While ideas and concepts have always been
the creative fuel of both the arts and the sciences, the defining
characteristics of “information” have remained vaguely drawn,
polemicized and a constant topic of investigation within 20thcentury
art and academia. The artworks surveyed in this paper
will illustrate a set of artifacts highlighting the thematic overlap
between cybernetics and art. We can trace these correlated
developments by linking the skeuomorphs of information theory
and cybernetics within the conceptual art of the 1960s and
the video and new media art of the 1970s and the 1990s. A
skeuomorph is a term from archaeology, indicating a design
feature that is no longer functional. In the development of
cybernetics, skeuomorphs can signify and act as threshold
devices/ideas denoting a transition and influence from one
wave/constellation to another.
The first wave of cybernetics began with the Macy conferences
in New York City between 1946 and 1953 and drew together
an interdisciplinary set of participants, which included
some of the period’s top scientists. Cybernetics stems from the
Greek root kybernetes, meaning steersman or governor; Norbert
Wiener defined cybernetics as the study of communication
and control in both animals and machines [1]. Cybernetics
has since diverged into a number of fields, such as information
theory, artificial intelligence, artificial life and bio-informatics
(Fig. 1).
Defining “Information”
Information as a word is often used loosely and is rarely delineated.
It is the noun of action for to inform, where both inform
and informatio had previously existed in Latin. To inform traditionally
meant “to give form to” or “to form an idea of.” Thus,
to inform can be thought of in a multiplicity of ways: It can
define that which has no form (i.e. pure content) or rather
that which creates form. In The Republic, Plato often used the
Greek word for “form,” Eidos, as the essence of something
(i.e. ideal form), which could also denote a concept, thought
or even proposition. Ultimately, Plato’s Eidos denoted a disembodied,
immaterial and transcendental ideal. According
to Katherine Hayles, one of the first concepts to come out of
the Macy Conferences was the reification of information flows
such that information itself began
to be considered more important
than the physicality of matter, energy
and noise, thereby returning
to a pseudo-Platonic ideal by envisioning
information as a disembodied
entity [2].
After debating possible definitions
of information, in an attempt
to pin down a mathematical definition,
scientists Wiener and Shannon
argued for a decontextualization of
information as a probability function that quantifies a message
that is independent of a receiver’s frame of reference. Thus,
the conceptualization of information emerged as a signal
whose opposite is entropic and statistical noise, and information
was mathematically defined such that it would have the
same numerical value regardless of its content [3].
Art as Concept and Idea
It should come as no surprise that many artists were fascinated
by the meaning and possible interpretation of information.
Indeed, Marcel Duchamp had already deflated the aesthetics
of materials by working with an assemblage of immaterials,
or rather, ideas. One of Duchamp’s first readymades was a
standard Bedfordshire urinal that he purchased in 1917 and
submitted to an art exhibition that had proclaimed it would
display all art entries. The piece, entitled Fountain (Fig. 2),
was rotated by 90º and signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt”
[4]. Although Duchamp was on the committee of the exhibition,
the board members were unaware of his involvement
with Fountain and subsequently decided to hide it during the
exhibition, as they could not agree whether or not Fountain
could be considered an artwork.
Certainly, Duchamp’s readymades precipitated 20th-century
conceptual art, which further entrenched its immateriality
via its McLuhanite and cybernetic emphasis on information
theory in the 1960s.
Conceptual Art: 1950 to Mid-1970s
Everything we do is music [and] everyone is in the best seat.
—John Cage [5]
Duchamp’s ideas were developed by conceptual artists including
Sol LeWitt, who further stressed that the idea/concept
©2012 ISAST	 LEONARDO, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 57–63, 2012       57
h i stor i cal perspect i ve
Contemporary Art and Cybernetics:
Waves of Cybernetic Discourse
within Conceptual, Video and
New Media Art
Etan J. Ilfeld
Etan J. Ilfeld (gallery director, digital media artist), 10 Cecil Court, London, U.K., WC2N
4HE. E-mail: <etan@tenderpixel.com>.
