from the Introduction: The Sixties Media Art Revolution: the Digital Dimension

This was above all, a cultural revolution. It impacted on many aspects of our culture, and what we now call our Cultural Industries - the whole range of artists, producers, directors, writers, musicians, composers, designers, photographers, Ad-men and women, television producers, publishing entrepreneurs and editors, cinema owners, pop-stars, fashion designers, special effects operatives, theatre directors, playwrights, industrial designers, club-owners - all of them - at various stages through the early part of the decade - infected with what we might call the ‘buzz’ of the new decade. This electric, psycho-somatic feeling - literally a body-jolt - was triggered by the experience of what art-critic Robert Hughes later called ‘The Shock of the New’ (Hughes: The Shock of the New 1980 book and TV series - on Youtube). 

These were the two books and television series that I found most useful as an overview, and that balanced out Marxist and more traditional approaches to art history, and both had television series to accompany them too. And both the charismatic writers/directors (Hughes and Berger) brought something entirely new to their productions - Hughes with a seemingly broad though somewhat limited in retrospect overview of Modern art, Berger much more leftist and philosophical analyses of what art is for, and who its for.

For me, it was the buzz of discovering the Beats in the late 1950s (especially On The Road, and The Subterraneans); of seeing the new ‘Pop Art’ in the early Sixties (especially Richard Hamilton and Robert Rauschenberg - and Eduardo Paolozzi), of hearing the first records from the Beatles and especially the Rolling Stones; of going to my first Stones gig in 1963; of attending two Aldermaston marches (62 and 63); of seeing Boorman’s Citizen 63 TV documentary, of going to Art School that year and meeting people like me, - and seeing and meeting girls in micro-minis and maxis (aah Monica Burton); of later seeing the first Bond movie (Doctor No) . It was all such a blast when you were a teenager...

at the Empire Leicester Square - and seeing those spectacular Panavision titles by Maurice Binder; of watching the first That Was the Week that Was, - and buying Private Eye. It seemed that everywhere you looked there was a new spirit of the age popping-up. I’d been brought up in the Fifties, in an environment of food rationing, of ‘short back and sides’ military hair-cuts, of post-Imperial crises like Suez and Hungary, of the potential of two-years of compulsory military service at age 18, or a career of 9-5 work dressed in a grey suit, so these buzzy inklings of better things to come were like a glimpse of heaven. 

Peter Blake: Got A Girl (1960-61) used in an early design for cover of my Sixties book (2015)

Download the complete 400-page pdf here

And the cultural revolution embraced technology too. As early as 1960 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider had published his paper on the potential of Man-Computer Symbiosis 

- a concept that inspired a generation of visionary engineers and computer scientists, and eventually produced ARPANET - the first inter-computer network, soon to be the Internet; the idea of a personal computer; and portable personal computing; computer graphics; and the work of Jay Wright Forrester in systems simulation (Forrester: Industrial Dynamics 1958)

 - using computers to model real-world systems like businesses, city-planning, management of world resources. The various developers of computer games (especially Steve Russell (SpaceWar! 1962) 

- and much else that prototyped our 21st century media. The Sixties also saw the invention of Colour Television; portable video camera-recorders;

 compact music cassettes; the emergence of pocket-size transistor radios; the first communications satellites; the invention of LASERs (Theodore Maiman 1960); sophisticated Air-Defence early-warning systems;

 the BASIC computer language (John G. Kemeny + Thomas E. Kurtz 1964) and UNIX operating system (Ken Thompson + Dennis Richie 1969) and Hypertext (Ted Nelson 1963-1965); the first round the world television hook-up; Packet-Switching Network protocols (Baran + Davies 1960-1965) - and loads more. 

The widespread exploration of technology by artists, and by artists and engineers working together produced a swathe of new art-forms and movements, not least spawning kinetic art, auto-destructive art, audio-visual art, computer-generated art, poetry and music, happenings, computer-graphics, inflatables or pneumatic art and early Television or Video Art (Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman,  etc) - and aspects that these new, experimental arts played with was that they either fuzed together mono-media into multimedia, they became immersive, or that they deployed an algorithmic or instructional approach and that they incorporated elements of personal choice, human interaction or chance…these features: multimedia; immersion; interaction, algorithm-driven - characterise the mass of 21st century digital media. We invented modern Media and modern Culture in the Sixties, and this picture essay explains how.”
The proposed book works on two levels: it is both a browsable picture ‘coffee-table’ book on the Sixties Cultural  Revolution - featuring pictures and explanations of innovations in:   

Stones in 1963 - I saw them in July at the Wooden Bridge Guildford - with the Richmond/Eel Pie Island/Marquee cool school- they were just like us!

