July 1 – Guest Lecture “From Geeks to Tech Titans: Apple and the Making of Silicon Chic” 🗓

Abstract
Ever since Annie Leibovitz’s photos of coders playing computer games made it into the December 7, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, four years after Doug Engelbart staged “the mother of all demos” in San Francisco, digitality has been impressing itself on media, the fashion world, and other forms of popular culture, becoming ubiquitous in everyday life and a powerful source of imaginaries that reflect and reinforce lifestyle desires, aspirations, anxieties, and fears. In this paper we trace how the San Francisco Bay area came to be associated with computer culture, and we show how constitutive elements of its fashion and lifestyle paved the way for technology to become chic by bringing beatnik, dropout and countercultural rebellion to a space dominated by resource extraction, transport and higher education. Our focus is on Apple’s expertise in insinuating itself into personal lifeworlds. Its becoming synonymous with the increasingly personal use of computers took place at the level of technology as well as at the level of images of leadership, with Steve Jobs in his iconic Issey Miyake turtleneck a proto-influencer, paving the way for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s black leather jackets. We will also be examining some of Apple TV+’s offerings to establish how technology and lifestyle complement each other in the imaginaries of boutique streaming television shows.

Bio Blurbs
Susan Ingram is Professor of Humanities at York University, Toronto, where she coordinates the Graduate Diploma in Comparative Literature. She is the general editor of Intellect Book’s Urban Chic series and co-author of the volumes on Berlin, Vienna, and Los Angeles. A past president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and its current web systems administrator, her research interests revolve around the institutions of European cultural modernity and their legacies.

Markus Reisenleitner is also Professor of Humanities at York as well as the Director of the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture and the editor-in-chief of Imaginations: Revue d’études interculturelles de l’image / Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. Before joining York’s Division of Humanities in 2006, he taught at the University of Vienna, the Vienna campus of the University of Oregon’s International Program, the University of Alberta, and Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where he was Head of the Department of Cultural Studies from 2004–2006. His research focusses on the intersections and socio-political implications of popular culture, digital humanities, the urban, and fashion.

You can download the poster for the event here.