See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/45/1> for supplemental files associated with this
issue.
abstract
This paper aims to highlight
the interplay of technology and
cybernetics within conceptual
art. Just as Lucy Lippard has
illustrated the influence of
information theory within 1960s
conceptual art, this paper traces
the technological discourses
within conceptual art through to
contemporary digital art—specifically,
establishing a correlation
between Katherine Hayles’s
mapping of first-, second- and
third-wave cybernetic narratives
and, respectively, 1960s–1970s
conceptual art, 1970s–1990s
video art and new media art.
Technology is shown to have a
major influence on conceptual
art, but one often based on
historical, social and cybernetic
narratives. This paper echoes
Krzystof Ziarek’s call for a Heideggerian
poiesis and Adorno/
Blanchotnian “nonpower” within
conceptual art and advocates
Ziarek’s notion of “powerfree”
artistic practices within new
media and transgenic art.
58       Ilfeld, Contemporary Art and Cybernetics
of a work is more important than the
aesthetics of the object and focused instead
on the communicated content [6].
LeWitt’s premise became anti-formalist
or rather informalist, and LeWitt developed
conceptual art as a “postobject” art
form. Meanwhile, the conceptual artists
of the 1950s were very much aware of the
cybernetic discourses that were prevalent
at the time. As early as the 1950s,
John Cage’s composition 4’33” could be
viewed as a subversive deconstruction of
Shannon’s information/noise binary.
4’33” was first performed by David Tudor
in 1952 at Woodstock, New York; the
piece consisted of three movements during
which Tudor would open and close
the keyboard lid while waiting silently for
the audience to settle, thereby allowing
the audience unknowingly to “perform”
and alluding to the fact that there is no
such thing as silence. Even the length of
4 minutes and 33 seconds was chosen by
chance using an I Ching process. 4’33”
can be viewed as a rebuke of Shannon
and Weiner’s signal-based information,
which had championed signal over noise;
after all, it is precisely the “noise”—whispers,
coughs and ambient sounds—that
became the actualized message/signal
in 4’33”.
By 1966, artist John Baldessari proclaimed,
“I was beginning to suspect
that information could be interesting in
its own right and need not be visual as in
Cubist, etc. art” [7], and began creating
paintings that were depicted exclusively
through words. Similarly, in 1968 the
Institute for Contemporary Art’s Cybernetic
Serendipity exhibition in London
celebrated computer-aided creativity and
cybernetic ideas in contemporary dance,
poetry, music, animation, sculpture, robots,
painting machines and “all sorts of
works where chance was an important ingredient”
[8]. In 1970, the “Information”
show at the Museum of Modern Art (New
York) celebrated the American apogee
during which the synthesis of cybernetics
and conceptual art was manifested in
films, videos and avant-garde works such
as John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem and Adrian
Piper’s blank notebooks that asked the
viewers to collaborate: “write, draw or
otherwise indicate any response suggested
by this situation (this statement,
the blank notebook and pen, the museum
context, your immediate state of
mind, etc.)” [9].
Shannon and Cage’s dialogue was
further played out in Christine Kozlov’s
Information: No Theory (1969):
1. The recorder is equipped with a continuous
loop tape.
2. The recorder will be set at record. All
the sounds audible in the room will be
recorded.
3. The nature of the loop tape necessitates
that new information erases old
information. The “life” of the information,
that is, the time it takes for the information
to go from “new” to “old,” is
the time it takes the tape to make one
complete cycle.
4. Proof of the existence of the information
does in fact not exist in actuality, but
is based on probability [10].
Certainly, Kozlov’s notion of information
as probabilistic is much in line with
Shannon, and Information: No Theory
emphasizes the dematerialized and transient
nature of conceptual art. Similarly,
Jack Burnham’s seminal 1968 essay “System
Aesthetics” claimed that the “nonobjects”
of conceptual art establish a
“transition from an object-oriented to a
systems oriented culture [where] change
emanates, not from things, but from the
way things are done” [11]. Lippard’s
text Six Years: The dematerialization of the
art object further traces conceptual art’s
de-emphasis on the traditional materialist
aspect of art as unique, permanent or
aesthetically attractive; as a result, conceptual
art began dematerializing the
artworld. However, Lippard admits that
“dematerialization” was an exaggerated
term, since conceptual art is still physically
stored or embodied via a piece of
paper or photographed documentation.
