Cold War, Space Race

SAT. 9/20: WELCOME TO MARS + SHAW PRELINGER
+ DAVIS +
Kook-expert Ken Hollings jets in from London-town for the North American book-launch of his sub-pop Cult Study of Fifties America, on the bizarre intersection of cybernetics, behavior modification, atomic weapons, and UFOs, highlighting how these currents were refracted through the visual surfaces of popular culture, domestic design, and suburban living. Responding from the US side, Megan Shaw Prelinger, representing her own forthcoming book Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race, recalls the Eisenhower years with a fascinating flight through a pictorial history of aerospace ads, retrieved from her own SoMA library. For the third leg of this Cold War re-visitation, local A/V artist John Davis returns from, yes, Moldavia (formerly part of Romania), with the media-archeological remains of the very last Soviet newsreels, reflecting on this same period, but from the other side of the “Iron Curtain”! He screens the most astonishing agit-prop artifacts, and in fact performs an original sonic score, to a particularly uncanny iteration of Socialist Sur-Realism.
$6.