Engineering and Technology Studies at Illinois

Another installment in the movie series Movies Even an Engineer Would Love, The Tailenders, will be shown Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 7-9 pm at the Spurlock Museum:

Filmed in the Solomon Islands, Mexico, India, and the US, this film chronicles a missionary organization’s development of ultra-low-tech audio technologies (like a cardboard record player) to evangelize to traditional communities with limited access to electricity and media. Interspersing interviews with shots of nodal patterns, waveforms and a signal generator, the film “has presented disembodied audio as a religion unto itself” (The New York Times).

The Tailenders [2005] is 72 minutes with discussion to follow. Join us Wednesday for another Engineering, Technology, and Culture (ETC) event.

Just a reminder that the first movie, Radiant City, in the film series Movies Even an Engineer Would Love will be held to night starting at 7:00 pm in the Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL.  A discussion will be held after the showing.

Radiant City. Across the continent the landscape is being leveled—blasted clean of distinctive features and overlaid with zombie monoculture. Politicians call it growth. Developers call it business. The Moss family calls it home. This look at urban sprawl through the eyes of one Canadian family also asks fundamental questions about design, planning, and technology. Covering topics from traffic and infrastructure to childhood, family, and ennui, it ultimately asks: How can we build sustainable systems that can grow gracefully as they age?