Conceptual art’s emphasis on the immaterial
coincided with its critique of
capitalistic and materialistic/consumer
culture. In fact, much conceptual art
during the 1960s was not meant to be
sold but rather to be kept as part of a gifteconomy
of ideas. In many cases, when
conceptual art was sold the purchase was
largely a matter of supporting the artist
financially.
Constellations
Period
Homeostasis
1945
Player
Self-
Organization
1960
Homeostasis
Shannon
MacKay
McCulloch
Pitts
Kubie
von Foerster
feedback loop
information as
signal/noise
circular causality
instrumental
language
quantification reflexive language
autopoiesis
structural coupling
system-environment
electronic rat
homeostat
electric tortoise
frog’s visual
cortex
simulation
mobile robot
emergent behaviour
functionalities
computational
universe
von Foerster
Maturana
Varela
Varela
Brooks
Moravec
Reflexivity Virtuality
Virtuality
1985
Artifacts Skeuomorphs
man-in-the-middle
homeostasis
self-organization
Fig. 1. Three Waves of Cybernetics, adapted from Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman,
MIT Press, 1995. (© Katherine Hayles)
Fig. 2. Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain, 1917. (© 2011
Artists Rights Society [ARS],
New York/ADAGP, Paris/
Succession Marcel Duchamp.
Photo: Alfred Stieglitz, © 2011
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum /
Artists Rights Society [ARS],
New York.)
©2011ArtistsRightsSociety(ARS)NewYork
Ilfeld, Contemporary Art and Cybernetics     59
Cultural theorists Scott Lash and Celia
Lury explain 1960s conceptual art as
follows:
The ideas or concepts of [1960s] conceptual
art are a “self-regulating series and
systems of rules for the production of objects
out of preformed materials. They
are a series of propositions, systems of
rules (and the parallel with the feedback
loops of computers and other new media
objects such as brands is worth drawing)”
[12].
The circulation of ideas maintained
a primacy over their material channeling.
In the spirit of Duchamp’s readymade,
Cildo Meireles “hacked” Brazil’s
social systems of distribution by recycling
Coca-Cola bottles after painting “Yankees
Go Home” onto them; in a similar
interventionist manner, Meireles added
authentic-looking stamped messages
onto banknotes, with oppositional political
slogans [13].
Arakawa’s Sculpting No. 1 (1961–1962)
attempts to transcend materiality by
utilizing arrows that point beyond the
canvas’s edges, thereby directing the
viewer toward an invisible work outside
the painting. By igniting the viewer’s
imagination, Sculpting No. 1 relinquishes
control of the perceptual experience
yet maintains its influence through its
physicality. Thus, the expected and unexpected
are intertwined—a central
motif in conceptual art—analogous to
information theory’s signal and noise
interdependence.
In Argentina in 1969, Graciela Carnevale
welcomed visitors to his show,
which consisted of an empty room with
a glass window; he locked the visitors inside
and waited for over an hour, until
they finally broke the glass window and
escaped [14]. Carnevale’s experimental
art created an interplay between unexpected
behavior and the expected/
controlled physical structure, which was
sufficient to motivate the audience to
perform Carnevale’s intention of breaking
the window: His piece transformed
his audience from an indeterminate
mob into a controlled signal, whose message
was transmitted by their breakout.
Meanwhile, the amount of time it took
the audience to escape remained indeterminate
until the event was actualized.
Video Art: 1970s to
Mid-1990s
In the second wave of cybernetics, Gordon
Pask extended its realm to include
the study of information flows in all media
(e.g. feedback loops in cosmology,
cognitive science and the theoretical interaction
of any actors/agents) [15]. Certainly,
it is not surprising to imagine that
this conceptual expansion might seep
into the art sphere and be synthesized
with the technology of video.
