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Barry Vacker
All my art+theory projects (future, present, past) are in Instagram: @BarryVackerArt.
1. I am an author, professor, mixed-media artist. Two-time international award winner for creative work. My stuff is about big spaces and big ideas.
2. I am interested in the trajectories of civilization and our shared destiny as a species on Spaceship Earth as it hurtles through the vast universe. In other words: where are we going, what does it mean, and what can we hope?
3. My projects creatively and critically theorize the intersections of art, media, philosophy, culture, space, science, and technology, all of which try to give us meaning and shape human destiny around the world.
Why such cosmic and macro interests? Because all humans share 99.9% of the same DNA and our bodies are composed of some of the most common elements of the cosmos: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Thus, there have to be some universal values and destinies for humanity.
A professor for 25+ years, I am an associate professor at Temple University and received my PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. I teach media studies courses on topics such as: media and society, technology and culture, media and apocalyptic culture, and media and images of utopia/dystopia.
1. I am an author, professor, mixed-media artist. Two-time international award winner for creative work. My stuff is about big spaces and big ideas.
2. I am interested in the trajectories of civilization and our shared destiny as a species on Spaceship Earth as it hurtles through the vast universe. In other words: where are we going, what does it mean, and what can we hope?
3. My projects creatively and critically theorize the intersections of art, media, philosophy, culture, space, science, and technology, all of which try to give us meaning and shape human destiny around the world.
Why such cosmic and macro interests? Because all humans share 99.9% of the same DNA and our bodies are composed of some of the most common elements of the cosmos: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Thus, there have to be some universal values and destinies for humanity.
A professor for 25+ years, I am an associate professor at Temple University and received my PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. I teach media studies courses on topics such as: media and society, technology and culture, media and apocalyptic culture, and media and images of utopia/dystopia.
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Drawing from Sartre, McLuhan, and Baudrillard, this 24-minute experimental film was shot entirely inside Times Square in 2006. Now fully remastered, the film decodes Times Square as a microcosm of the electronic big bang — an expanding electronic cosmos of voids and nothingnesses, enlightenment and ignorance, entertainment and inquisition, iPod people and hive-minds, flash mobs and flat-screens, black holes and vanishing points, war and bankruptcy, existentialism and nihilism. Accompanied by poetic narration and haunting original score by Brett Sroka.
"Media Environments: Using Movies and Texts to Critique Media and Society" uses popular film as a gateway to critical readings, encouraging students to think creatively and critically about media, society, technology, and popular culture.
The text anthology explores media in their totality and provides models and theories for interrogating many universal themes that span media, technology, and planetary civilization. Using popular films about media as lead-ins, students are introduced to the works of well-known thinkers and writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Charlton D. McIlwain, Shoshanna Zuboff, Julia Hildebrand, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Devon Powers, Antonio Lopez, and many others. Chapters span interconnected topics:
Memes (original meaning),
Networks (McLuhan),
Spectacle (Debord),
Hyperreality (Baudrillard).
Capitalism and Consumerism,
Freedom and Protest,
Social-Mobile Media,
Ecology and the Anthropocene,
Science and Our Place in the Universe,
Pseudoscience and Conspiracy,
Celebrity and Superheroes,
New Concepts of "Hot" and "Cool" Media,
Land Art, Dark Skies, and Technological Civilization.
The fourth edition features 19 new readings that explore Afrofuturism in Black Panther, Avatar and global media ecosystems, Hollywood and climate change, Blade Runner 2049 and future earth scenarios, Avengers and environmental advocacy, #BlackLivesMatter and Black movements in digital culture, and the International Dark Sky movement as a radical media-tech philosophy. Intellectually rigorous and thematically diverse, Media Environments is ideal for courses and programs in media and/or communication studies.
-- The book combines movies and texts to introduce students to critical media studies. Accessible and readable, the book is well-liked by students. Topics include the Spectacle, Hyperreality, the Global Village, Social/Mobile Media, Capitalism and Counterculture, Surveillance and Privacy, Ecology and the Anthropocene, Media and Science, Media Futures, the Meme (original version from Dawkins), and many others.
-- Upon adoption, I will provide handouts, syllabus, PPTs.
