Difference between revisions of "Stewart Brand"
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Stewart Brand grew up in a technically oriented environment: his home town in Illinois specialized in making machine tools, his father was a ham radio operator and his college-educated mother a space buff. Stewart Brand obtained a degree in biology in 1960 from Stanford University, where he encountered systems theory in a biology class taught by Paul Ehrlich, a specialist in butterfly ecology (who later wrote The Population Bomb). American biology at that time was under the influence of [[Cybernetics]] and information theory. | Stewart Brand grew up in a technically oriented environment: his home town in Illinois specialized in making machine tools, his father was a ham radio operator and his college-educated mother a space buff. Stewart Brand obtained a degree in biology in 1960 from Stanford University, where he encountered systems theory in a biology class taught by Paul Ehrlich, a specialist in butterfly ecology (who later wrote The Population Bomb). American biology at that time was under the influence of [[Cybernetics]] and information theory. | ||
| − | Upon graduation from Stanford, Brand was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he began training infantry and ended as an army photographer. While stationed in New Jersey, Brand spent off-duty weekends visiting the lower-Manhattan loft of a young painter named Steve Durkee, thus coming in contact with the bohemian art world of Manhattan. Returning to civilian life in 1962, he studied design at the San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State College. | + | Upon graduation from Stanford, Brand was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he began training infantry, and ended as an army photographer. While stationed in New Jersey, Brand spent off-duty weekends visiting the lower-Manhattan loft of a young painter named Steve Durkee, thus coming in contact with the bohemian art world of Manhattan. Returning to civilian life in 1962, he studied design at the San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State College. |
Around 1962 Steve Durkee teamed up with San Francisco–based poet Gerd Stern and multimedia technician Michael Callahan to form an art troupe they called USCO, short for "The US Company." Brand collaborated periodically with USCO, for example contributing photographs to a 1963 event called "Verbal American Landscape," in which three slide projectors showed, in random sequence, photographs of individual words found on road signs and billboards. Over the next few years, USCO was to transformed the "happening" into a psychedelic celebration, using strobe lights, projectors, tape decks and stereo speakers to transform the audience's consciousness. | Around 1962 Steve Durkee teamed up with San Francisco–based poet Gerd Stern and multimedia technician Michael Callahan to form an art troupe they called USCO, short for "The US Company." Brand collaborated periodically with USCO, for example contributing photographs to a 1963 event called "Verbal American Landscape," in which three slide projectors showed, in random sequence, photographs of individual words found on road signs and billboards. Over the next few years, USCO was to transformed the "happening" into a psychedelic celebration, using strobe lights, projectors, tape decks and stereo speakers to transform the audience's consciousness. | ||
