AFC at The L Magazine: Portrait of the Robot as a Young Man

by Will Brand on July 25, 2012 The L Magazine

This week at the L Magazine, I review The New Museum’s latest show “Ghosts in the Machine.” The exhibition spans twenty-five years of machine-related art, from outsider art to Op art to sci-fi. At best, it captures a 20th-century shift in consciousness:

“Ghosts in the Machine,” the current exhibition filling up three floors of the New Museum (through September 30), attempts to tell the history of mankind’s changing relationship with technology through a snapshot. Though it deals with a theme that stretches from the Industrial Revolution to the present—the threat and promise of man’s replacement, augmentation, or destruction by machines—it tells its story almost exclusively through artworks and cultural artifacts created between 1950 and 1975, seeking to provide a kind of in-depth, lateral catalog of possible reactions to the machine at a single point in time. It is at times disjointed and at times indulgent; taken as a whole, however, it paints a portrait of cybernetic thought at the point of its first full maturity.

To read the full piece click here.

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