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There is a good definition of Serendipity at http:// www.medienkunstnetz.de/exhibitions/serendipity/, I quote " Serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. There was a legend about three princes of Serendip (old name for Ceylon) who used to travel throughout the world and whatever was their aim or whatever they looked for, they always found something very much better. Walpole used the term serendipity to describe the faculty of making happy chance discoveries. Through the use of cybernetic devides to make graphics, film and poems, as well as other randomising machines which interact with the spectator, many happy discoveries were made." Is the idea here that cybernetics somehow penetrates a seeming randomness in the phenomenal world to uncover deeper (serendipitous) structure and meaning? This would fit well with the artist-as-seer/ artist-as-revolutionary personas of Joseph Beuys, Guy Debord and others influential to the '68 uprisings. I think that cybernetics provides us with as good a framework for seeing wholes and critiquing 'the system' as it did forty years ago but minus the utopian, revolutionary fervour. Ecological thinking shares with cybernetics a perception of relationships and links between things not immediately apparent and not part of general public discourse. As an artist who works a lot in the public realm, I also think that cybernetics/system theory has had a significant positive influence on aspects of current urban and transport design. A crash course in cybernetics and ecological science should be mandatory for anyone seeking public office. Simeon On 4 Sep 2008, at 10:24, Simon Biggs wrote: It occurs to me that cybernetics and serendipity are two different things. We have been discussing the first part of the term but assuming the second part is subsumed into that subject. It is, of course, a term with its own independent existence. I understand Oserendipity’ to mean a happy accident or confluence of events. Perhaps this is where a problem lies? As I observed in a previous post, we have, and still do, live in dark times. Perhaps the likelihood of happy accidents is something most people do not consider probable anymore. Most accidents we encounter are definitely not happy, whether a car crash on the highway, a nuclear power plant melt-down or (oops) a little genocide. When we think of the future now we think of it with trepidation; not of sunny uplands but of ecological crisis and social breakdown. In 1968 happy accidents may well have seemed more probable. So, I would be interested to see how the subject of cybernetics might be addressed in our current context – but I would be keen to see this happen in a manner decoupled from the serendipitous. Any attempt to place cybernetics into current discourse would be doomed to failure if it did not recognise the zeitgeist of the age and how distinct that is from where things were 40 years ago. Perhaps cybernetics could he harnessed to look at how ecological systems function and to aid in the public understanding of why things need to change if we are to preserve the world. I would imagine this to be the Batesonian approach. The current Republican vice-presidential nominee could do with a crash course in cybernetics and ecological science. However, if that were to happen it would definitely be most serendipitous! 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: Simeon Lockhart Nelson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2008 10:53:53 +0100 To: Simon Biggs <[log in to unmask]> Cc: <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Fwd: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Fwd: [OlatsNewsEnglish] Cybernetics Serendipity Redux 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 Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201