Talk: Jason Brown on "Paranoid Machines"


Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn
­Date: April 4, 2009
Time: 7-9 pm
FREE. No RSVP necessary. Organized by Machine Project, Los Angeles.

Jason Brown's talk will examine contemporary gnostic mythologies of technology and paranoia, focusing on Vannevar Bush as a self-embodied allegorical­ emblem of information perversity. Bush's famed "memex" and the modern UFOs are both hypothetical machines—devices which use association and performativity to spin information out of noise. In modern techno-myths, this process is often represented as an alchemical self-destruction resulting in god-like power. Not coincidentally, all these issues are illustrated with disturbing density and prescience in the 1981 Disney film "Tron."

Reception will follow.