-- Published by Cognella. https://titles.cognella.com/media-environments-9781516521104
Black Mirror is The Twilight Zone of the twenty-first century. Already a philosophical classic, the series echoes the angst of an era, a civilization and consciousness fully engulfed in the 24/7 media spectacle spanning the planet. With clever plots and existential themes, Black Mirror presents near-futures where humans collide with technology and each other—tomorrows that might arrive in five years or five minutes. Featuring scholars from three continents and ten nations, Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory is an international collection of critical media theory applied to the most intellectually provocative TV show of our time and the all-too-real conditions that inspire it.
-- Drawing from thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Marshall McLuhan, and Paul Virilio, the authors reverse-engineer Black Mirror by probing the ideas, meanings, and conditions embedded in the episodes. The book is organized around six key topics reflected and explored in Black Mirror—human identity, surveillance culture, spectacle and hyperreality, aesthetics, technology and existence, and dystopian futures.
Blurb inside cover: "Like David Bowie’s Major Tom, 'floating in a most peculiar way', Barry Vacker seems to contemplate Planet Earth through the porthole of a spacecraft. Via critiques of the Apollo program and films like 2001 and Interstellar, Barry offers us a unique opportunity to step back and think of the contradictions of space exploration and our contemporary society. Barry shows we live in a 'post-Apollo' culture torn between a frenetic race towards ever more scientific-technological progress and a just as powerful fall-back into the cultural ideologies of tribal ages of the past. For those who can embrace their non-centrality and possible meaninglessness in a majestic universe, yet yearn for a shared destiny in a sane planetary civilization, Specter of the Monolith is a wonderful and inspiring work." — Carine and Elisabeth Krecke (internationally renowned artists). Available in high-quality paperback in Amazon and Barnes & Noble; available in Kindle and Apple iBook.
Have we really embraced our true existence on Spaceship Earth floating in the cosmos of the new millennium? Our calendars say we have passed the year 2000, but have we really entered the new millennium? The End of the World — Again offers an original, exciting, and (for some) terrifying critique of culture in 2012 and beyond.
Available in high quality paperback via Amazon.
Drawing from Jean-Paul Sartre and Marshall McLuhan, Slugging Nothing shows how Fight Club reflects the philosophical angst toward the postmillennial and technological futures, where zero and nothingness reflect the existential conditions of a culture that has crashed into its vanishing points, the vanishing points of mediation, hyperreality, and fundamentalism. Slugging Nothing boots Tyler Durden back to his jungle of space monkeys, the noble savages of the non-information age, the next humans of the non-future.
Available in high quality paperback and Kindle via Amazon. Uploaded here is a PDF of the text, minue the cover.
"NEVER HILLARY." This amazing bit of found poetry is actually the inescapable message of a large billboard set on a country road deep in the heart of Texas. It was captured by photographer Peter Granser during his recent exploration of the American state that has, over the last eight years, become synonymous with the conservative hegemony of George W. Bush. There can be no doubt about who is not wanted here. On the heels of his acclaimed first books, Sun City (2003) and Coney Island (2006), Granser's newest offering, Signs, draws a telling picture of life today in America. For it, Granser traveled 12,000 miles through the "republic" of Texas. With keen and objective precision, he focuses in his color photographs on the plethora of relics and signs that proliferate across the landscape and provide us with insights into the strange and contradictory state of contemporary American identity.
The year 2000 was once symbolic of the future -- the world of tomorrow filled with utopian possibilities for art, science, and technology. Entering the millennium, something is awry in the spirit of tomorrow for there exists a strange pattern of zeros in culture and technology, all related to the space-time coordinates of the future. There is ground zero, carbon zero, Coke Zero, and many others. What do these zeros suggest? Void or emptiness, end or beginning, the past or the future for utopia? It is ground zero for theory.
Drawing from art, media, science, and philosophy, Barry Vacker uses zero as countdown and blastoff for theorizing the existential conditions of postmillennial culture. And here is the key question -- are any models for a future utopia possible after the three zeros of 2000?
As part of my experimental book series, Zero Conditions is available in high quality paperback and Kindle via Amazon.
