📚 Cybersentics Book Club: Art and Technics by Lewis Mumford

🧠 This Month's Reading

Mumford, L. (1952). Art and Technics. Columbia University Press.

📩 A link to the reading will be sent to you in your RSVP confirmation email.

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🔍 About the Book

Rooted in a series of lectures delivered at Columbia University, Art and Technics charts the friction between two fundamental ways of engaging with the world — one driven by efficiency and optimization, the other by meaning, symbolism, and imaginative depth. Mumford argues that modern society's overwhelming fixation on technics has steadily hollowed out the symbolic and ritual dimensions of everyday life.

This tension feels especially palpable in the Bay Area, where aspiring tech entrepreneurs and embattled humanists occupy parallel worlds, sharing remarkably little common ground in values while the socioeconomic gap between them continues to widen. Using Mumford as a guide, the group will also examine AI and surveillance systems — technologies increasingly deployed not as instruments of knowledge, but as mechanisms of control.

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🤖🎨 About the Cybersentics Book Club

Gray Area is proud to host the Cybersentics Book Club, a reading community dedicated to exploring the human sensorium through the intersecting lenses of art and technology.

The inaugural reading cycle centers on key themes surrounding the bidirectional flow of information between bodies and environments:

• 🔁 Outward perspective — biofeedback
• 🦾 Inward perspective — cyborg art

This club welcomes artists, makers, researchers, scholars, engineers, and anyone fascinated by the integration of technology and human experience — from biofeedback and sonification to sensor-embedded practices that challenge and expand our perceptions.

The community's mission is to foster a warm, inclusive space for knowledge-sharing, peer learning, collaboration, and critical inquiry.

Cybersentics is organized and led by Gray Area Research Fellow Anastasia Chernysheva as part of the Biofeedback Art|Research Network (BARN).

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♿ Accessibility

• 👶 All ages welcome (high school reading level or above recommended)
• 📍 Hosted upstairs in the Gray Area Incubator — not wheelchair or mobility accessible
• ❓ For more info, visit the FAQ page or reach out at info@grayarea.org with any accommodation requests

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🎟️ RSVP Here