Cybernetic Serendipity was an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, from 2 August to 20 October 1968, [1] and then toured across the United States. Two stops in the United States were the Corcoran Annex (Corcoran Gallery of Art), Washington, D.C., from 16 July to 31 August 1969, and the newly opened Exploratorium [2] in San Francisco, from 1 November to 18 December 1969.
One part of the exhibition was concerned with algorithms and devices for generating music. Some exhibits were pamphlets describing the algorithms, whilst others showed musical notation produced by computers. Devices made musical effects and played tapes of sounds made by computers. Peter Zinovieff lent part of his studio equipment - visitors could sing or whistle a tune into a microphone and his equipment would improvise a piece of music based on the tune. [3]
Another part described computer projects such as Gustav Metzger's self-destructive Five Screens With Computer, a design for a new hospital, a computer programmed structure, and dance choreography.
The machines and installations were a very noticeable part of the exhibition. Gordon Pask produced a collection of large mobiles (Colloquy of Mobiles (1968)) with interacting parts that let the viewers join in the conversation. [4] Many machines formed kinetic environments or displayed moving images. Bruce Lacey contributed his radio-controlled robots and a light-sensitive owl. Nam June Paik was represented by Robot K-456 and televisions with distorted images. Jean Tinguely provided two of his painting machines. Edward Ihnatowicz's biomorphic hydraulic ear (Sound Activated Mobile (SAM, 1968)) turned toward sounds and John Billingsley's Albert 1967 turned to face light. Wen-Ying Tsai presented his interactive cybernetic sculptures of vibrating stainless-steel rods, stroboscopic light, and audio feedback control. Several artists exhibited machines that drew patterns that the visitor could take away, or involved visitors in games. Cartoonist Rowland Emett designed the mechanical computer Forget-me-not, which was commissioned by Honeywell. [5]
Another section explored the computer's ability to produce text - both essays and poetry. Different programs produced Haiku, [6] children's stories, and essays. [7] One of the first computer-generated poems, by Alison Knowles and James Tenney, was included in the exhibition and catalogue.
Computer-generated movies were represented by John Whitney's permutations and a Bell Labs movie on their technology for producing movies. Some samples included images of tesseracts rotating in four dimensions, a satellite orbiting the Earth, and an animated data structure.
Computer graphics were also represented, including pictures produced on cathode ray oscilloscopes and digital plotters. There was a variety of posters and graphics demonstrating the power of computers to do complex (and apparently random) calculations. Other graphics showed a simulated Mondrian and the iconic decreasing squares spiral that appeared on the exhibition's poster and book. The Boeing Company exhibited their use of wireframe graphics.
Keith Albarn & Partners contributed to the design of the exhibition. [8]
Reflecting the prominence of music in the show, a ten-track album Cybernetic Serendipity Music was released by the ICA to accompany the show. [3] [9] Artists featured included Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, and Peter Zinovieff, a detail of whose graphic score for 'Four Sacred April Rounds’ (1968) was used as the cover artwork. [10]
Time magazine noted that there had been 40,000 visitors to the London exhibition. [11] Other reports suggested visitor numbers were as high as 44,000 to 60,000. However, the ICA did not accurately count visitors. [12]
The exhibition provided the energy for the formation of British Computer Arts Society which continued to explore the interaction between science, technology and art, and put on exhibitions (for example Event One at the Royal College of Art [13] ). Several pieces were purchased by the Exploratorium in 1971, some of which are on display to this day. [14]
In 2014 the ICA held a retrospective exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity: A Documentation which included documents, installation photographs, press reviews and publications and a series of discussions in one of which Peter Zinovieff took part. [15] To coincide with the exhibition, Cybernetic Serendipity Music was re-released as a limited-edition vinyl LP by The Vinyl Factory. [3]
The Victoria and Albert Museum marked the 50th anniversary with an exhibition in 2018 entitled "Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers". The V&A exhibition included many works by artists who featured in the original ICA show, plus related ephemera. "Chance and Control" subsequently toured to Chester Visual Arts and Firstsite, Colchester. [16] [17]
In 2020, The Centre Pompidou exhibited the replica of Gordon Pask's 1968 Colloquy of Mobiles, reproduced by Paul Pangaro and TJ McLeish in 2018. [18]
In 2022 the Australian National University's School of Cybernetics launched the school by presenting an exhibition Australian Cybernetic: a point through time. The exhibition included works from Cybernetic Serendipity (1968), Australia ‘75: Festival of Creative Arts and Science (1975), and contemporary pieces curated by the School of Cybernetics. In describing Reichardt's Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition the school stated that it "represented points of expanding the cybernetic imagination" and was a "ground-breaking" "glimpse of a future in which computers were entangled with people and cultures, and through this she fashioned a blueprint for the future of computing that has since inspired generations". [19] [20]
Computer art is art in which computers play a role in the production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many traditional disciplines are now integrating digital technologies and, as a result, the lines between traditional works of art and new media works created using computers has been blurred. For instance, an artist may combine traditional painting with algorithm art and other digital techniques. As a result, defining computer art by its end product can thus be difficult. Computer art is bound to change over time since changes in technology and software directly affect what is possible.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA contains galleries, a theatre, two cinemas, a bookshop and a bar.