Drawing from across the pop culture landscape, this essay critiques the proliferation of pseudoscience and anti-science in America — including astrology, Alt-Fact culture, Ancient Aliens, Apollo moon landing hoaxes, Flat-Earthers, Hollywood and TV paranormalism, failing education systems, and the erosion of scientific literacy in media and culture. The essay also provides some easy-to-understand components of scientific literacy.
This essay critiques the "Alpha" and "Omega" of conspiracy theory in America, the origins and destiny, the beginnings and ends for a worldview that promises truth and prophecies as it seeks to seize political power.
In conspiracy theory, the true believers are millions of copies of Neo, downing "red pills" as they break free from "the Matrix." Copies of copies of copies. The new Neos were born in the desert near Roswell, shocked on the streets of Dallas, made heroic in Hollywood, validated on the History Channel, and now feeling empowered by the prophecies of Q-yearning to be born again in "the desert of the real," to quote from Morpheus in The Matrix.
"Flying saucers"—"single bullet theory"—"the truth is out there"—"the Matrix is everywhere"—"where we go one, we go all": these are concepts and slogans that accelerated conspiracy into pop consciousness over the past seven decades. For many millions of people, on the left and the right, from New Age spirituality to age-old religion, conspiracy theory has become an entire worldview, with its own cosmology and structure that satisfy deep philosophical and psychological needs. After all, the "deep state" taps into deep fears.
Obviously, I am being playful with the letters alpha and omega. at's because the point of this appendix is not to refute the conspiracies, but to show the philosophical role that conspiracy theory plays in twenty-rst-century culture and consciousness-and to have a little fun while we do it.
This article uses Prada Marfa, McDonald Observatory and Santa Elena Canyon as probes for a hot planet under dark skies, while also deploying a cool gaze into the Milky Way. In so doing, cool media takes on a profound new meaning for our shared destiny on a tiny planet, getting ever hotter as it hurtles through the vast universe.
Carl Sagan once asked, "Who Speaks for Earth?" This chapter presents a philosophy grounded in five principles that should guide/speak for Earth: Scientific Discovery—Philosophy—Ecology—Aesthetics—Cooperation.
As such, the chapter explicitly rejects the unenlightened visions of Elon Musk, SpaceX, and other firms/nations that want to terraform Mars and strip-mine the moon and Mars. These are little more than 19th century visions of "Manifest Destiny" and industrial exploitation, presented as visionary for the 21st century. It is the same with the militarization of space and extending theology into space, with the intent of conquest and colonization.This chapter also rejects the "Ancient Alien" pseudoscience. These are all unenlightened, delusional, backward-looking, and not in line with the facts and evidence of our evolutionary existence. Places like Mars and the moon should be protected as Celestial Wilderness Areas, open to study, visit, and appreciate their beauty and majesty, but with no industrial exploitation.
In the end, we are tiny, yet we are also brainy, curious, and creative, with the power to explore the cosmos in peace, with the goal of understanding the universe and our place in it. In the pursuit of meaning, we will find our destiny.
—From my book inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the famed black monolith.
The chapter show how pop culture/pop consciousness were deep into "future shock" (Toffler 1970) and the confrontation with the "premature arrival of the future" -- namely a future in which the universe is vast and majestic, while humans are a single species sharing a single planet and not the center of anything. This "future shock in space" triggered retreats into technological narcissism, apocalyptic scenarios in space, and all kinds of technological/cultural reversals (among many, "urban cowboys" replacing astronauts as popular male role models by the late 1970s). It is no coincidence that Hubble Deep Field images were countered by the internet and social media. In effect, humans are "moonwalking into the future"—it looks like we are going forward (in some ways), but are really going backward (in most ways). This is still 100% true in 2023.
Films with space or space-related themes include: Diamonds are Forever (1971), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Silent Running (1972), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Star Wars (1977), Capricorn One (1978), Alien (1979), the Black Hole (1980), Moonraker (1981), The Fifth Element (1997), Contact (1997), Star Trek (2009), Melancholia (2011), Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), and others. TV shows include The Six-Million Dollar Man (1973), Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).
—From my book inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the famed black monolith.
