Welcome To Mars
Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959
Strange Attractor Press 2008
ISBN 978-0-9548054-8-7

Strange Attractor press are part of a contemporary resurgence of interest in esoterica in the UK that explores sociological and technological strangeness in the way that previous expressions of this cultural current explored the supernatural. They publish an excellent, eponymous, journal and the kind of electronic music that the Radiophonic Workshop would have made if it had been relocated to Summerisle.

Their latest book is “Welcome To Mars” by Ken Hollings, subtitled “Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1957-1959”. Hollings combines the history of 1950s America as told by the New York Times with the same history as told by the Fortean Times. It’s eye-opening (sometimes consciousness-expanding) stuff, a look at the wiring under the board of the culture and technology of an era.

Starting with the building of the first “Levittown” pre-fabricated suburban settlement and ending, almost, with the broadcast of the first episode of The Twilight Zone, Hollings traces the history of the scientific and popular imagination wherever it leads. The history that Hollings constructs is Rhizomatic. It is a history of the links between technology, popular culture, power and society.

Conspiracy theorists see links where none exist. But history that tries to be too tidy will miss links where they could be informative. The links that Hollings demonstrates are very real and bring the culture that emerged from the aftermath of the Second World War into vivid focus. This is the mythology and self-image of a supposedly scientific era that led directly to our own.

Suburbia and the military-industrial complex both emerged in America from the planned economy of World War Two. The military-industrial complex continued from wartime research and manufacturing projects. The construction of suburban homes was carried out by contractors involved in the atomic bomb project, and the layout of suburbia was developed in response to the threat of atomic bombing. Into these parallel structures flowed fear of the unseen – of atomic radiation, brainwashing, computation and the unknown inhabitants of strange saucer-shaped phenomena that were first seen in the sky in this era.

In an age when the future, whether utopian or apocalyptic, was both technological and almost here the planet Mars seemed within reach. Whether imagined as the furthest outpost of an American empire or as the source of an unstoppable alien invasion force, Mars was the embodiment of the promise of a technological future. As the social, cultural, architectural and technological forms of the 1950s became ever stranger Mars would have seemed no more alien than the suburbs or their surrounding deserts.

This is the world, or the time, that gave us the RAND think tank, Game Theory, Cybernetics, Information theory, the nuclear arms and space races. This is the first commercial distribution of LSD and its use on an unsuspecting population by the CIA. This is the rise of psychoanalysis, scientology, alien abducteeism, tranquiliser abuse. This is mind control tested in blatant disregard of the Nuremberg Code. Most of all, this is the unlikely flow of people and ideas between these areas.

The technology and aesthetics of the post-war era, whether the austere grids of government papers or the lurid imagery of pulp magazines and B-Movies are, as the book’s subtitle indicates, fantasies of science. These fantasies have continued through the “white heat of technology” of the 1960s to present-day environmental apocalypses and internet fantasies of technological solutions to them. And they are present in the art and activism of twenty-first century technoculture.

From an artistic point of view I wish that Hollings could have spent more time on the artistic and musical avant-garde, but that isn’t the point of this study. This is the story of the technological culture of the ruling class and the aesthetics of the mass culture and spontaneous social phenomena that tried to come to terms with it.

The esoteric and alternative cannot be separated from the official and mainstream in the long chains of meaning and iconography that Hollings teases out. This isn’t a product of reading-in or supposition, it is there in the historical record. And this isn’t just a list of great men and great ideas. The deluded and the mendacious play their part as much as the great and the good. Hollings has produced a skeleton key to the high, mass and alternative culture of the day.

This is a framework for understanding the art and culture of the 1950s in context. You can find out why the new advanced technology of the tape recorder became associated with the musically primitive. You can find out the symbolic role of Robbie The Robot from “Forbidden Planet”, who attended the opening of This Is Tomorrow at the ICA. You can get a feel for what was happening as Brion Gysin discovered the cut up method. Then you can read up on Jack Parsons, RAND, MK-ULTRA, and fit them into your knowledge of the Beats and Abstract Expressionism.

This is an exemplary exercise in cross-specialism history. We can learn from this and apply its method to understanding our own times, or at least our own recent past. Don’t be fooled by the sanitized autobiography of a culture, look for the untidy realities that lie behind it and you’ll be much the wiser. The history of computing, for example, is not just the history of men and women in white coats. The roots of the often drug-fueled or mystically-inspired technological culture of the 1950s can be followed into the counter-culture, conceptualism and art computing of the 1960s and 1970s, and even into the network culture and techno-economics of the 1980s and 1990s.

“Welcome To Mars” is well worth reading on its own unique terms. It is a rollercoaster ride through the dreamtime of post-war American esoteric, technological and mass culture with a wealth of often amazing and sometimes shocking information on every page. Hollings never lets this become overwhelming or lose is connection to the main threads of his historical narrative. And the technological aesthetics, iconography and concepts of the 1950s can be used allegorically to understand and depict our own times. The cover of the book, for example, looks like a 1950s performance but in fact it shows a work produced in 2002. Welcome to Mars indeed.

http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.