About

W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona obtained in 1996. His research, writing, and teaching focus on the histories of technology and science, particularly in the context of modern developments after 1945, with an emphasis on the United States. His interests include the intersections of art, technology, and science, as well as the histories of computing, environmental science, and the future of technological innovation. McCray has authored several books, including 'README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines' (2025), which explores the history of information technologies since 1945 through a selection of influential books about computers. His previous works include 'Making Art Work' (2020), examining art-technology collaborations during the Cold War era, and 'Giant Telescopes' (2004), which details the history of astronomical instrumentation. He has also contributed to the understanding of science and technology's role in American counterculture through co-edited collections like 'Groovy Science' (2016). His research extends to the history of space exploration, environmental science, and the cultural implications of technological change, with ongoing projects exploring space habitability and outdoor recreation in the western United States.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Visual arts
• Engineering
• Art
• Computer Science
• Engineering ethics
• Public relations
• Mechanical engineering
• Aesthetics
• Architectural engineering
• Art history

Selected publications

• HSS, the FBI, and the Unabomber

  Isis · 2024-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the mid-1990s, efforts to identify the Unabomber brought HSS and the FBI into a brief collaborative relationship until the 1996 arrest of Theodore Kaczynski. This article explores this strange syzygy of organizations and individuals. In doing so, it considers Kaczynski's own writings about science and technology—most notably, his 1995 manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future”—and places this against a backdrop of scholarly and popular writings, as well as the so-called Science Wars of that era. While uncomfortable to consider, Kaczynski’s manifesto is one of the most widely read documents about modern science and technology. One might even go so far as to say that Kaczynski was the most-read science and technology studies (STS) author of the 1990s. We also consider HSS’s collaboration with the FBI as well as the social responsibilities of historians of science then and now.

  PublisherDOI

• Philip Glahn and Cary Levine, <i>The Future Is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image</i> Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024. Pp. 336. ISBN 978-0-262-54807-6. $45.00 (paperback).

  The British Journal for the History of Science · 2024-10-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the mid-1960s, a colourful palette of art-and-technology projects burst forth from corporate laboratories, artists' lofts and museum galleries.This aesthetic explosion was catalysed by money, media exposure and the creative energies of engineers and artists alike.For some participants, it was a short, tumultuous affair.For others, these interactions left indelible marks on their professional lives.Then, after less than a decade of highly visible and expensive efforts, this wave of art-and-technology activity appeared to retreat.Critics attacked interdisciplinary partnerships as an aesthetic disappointment that had somehow sullied the art world.A related gripe was ontologicalwhat exactly were these partnerships producing?Sure, it was interesting, but was it really art? (Such debates persist today around artworks produced via artificial intelligence.)Finally, and perhaps most damning, critics attacked artists for compromising themselves ethically by collaborating with engineers, using military-derived technology and accepting corporate patronage.By the mid-1970s, the art-and-technology movement appeared as out of fashion as moon landings and other techno-utopian projects launched in the mid-1960s.This abeyance proved temporary, however.This is where Philip Glahn and Cary Levine, two professors of art history/theory, pick up the story.The Future Is Present examines the activities of Mobile Image, a two-person art collective founded in 1977.More specifically, Glahn and Levine focus on three works made by Mobile Image's two members, Kit Galloway (b.1948) and Sherrie Rabinowitz (1950-2013).Satellite Arts (The Image as Place) was made in 1977 in collaboration with the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA).It featured a 'bidirectional link' enabled by a communications satellite which fostered artistic experimentation 'between two groups of dancers and technicians' (p.45) separated by thousands of miles.Three years later, Mobile Image unveiled Hole in Space (A Public Communication Sculpture) where two large screens in New York City and Los Angeles, linked by satellite, enabled members of the public to see and interact with another as part of a 'globally distributed electronic commons' (p.119).Finally, in 1984, Electronic Caf linked members of the public across several different neighborhoods in Los Angeles to form a 'telecollaborative network'.Glahn and Levine describe their book as a 'critical history' of Mobile Image, using the three aforementioned works to make 'an argument for the historical importance' of the art collective (pp. 1, 3).Despite these claims, their book works better when seen as a close reading, grounded in art criticism, of these three particular instantiations of new-media artworks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy by Lindsay Caplan