The films are analyzed and compared along many categories, including their cosmic imagery, space technologies, trajectories in time, depiction of acceleration, view of human destiny, aesthetics of the sublime, feelings of awe and terror, depictions of meaning and human insignificance, and others. You will never look at the films quite the same!
—From my book inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the famed black monolith.
—From my book inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the famed black monolith.
Bigger than the rocket launches of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bigger than the football coliseums for the Cowboys, Longhorns, and Aggies. Bigger than any tech dream launched by the hipsters at Apple, Google, or Tesla in Austin. Bigger than the towering 10,000 Year Clock being inserted into a 300-foot deep cave in the Sierra Diablo Mountains near Van Horn. Believe it or not, there is something wondrous and profound happening in the Big Bend, far grander than anything happening in our big cities or on our electronic screens.
Imagine a huge swath of the modern world better integrated into the natural world here on Earth and the cosmos above—an area in which the bright skyglow of our cities is tempered in favor of the radiant starglow of the cosmos. In that difference between skyglow and starglow lies hope for a better tomorrow. That’s why we need to turn our gaze away from our screens, at least for a while, and experience our true place in the universe. We can find it in the Big Bend, site of this profound and beautiful project.
It’s called the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve. You’ve probably never heard of it. But, I find this to be an incredibly hopeful project, not only for Texans, but for Americans and the rest of humanity Relax, this is not a political essay. It’s a story about hope for a deeper and richer understanding of our place on Earth and in the universe.
Drawing from Sartre, McLuhan, and Baudrillard, this 24-minute experimental film was shot entirely inside Times Square in 2006. Now fully remastered, the film decodes Times Square as a microcosm of the electronic big bang — an expanding electronic cosmos of voids and nothingnesses, enlightenment and ignorance, entertainment and inquisition, iPod people and hive-minds, flash mobs and flat-screens, black holes and vanishing points, war and bankruptcy, existentialism and nihilism. Accompanied by poetic narration and haunting original score by Brett Sroka.
"Media Environments: Using Movies and Texts to Critique Media and Society" uses popular film as a gateway to critical readings, encouraging students to think creatively and critically about media, society, technology, and popular culture.
The text anthology explores media in their totality and provides models and theories for interrogating many universal themes that span media, technology, and planetary civilization. Using popular films about media as lead-ins, students are introduced to the works of well-known thinkers and writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Charlton D. McIlwain, Shoshanna Zuboff, Julia Hildebrand, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Devon Powers, Antonio Lopez, and many others. Chapters span interconnected topics:
Memes (original meaning),
Networks (McLuhan),
Spectacle (Debord),
Hyperreality (Baudrillard).
Capitalism and Consumerism,
Freedom and Protest,
Social-Mobile Media,
Ecology and the Anthropocene,
Science and Our Place in the Universe,
Pseudoscience and Conspiracy,
Celebrity and Superheroes,
New Concepts of "Hot" and "Cool" Media,
Land Art, Dark Skies, and Technological Civilization.
The fourth edition features 19 new readings that explore Afrofuturism in Black Panther, Avatar and global media ecosystems, Hollywood and climate change, Blade Runner 2049 and future earth scenarios, Avengers and environmental advocacy, #BlackLivesMatter and Black movements in digital culture, and the International Dark Sky movement as a radical media-tech philosophy. Intellectually rigorous and thematically diverse, Media Environments is ideal for courses and programs in media and/or communication studies.
-- The book combines movies and texts to introduce students to critical media studies. Accessible and readable, the book is well-liked by students. Topics include the Spectacle, Hyperreality, the Global Village, Social/Mobile Media, Capitalism and Counterculture, Surveillance and Privacy, Ecology and the Anthropocene, Media and Science, Media Futures, the Meme (original version from Dawkins), and many others.
-- Upon adoption, I will provide handouts, syllabus, PPTs.
-- Published by Cognella. https://titles.cognella.com/media-environments-9781516521104
Black Mirror is The Twilight Zone of the twenty-first century. Already a philosophical classic, the series echoes the angst of an era, a civilization and consciousness fully engulfed in the 24/7 media spectacle spanning the planet. With clever plots and existential themes, Black Mirror presents near-futures where humans collide with technology and each other—tomorrows that might arrive in five years or five minutes. Featuring scholars from three continents and ten nations, Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory is an international collection of critical media theory applied to the most intellectually provocative TV show of our time and the all-too-real conditions that inspire it.
