RENEGADE ACADEMIA: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (1999, unpublished feature)

So let me tell you how I came to write this piece: the only profile of ccru - Cybernetic Culture Research Unit - written during the group's lifetime.In the 1990s, there was this cool American magazine called Lingua Franca that coveredacademia – rising figures, trends in theory, institutional politics, intellectual fashions. It wasn’t ascholarly journal, though - it was far more readable and widely read, something you could pickup in trendy bookstores or the gift shop at an art museum.When emanations from ccru and its allies reached my eyes, I pitched Lingua Franca on theidea of a story about what I called “renegade academia”. Not only did they agree, they flew meto England (this was late 1998, by which time I’d been living in New York for several years) and putme up in a hotel. The full-blown, fully-expensed, serious reporter deal. So I went about it like a serious reporter: journeying to Leamington Spa to spend a day with ccru, meeting the unit’s former founder Sadie Plant in…