This Month's Reading:

Mumford, L. (1952). Art and Technics. Columbia University Press.

Access book.

Gray Area is pleased to host a new reading group, the Cybersentics Book Club that will explore the human sensorium through the lens of art and technology.

In the first cycle, Cybersentic's reading list will center key themes related to the bidirectional flow of information between bodies and the environment. The outward perspective examines biofeedback, while the inward perspective focuses on cyborg art.

This book club is a fit for artists, makers, researchers, scholars, engineers, and anyone curious about the integration of technology and art. Join us as we investigate how to enhance our sensory experiences, from biofeedback and sonification to embedding sensors that challenge our perceptions.

Our group's purpose is to cultivate a welcoming community that fosters knowledge-sharing and collaboration. Whether you're seeking to connect with potential collaborators, look for answers to pressing questions, gain critical insights, or engage in peer learning, this is the place for you!

Cybersentics is organized and led by Gray Area Research Fellow Anastasia Chernysheva as part of the Biofeedback Art|Research Network (BARN).

An open-access library that accompanies this book club can be accessed here.

Drawing on lectures Lewis Mumford delivered at Columbia University in 1952, "Art and Technics" maps a tension between two seemingly disparate ways of navigating the world — one oriented toward efficiency, the other toward meaning — and argues that modern society's fixation on technics has deprived daily life of symbolic concerns.

This divide is rather visible in the Bay Area, where the worlds of aspiring tech entrepreneurs and embattled humanists exist in parallel, with strikingly little overlap in values and an ever-widening gap in socioeconomic power. With Mumford as a guide, we will also consider AI and surveillance systems as technologies increasingly deployed not as tools of knowledge, but of control.

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was an American social philosopher, architectural critic, and historian of technology whose work ranged across urban planning, cultural criticism, and the philosophy of science. He served as architectural critic for The New Yorker for over thirty years and was the author of more than thirty books, including Technics and Civilization (1934), The Culture of Cities (1938), and <The City in History (1961), which received the National Book Award.