Steve Rushton Boeken

"The Milgram Re-enactment was a reconstruction of one part of Stanly Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment, first conducted at Yale University in Connecticut from 1960. During the original experiment subjects were asked to give seemingly real electric shocks to another individual. The experiment was designed to test the limit to which subjects were prepared to follow the orders of a scientist. It aimed to establish to what degree an individual would be prepared to hurt a fellow human because they were ordered to do so. (.) The Milgram Re-enactment was initiated by artist Rod Dickinson. It took place at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow on February 15th and 17th 2002. The Re-enactment followed the same procedure as the original experiment in every respect, and the laboratory and the machinery were identical to the equipment used in the Yale experiment. However there were several significant differences." (Introduction)

Steve Rushton's research is an investigation into feedback, social control, and the contemporary culture of self performance, developing a thorough analysis of the techniques and processes of information management and subjectivization in Western society since the second half of the twentieth century. This book, second in a series inaugurated by the Piet Zwart Institute, articulates a clear relationship between diverse subjects, drawing from a broad range of archival materials from military experiments in social psychology to works by Don DeLillo and Ant Farm. It includes texts on art and media linked to theories of cybernetics, Rushton collaborative projects with Rod Dickinson and Thomson and Craighead and fictional and allegorical texts, giving these observations narrative form