Frederick Rowland Emett OBE, known as Rowland Emett, was an English cartoonist and constructor of whimsical kinetic sculpture.
Bruce Lacey was a British artist, performer and eccentric. After completing his national service in the Navy he became established on the avant garde scene with his performance art and mechanical constructs. He has been closely associated with The Alberts performance group and The Goon Show. He made the props and had an acting part in Richard Lester's The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.
Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask was a British cybernetician, inventor and polymath who made multiple contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, educational technology, applied episteomology, chemical computing, architecture, and systems art. During his life, he gained three doctorate degrees. He was an avid writer, with more than two hundred and fifty publications which included a variety of journal articles, books, periodicals, patents, and technical reports. He worked as an academic and researcher for a variety of educational settings, research institutes, and private stakeholders including but not limited to the University of Illinois, Concordia University, the Open University, Brunel University and the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He is known for the development of conversation theory.
Kenneth Charles Knowlton was an American computer graphics pioneer, artist, mosaicist and portraitist. In 1963, while working at Bell Labs, he developed the BEFLIX programming language for creating bitmap computer-produced movies. In 1966, also at Bell Labs, he and Leon Harmon created the computer artwork Computer Nude .
Roy Ascott FRSA is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic art and telematic art.
Peter Zinovieff was a British composer, musician and inventor. In the late 1960s, his company, Electronic Music Studios (EMS), made the VCS3, a synthesizer used by many early progressive rock bands such as Pink Floyd and White Noise, and Krautrock groups as well as more pop-orientated artists, including Todd Rundgren and David Bowie. In later life, he worked primarily as a composer of electronic music.
The Computer Arts Society (CAS) was founded in 1968, in order to encourage the creative use of computers in the arts.
Edward Ihnatowicz was a Polish cybernetic art sculptor active in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His sculptures explored the interaction between his robotic works and the audience.
Desmond Paul Henry (1921–2004) was a Manchester University Lecturer and Reader in Philosophy (1949–82). He was one of the first British artists to experiment with machine-generated visual effects at the time of the emerging global computer art movement of the 1960s. During this period, Henry constructed a succession of three electro-mechanical drawing machines from modified bombsight analogue computers which were employed in World War II bombers to calculate the accurate release of bombs onto their targets. Henry's machine-generated effects resemble complex versions of the abstract, curvilinear graphics which accompany Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Henry's machine-generated effects may therefore also be said to represent early examples of computer graphics: "the making of line drawings with the aid of computers and drawing machines".
Systems art is art influenced by cybernetics and systems theory, reflecting on natural systems, social systems, and the social signs of the art world itself.
Jasia Reichardt is a British art critic, curator, art gallery director, teacher and prolific writer, specialist in the emergence of computer art. In 1968 she was curator of the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is generally known for her work on experimental art. After the deaths of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson she catalogued their archive and looks after their legacy.
Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular processes such as feedback systems where outputs are also inputs. It is concerned with general principles that are relevant across multiple contexts, including in ecological, technological, biological, cognitive and social systems and also in practical activities such as designing, learning, and managing.
Keith Albarn was an English artist. He was the father of musician Damon Albarn and artist Jessica Albarn.
Cybernetic art is contemporary art that builds upon the legacy of cybernetics, where feedback involved in the work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The relationship between cybernetics and art can be summarised in three ways: cybernetics can be used to study art, to create works of art or may itself be regarded as an art form in its own right.
William Fetter, also known as William Alan Fetter or Bill Fetter, was an American graphic designer and pioneer in the field of computer graphics. He explored the perspective fundamentals of computer animation of a human figure from 1960 on and was the first to create a human figure as a 3D model. The First Man was a pilot in a short 1964 computer animation, also known as Boeing Man and now as Boeman by the Boeing company. Fetter preferred the term "Human Figure" for the pilot. In 1960, working in a team supervised by Verne Hudson, he helped coin the term Computer graphics. He was art director at the Boeing Company in Wichita.
The Doors Are Open is a 1968 black-and-white documentary about the American rock group the Doors. It was produced by Jo Durden-Smith for Granada TV and directed by John Sheppard and first aired in the United Kingdom on 4 October 1968. The programme combines footage of the Doors playing live at London's Roundhouse venue, interviews with the band members and contemporary news snippets of world current affairs - protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention, French riots, statements from politicians and footage of the Vietnam War etc.
Catherine Mason is an art historian and author who specialises in digital art, especially computer art.
George L. Mallen FBCS FRSA is a British businessman who has been a pioneer of creative computer systems since 1962. He co-founded the Computer Arts Society (CAS) with Alan Sutcliffe and John Lansdown in 1968. In 1970, he led CAS members in creating Ecogame, the "first digitally driven, multi-player, interactive gaming system in the UK". Also in 1970, he founded the company System Simulation Ltd, one of the longest established software companies in the United Kingdom.