Some art texts claim that between the
mid-1970s and the early 1990s, media art
had faded in response to the counterculture,
which included many artists and
curators who began to associate technology
with the Vietnam War and corporate
capitalism [16]. However, conceptual artists,
along with newcomers, kept experimenting
with video art and produced a
great deal of thought-provoking work
during this period. Curiously, whereas
the first wave of cybernetics followed the
antiquated scientific paradigm of an observer
outside a system—as Hayles points
out, the term “reflexivity” does not appear
at any single point of the original
Macy transcripts—the second wave was
determined to incorporate notions of
reflexivity [17].
Scott Lash has suggested that video
art may be a possible model for secondwave
conceptual art, whose ideas often
involve the “mediascape” and the information
economy [18]. Curiously, much
of the video art from the 1970s into the
1990s also corresponds with second-wave
cybernetic thought.
Indeed, Humberto Maturana’s neurophysiology
research proved in the late
1950s that a frog’s visual perception constructs
reality into what it wants/needs
to see, which are small and fast-moving
flies rather than large and slow-moving
animals such as cows. Later, with Francisco
Varela, he developed the term autopoiesis
to describe a living system through
its ability to self-organize, while insisting
that organisms were structurally coupled
with their environment. Second-wave cybernetic
discourse stressed that language
is structurally coupled as a social system
founded on a “reciprocal consensus”
and therefore not representative of an
external reality but rather of “consensual
objects” [19]. Thus, Maturana and Varela
emphasized reflexivity and an inevitably
constructed subjectivity that permeates
disciplines ranging from philosophy all
the way into the hard sciences.
Video art’s specificity is inherently reflexive:
Video’s closed-circuit feedback
technology enables the transmission of
live images capable of denoting their
own structural organizations; this feature
stands in direct opposition to the
illusionism of film and TV, motivating
the slogan “VT ≠ TV” (videotape is not
television), which was employed during
this time [20]. Additionally, video art
maintained the dematerialist trend of
first-wave conceptual art, as both tape
recordings and live feeds projected onto
screens dematerialized physical objects
into visual representations—prompting
a videotaped Jean Baudrillard in 1988 to
Fig. 3. Scott Blake,
Self Portrait Made with
Chuck Close Filter, net
art, 1500 × 1950 pixels,
2008. (© Scott Blake)
60       Ilfeld, Contemporary Art and Cybernetics
ask: “Am I a man, or am I a machine?”
[21]
Influenced by his participation in the
Fluxus movement, Nam June Paik also
began exploring video art and as early as
the 1960s had created his first multitelevision-sculpture
work, TV Cross. However,
it was not until 1974 that Paik created
one of the first sculptural-video feedback
installations, TV-Buddha. By creating a
live feed of a Buddha statue, Paik’s work
generated interplay between Western
media and an Eastern icon—enabling
the viewer to interlace his own image
into this media ecology. Paik considered
broadcast TV to be an oppressive institution,
which he attempted to subvert
by turning the viewer into a user of the
medium [22].
Akin to video, phenomenology contradicts
realism by insisting that objects
only exist for a user. Video’s structural
coupling and phenomenology both shift
objective judgment toward experience
through the realization that there is no
such thing as a subject-at-a-distance [23].
As a result, video art installations such as
Paik’s TV-Buddha (1974) and Bruce Nauman’s
Live/Taped Video Corridor (1970) address
a subject that is fully immersed and
invite the viewer to self-reflexively play
with his or her environment, continuing
conceptual art’s tradition of transforming
its audience into an active user rather
than a passive viewer.
Mid-1990s to Present Day
“You’re just analog players in a
digital world.”