-- Drawing from thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Marshall McLuhan, and Paul Virilio, the authors reverse-engineer Black Mirror by probing the ideas, meanings, and conditions embedded in the episodes. The book is organized around six key topics reflected and explored in Black Mirror—human identity, surveillance culture, spectacle and hyperreality, aesthetics, technology and existence, and dystopian futures.
Blurb inside cover: "Like David Bowie’s Major Tom, 'floating in a most peculiar way', Barry Vacker seems to contemplate Planet Earth through the porthole of a spacecraft. Via critiques of the Apollo program and films like 2001 and Interstellar, Barry offers us a unique opportunity to step back and think of the contradictions of space exploration and our contemporary society. Barry shows we live in a 'post-Apollo' culture torn between a frenetic race towards ever more scientific-technological progress and a just as powerful fall-back into the cultural ideologies of tribal ages of the past. For those who can embrace their non-centrality and possible meaninglessness in a majestic universe, yet yearn for a shared destiny in a sane planetary civilization, Specter of the Monolith is a wonderful and inspiring work." — Carine and Elisabeth Krecke (internationally renowned artists). Available in high-quality paperback in Amazon and Barnes & Noble; available in Kindle and Apple iBook.
Have we really embraced our true existence on Spaceship Earth floating in the cosmos of the new millennium? Our calendars say we have passed the year 2000, but have we really entered the new millennium? The End of the World — Again offers an original, exciting, and (for some) terrifying critique of culture in 2012 and beyond.
Available in high quality paperback via Amazon.
Drawing from Jean-Paul Sartre and Marshall McLuhan, Slugging Nothing shows how Fight Club reflects the philosophical angst toward the postmillennial and technological futures, where zero and nothingness reflect the existential conditions of a culture that has crashed into its vanishing points, the vanishing points of mediation, hyperreality, and fundamentalism. Slugging Nothing boots Tyler Durden back to his jungle of space monkeys, the noble savages of the non-information age, the next humans of the non-future.
Available in high quality paperback and Kindle via Amazon. Uploaded here is a PDF of the text, minue the cover.
"NEVER HILLARY." This amazing bit of found poetry is actually the inescapable message of a large billboard set on a country road deep in the heart of Texas. It was captured by photographer Peter Granser during his recent exploration of the American state that has, over the last eight years, become synonymous with the conservative hegemony of George W. Bush. There can be no doubt about who is not wanted here. On the heels of his acclaimed first books, Sun City (2003) and Coney Island (2006), Granser's newest offering, Signs, draws a telling picture of life today in America. For it, Granser traveled 12,000 miles through the "republic" of Texas. With keen and objective precision, he focuses in his color photographs on the plethora of relics and signs that proliferate across the landscape and provide us with insights into the strange and contradictory state of contemporary American identity.
The year 2000 was once symbolic of the future -- the world of tomorrow filled with utopian possibilities for art, science, and technology. Entering the millennium, something is awry in the spirit of tomorrow for there exists a strange pattern of zeros in culture and technology, all related to the space-time coordinates of the future. There is ground zero, carbon zero, Coke Zero, and many others. What do these zeros suggest? Void or emptiness, end or beginning, the past or the future for utopia? It is ground zero for theory.
Drawing from art, media, science, and philosophy, Barry Vacker uses zero as countdown and blastoff for theorizing the existential conditions of postmillennial culture. And here is the key question -- are any models for a future utopia possible after the three zeros of 2000?
As part of my experimental book series, Zero Conditions is available in high quality paperback and Kindle via Amazon.
Drawing from across the pop culture landscape, this essay critiques the proliferation of pseudoscience and anti-science in America — including astrology, Alt-Fact culture, Ancient Aliens, Apollo moon landing hoaxes, Flat-Earthers, Hollywood and TV paranormalism, failing education systems, and the erosion of scientific literacy in media and culture. The essay also provides some easy-to-understand components of scientific literacy.
