Cybernetic Serendipity: The 1968 Show Where Machines Made Art
In 1968 Jasia Reichardt filled London's ICA with computer drawings and machines that moved and listened, and put engineers on equal footing with artists.
It started with a tip. When the German philosopher Max Bense visited a concrete poetry show at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1965, the curator Jasia Reichardt asked him what she should do next. He told her to look into computers. Three years later, from August 2 to October 20, 1968, her answer filled the ICA: Cybernetic Serendipity.
It had about 130 contributors. By Reichardt's own count, 43 were composers, artists and poets, and 87 were engineers, doctors, computer scientists and philosophers. Plotter drawings by Frieder Nake and Georg Nees shared the rooms with machines. Edward Ihnatowicz's SAM, a flower-like Sound Activated Mobile, turned toward whoever was making noise. Gordon Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles, a large reactive installation, is now seen as an early step toward human-machine interaction. William Fetter's Boeing drawings, often called the first computer drawings of the human figure, were there too.
Tony Benn, then Minister of Technology, opened the show, and it made no distinction between art-school makers and scientists. The ICA puts attendance at some 60,000. In 1969 it traveled to the Corcoran in Washington and the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and the Computer Arts Society was founded in London in its wake. As the ICA later put it, the show dealt with possibilities rather than achievements. In 1968, that was the point.
Sources
- Cybernetic Serendipity: A Documentation | Institute of Contemporary Arts
- Cybernetic Serendipity: Getting Rid of Preconceptions | Studio International
- Cybernetic Serendipity: History and Lasting Legacy | Studio International
- Cybernetic Serendipity | Database of Digital Art
Image: SAM by Edward Ihnatowicz, photo by 384 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).