  Technology and Culture · 2023-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy by Lindsay Caplan W. Patrick McCray (bio) Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy By Lindsay Caplan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Pp. 312. In the 1960s, an array of art-and-technology projects, exhibitions, and collaborations burst forth from artists' workshops, corporate laboratories, and museum galleries in the United States, Great Britain, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. Lasers, miniaturized electronics, and new multimedia environments all became materials for artistic experimentation. One of the new technologies that most intrigued artists was the digital computer. Engineers and artists alike experimented with using computers to [End Page 609] generate images and music. At the same time, artists and curators displayed an increasing interest in abstract concepts like cybernetics, systems, and information. Given the often-rudimentary nature of the visual artworks produced, critics often attacked them on aesthetic and ontological grounds. Were they computer art or merely computer-generated forms? And if a computer made it, was it still art? The idea that machines might substitute for artistic originality paralleled contemporary concerns about the dehumanizing and deskilling effects of computers. To date, much scholarly attention on the art-and-technology movement (including work by this reviewer) has focused on large-scale efforts in the United States by groups such as Experiments in Art and Technology. Arte Programmata—written by Lindsay Caplan, an art historian at Brown University—expands that geographic coverage in provocative new directions. As her subtitle suggests, ideas of freedom and control along with computer science concepts such as "programming" and "information" were central topics for her historical actors. Unlike many of their counterparts in the United States, for example, the artists who joined collectives such as Gruppo N engaged with politics in more explicit and combative ways. Caplan does a wonderful job of situating their artistic activities in the context of the enormous political and economic shifts that Italy experienced in the 1960s. Throughout her narrative, we see artists' activities framed in various oppositional modes: the individual vs. the collective; capitalist vs. socialist economies; and, perhaps most notably, free or programmed spectators who experienced various interactive sensory "environments" (ambienti) created by artists in the mid-1960s. Despite having "computer" in the title, Caplan's book is less about using machines to make art and instead is more concerned with varying definitions of "programming." Although concepts like "cybernetics" and "information theory" were originally developed during World War II in response to specific engineering problems, Caplan describes how artists and curators embraced them in ways that someone like cybernetician Norbert Wiener might have found disquieting. While Max Bense and Abraham Moles suggested how one might quantify an artwork's "aesthetic information," the idea would likely have puzzled Claude Shannon (who placed information theory on a mathematical footing only to later write a brief but acerbic essay called "The Information Bandwagon"). Nonetheless, the spread of cybernetics and systems thinking into such diverse fields affords us an opportunity to look more deeply at how and where histories of technology and art overlap. Caplan's book takes up this opportunity most notably in her chapter on "The Politics of Information." She asks, for example, why the artists of the Arte Programmata movement "abandoned computers" around 1968, even as their creative colleagues elsewhere were just starting to embrace the technological possibilities. She locates the answer in the specific political circumstances and ideologies of Italian artists. Caplan focuses on "computer art's most contested, mutable, and socially relevant" issue, which was the [End Page 610] "meaning of information" (p. 131). In doing so, we get a glimpse of the ways in which cybernetics and information theory were understood, deployed, and exploited in varying national contexts. Well-written and relatively jargon-free, Arte Programmata is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the intersection of art and technology (and artists and engineers). Historians of technology may take issue with some of the factual infelicities that crop up occasionally: Wiener's first book on cybernetics came out in 1948, not 1946, and Olivetti's Programma 101 was not a personal computer, for example. I personally would have welcomed more discussion about how the...

  PublisherDOI

• Art Out of Order: Jack Burnham, the 1970 Software Show, and the Aesthetics of Information Systems

  Technology and Culture · 2022-07-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In 1970, curator Jack Burnham debuted the lavish exhibition Software at the Jewish Museum in New York. Conceptual artists displayed information-oriented pieces, while technical experts deployed computers, image-making, and multimedia technology in their works. Burnham's goal was to showcase contemporary techniques of computer-based command and control, allowing viewers to respond in real time to the "programmatic situations" artists presented. While critics dismissed Software as a technical and aesthetic disaster, today it stands as a touchstone for efforts to integrate technology with artmaking. This article takes us back to Software's gallery spaces and Burnham's aim of showcasing the potential of interactivity and "real-time systems." More broadly, it situates Software as a provocation to a public unfamiliar with computer technology yet at the threshold of a new postindustrial era, where the power and performative aspects of computing would predominate.

