Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Gannaway_Cultural Intercom Response

Stan VanDerBeek's Cultural Intercom is an exciting take on future roles of technology and human interaction/communication. Written in 1966, this work is surprisingly futuristic. I say this because VanDerBeek mentions how his Cultural Intercom or "movie-drome", or "life theatre", or "experience machine" or whatever other name he calls it is essentially a "world wide library source". This notion seems futuristic because someone today might consider VanDerBeek's Cultural Intercom to be the Internet, or the World Wide Web. This connection is impressive, considering the Internet as we know it today didn't exist in any part of the world during the 1960s.

I also like VanDerBeek's ideas on an "appreciation of individual minds" and "the interlocking of good wills on an international exchange basis." It seems like VanDerBeek had inspirational and exciting ideas about the future, although his notion of an "non-verbal" "international pictorial-language" seems a bit unrealistic. The drawings were also evocative and thought-provoking, overall emphasizing VanDerBeek's Cultural Intercom idea.

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