—Ocean’s Thirteen (Film,
Warner Brothers, 2007)
The recent obsession to digitize is prevalent
in everything from the Human
Genome Project—completed 5 years
ahead of schedule, in 2003—to Google’s
attempt to digitize all the books within
Stanford University’s libraries. Inevitably,
as with Shannon’s noise-signal
informatics, interpretation and digitization
are confluent with discrimination
(a close cousin of censorship) and are
a loss of that which does not surpass the
analog threshold from which a digital
signal emerges. Additionally, digitization
reinforces the realm of the virtual;
as early as 1985, third-wave cybernetics
explored the digitally structured worlds
that could be created either as virtual
representations of our physical world
or as autonomous entities within the
field of Artificial Life. Certainly, digital/
virtual representations come with many
advantages over “real”-world physical
objects. Unlike physical objects, virtual
objects can be transported at the speed
of light and perfectly duplicated. Thus,
the recent “Information Age” (or rather
Digital Information Age, if we consider
the information age to have begun with
first-wave cybernetics) has sparked an
all-encompassing digitized convergence.
Even video art became digital in the
1990s and, as such, a sub-genre of new
media art. Jean Baudrillard claimed
that the digitization of biology (DNA),
sound recording, TV/film, information
Fig. 4. Vuk ´Cosi´c, Deep ASCII, ASCII animation, 1998. Programming by Luka Frelin.
(© Vuk ´Cosi´c)
Fig. 5. Jeremy Wood, My Ghost, GPS drawing, 2000–2009. (© Jeremy Wood)
Ilfeld, Contemporary Art and Cybernetics     61
technology, etc. generated the idealization
of reproducible codes such that
there is no longer any meaningful difference
between a copy and its original
[24]. Of course, 1960s conceptual art
had already emphasized collaboration,
de-authorship, dematerialization and the
un-uniqueness of the art object; however,
digitization shifted the notion of “postobject”
art into a virtual object and introduced
a digitized production process
whose ontology intermixed creation with
technological duplication.
In classical Greece, Techne was known
as the patron goddess of practical knowledge
and art, and the word techne was
used to refer to art and was responsible
for the Greek derivation tikein—meaning
“to create” [25]. In The Origin of
the Work of Art (1935) and The Question
Concerning Technology (1949) [26], Martin
Heidegger pointed out that the root
techne within technology originally implied
a mode of revealing that which is hidden.
Heidegger claimed that within art,
techne was a “bringing forth out of concealedness”
as a form of creative poiesis;
whereas, within an instrumental context
such as science, techne implies a mode
of technicity that discloses intrinsically
calculable resources. Technicity is that
aspect of the creator/user/viewer’s identity
that both forms and is represented via
technological differentiation [27].
According to Krzystof Ziarek, as technicity
becomes digitized in the “Information
Age,” Adorno and Heidegger’s
terminology can be rephrased as: Calculation
becomes computation; manipulability
or instrumentality becomes
programmability; enframing becomes
formatting, or mainframing; resources
and standing reserves become databases;
and technicity becomes synonymous with
digitality. Ziarek also claims that the technicity
of digitization can be folded upon
itself so as to reveal a form of poiesis; that
is to say that technology can be operated
in a non-instrumental mode of play, and
that its digitization can be creative—
thereby generating a space for digital art.
It is interesting to note that digital art
does not necessarily need to be in binary
code or magnetically archived. In
fact, one could consider Chuck Close’s
meticulous paintings within the realm of
digital art, as their grid-based production
process involves a form of digitization
and strongly alludes to computerized
pixels. Indeed, Close’s fractal-like pixelwithin-pixel
drawings bear a striking resemblance
to JPEG compressions and to
LCD monitor neighboring-pixel approxi-
mations.
As a post-photographic phenomenon,
Close’s works hint at our photographic
misreadings and at how we interpret
visual stimuli. Certainly, the viewer of
Close’s works is as much a user, who
is able to zoom in or zoom out of the
paintings by walking a few feet closer or
backward, severely altering his/her perception
of these colossal canvases—often
as large as 20 feet—and their unusually
large “pixels.”
Artist Scott Blake has attempted to
emulate Close’s pixel-aesthetics by creating
a software program, The Chuck Close
Filter, that emulates and utilizes elements
of Close’s technique in order to create
his very own Chuck-Close-like artworks.
Scott Blake’s Self Portrait Made with Chuck
Close Filter (Fig. 3) demonstrates the potential
of appropriating Close’s aesthetics
into a purely digital form and resonates
strikingly with Close’s work.
