Philip Glahn, professor of aesthetics and critical studies at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, has received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association along with Cary Levine, an associate professor at University of North Carolina. The essay, “The Future Is Present: Electronic Café and the Politics of Technological Fantasy,” was featured in Art Journal, the College Art Association’s peer-reviewed journal that serves as a forum for scholarship and exploration in the visual arts.

During the summer of 1984, the art-activist group Mobile Image operated Electronic Café, an elaborate network of telecommunications production spread across the city of Los Angeles. “The Future Is Present" discusses how the project politicized enduring myths of technological innovation and engaged fantasy in an exceptional way—as pedagogical and organizational process rather than imagination-as-product.

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, Ana Maria site (East LA), 1984 (artwork © Kit Galloway; photograph provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)