  PublisherDOI

• Stewart Brand's radical environmentalism <b>We Are As Gods</b> <i>David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, directors</i> Structure Films, 2021. 94 minutes.

  Science · 2021-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The counterculture icon continues to embrace an outside-the-box approach to the future

  PublisherDOI

• 24 The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

  2021-01-01

  article

  We don't normally think of food as a technology, but people have learned to engineer it with ever better precision. Centuries ago humankind figured out that combining yeast, grain, and water would yield alcohol. Today, food scientists can reformulate food products to create very specific effects for consumers. The goal for many food producers is to achieve the bliss point, the perfect balance of flavor and texture that makes people want to eat more. Focusing on compelling people to buy more and eat more does, however, have wide-reaching effects beyond a healthy bottom line for the producer. Many scientists argue that the easy availability of certain foods (which they go so far as to label addictive) has been a major, if not the major, contributor to the obesity problem in the United States and beyond. Moss suggests that the engineers involved were able to advance the values of their bosses, perhaps, to the detriment of the values of many others.

  Publisher

• 29 Cyber (In)security: Threat Assessment in the Cyber Domain

  2021-01-01

  article

  Books about military history are filled with platitudes about how technology has, over the centuries, changed the nature of warfare. From the invention of chariots around 3000 BC, to the development of gunpowder around 800 AD, to naval ships and airplanes more recently, what nation-states (or individuals, for that matter) do in order to defend against enemies has changed as weapons of warfare have changed. With the development of computers, informa­tion technology, and the Internet in the twentieth century, conflict between nations began to play out in the cyber realm, a trend likely to continue and escalate in the twenty-first century.

  Publisher

• 9 Technological Momentum

  2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  article

  In this article, Thomas Hughes argues that although both technological determinists and social constructivists provide interesting accounts, neither provides the full picture. He asserts that rather than adhering to one or the other theory, one should examine how society and technology both exert influence. Hughes acknowledges that people—i n the form of individuals, governments, corporations, and so on—direct the development of new technologies. But he also claims that large sociotechnical systems can gain momentum. By this he means that some of these systems may appear at times to have a mind of their own and cannot be stopped—or, at least, they resist change. But Hughes maintains that this is simply because a large number of social groups (such as corporations, governments, industries, and consumers) have financial, capital, infrastructure, and ideological reasons for keeping such systems going. Once certain large systems are in place, there is inertia to keep them going and innovate around the edges rather than make radical change or abandon them altogether. In this way Hughes offers a compromise of sorts in the social determinism versus technological determinism debate, a compromise that helps to explain how both people and technological systems influence and shape each other. He argues that the investment of money, effort, and resources required to develop technological systems creates conditions that make those systems resistant to subsequent attempts to change them.

  Publisher

• 2 The Prolongation of Life

  2021-01-01

  article

  In this chapter of Our Postmodern Future, Francis Fukuyama explores the social and psychological implications of technological change. He supposes that we will continue to make progress in using technologies to extend human life span and then speculates about the effects this will have on a range of social arrangements, practices, and ways of thinking. Although the data and theories that Fukuyama cites are a few decades old now, his vision of a future in which individuals live increasingly longer still provides food for thought. Like Forster, Fukuyama imagines a world in which an important human value is realized—in this case, a preeminent value in Western culture, avoiding death—yet he seems to warn us to be careful what we wish for. Fukuyama suggests that longevity may radically transform how we think about our lives, one another, and the organization of our society. Increased longevity could wreak havoc on many of our social and political practices as those in power hold on to their positions for much longer periods of time. Fukuyama anticipates the social, ethical, and psychological changes that could accompany prolongation of life. In doing this, he reveals connections between new technologies, demographic change, and social, ethical, and policy issues. His exploration reminds us that because decisions and choices about technology can have far-reaching and powerful implications, it is important to think those choices through before we make them.

  Publisher

• Keep Watching the Skies!

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2021-08-10 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Langdon Winner

  5 shared

• Gary Chapman

  5 shared

• Stellan Welin

  5 shared

• Daniel Sarewitz

  5 shared

• Patrick D. Hopkins

  5 shared

• Jameson M. Wetmore

  Arizona State University

  5 shared

• Noela Invernizzi

  Universidade Federal do Paraná

  5 shared

• John L. Pollock

  5 shared

Labs

• The Tague Team LabPI

Awards & honors

• 2014 Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize (History of Sc…
• 2012 Eugene E. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature (Amer…