Objectives: Today we will discuss Michael Smith's essay, "Making Time: Representations of Technology at the 1964 World's Fair." Drawing on Smith's analysis, we will consider how representations of technology at the 1964 Fair compare to technological imagery at earlier fairs and expositions. We will pay particular attention to representations of space and nuclear technology at the 1964 World's Fair.

Questions to Consider:

1) What did the 1964 World's Fair have in common with earlier U.S. fairs and expositions? How was it different?

2) According to Smith, "World's Fairs . . . are ads disguised as museums" (239). What was being advertised at the 1964 World's Fair? How important was consumption to the representation of technology at the Fair?

3) Smith states that "[i]t is in the nature of representations to omit more than they portray." What was omitted from representations of technology at the 1964 World's Fair?

4) What does Smith mean by the "black box approach to technological display"? (See page 229.) Do you find the concept of the "black box" useful in evaluating twentieth-century technological images?

5) Which technologies were featured at the 1964 World's Fair?

6) What is the significance of the Underground House, described on page 234?

7) How does Smith analyze GM's exhibit, "Futurama II"? What do we learn about American attitudes toward superhighways, colonization, and the environment?

8) What is the significance of the Runabout? (See page 238.)

9) How is the myth of the frontier invoked at the 1964 World's Fair?

PASSAGES

[T]his essay will focus on the images themselves, exploring the underlying themes with which the designers of the 1964 Fair sought to encapsulate the relation between public and private, power and community at the height of postwar U.S. affluence. What assumptions reside within the pavilions' corporate and national depictions of change over time? What are the cultural implications of these assumptions? What (and who) has been omitted from the story as told? How closely do the fair's representations of technology, culture, and progress mirror the patterns of change within U.S. society? (224-25)

Following in the tradition of world's fairs and expositions, the 1964 Fair's corporate exhibits tended to fixate on the products of technology, rather than on the social processes that created them. To the pantheon of wonders at previous fairs--steam engines, electric lights, telephones, streamlined locomotives, "cars of the future," television--this one added space stations, nuclear generators, picture-phones, computers and a variety of new plastics and synthetics. (225)

Designers of the 1964 pavilions were even more reluctant than their 1939 counterparts to portray workers, or the process of production embedded in each displayed artifact; they were eager, however, to offer scenarios of consumption for each product. No longer just halls of machinery, corporate pavilions had become their own realms of simulation: three-dimensional advertisements that sold not just products but consumer environments, ways of life receptive to the necessity of those products. (225)

It is in the nature of representations to omit more than they portray; yet the patterns of their omissions sometimes reveal more than the most vivid image. To understand what the 1964 Fair reveals about postwar American culture, we have to invoke what it did not depict, and reintroduce people and relationships into a vision of technology and culture inhabited primarily by gleaming machines and disembodied voices. (227)

In portraying dimensions of science and technology, sponsors and designers of world's fair exhibits, like advertisers, must devise strategies of representation that lean toward one of two contrasting approaches: they can focus on the products of research and development as black boxes, portraying them as markers on the unwavering path of progress; or they can endeavor to open the black box, and usher the observer into the rich mix of voices, the cacophony of social process that is embedded in each artifact like the sound of the ocean inside the seashell. (228)

The black box approach to technological display lends itself to technological determinism, hiding the people behind the machines, polishing the metal surfaces clean of fingerprints, obscuring the social relations and social choices that are the very substance of technological development. It is a determinism visited upon the present by imagined pasts and futures. At the risk of oversimplification, we might call the black box approach closed, and its opposite open. Has the depiction of technology in twentieth-century American culture become more closed with each decade, and if so, why? How can we break open the black box that was the 1964 World's Fair? What hidden cultural assumptions does it harbor? (229)

Visitors to the 1964 Fair encountered images of space and the atom at every turn. The Unisphere itself, with its three orbiting satellites, was a self-proclaimed talisman of the space age. (232)

Far from evoking the bizarre or daring scenes of 1950s science fiction films, most of the fair's depictions of space travel made a special effort to domesticate outer space. (232)

The Fair's representations of nuclear technology pursued even more emphatically the domestication of a new technology. (233)

The Fair's sunny assertions of the wonders of the peaceful atom were not enough to dispel all of the shadows cast by the Cold War and the arms race. . . Perhaps the clearest example of the Fair's approach to the dark side of nuclear technology was the Underground House. Based on a prototype built by Jay Swayze . . . the Underground House was essentially a luxury fallout shelter. The Fair's newsletter and publicity releases, however, cast the planned exhibit in the most favorable light possible, describing it as a "modern home and garden" designed to demonstrate the "advantages of underground living." (234)

Futurama served primarily as a lobbying device for a national superhighway system; its elaborate futurescape was predicate don the triumph of the private automobile over mass transit. And while visitors were marveling at the City of Tomorrow's multilevel highways, General Motors was in the midst of a "motorization" campaign, aimed at eliminating electric streetcars from the nation's cities. (235)

GM's vision of taming the jungle focused on replacing its natural transportation medium, an "aimlessly wandering river," with modern superhighways. First, a jungle harvester felled great swaths of trees with laser beams. Then the area was sprayed with chemical defoliants, and a "road-building vehicle as high as a five-story building and as long as three football fields" leveled the cleared ground, set steel pilings, and extruded a multilane highway "in one continuous operation!" GM press releases predicted that this massive "road-builder," powered by its own mobile nuclear reactor, would be "capable of producing from within itself one mile of four-lane, elevated superhighway every hour." (237)

Futurama II's specialized vehicularization reflected its designers' conception of gender roles as well. For shopping districts, GM engineers had designed "easily maneuverable, three-wheeled 'Runabouts'" with built-in, detachable shopping carts. The Runabout, according to GM press releases, was an experimental car "especially designed for housewives," who were widely recognized as "avid shoppers" but "poor drivers." (238)

In the twentieth century, advocates for diverse causes spoke of the nation's technological frontier as a kind of conceptual West. In this context, the Fair's techno-colonies appeared to extend the parameters of national conquest. Their visually arresting settings may have described questionable expenditures of human effort; but as futurist updates of frontier settlement, they served as vivid signifiers for science, technology, and national progress.

By 1964, this association of remote settlement with technological and national frontiers had acquired explicit political overtones as well. President Kennedy presented the space program as a "new frontier" in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. (240)

The 1964 Fair embraced the unchallenged nuclear optimism of the fifties and six

ties. (241)

What depths of national and corporate imperialism were implied by the road-builder's intolerance of unpaved surfaces? A clear cultural judgment was implicit in the Futurama II guidebook's assertion that "[n]unclear power is being used to transform this land of impenetrable vegetation into civilization--to give motion to people and usefulness to resources too long dormant."  (242)

The Fair's blind spots regarding race and class provided additional targets for challenges to Futurama II's worldview. . . Yet Futurama II, like most of the Fair, "solved" these problems by simply omitting any reference to them. Everyone in the future was white and middle-class. (243)

Postwar culture's unwillingness to confront the realities of the nuclear threat fueled a technology of escapism. Perhaps the Fair's most expressive symbol of the age was not the Unisphere, or even the road-builder, but the Underground House.  (244)