Hi Roger
I agree that James Lovelock's Gaia and earlier prototype concept,
daisyworld, http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/flash/gaia1.htm are
great examples of cybernetic thinking; an entity, in this case a
planet, adjusting itself to external stimuli enters and maintains a
state of homeostasis or autopoesis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Autopoiesis - This increasing order and stability could be thought of
as purposive, a perspective which makes some scientists quite queasy
according to some scientist freinds of mine!
Rachel Carson, deep ecologist Arne Naess, and eco-design guru Victor
Papanek all intuited this fundamental planetary equilibrium and
were concerned not just for humanities sake but saw nature as
something intrinsically valuable, an idea many of us now accept. The
Arte Povera movement, Haacke, Merz, Penoni etc, and Hesse, Smithson
and others represented this zeitgeist in the visual arts; they did
not necessarily use computers or even other high-tech and I dont
think that an artist has to use computer technology to qualify for
the cybernetic label.
Bucky-Fuller was quite different to the above I think in that his
dymaxion (dynamic maximum tension) concept presupposed that the earth
would be able to support unbelievably vast numbers of people in the
future with less resources than were used in his time for the
population then. He was the (last?) supreme techno-optimist and like
all utopian thinkers was too optimistic about human nature.
Perhaps a truly cybernetic world-view would see society, nature and
technology as interacting systems sharing structure and dynamics on a
more abstract level of description. It might even be able to include
aspects of currently intensely fashionable 'social engagement'.
Simeon
On 3 Sep 2008, at 13:53, roger malina wrote:
simon simeon et al
yes= the end of the 6Os is a period when the "social contract"
between science and government established during and after
WWII began to unravel= not only vietnam, but the environmental
movement/rachel carsons silent spring, the club of rome, the cold war
context
the " failure of the enlightenment" discussion also is relevant here
since the 20th century saw so many highly technological wars and
then ongoing genocides including ruanda and kosovo
cybernetics serendipity is indeed part of the post WWII techno optimism
( the miracle of the green revolution= i think the term green revolution
re the new techniques of food production was used in 1968), and
scientific
humanism. In my talks about Leonardo i have pointed out that Leonardo
which was founded in 1967 shared this scientific humanism vision of its
founders= and associated
people like jacob bronowski, cp snow, even bucky fuller, or Julian
Huxley
who was the first director of UNESCO, and certaily bateson= the world
expos
are part
of the same zeitgeist such as Osaka 1970 which featured
the work of a number of technological artists
even the gaia concept of the time and james lovelock share this
optimistic
view of cybernetic systems (*a complex entity involving the Earth's
biosphere <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere>,
atmosphere<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_atmosphere>,
oceans <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean>, and
soil<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil>;
the totality constituting a feedback or
cybernetic<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic>system which seeks
an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on
this planet.)
dates from 1969 i think
*
the technological art movements of the late 1960s disappeared from view=
and the video art movement, equally technologically based, was much more
grounded in social practice and issues
roger
On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 2:53 AM, Simeon Lockhart Nelson <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi Simon and list
>
> Taking up Simons point that cybernetics is essentially a humanist
> discourse,
> I would agree and go further. Gregory Bateson and other early
> cyberneticists
> positioned cybernetics as a complete world view, a view that was
> processual
> and
> relational rather than atomistic and reductivist. Bateson I believe
> was
> highly
> influenced by A N Whitehead's process philosophy and his critique of
> 'purposeless'
> science. Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics to denote the
> study of
> what he called
> teleological mechanisms. This represented a radical break from the
> paradigm
> of 'objectivity' in
> reductivist science.
>
> Cybernetics is essentially optimistic and curiously Aristotelian in
> that
> it situates humans in a wider cosmological context and identifies
> processes
> like
> feedback as unifying principles underlying all phenomena, natural,
> cultural
> and
> technological. I think this 'classical' cybernetics as a world-view
> has a
> reinvigorated relevance to
> some of the epistemological debates of today, particularly the current
> culture war
> between fundamentalist religion and scientistic science.
>
> Is it time for a new Cybernetic Serendipity?
>
> Simeon
>
> Simeon Nelson FRSA
> Reader in Sculpture
> University of Hertfordshire
> Hatfield, UK
> [log in to unmask]
> +44 (0)2072471375
> +44 (0) 7702375452
> www.simeon-nelson.com
>
>
>
>
>
> On 3 Sep 2008, at 09:30, Simon Biggs wrote:
>
> I think Roger has touched on two of the key issues why events like
> Cybernetic Serendipity, 9 Evenings and Software marked the high-
> water mark
> of certain artistic practices and social agendas rather than a
> beginning.
>
> The gender issue was important, as has already been discussed.
> Since 1968
> the world has changed, in large part due to shifts in gender politics.
>
> Issues around colonial/post-colonial politics were equally
> important, both
> within states and between them. This is still an active determinant
> in our
> world and is a complex issue (I am completing a paper that cites
> Ortiz's
> work, which remains relevant today).
