Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Margaret Mead was a foundational figure in American anthropology who bridged academic inquiry with avant-garde artistic and intellectual circles, particularly through her partnership with Gregory Bateson. The course readings position her as both a theorist of culture and cognition and a participant in Cold War-era military and intelligence research—specifically her involvement with Bateson in truth drug and hypnosis experiments for the OSS—making her emblematic of how mid-century science became entangled with state apparatus and avant-garde aesthetics. Her Greenwich Village salon served as a nexus where anthropological insight met artistic experimentation, complicating any clean separation between cultural analysis and the cybernetic/psychological research that would inform AI discourse.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Scott Benzel

Notes on À bruit secret: on Duchamp, Cybernetics, and Organized Crime

5

The Western Round Table on Modern Art (1949) featured artists and thinkers (all men) including Marcel Duchamp, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the composers Darius Milhaud and Arnold Schoenburg, and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson spea…When Bateson wrote his report calling for the establishment of CIA and the pursuit of “indirect methods of warfare”, the 1942 Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, OSS ‘black propaganda’ work in the South Pacific, and the Truth Drug and hypnosis exp…When Bateson wrote his report calling for the establishment of CIA and the pursuit of “indirect methods of warfare”, the 1942 Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, OSS ‘black propaganda’ work in the South Pacific, and the Truth Drug and hypnosis exp…

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