Barry Vacker
Barry Vacker is a professor of media theory at Temple University in Philadelphia. His writings explore the models of utopia and dystopia that are shaping the postmodern world; influenced by Sartre, McLuhan and Baudrillard, he recently completed the book manuscripts Utopia and Nothingness and Media and Nothingness. Vacker’s writings have critiqued the utopian and dystopian themes represented in the Big Bang, the Millennium Dome, the Twin Towers, the Gaia hypothesis, the Guggenheim-Bilbao, Burning Man, Fight Club, Las Vegas, Death Valley, Fahrenheit 9/11, New Orleans, Coke Zero, chaos theory, cyberspace and many others (www.barryvacker.net). Not limited to writing, Vacker co-organized a symposium that was one of earliest telecasts on the internet in 1996; he questioned the meaning of “The Matrix” with Anderson Cooper on CNN in 2003; and he wrote and directed the experimental film “Space Times Square,” which will be released in Fall 2006. Vacker earned his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in 1995.