Similarly, Vuk ´Cosi´c digitizes classic
films and TV shows—such as Star Trek,
Psycho and Deep Throat (as Deep ASCII
[1998] [Fig. 4])—into animations in
which ASCII characters substitute for pixels
[28]. According to post-structuralist
theorist Maurice Blanchot, “power” cannot
mark its own limit or “conceive” of a
mode of “non-power,” and yet a nonutilitarian
playfulness might provide an alternative,
as a form of “non-power”—that
is, neither active nor passive, but rather
a mode of letting be [29]. Viewed in this
light, ´Cosi´c’s work synthesizes technical
techne and poetic techne and illustrates
the playful potential of ASCII text.
Fig. 6. Eduardo Kac, Genesis, transgenic work with artist-created bacteria, ultraviolet light, Internet, video (detail), edition of 2, dimensions
variable, 1999. Collection Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), Valencia, Spain. (© Eduardo Kac)
62       Ilfeld, Contemporary Art and Cybernetics
Curiously, ´Cosi´c is also famous for being
the first to coin the term net.art in
1995, which was a sort of Duchampian
readymade, since he had seen the words
“net” and “art”—joined by a period—in
an e-mail message [30].
Conceptual Net.Art has cultivated an
alternative—albeit virtual—platform
and infrastructure for the Information
Age’s social and economic systems. In
2000, Michael Daines hacked the virtual
worlds of finance and cyberspace by attempting
to sell his body within eBay’s
sculpture category. Similarly, in 2002, artist
Keith Obadike tried to sell his AfricanAmerican
identity on eBay in Blackness
for Sale (2001); by echoing the slave auctions
within the virtual world, Obadike
illustrated that the body’s identity politics
(gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
etc.) are just as significant in today’s
digital/virtual age [31].
Emergence in Cybernetics
and Digital Art
The key relation between third-wave cybernetics
and digital art is exemplified
in the conceptualization and practice of
emergence, which has opened new horizons
and modes of art production. Howard
Rheingold correlates the emergence
of an on-line “collective intelligence” as
analogous to the behavior of swarm systems
where agents residing on one scale
produce higher-level behavior and patterns
[32]. Emergence may also occur
when a recursive feedback loop evolves
within a system in such as a way as to lead
to previously unforeseeable phenomena.
Emergence provides an indeterminate
and noninstrumentally playful evolution,
allowing for a creative freedom. As a conceptual
framework it is aligned with Blanchot’s
notion of non-power as a mode of
letting be and with the technological
synthesis of Heidegger’s techne’s poeisis
and technicity. Like Heidegger, Blanchot
stated, “That which art discovers, or uncovers,
or lays bare will not be found under
any encyclopaedic subject heading.
To put it very simply: art is useless matter
. . . art uses matter such that it is unused,
workless, idle, useless” [33]. Similarly,
Lev Manovich perceptively points out
that new-media objects are readymades
by default and are in line with Barthes’s
criticism of the author as a sole-inventor,
such that the text becomes a “tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable
centers of culture” [34]. Viewed in this
light, the “computational ready-made” is
a product of self-generated (emergent)
algorithmic operations upon a newmedia
object and exemplifies the spaces
within creativity, science and art.
Jeremy Wood is a GPS artist who carries
a receiver with him religiously—
everywhere he goes. His appropriation of
GPS technology is both a form of emergent
gameplay and a visual manifestation
of emergence. In My Ghost (Fig. 5), Wood
documents a decade of his movements
throughout London and illustrates that
the emergent patterns that are revealed
as he treks are constrained within the
city’s urban infrastructure. His practice
takes place on several scales, and he often
spells out sentences through his movements.
Zooming in on the lower right of
My Ghost reveals a Moby Dick quote tracing
Wood’s movements, proclaiming: “True
places are not on any map.”
John F. Simon’s aLife (2003) is a realtime
software-driven animation that
models the emergent evolution of six
miniature and artificial worlds [35]. Curiously,
Simon’s aLife is not concerned with
scientific or instrumental knowledge but
rather with exploring aesthetic possibilities
and “capitalizing on accidents” [36].
