“Silicon City,” begins with Samuel Morse’s telegraph and the many wonders that sprang from Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratories. In contrast to Silicon Valley (which was still largely made up of fruit orchards as late as the 1960s), such early inventions did not lead to wave after wave of entrepreneurial innovation. Instead they gave rise to vast, monopolistic or quasimonopolistic enterprises that helped define 20th-century America — chief among them IBM and AT&T. But during the ’60s, improbably enough, this spawned a fusion of art and technology that could only have begun in New York.
IBM is represented in “Silicon City” by such artifacts as a System/360 computer, from a line of mainframes that revolutionized the industry in the ’60s, and the groundbreaking film “THINK” that Charles and Ray Eames produced for the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Read all at: www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/arts/design/the-big-bang-of-art-and-tech-in-new-york.html?_r=0
The “Egg,” a multiscreen installation recalling the IBM Pavilion’s oval theater at the 1964 World Fair, at the "Silicon City".
Courtesy: Emon Hassan for The New York Times.