>
> However, in a sense (and acutely aware I am not seen to be
> downplaying what
> remain major social issues), these were not the key factors. They
> can be
> regarded as part of the change rather than prescient or causal.
>
> 1968 was a turning point. It was the year that people began to move
> away
> from optimistic expectations for the future to a far darker view of
> where
> we
> were going. Paris 1968 was inspired by despair and fear, not hope and
> renewal. The Vietnam war hung over everything like a sickening
> stench. You
> could smell the moral decay effusing from the elites of Washington,
> London,
> Paris and Moscow. They were without vision, trapped in their cold-war
> manoeuvres, no longer certain why they were at each other's throats.
>
> Another Yasmin member mentioned that people turned against
> technology as
> they began to see it as a negative force. I don't think it was as
> simple or
> as shallow as that. People were aware of and responding to
> something more
> fundamental. My impression, having grown to adulthood during the
> decade
> that
> began in 68, was that people's perception of themselves, of people in
> general, shifted profoundly. There began to be a general view that
> people
> were not very nice, that we were violent, corrupt, selfish and
> abusive to
> our environment and to one another. The politicians of the day
> didn't help
> as they generally set a poor example (they continue to set a bad
> example).
> I
> have always understood that this change in world-view marked the
> shift from
> the Modern to that which followed it (what has often been called
> post-modernism), even if post-modern themes were evident a decade
> or more
> before. We should remember that the term post-modern did not enter
> common
> parlance until a decade after 1968, with Lyotard's Post-Modern
> Condition
> (1979).
>
> Artists both led the development of and reflected this zeitgeist.
> The art
> of
> the decade or so after 68 was markedly different to that of the period
> prior. It was darker, existentially pregnant with a sense of
> absence. I am
> thinking minimalism and early performance/video practices, such as
> Lucinda
> Childs and Vito Acconci, as well as artists as diverse as Andre and
> Beuys.
> I
> am thinking of Pasolini and Antonioni's landscapes, Kubrick's
> journey from
> 2001 to A Clockwork Orange. It was an art that presented the human
> condition
> as fundamentally flawed, that proposed we could not trust our own
> instincts
> nor the social constraints that tamed them. It was bleak, with people
> caught
> between a rock and a hard place. However, much of the art of that
> time was
> beautiful in its elegance, simplicity and simmering fear.
>
> For artists who developed in the shadow of these opposing world-
> views (I am
> one of that generation) it was confusing, to say the least. At one
> extreme
> there was the positivist, humanist (Roger is right to cite
> cybernetics as
> essentially a humanist paradigm) and perhaps naive outlook of those
> artists
> associated with the art and technology movement. At the other there
> was the
> doom-laden nihilist moaning's of those artists who thought we were
> at the
> Oend of time'. Most artists worked somewhere along this spectrum,
> but this
> was the spectrum they had to work with. Some emerging artists
> sought to
> broker a compromise between the two positions, others chose a side
> – many
> chose to ignore the debate altogether and pursue highly personal
> agendas
> instead. To some degree all these positions came to fruition in the
> 1980's,
> which was such a pluralist decade.
>
> I am still digesting the 90's...
>
> A discussion of Cybernetic Serendipity might benefit from engaging the
> social context within which the show was mounted and the
> developments that
> came after. Art is meaningless, decoration for our museums, without an
> understanding of the context within which it was made and a reasonable
> knowledge of the history around it. It would be good to hear some
> of the
> personal reminiscences of those involved with events such as
> Cybernetic
> Serendipity, especially as concerns how they perceived the social
> developments of the time and how these impacted on their art and
> ideas.
> This
> is the history that has not been told but one many of us share, if
> only as
> a
> legacy.
>
> Somebody also mentioned that in the States (and elsewhere) Cybernetic
> Serendipity was not as high profile as it seemed in the UK, citing
> other
> events (and Burnham) as key. It would be good to hear from those
> who were
> involved in these other initiatives too, partly to place Cybernetic
> Serendipity within its context and to gain a better understanding
> of how
> similar dynamics were encountered and managed in different contexts.
>
> 2008 is the fortieth anniversary of lot's of things.
>
> Regards
>
> Simon
>
>
> Professor Simon Biggs
> edinburgh college of art
> [log in to unmask]
> www.eca.ac.uk
>
> [log in to unmask]
> www.littlepig.org.uk
> AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
>
>
>
> From: roger malina <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: roger malina <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 10:25:17 -0700
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Fwd: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Fwd:
> [OlatsNewsEnglish] Cybernetics Serendipity Redux
>
> if cybernetics serendipity were re imagined today= hopefully the
> gender
> balance
> in exhibiting artists in 2008 would be improved compared to 1968= yet
> cybernetics
> i bet is a very male field today as it was in 1968
>
> a parallel discussion would be relevant about the national origin
> of the
> artists concerned !!
>
> roger malina
>
>
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland,
> number
> SC009201
>
--
Roger Malina is in France at this time
IN USA
phone 1 510 853 2007
When in France I can be reached at:
011 33 (0) 6 15 79 59 26
or (0) 6 80 45 94 47
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