Thus, emergence can be used to blur the
boundaries between signal and noise—
facilitating a mode of non-power that
allows the cultivation of the unexpected
and indeterminate. Similarly, Eduardo
Kac utilizes emergence in his transgenic
bioart. In Genesis (1999), Kac translated
a quote from the Bible (Genesis 1:26)
into Morse code and then converted it
into a DNA sequence—ordered from a
genetics lab—and infused it into a Petri
dish with fluorescent E. coli bacteria
(Fig. 6). Finally, the bacteria’s light
source was connected to the Internet
such that web users could turn it off and
on, influencing the E. coli’s unpredictable
mutation. As a result, Genesis parodies genetics’
tendency toward technoscientific
manipulation and exemplifies the potential
of emergence as a bridge between
technological techne and poetic techne.
Conclusion
Cybernetics concepts such as dematerialization,
reflexivity and digitization
remain highly influential within contemporary
art practices. For example, Arakawa’s
Sculpting No. 1, which consisted
of a canvas filled with arrows pointing
outside the frame, is much aligned with
first-wave cybernetics and the idea of dematerialization,
while John Cage’s 4’33”
highlights elements of chance and noise.
Peter Kennedy’s 1970s 10-minute video
piece in which he removes and transfers
bandages from a microphone to a video
camera illustrates the transition from
silence to invisibility and exemplifies
1970s video art’s themes of reflexivity,
structural coupling and phenomenology—in
accord with second-wave cybernetic
discourse. Similarly, new media art
employs third-wave cybernetic discourse
and champions notions of emergence,
virtualization, de-authorization, gift
economies and digitization.
The artworks surveyed in this paper
have provided a set of artifacts that illustrate
the thematic overlap between
cybernetics and art. While the art practices
surveyed are far from an exhaustive
taxonomy, they provide examples of
the prevalent concepts of each period
(Fig. 7).
The question remains as to why there
has been at minimum a 15-year lag between
the ideas proposed in cybernetics
and their artistic counterparts. What
caused this delay? While it takes time for
Period
Conceptual Art
Video Art
New Media Art
1960s-mid 70s
Mid 1970s-mid 90s
Mid 90s to Present
Primacy of Information
Institutional Critique
Ontological Crisis
Collaboration
(viewer as user)
De-authorship
Gift Economy (free
communication of ideas)
Chance/Noise/Probability
Structural
Coupling
Recursive
Phenomenological
Feedback loop
Emergence
Virtual Collaboration
(viewer as user)
De-Authorship
Gift Economy
(open source)
Reflexivity
De-materialization
Readymade
Minimalism
De-materialization Reflexivity Digitization Skeumorph
Fig. 7. Constellations of 1960s conceptual art, 1970s to 1990s video art and new media art.
(© Etan Ilfeld)
Ilfeld, Contemporary Art and Cybernetics     63
ideas to seep into the social consciousness,
artists are often capable of rapidly
integrating ideas and conceptualizing
new ones. Perhaps these ideas first had
to be incorporated into the technologies
these artists used. New media studies
often suggest a form of technological
determinism; however, scholars such as
David Morley and Raymond Williams
strongly oppose the idea that technology
follows a path that is intrinsic to its
inner structure (a sort of predetermined
road of progress); instead they emphasize
that technological history is often the
outcome of social struggles between powerful
interest groups [37]. Perhaps the
correlation between cybernetics and art
is itself a form of emergence? One thing
is certain: Cybernetic thought and art’s
synthesis have revealed a poetic technicity
within the technological and spawned
an ever-emerging and continuous source
of concepts and ideas.
References and Notes
Unedited references as provided by the author.
1. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine
(MIT Press, 1965).
2. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(University of Chicago Press, 1999).
3. C.E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Com-
munication,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27,
pp. 379–423 and 623–656, July and October, 1948.
