Bateson, “witting” or not, was surrounded by a web of agents, consultants, academics, and think-tankers directly or indirectly on CIA’s payroll — Harold Abramson, Frank Fremont-Smith, George Hunter White, James Mysbergh, James Alexander Ham…[...] She threw raucous, amphetamine-fueled parties at her apartment at 61 Morton Street in Greenwich Village, dancing barefoot to calypso music. Her guest list included Anaïs Nin, Ralph Ellison, Gore Vidal, and Marcel Duchamp.
And, starti…[...] She threw raucous, amphetamine-fueled parties at her apartment at 61 Morton Street in Greenwich Village, dancing barefoot to calypso music. Her guest list included Anaïs Nin, Ralph Ellison, Gore Vidal, and Marcel Duchamp.
And, starti…
Maya Deren
filmmaker · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Maya Deren was an avant-garde filmmaker and dance theorist whose experimental work in the 1940s-50s bridged cinema, embodied movement, and abstraction during a period when those domains rarely intersected. The course readings position her through her Greenwich Village salon culture—a node connecting artists, writers, and intellectuals—which contextualizes how creative networks formed around precisely the moment when cybernetics and systems thinking were emerging from wartime research environments. Her parties and artistic practice represent a parallel, non-institutional genealogy of ideas about motion, pattern, and human agency that complicates any straightforward narrative of how feedback systems and computational thought entered cultural consciousness.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Gregory Bateson 2Marcel Duchamp 2Ana Mendieta 1André Breton 1Benjamin Breen 1Frank Fremont-Smith 1George Hunter White 1Harold Abramson 1Irving Janis 1James Alexander Hamilton 1James Mysbergh 1Peggy Guggenheim 1Alexander Hammid 1Anaïs Nin 1Frances Stonor Saunders 1Gore Vidal 1Margaret Mead 1Miklos Legrady 1Ralph Ellison 1