Hippie Modernism Forum: Counterculture / Cyberculture

The first of a series of four monthly Saturday afternoon forums at the Berkeley Art Museum bringing together artists, scholars, and counterculture veterans to explore the contemporary relevance of the Bay Area hippie legacy.

Digital pioneer and fellow at the Computer History Museum of Palo Alto Lee Felsenstein; Stanford professor Fred Turner, who has written about The Whole Earth Catalog; and Lynn Hershman Leeson, media artist and chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute join in a discussion moderated by UC Berkeley’s Greg Neimeyer

Lee Felsenstein is a digital pioneer and a fellow at the Computer History Museum of Palo Alto. In 1973 as a member of the Berkeley “Village of Arts and Ideas” commune, Felsenstein worked with Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and others to develop the Community Memory Project, a hippie experiment in decentralized, user-friendly technology that has been called the world’s first version of online social media.

Fred Turner is the author of several books about media and American culture since World War II, including the award-winning From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. He has taught at Harvard University and MIT, and is currently Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communications at Stanford University.

Lynn Hershman Leeson is among the first and most influential of media artists. Her most recent works include robots, mass communication media such as smart-phones, and scientific developments like 3D bioprinters that create human body parts—explorations surveyed in the monograph Civic Radar. Hershman Leeson is chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Greg Neimeyer, UC Berkeley associate professor of art practice, creates works that explore the mediation between humans as individuals and as members of a technological collective, and emphasizes playful responses to technology. Niemeyer’s teaching focuses on critical analysis of new media on human experience, including digital citizenship and the nature of online participatory practices.