This essay critiques the "Alpha" and "Omega" of conspiracy theory in America, the origins and destiny, the beginnings and ends for a worldview that promises truth and prophecies as it seeks to seize political power.
In conspiracy theory, the true believers are millions of copies of Neo, downing "red pills" as they break free from "the Matrix." Copies of copies of copies. The new Neos were born in the desert near Roswell, shocked on the streets of Dallas, made heroic in Hollywood, validated on the History Channel, and now feeling empowered by the prophecies of Q-yearning to be born again in "the desert of the real," to quote from Morpheus in The Matrix.
"Flying saucers"—"single bullet theory"—"the truth is out there"—"the Matrix is everywhere"—"where we go one, we go all": these are concepts and slogans that accelerated conspiracy into pop consciousness over the past seven decades. For many millions of people, on the left and the right, from New Age spirituality to age-old religion, conspiracy theory has become an entire worldview, with its own cosmology and structure that satisfy deep philosophical and psychological needs. After all, the "deep state" taps into deep fears.
Obviously, I am being playful with the letters alpha and omega. at's because the point of this appendix is not to refute the conspiracies, but to show the philosophical role that conspiracy theory plays in twenty-rst-century culture and consciousness-and to have a little fun while we do it.
This article uses Prada Marfa, McDonald Observatory and Santa Elena Canyon as probes for a hot planet under dark skies, while also deploying a cool gaze into the Milky Way. In so doing, cool media takes on a profound new meaning for our shared destiny on a tiny planet, getting ever hotter as it hurtles through the vast universe.
Carl Sagan once asked, "Who Speaks for Earth?" This chapter presents a philosophy grounded in five principles that should guide/speak for Earth: Scientific Discovery—Philosophy—Ecology—Aesthetics—Cooperation.
As such, the chapter explicitly rejects the unenlightened visions of Elon Musk, SpaceX, and other firms/nations that want to terraform Mars and strip-mine the moon and Mars. These are little more than 19th century visions of "Manifest Destiny" and industrial exploitation, presented as visionary for the 21st century. It is the same with the militarization of space and extending theology into space, with the intent of conquest and colonization.This chapter also rejects the "Ancient Alien" pseudoscience. These are all unenlightened, delusional, backward-looking, and not in line with the facts and evidence of our evolutionary existence. Places like Mars and the moon should be protected as Celestial Wilderness Areas, open to study, visit, and appreciate their beauty and majesty, but with no industrial exploitation.
In the end, we are tiny, yet we are also brainy, curious, and creative, with the power to explore the cosmos in peace, with the goal of understanding the universe and our place in it. In the pursuit of meaning, we will find our destiny.
—From my book inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the famed black monolith.
The chapter show how pop culture/pop consciousness were deep into "future shock" (Toffler 1970) and the confrontation with the "premature arrival of the future" -- namely a future in which the universe is vast and majestic, while humans are a single species sharing a single planet and not the center of anything. This "future shock in space" triggered retreats into technological narcissism, apocalyptic scenarios in space, and all kinds of technological/cultural reversals (among many, "urban cowboys" replacing astronauts as popular male role models by the late 1970s). It is no coincidence that Hubble Deep Field images were countered by the internet and social media. In effect, humans are "moonwalking into the future"—it looks like we are going forward (in some ways), but are really going backward (in most ways). This is still 100% true in 2023.
Films with space or space-related themes include: Diamonds are Forever (1971), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Silent Running (1972), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Star Wars (1977), Capricorn One (1978), Alien (1979), the Black Hole (1980), Moonraker (1981), The Fifth Element (1997), Contact (1997), Star Trek (2009), Melancholia (2011), Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), and others. TV shows include The Six-Million Dollar Man (1973), Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).
—From my book inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the famed black monolith.
The films are analyzed and compared along many categories, including their cosmic imagery, space technologies, trajectories in time, depiction of acceleration, view of human destiny, aesthetics of the sublime, feelings of awe and terror, depictions of meaning and human insignificance, and others. You will never look at the films quite the same!
—From my book inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the famed black monolith.
—From my book inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the famed black monolith.
