Cold War Legacies Systems, Theory, Aesthetics

John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, London. He is the author of Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (SUNY, 2001) and Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2009) co-editor of American Visual Cultures (Continuum, 2005).

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at Winchester School of Art and Co-Director of the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media at the University of Southampton. He co-edits Cultural Politics (Duke UP) with John Armitage and Doug Kellner, and he edits the book series Theory Now for Polity Press. His research areas include critical theory, art, media, literary studies, technology, urbanism and militarisation of daily life.

List of Figures

Series Editors' Preface

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: The Long Cold War
John Beck and Ryan Bishop

I Pattern Recognition

1 The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to Know
John Beck

2 Simulate, Optimise, Partition: Algorithmic Diagrams of Pattern Recognition from 1953 Onwards
Adrian Mackenzie

3 Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts
Aura Satz and Jussi Parikka


II The Persistence of the Nuclear

4 The Meaning of Monte Bello
James Purdon

5 Deep Geological Disposal and Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo
Adam Piette

6 Shifting the Nuclear Imaginary: Art and the Flight from Nuclear Modernity
Ele Carpenter

7 Alchemical Transformations? Fictions of the Nuclear State after 1989
Daniel Grausam


III Ubiquitous Surveillance

8 'The Very Form of Perverse Artificial Societies': The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family from its Cold War Nuclear Bunker
Ken Hollings

9 The Signal-Haunted Cold War: Persistence of the SIGINT Ontology
Jussi Parikka

10 'Bulk Surveillance', or The Elegant Technicities of Metadata
Mark Coté


IV Pervasive Mediations

11 Notes from the Underground: Microwaves, Backbones, Party Lines and the Post Office Tower
John W. P. Phillips

12 Insect Technics: War Vision Machines
Fabienne Collignon

13 Overt Research
Neal White and John Beck

14 Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems
Ryan Bishop

Index