Home » Art & Museums, Community, In Person, Literature

Free Cybersentics Book Club: Art + Technics (SF)

Sunday, May 17, 2026 - 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm | Cost: FREE
Gray Area Art & Technology Theater | 2665 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA,

Event Details

Drawing on lectures Lewis Mumford delivered at Columbia University in 1952, “Art and Technics” maps a tension between two seemingly disparate ways of navigating the world — one oriented toward efficiency, the other toward meaning — and argues that modern society’s fixation on technics has deprived daily life of symbolic concerns.

This divide is rather visible in the Bay Area, where the worlds of aspiring tech entrepreneurs and embattled humanists exist in parallel, with strikingly little overlap in values and an ever-widening gap in socioeconomic power. With Mumford as a guide, we will also consider AI and surveillance systems as technologies increasingly deployed not as tools of knowledge, but of control.

________

Reading:

Mumford, L. (1952). Art and Technics. Columbia University Press.

Access: https://archive.org/details/arttechnics0000mumf_g6i8/page/n5/mode/2up or receive a PDF with RSVP.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.


Cost: FREE
Categories: Art & Museums, Community, In Person, Literature
Venue: Gray Area Art & Technology Theater
Address: 2665 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA,

Sunday, May 17, 2026

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*Free with RSVP - 21+
8:00 am   Bay to Breakers 2026 (Everything You Need to Know)  FREE*
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8:00 am   Run Bay To Breakers with TrueFoundry’s Failover Team26  FREE*
*Request to join TrueFoundry's Centipede Team, Failover Team26, via the Luma event website and we'll take care of your race registration. Spots are limited, and we'll confirm participants in advance.
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*is an rsvp required
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10:00 am   43rd Annual Berkeley “Himalayan Fair” (May 16-17)  FREE*
*Donations encouraged at the door
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11:00 am   Pleasant Hill’s Art, Wine & Music Festival 2026 (May 16-17)  FREE*
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