Bigger than the rocket launches of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bigger than the football coliseums for the Cowboys, Longhorns, and Aggies. Bigger than any tech dream launched by the hipsters at Apple, Google, or Tesla in Austin. Bigger than the towering 10,000 Year Clock being inserted into a 300-foot deep cave in the Sierra Diablo Mountains near Van Horn. Believe it or not, there is something wondrous and profound happening in the Big Bend, far grander than anything happening in our big cities or on our electronic screens.
Imagine a huge swath of the modern world better integrated into the natural world here on Earth and the cosmos above—an area in which the bright skyglow of our cities is tempered in favor of the radiant starglow of the cosmos. In that difference between skyglow and starglow lies hope for a better tomorrow. That’s why we need to turn our gaze away from our screens, at least for a while, and experience our true place in the universe. We can find it in the Big Bend, site of this profound and beautiful project.
It’s called the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve. You’ve probably never heard of it. But, I find this to be an incredibly hopeful project, not only for Texans, but for Americans and the rest of humanity Relax, this is not a political essay. It’s a story about hope for a deeper and richer understanding of our place on Earth and in the universe.
This Dark Sky Reserve brings together nature and science, ecology and cosmology, and peaceful cooperation along a contentious border—all quietly pointing toward a new philosophy for the human species. In a culture filled with collapse and despair, this gives me hope.
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498573535/Black-Mirror-and-Critical-Media-Theory
Featuring scholars from ten countries and three continents, this international collection features 18 essays that explore various episodes of Black Mirror, drawing from media theorists such as Debord, Foucault, Baudrillard, McLuhan, and others. Topics include: Human Identity, Surveillance, Hyperreality, the Spectacle, Technology and Existence, Utopian and Dystopian Futures.
-- From Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory (2018).
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498573535/Black-Mirror-and-Critical-Media-Theory
"Space Times Square" is where aesthetics meets critical theory meets cosmology. Drawing from Sartre, McLuhan, and Baudrillard, this 24-minute experimental film decodes Times Square as a microcosm of the electronic universe that has overtaken contemporary civilization.
"Space Times Square" has been screened at festivals and conferences in Paris, Beijing, Brussels, New York, Hamburg, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Tulsa, along with thousands of downloads at BitTorrents and other sites. A new digital copy of the film was made in 2014 and is available in YouTube, listed as: Space Times Square (2014 version).
The film was co-produced by Jo Ann Caplin (Penn) and Olivia Antsis (Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival). The amazing original soundtrack is by Brett Sroka, a NY avant garde musician.
Humans have long sought to map their place in the cosmos and then situate their selves at the center of the universe. These patterns are displayed at two radically different sites — the Hubble Space Telescope and Facebook. Drawing from Marshall McLuhan, this presentation theorizes the parallels and reversals in these sites, where cosmological discoveries of the expanding universe have been countered by technological innovations involving electronic screens, such that social media counters space telescopes, cyberspace counters outer space, and Facebook counters Hubble. Perhaps the “revolution” of social media merely parallels other cultural reversals, all of which seek to return humans to the center of the universe, when we are the center of nothing. And this desire and delusion to be at the center of everything lies at the heart of contemporary issues facing the global civilization.
Other panelists included Angela Cirucci (Temple U) and Genevieve Gillespie (Temple U).
2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s famous “moon speech” at Rice University, which is famed for its challenge to put humans on the moon and “measure the best of our energies and skills.” Overlooked is his claim that the “new knowledge of our universe” would help bring “peace” and “progress” for “all people.” Since 1962, artists and scientists using media technology have been visualizing the “new knowledge of our universe” — a cosmos of staggering scale in space and time. Efforts include Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames, 1968), Earthrise (Apollo 8, 1968), Whole Earth, (Apollo 17, 1972), Pale Blue Dot (NASA, 1990), Cosmic Voyage (Bailey Silleck, 1997), and The Known Universe (American Museum of Natural History, 2009).
Earthrise inspired the founding of Earth Day and, in combination with Whole Earth, led to the Gaia hypothesis and a rebooting of the global ecological consciousness. In contrast, films such as Powers of Ten and The Known Universe have had little impact on the global community or global consciousness. Why? This multimedia presentation will explore this question and its relevance for our ability to imagine an optimistic human destiny on Spaceship Earth.
