In this exciting and inspiring talk, Professors Charlotte Kent and Fred Turner discuss the great potential art holds in creating shifts in the public consciousness through examples of historical art movements, art’s impact on technology and society at large, and its effective way of communicating democratic ideals.

They also cover the background and process behind Fred's latest book "Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America", a collaboration with notable photographer Mary Beth Meehan.

This episode was originally produced for the 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.

Speakers

Charlotte Kent
Charlotte Kent, PhD (@Lucy2Scribbles) is the Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University and an arts writer. Her work theorizes how visual and linguistic rhetorical devices constrain what we see by exploring their historical and political context. Her current research investigates the absurd in contemporary art and speculative design. She writes for academic journals (Word and Image, Leonardo, Journal of Visual Culture, etc) and general audience magazines (Art Review, BOMB, Wired, among others), with a monthly panel and column on Art and Technology for The Brooklyn Rail, where she is also an Editor-at-Large. Prior to academia, she developed education for the eyecare industry and managed an art school located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate Center, St. John’s College, and Philips Academy Andover. She currently lives in New York City.

Fred Turner
Fred Turner (@fturner) is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of five books: Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); L’Usage de L’Art dans la Silicon Valley; The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.

This is a RadicalxChange production.

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