ago. I could not have imagined this happening back then. As Aleksandra and I returned along the length of Mars Yard we noticed a red admiral butterfly lying dead on the guardrail – it seemed entirely appropriate somehow. No summer lasts forever – but this had been a great moment.

Pictured above: KH on Mars photographed by Aleksandra Mir – note the ExoMars rover at the far right of the Mars Yard.

Welcome to the Freak Zone - Enter the Freak Zone

I have recently been talking to Radio 6’s Stuart Maconie about how music is used in science-fiction movies and playing some of my personal favourites, including the OSTs for ‘Forbidden Planet’, ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’ and ‘Akira’. The recording of our conversation is being broadcast as part of Stuart’s ‘Freak Zone’ show on the evening of Sunday November 23 between 20.00 and 22.00 hrs. 

My sequence should come on on around 20.45. 

‘Freak Zone’ is a BBC music programme dedicated to the weird, the wonderful and the unexpected in modern music, and this special edition is dedicated to music, outer space and the future. The show can be accessed through the Radio 6 website and will also be available for listening after the initial broadcast.

Situation Normal: Breathing the Same Air

As my health is now starting to improve following the departure of the chemo gods in the autumn, it seems like the right time to start mentioning some of the other things going on in my life.

For example, I have a new essay, ‘Breathing the Same Air: Cold War Sci-Fi’, in the latest BFI compendium Days of Fear and Wonder, which has just been published to coincide with the British Film Institute’s extensive festival of Science Fiction movies taking place between late October and December this year. The essay was specially commissioned by the compendium’s editor, James Bell, and appears alongside pieces by Mark Fisher, Roger Luckhurst, Helen Lewis, Adam Roberts, Kim Newman and Marketa Uhlirova. It was written during the height of summer when the chemical activity inside my body was reaching some kind of critical peak, which might explain the essay’s fascination with toxic environments and incompatible life forms as metaphors for the ideological and cultural fissures that were opened up during the Cold War. As with the film festival itself, Days of Fear and Wonder offers a comprehensive overview of what has quite often been overlooked as a vital film genre and covers a wide range of its facets, including politics, science and technology, evolution and mutation, costume design, architecture, kitsch and alien cultures. It is consequently well worth the attention of anyone who visits or reads this blog.

PUBLICATION DETAILS: Days of Fear and Wonder, edited by James Bell, ISBN 978-1-844457-861-0, British Film Institute, £16.99.

More information and ordering details can be found here.

Pictured above Days of Fear and Wonder cover art.