This course explores the significant contributions and profound influence of the legendary California multimedia artist Wallace Berman (1926-1976) and the wide network of post-World War II counter-cultural artists with whom he was associated. This network was reviewed extensively by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna in their important exhibition and catalogue, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and his Circle (2005). The first part of the course focuses on how Berman established himself as a key figure in the Beat cultures of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1950s against the backdrop of the Cold War devoting himself to his private mail art publication Semina that released nine issues starting in 1955. The second unit explores Berman's work while based in Topanga Canyon beginning in 1963 where he worked on his innovative photo-based art (collages utilizing a Verifax copy machine) and where he was immersed in the West Coast hippie counterculture sixties scene. The course situates Berman at the crossroads of such intellectual currents as Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), the reception of French Surrealism, post-war experimental film, Pop art and music, Beat poetry, and assemblage art while examining Berman's connections to key artistic figures in a variety of media such as Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Allen Ginsberg, Jay DeFeo, Marjorie Cameron, Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, Jack Hirschman, and David Meltzer, among others. Specific comparisons will be made between his Verifaxes and other photo-collage practices in the same period including the work of Robert Heinecken, Penny Slinger, Romare Bearden, and Peter Blake (who included Berman in the countercultural pantheon on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Hearts Club Band in 1967). As a post-script, the course will reflect on Berman's prophetic emblem of the hand holding a transistor radio emitting an overload of visual signs in the light of contemporary media and of life in the age of the smart phone.