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Article Excerpt
In 1965 Jasia Reichardt, then assistant director of the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, embarked on one of the most technologically ambitious art exhibitions of its time. Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, on view at the ICA from August 2 to October 20, 1968, explored the role of computers in the arts, broadly conceived to include music, poetry, theater, film, dance, graphics, robots, installations, and environments. At the time, the word "computer" designated a variety of devices, from IBM mainframes to individually improvised analogue machines. By linking the computer to creative practices, the exhibition challenged the separation of art and creativity from science and technology. Because computers could produce work in diverse media, the exhibition also implicitly questioned distinctions between presumably discrete creative realms.
Recently, art historians, artists, and curators have given considerable attention to art exhibitions of the late 1960s and 1970s, decades during which exceptional curators adopted the dual roles of organizers and critics and conceived the exhibition itself as a medium with which to develop new ideas about art. Exhibitions such as When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations, organized by Harald Szeemann in 1969 for the Kunsthalle Bern, and Information, curated by Kynaston McShine for the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, were not limited to providing contexts in which to teach art but became vehicles for redefining artistic and institutional practices and even to circumvent art institutions.' (1) Other initiatives such is the proposal for the exhibition Art by Telephone, organized by Jan van der Mark for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1969, have been lauded for their engagement with technologies and procedures then new to the art world. (2)
The recent scholarly interest in these historical exhibitions is not accidental, for during the last decade, increasing involvement of artists with digital and genetic technologies and tactical media practices has again presented challenges to traditional ideas about art, the institution of the museum, and the separation of art from other realms of knowledge and practice. Given the retrospection prompted by these contemporary concerns, current criticism focuses on shows that transgress disciplinary borders and endow the museum space with the potential to make new meanings. (3) Yet scholars writing about curatorial work consistently exclude Cybernetic Serendipity. (4)
The omission of Cybernetic Serendipity from the canon of modern-art exhibitions is not entirely surprising, because from 1970 to the mid- 1990s computer art developed independently from modern art museums and was largely ignored by art historians. (5) More puzzling is the scarcity of information on Reichardt within the field of digital art. Her show, organized at a time in which the use of computers in art institutions was rare and the involvement of women in scientific subjects even more so, was no small achievement. How did Reichardt engage in such a venture? How was the exhibition conceived, how was it received, and what did it achieve?
I posit that far from being perceived solely as entertainment, as some of the exhibition's critics have argued, the show's theoretical premises unsettled neat notions of human uniqueness by allowing machines to invade purportedly exclusive human domains. In contrast to criticism that has portrayed the exhibition as politically reactionary, I suggest that it was compatible with aspects of progressive posthumanism. In her important 1999 study How We Became posthuman, Katherine Hayles identifies two kinds of posthumanism, one that emphasizes virtualization and disembodiment, and another that recognizes the inseparability of consciousness from the specificities of embodiment. (6) In her analysis, the first remains attached to liberal humanism in its adherence to notions of unified subjectivity and conscious agency as the bases for human identity, while the second understands subjectivity as emergent and contingent, and rather than perceiving technology as a threat to human control recognizes the historically long partnership between human and machine. I suggest that Reichardt's work, and especially Cybernetic Serendipity, manifests affinities with this second kind of posthumanism, reflecting a commitment to the unification of science and art that was consistent with her background as an art critic as well as with the philosophical objectives of her family.
The Exhibition
Although it was neither the first exhibition to display computer art nor the first to promote the unification of science and art, Cybernetic Serendipity stands as one of the foundational events in the development of electronic and digital art. Three small shows of computer graphics in Stuttgart, Germany, and one at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York preceded it. (7) Cybernetic Serendipity was unique in its focus on cybernetics, the theoretical backbone of the art-and-technology movement of the 1960s. Cybernetics, defined by Norbert Wiener as the science of communication and control between animals (humans included) and machines, and between machines and machines, created a framework for studying communication and control in systems organic and artificial. (8) According to Wiener, the interaction of a machine with the external world involved the introduction of data (input) to elicit the machine's effect on the outside world (output). Feedback was the act of controlling a machine on the basis of its performance. Elements of the machine itself, which he called "sensory members," evaluated the machine's performance. The notions of control, communication, input, feedback, and output as used in cybernetics were fundamental to the development of computer and other technological art. Reichardt's press release for the exhibition explained:
A cybernetic device responds to stimulus from outside and in turn affects the external environment, like a thermostat which responds to the coldness of a room by switching on the heating and thereby altering the temperature. This process is called feedback.
Exhibits in the show are either produced with a cybernetic device (computer) or are cybernetic devices themselves. They react to something in the environment, either human or machine, and in response produce either sound, light or movement.
Unlike the other exhibitions focused on technology, Cybernetic Serendipity was experimental not only in the metaphorical sense that it explored new ideas, methods, and materials, but also because it was explicitly designed as an experiment that would test its own premises. At the beginning of the 1960s, Reichardt had asserted that artistic production depended less on miracles than on firm principles and that consequently the effectiveness of art could be scientifically assessed. (9) Aspects of this reasoning were evident in Cybernetic Serendipity even if, in contrast to a laboratory experiment, no attempts were made to record the results.
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As stated in its accompanying publication, the principal objective of the show was to explore and demonstrate in an international arena the relationships between technology and creativity; "to present an area of activity which manifests artists' involvement with science, and the scientists' involvement with the arts; also, to show the links between the random systems employed by artists, composers, and poets, and those involved with the making and use of cybernetic devices." (10) The experimental character of the exhibition in a figurative sense was evident in Reichardt's candid assessment that it dealt with "possibilities rather than achievements" because computers had yet to revolutionize music, art, and poetry in the same way that they revolutionized science. Simultaneously, in her opinion, Cybernetic Serendipity was "a demonstration of contemporary ideas, acts and objects, linking cybernetics and the creative process." (11) I suggest that Reichardt and her collaborators attempted empirically to substantiate these propositions by establishing specific controls in the exhibition design.
Cybernetic Serendipity occupied a gallery of 6,500 square feet in the new quarters of the ICA at Pall Mall and included the work of about 130 participants. (12) Neither the wall texts nor the accompanying publication specified the disciplinary affiliation of each contributor, making it difficult for a viewer to determine whether an artist, engineer, mathematician, musician, or architect created the object or the environment. This intentional confounding of boundaries left the responsibility for evaluating and classifying the work entirely to the viewer, encouraging the interrogation of stereotypes of the engineer and the artist. Reichardt elucidated: "It is assumed that the electronic engineers represent a clever but an uncreative branch of society, whereas artists are exceptionally creative but it is unlikely that they should possess any technological skills. It is also widely assumed that to the engineer, scientist, and mathematician, art is magic,...
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