Sarah Winchester and the Origins of Silicon Valley
with Homay King
Bryn Mawr College
Presented by the Berkeley Film & Media Seminar. Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.
This talk is about Sarah Winchester (1840-1922), the heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms company, who moved from Connecticut to San Jose, CA after the death of her husband. She spent the remainder of her life building a colossal Victorian mystery mansion. Winchester was painted by the press as an eccentric who built her mausoleum-like house out of guilt, melancholy, and superstition, in an attempt to assuage the spirits of Native Americans slaughtered by her family’s guns. In this talk, I claim that she was also a savvy business woman whose vast construction projects were more about Gilded Age displays of wealth: a continuation of settler colonialism, not symbolic reparation thereof. Her many property holdings throughout the Bay Area anticipate the contemporary built environment in that region, and were filled with technically innovative design features of her own creation. How do our stories about Silicon Valley change if we situate her, a 19th-century woman, at the origins of tech innovation culture? The talk proceeds to readings of Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Trilogy (2002-04), Zach Blas’ Contra-Internet (2018), and Simon Leung’s Squatting Projects (1992-2008).
Homay King is Eugenia Chase Guild Chair in the Humanities, Professor and Chair in the Department of History of Art, and a co-founder of the Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Duke, 2015) and Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Duke, 2010). Her essays on film, digital media, contemporary art, and theory have appeared in Afterall, Discourse, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, October, and edited collections including the exhibition catalogs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s China: Through the Looking Glass and the ICA Philadelphia’s Myths of the Marble. She was recently featured in a video essay for the Criterion Collection’s edition of Shanghai Express. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective.