Cybersentics Book Club
Sun, May 17
|Gray Area Theater
What if emotions have a universal physical language — one that can be measured, transmitted, and felt across bodies and cultures?
Time & Location
May 17, 2026, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Gray Area Theater, 2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA
About the event
Drawing on lectures Lewis Mumford delivered at Columbia University in 1952, "Art and Technics" maps a tension between two seemingly disparate ways of navigating the world — one oriented toward efficiency, the other toward meaning — and argues that modern society's fixation on technics has deprived daily life of symbolic concerns.
This divide is rather visible in the Bay Area, where the worlds of aspiring tech entrepreneurs and embattled humanists exist in parallel, with strikingly little overlap in values and an ever-widening gap in socioeconomic power. With Mumford as a guide, we will also consider AI and surveillance systems as technologies increasingly deployed not as tools of knowledge, but of control.
Reading:
Mumford, L. (1952). Art and Technics. Columbia University Press.
Access: https://archive.org/details/arttechnics0000mumf_g6i8/page/n5/mode/2up or receive a PDF with RSVP.
Organized by: Gray Area