[ongoing]

U.C. San Diego Department of Visual Arts, 2009-present

[02.2009]

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UCSD is located in La Jolla, along the pacific coast and a few miles north of San
Diego. It was founded in the post-War boom years, originally planned as a high-tech
graduate school. It is now ranked as one of the top 5 public universities in the
nation. San Diego is the 8th largest American city, tucked into the southwestern
corner of the country, right against the Mexican border. The region is a volatile
geopolitical interface between northern and southern hemispheres and the social
economies that infuse them. While San Diego has traditionally been a Navy town, but
is now global hub of biotech and infotech.
Roger Revelle, Scripps Institute turn of the century, originally graduate only focusing 
on science and technology but without borders between arts and humanities, instead 
cluster of colleges. climate science, pioneer

Nestled in groves of supermodernist concrete baked in sea salt, UCSD is home to
seven Nobel Prize winners (?College of the Surf? in Thomas Pynchon?s Vineland was
based on it). It also hosts the Scripps Research Institute (where among other
things Denning pioneered the measurement of CO2 and climate change, in essence
inaugurating global warming science), the Salk Institute, and the San Diego
Supercomputing Center, one of the world?s top 5 university supercomputing sites. Its
national top ten programs include neuroscience, bioengineering, bioinformatics,
cognitive science, computer science, mechanical and aerospace engineering,
electrical and computer engineering, structural engineering, geophysics, economics,
and studio arts.

In its surfy commune of biotech, compsci, neurotech, and nanotech, La Jolla is where the Singularity will be born. We will all see it like a bright light, Hiroshima/ Christ, eminating from near the gliderport. And then we will know.

It was also a somewhat accidental home to the Americanization of European Critical
Theory. UCSD was where Herbert Marcuse fought with Gov. Reagan and mentored 
Angela Davis and Kathy Acker. Fredric Jameson often hosted Jean Baudrillard while 
teaching in the same Literature department where Michel de Certeau taught for many 
years and writing The Practice of Everyday Life, while in La Jolla. At the Louis Kahn-designed
Salk Institute, a young Bruno Latour studied proteins, peptides and the scientists
who love them, and in doing so inaugurated Actor-Network Theory and revolutionized
Science and Technology Studies.

Today the intellectual culture at UCSD orbits biotechnologies, bioinformatics &
 biopolitics, neurophilosophy, cognitive linguistics & eliminative materialism, the
epistemic history of technoscience, computational ontologies & interactive art. As
such it is precisely where the Design Policy Program?s brief of emergent ICT and
public infrastructure can help to invent the alternative modernities to come.

Tags: theory, branding

Published: 02.09.2009

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