Towards a Data Base of Dreams: Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, c. 1947-61

Lemov, Rebecca

doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn065

Cited by 19 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…All these designers participated in a discourse of data inundation emerging from their interactions with communication science and computation. While much scholarship attends to the relationship between the military, communication sciences, computation, cybernetics, and fields ranging from design to the social and the life sciences, what has not received much attention in the historiography of post and Cold War science and its relationship to art and visual culture are the attendant forms of epistemology that condition and accompany such aesthetic transformations (Colomina, 2007;Edwards, 1997;Lee, 2004;Lemov, 2009;Martin, 2003;Masco, 2010). Even in the histories of design and architecture, the attention to the work of these designers has largely evaded any specific discussion of what terms like 'information', 'image', or 'knowledge' actually denote in these practices, and more importantly how the specific tactics, methods, and strategies by which perception was reconceived as measurable, modifiable, and the subject and object of design separate from previous histories of cinema, psychophysics, and media.…”

Section: Figure 1cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving, and Vision in Post-War American Design

Halpern¹

2012

Journal of Visual Culture

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This article examines historical transformations in the relationship between the image, time, and knowledge after the war. One site to investigate these changes in representation is at the locus of science, design, film and architecture in the works of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes for the Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT and in the interests of science education. In these works, including many science education and pedagogy films, the nature of the image, the materiality of vision, and the relationship between documentation and communication were being aggressively rethought. All these projects were deeply invested in the emergent terms of cybernetics and electronic media. Ontology, documentation, and representation were seemingly replaced by discourses of communication, performance, and modularity; the world as interface for the mediation of ongoing, lively communicative exchanges. The work of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes provides evidence of a more global reformulation of the work of the document, the relationship between abstraction and materiality, and among science, aesthetics, and visuality.

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Section: Figure 1cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving, and Vision in Post-War American Design

Halpern¹

2012

Journal of Visual Culture

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“…The project, officially named Microcard Publications of Primary Records in Culture and Personality, but more accurately, perhaps, labeled the “database of dreams,” was from its first micropublished installment in 1956 to its last in 1963, both a success and a failure. (On the archive, see Lemov, 2010a; on the history of anthropological knowledge‐gathering practices in the twentieth century, see Lemov, forthcoming; space does not permit anything more than a capsule history of the database to be given here.) Figures 4 through 9 show some of the forms by means of which the records were standardized , , ,…”

Section: Technologies Of Subjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

X‐rays of inner worlds: The mid‐twentieth‐century American Projective Test Movement

Lemov

2011

J History Behavioral Science

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This essay begins to tell the neglected history of the projective test movement in the U.S. behavioral sciences from approximately 1941 to 1968. This cross-disciplinary enterprise attempted to use projective techniques as "X-ray" machines to see into the psyches of subjects tested around the world. The aim was to gather subjective materials en masse, pursuing data on a scope, scale, and manner rarely hazarded before in any science. In particular, the targeted data included the traces of the inner life and elusive aspects of subjective experience including dreams, life stories, and myriad test results from a battery of tests. This essay explores how the movement and the experimental data bank that resulted were unlikely yet telling sites for the practice and pursuit of the Cold War human sciences. To look closely at the encounters that resulted is to show how the most out-of-the-way places and seemingly insignificant moments played a role in heady scientific ambitions and global geopolitical projects. At times, the projective test movement became a mirror of Cold War rationality itself, as tests were employed at the very limits of their possible extension. The essay argues for an off-kilter centrality in the movement itself, shedding light on the would-be unified social sciences after World War II and the "subjective turn" they took.

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“…During the Cold War, it was a ubiquitous and adaptable tool for understanding selves and societies in both their normal and pathological forms. Psychoanalytic theories about politics, based on numerous cross cultural studies using projective tests, were a common fixture in foreign area research (Lindzey, 1961; Herman, 1995; Lemov, 2009). The RF/PF study trod well‐worn terrain.…”

Section: The Justification Of War As National Therapymentioning

confidence: 99%

The last stand of the psychocultural Cold warriors: Military contract research in Vietnam

Rohde

2011

J History Behavioral Science

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In 1966, the social scientists of the Simulmatics Corporation arrived in Saigon. Tasked by the Pentagon with helping to pacify South Vietnam, they conducted political and social psychological research on Viet Cong defectors, government soldiers, and Vietnamese villagers. This essay argues that Simulmatics's work captures some of the ironies of Cold War social science: its tendency to mask militarization behind the rhetoric of peaceful nation-building, its blurring of data collection and intelligence gathering, and its ambitious dedication to revealing the unseen contents of hearts and minds while remaining ignorant of the historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which its subjects lived.

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Towards a Data Base of Dreams: Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, c. 1947-61

Cited by 19 publications

References 27 publications

Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving, and Vision in Post-War American Design

Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving, and Vision in Post-War American Design

X‐rays of inner worlds: The mid‐twentieth‐century American Projective Test Movement

The last stand of the psychocultural Cold warriors: Military contract research in Vietnam

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