[SIGCIS-Members] Reconsidering John C. Lilly Conference

[Hannah Zeavin]

Dear all,

I hope you're all well, or in reach of it. With apologies for
cross-posting, I am writing to invite you to a one-day conference that I've
co-organized, which may be of interest to members of this list:

*Reconsidering John C. Lilly*
A day long virtual conference on April 2nd, 2022
Schedule and Registration <http://www.reconsideringlilly.info/>

John C. Lilly (1915-2001) was a neurophysiologist and trained physician who
had one of the most unusual careers in 20th century science: he theorized
extra-terrestrial language and intelligence, wrote quasi-philosophical
treatises about computer science and consciousness, self-experimented with
LSD and ketamine, and developed the first sensory deprivation tank (which
he later used for his scientific tripping). Most famously, John Lilly
worked with dolphins, trying to understand their forms of communication and
to teach them to speak English, later aiming to mediate human and dolphin
communication via computers.

Because of the wide range and, to contemporary eyes, often extreme nature
of his research, Lilly has frequently been reduced to an oddity. But in the
1950s, Lilly was the epitome of mainstream science, respected as a
theoretical wunderkind and able to wrangle the resources of NASA, the Air
Force, and others. By the end of the 1960s, Lilly established himself as a
counter cultural figure, a renegade scientist maligned and disowned by many
of his former peers and collaborators but now beloved as California-based
guru.

Accordingly, Lilly’s work illuminates 20th century cultural and scientific
phenomena ranging from cybernetics to the human potential movement. His
experiments with radio, taping, and computer-assisted communication make
his work pertinent to a range of additional fields such as musicology,
sound studies, and media studies.  His mid-century prominence as a
neurophysiologist further makes Lilly crucial to, albeit understudied
within, the history of Cold War science and technology. Reconsidering John
C. Lilly thus brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines—
from animal studies to the history of the human sciences, from the history
of architecture to feminist science and technology studies, to reevaluate
the life and career of John C. Lilly within his own moment and from our
vantage point in ours.

warmly,
Hannah

-- 
Dr. Hannah Zeavin
UC Berkeley
author of *The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distance-cure> *(MIT Press, 2021)
zeavin.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/attachments/20220323/607fc4e3/attachment.htm>