 Pop Music (British R&B, Folk- Protest, Folk-Rock, Psychedelic, Festivals, Clubs, Television (Ready Steady Go!, etc);  Dance (especially the Twist), Satire (Private Eye, Tom Lehrer, Lenny Bruce, Peter Cook, the Establishment Club, That Was the Week That Was),  Fashion (Quant, Hulanicki -  street fashion and haut couture, the Mini-skirt, mail-order, Biba, etc),  Architecture (Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, Xenakis etc) Art (Pop Art Paolozzi, Hamilton, Blake, Warhol etc, Conceptual Art: (Art Language, George Brecht, Fluxus etc) Algorithmic Art (Brecht, Ono, Higgins etc), Postal Art (George Brecht, Ray Johnson,  (Auto-Destructive Art Gerhard Richter, Jean Tinguely, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix etc), Happenings (Cage, Hansen Kaprow), Performance-Art (Ono, Schneeman, Gilbert and George), Audio-Visual Art (Warhol, Fluxus, Light/Sound Workshop UFO club, Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 14-Hour Technicolour Dream); Situationist International (psycho-geography, Society of the Spectacle, Situationist Times etc) Teen style (Beats, Hipsters, Teddy Boys, Folkies, Rockers, Soho Modernists, Hippie, New Romantics, Glam-Rock etc) Television (Pop Goes the Easel, 

Ken Russell: Pop Goes the Easel (1962) Russell's BBC documentary on the 'pop art' generation at the Royal College of Art - David Hockney, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Peter Philips, Pauline Boty...

Elkan Allan + BBC: Ready Steady Go! from 1963-1966 - a radical reconceptualisation of the teenage pop-music TV show - transparent, embedded, immersive - our social media in the early Sixties...

TW3, Dr Who, Star-Trek, The Avengers, Ready Steady Go!, Danger Man/The Prisoner, Culloden, The War Game, The Year of the Sex Olympics, The Machine Stops, Our World (All You Need is Love), Up the Junction, Kathy Come Home etc) Magazines (Evergreen Review, Peace News Anarchy, Oz, International Times, Situationist Times, Rolling Stone, Friends,  Twen, Nova, Whole Earth Catalog, etc Film (Tom Jones, Dr No, A Bout de Souffle, Alphaville, Dr Strangelove,  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, Modesty Blaise, Blow Up, Bonnie and Clyde, Privilege, Performance, Midnight Cowboy, Barbarella, 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Yellow Submarine, Thomas Crown Affair, Woodstock, Silent Running etc) Literature (Camus, Sartre, Frederick Pohl, Kurt Vonnegut, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Colin Wilson, Norman Mailer, Walter Tevis, Angry Young Men, Frank Herbert, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson)  Media-Theory (McLuhan, McHale, Maciunas, Vanderbeek, Enzensberger,

 Sontag, Youngblood) et cetera Environment (Silent Spring, Dylan: Hard Rain, Whole Earth Catalog, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Fuller: World Resources World-Game, Spaceship Earth; Forrester: World Dynamics; Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Meadows: Limits to Growth; 

Schumacher: Small is Beautiful; Papanek: Design for the Real World;Joni Mitchell: Big Yellow Taxi; Neil Young: After the Goldrush; Trumbull: Silent Running, Lovelock: Gaia Theory, et cetera...

And the Sixties book is an illustrated personal history of the prediction, invention and prototyping of the dominant media of the 21st century - ‘Man Machine Symbiosis’ (digital media, internetworks, computer graphics, system dynamics and simulation, computer games, hypertext, personal computing, graphical-user-interface, portable, pad-style computing, the Internet, email, Unix, Basic, etc.)
It’s also a record of the seminal art-forms emerging from the confluence of Art and Technology    and the kind of art and media innovations invented or realised in the Sixties (Performance Art, Art and Technology, Happenings, Auto-Destructive Art, Pneumatic Art, Fluxus and Situationist Art and publications, Conceptual Art,

underground comics, psychedelic posters, Light-Shows, Video-Art, Pop Festivals, British Rhythm and Blues, the Mini-skirt, the underground Press (IT, Rolling Stone, Oz etc).

Download a pdf of my Sixties book here