Page 142 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 142/146
Bush was chief science advisor to President Roosevelt in WW2, and as such he had to examine thousands of proposals, inventions, papers, reports, - and condense all these for the US govern- ment. At the time Bush only had filing cabinets and card-index systems to help him sort and archive these documents. He dreamed of a filing system that would echo the way we actually think – that would replicate the sequence of associative ideas that we create in our minds. Immediately after the war, he himself wrote a paper, published in the influential Atlantic Monthly, entitled As We May Think. In this article he described an experimental memory-extension machine he had conceived, called the Memex. Memex could store records (files), our notations, and ‘associations’ – the con- ceptual links with other documents that made them a valid expression and communication. This machine could scan documents, make copies of them on microfilm, archive them with an index number, and retrieve them on demand, either by browsing through the archive, by typing a keyword, or by clicking on a link from one archive document (record) to another. Not only that, but the user could add notes and links to other Memex records, and if needed, build an associative trail of links connecting several or several dozen records together. He could then send this ‘trail’ of links to other Memex owners, so that they could follow the same logic, peruse the same evidence, the same dia-
grams, the same pictures. It was hypermedia - foreseen in 1945!
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
So, the big breakthroughs in 21st century media were to come in the 1940s - the Memex idea (1945), Dowding’s Air Defence System (1940), the Transistor (1947), the Digital Computer (c1940), the theory of Cybernetics (Weiner, 1947), and Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communications (1949) even the universal surveillance (Big Brother) and Newspeak of Orwell.. And the rethinking of media con- tent, (Kepes and Moholy Nagy 1944-1947), and Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanisation Takes Command (1946) pointing to McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man 1951.
Eduardo Paolozzi: Bunk! Sketchbook collages inc I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything (1947)
These sketchbook collages by Paolozzi were constructed from American magazine given him by US G.I.s. They form part of what became a huge archive of clippings and cuttings from which Paolozzi drew inspiration for his collages and later for his collage photo-silk-screens (Editions Alecto) in the 1960s. This image is significant because it predates by a decade or so his colleague Richard Hamilton’s collage ‘Just What is it that Makes Todays Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) in
its overt mention of POP! (Pop Art).
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/37841/bunk
In the 1960s, Paolozzi drew upon these collages to make his famous photo-silkscreen prints - ano- ther extension of photography! The photo-silkscreen proved the ideal compositing medium for Pao- lozzi - and Bunk! a perfect example of the merging of fine-art and popular art - part of the coming Pop Art movement of a decade later...