Shannon defined information as the mathematical
logarithm of the number of elements within a message
set. In contrast, it is worth noting that this notion
of information was highly contested by Donald
McKay, who advocated a contextualized meaning for
information based upon a message’s interpreter; for
McKay, see Hayles [2] p. 54. First-wave cybernetician
Ross Ashby explains Shannon’s and Wiener’s notion
of communication as an act that “necessarily implies
the existence of a set of possibilities,” which he illustrates
with the example of a coded set of messages
from a wife attempting to send a message to her
husband in prison, which the warden attempts to
interpret/obstruct. Ashby, Ross, An Introduction to
Cybernetics (Clapham and Hall, 1957) p. 123.
4. Janis Mink, Duchamp. Taschen, 2004.
5. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage
(Bantam Books, 1967) p. 119.
6. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization
of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (University of
California Press, 1996) p. 5.
7. See Lippard [6] p. 14.
8. <www.medienkunstnetz.de/exhibitions/serendip-
ity/>.
9. See Lippard [6] p. xix.
10. Lippard [6] p. 80.
11. Peter Osbourne, Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002)
pp. 260–213 in Artforum, 7:1, September 1968.
12. Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry
(Polity Press, 2002) pp. 68–69.
13. Osbourne [11] pp. 150–151.
14. Lippard [6] p. xx.
15. Gordon Pask, The Cybernetics of Human Learning
and Performance (Hutchinson, 1975).
16. Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, New Media Art
(Taschen, 2006) p. 21.
17. Hayles suggests that reflexivity was avoided
during the first wave because its recursive nature
required a more advanced level of computational
power and that homeostasis was more in line with
1950s McCarthyism, which stressed a return to normalcy.
See Hayles [2] p. 69.
18. Lash and Lury [12] p. 68.
19. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela,
The Organization of Living Things. In The Tree of
Knowledge. (Shambhala, 1998); John Lechte, Fifty
Key Contemporary Thinkers (Routledge, 2008) pp.
339–341.
20. Sylvia Martin, Video Art (Taschen, 2006) pp.
7–13.
21. Baudrillard, Jean, The Transparency of Evil: Essays
on Extreme Phenomena (Verso, 1990).
22. David Morley, Media, Modernity and Technology:
The Geography of the New (Routledge, 2007) p. 284.
23. Lash and Lury [12] pp. 154–164.
24. Lechte [19] p. 303.
25. Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics (William Morrow,
1991) p. 424.
26. Martin Heidegger, “In the Origin of the Work of
Art” (1935) and “The Question Concerning Technology”
(1949), in David Farell Krell (Ed.), Basic Writings,
2nd edition (Harper Collins, 1993).
27. “Particular tastes and their associated cultural
networks have always been marked by particular
technologies, e.g., rockers with motorbikes and
mods with scooters.” Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy,
Game Cultures: Issues in Cultural and Media Studies
(Open University Press, 2006) p. 149.
28. See also <www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/
exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_
with_vuk_cosic/> for an online xhibition of work
by ´Cosi´c.
29. K. Ziarek, The Force of Art (Stanford University
Press, 2004) pp. 144–145. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical
Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (State
University of New York Press, 1999).
30. Tribe [16] p. 19.
31. Tribe [16] p. 38.
32. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs (Perseus Books,
Cambridge, 2002) p. 178. The term “collective intelligence”
was coined by Pierre Levy in 1994.
33. Ziarek [29] p. 69.
34. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
(MIT Press, 2003) p. 125.
35. <www.numeral.com/panels/alife.html>.
36. Tribe [16] p. 86.
37. Morley [22] p. 241.
Manuscript received 5 April 2010.
Etan Ilfeld launched Tenderpixel Gallery as a
platform to showcase emerging artists in central
London. Ilfeld is particularly interested in
the intersections of art, technology and media.
After graduating from Stanford University he
added to his eclectic education a Master’s in
Film Studies from the University of Southern
California and a Master’s in Interactive Media
from Goldsmiths, University of London.
He is also a professionally ranked chess master,
filmmaker and serial entrepreneur. Additionally,
Ilfeld is a digital artist and his New
Kind of Cinema work has been featured and
archived in Rhizome’s ArtBase.
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