Other panelsits included Jarice Hanson (U-Mass), Angela Cirucci (Temple U), and Genevieve Gillespie (Temple U).
In the six-minute film "The Known Universe" (2010), scientists at the American Museum of Natural History have mapped the cosmos and uploaded it in cyberspace, where it is “scientifically rendered for all to see." Like "Powers of Ten" (1968) by Charles and Ray Eames, "The Known Universe" features a journey to the edge of the observable universe, with Spaceship Earth disappearing into the vanishing point at the center of everything. Drawing from McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) and Through the Vanishing Point (1968), this paper will speculate about possible meanings of this film and what it reveals about: the space ages, space telescopes, and the power of media technologies to peer to the edge of the universe, model the end of the universe, and remove humanity from the center of the universe … only to return us again … through the vanishing point.
Other panelists included Angela Cirucci (Temple) and Agreen Wang (Temple).
"Space Times Square" is where aesthetics meets critical theory meets cosmology. Drawing from Sartre, McLuhan, and Baudrillard, this 24-minute experimental film decodes Times Square as a microcosm of the electronic universe that has overtaken contemporary civilization. Having screened at numerous conferences and festivals around the world, a new digital copy of the film was made in 2014 and is available in YouTube: "Space Times Square (2014 version)"
-- Guest lecture given to Dr. Julia M. Hildebrand's class at Eckerd College in Florida. December 1, 2021. Due to the Covid pandemic, the talk was given via Zoom.
Superiores de Monterrey. The talk was about my art installations, based on my international award-winning concept/design essay.
Due to the Covid pandemic, the talk was given via Zoom
Think you are immune to apocalyptic thinking? It's not only Mayan prophecy delusions. We have fiscal cliffs and economic meltdowns, terror wars and nuclear terrorism, hurricanes and tsunamis, pandemics and contagions, creationism and fundamentalism, global warming and ecological destruction, and endless media and movies celebrating doom -- what do all these scenarios say about our worldviews, our ideologies, our sense of meaning and purpose in the cosmos? You might be very surprised?
Other panelists: Jarice Hanson (U-Mass), Osei Alleyne (Penn), and Genevieve Gillespie (Temple U).
Other panelists included Laura Zaylea (Assistant Professor, Temple U) and Olivia Antsis (Director, Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival).
1. Domitainment (domination + entertainment)
2. Liberlightenment (liberation + enlightenment)
3. Massimulation (Mass rebellion + simulation)
4 Futurversal (futurism + reversal)
In my 25 years as a prof and grad student, I have never seen a symposium audience as energetic, enthusiastic, and culturally diverse (in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, fashion, and meanings of The Matrix). It was standing room only in the auditorium. I'll never forget the 80-something couple who took detailed notes during my presentation, while looking like how Neo and Trinity might look in 50 years, with their wardrobes right out of the Bauhaus school of fashion design.
Other panelists included: William Irwin, editor of the best-selling book, The Matrix and Philosophy (Open Court 2003); Read Mercer Schuchardt, Manhattan College.
Twenty years ago, doing a webcast was technologically complex. Handling the webcast of the event was a Dallas firm called "audionet," which later became "broadcast.com" and sold to Yahoo in 2000 and made Mark Cuban a billionaire.
The event was organized by David Sedman and myself (when I was a professor at SMU in Dallas) during 1996. Culturemorph was a live multimedia symposium which explored the cultural transformations being wrought by the internet, genetics, nanotechnology, and chaos theory. The event featured five theorists, including the poet and philosopher Frederick Turner (author of The Culture of Hope and many other books), Susan Herring (The University of Texas at Arlington), Wayne Key, Sedman, and myself.
We received email feedback from viewers in Tokyo and Paris, which was radically novel proof (for that era) that we had a effected a global telecast with a computer and camera.
In 1997 and 1999, we followed up with two other cyber-symposiums: "Virtual City" and "Trajectory of the Canvas."
Because there was such limited hard-drive capacity at that time, these events were not stored in any computer and are gone forever. But, you can download the crazy posters; we were having fun. We used fractals signifying the chaotic web of the internet; at least that was the idea.