Technocrats of the imagination : art technology and the military industrial avant garde Science Art Democracy A Laboratory of Form and Movement: Institutionalizing Emancipatory Technicity at MIT The Hands on Approach: Engineering Collaboration at E.A.T. Feedback: Expertise LACMA and the Think Tank How to Make the World Work Heritage of Our Times. TECHNOCRATS OF THE IMAGINATION traces the rise of collaborative art and technology labs in the U.S. from WWII to the present. Ryan Bishop and John Beck reveal the intertwined histories of the avant garde art movement and the military industrial complex showing how radical pedagogical practices traveled from Germanys Bauhaus movement to the U.S. art world and interacted with government funded military research and development in university laboratories. During the 1960s both media labs and studio labs leaned heavily on methods of interdisciplinary collaboration and the power of American modernity to model new modes of social organization. The books chapters take up MITs Center for Art Science and Technology Bell Labss E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) Salon and Los Angeles Museum of Arts Art + Technology Program. Their interconnected history illuminates how much of contemporary media culture and aesthetics depends on the historical relationship between military corporate and university actors. In light of revived interest in Black Mountain College and other 1960s art and technology labs this book draws important connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s. The authors situate the rise of collaborative art and technology projects in the 1960s within John Deweys ideology of scientific democracy showing how leading thinkers from the Bauhaus movement in Germany immigrated to the U.S. and brought with them a Deweyan model for collaborative and interdisciplinary art and technology research. Over the course of the decade the U.S. government increased funding to scientific research at university and private laboratories. Beck and Bishop investigate how various art and technology projects incorporated the collaborative and innovative interdisciplinarity of the avant garde art movement with the corporate funding structure driven by the U.S. governments military and technoscientific interests. Finally the authors consider the legacy of 1960s art and technology projects. During the 1970s and 80s defense R&D funding was less motivated by a Cold War corporate state and was instead restructured according to an entrepreneurial and neoliberal model. At the same time funding in the art world also became increasingly financialized and globalized. Todays art and technology work happens collaboratively not because of an intellectual commitment to interdis ...