From: Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s
- Edward A. Shanken
1. Moving away from the notion of art as constituted in autonomous objects, Ascott redefined art as a cybernetic system comprised of a network of feedback loops. He conceived of art as but one member in a family of interconnected feedback loops in the cultural sphere, and he thought of culture as itself just one set of processes in a larger network of social relations. In this way, Ascott integrated cybernetics into aesthetics to theorize the relationship between art and society in terms of the interactive flow of information and behavior through a network of interconnected processes and systems.
2. Certainly Stiles is correct that the genealogy from gestural abstraction to happenings and to the performative elements of interactive art offers an important source of insight into the growing concern in the 1960s with the temporal dimension of art. Indeed, by Ascott’s own estimation, the work of the New York school, and Jackson Pollock’s web-like compositions in particular, greatly influenced his own thinking about art. While the abstract expressionist ethos of unbridled expression of the unconscious was too romantic for Ascott’s temperament, Pollock’s physical, corporeal involvement in and around his paintings established an important model for experimenting with the process by which art comes into being. The interconnecting skeins of Pollock’s dripped and poured paint came to suggest, for the younger artist, ways in which art functions metaphorically within connective networks of meaning. Moreover, Pollock’s decision to take the canvas off the easel and paint it on the ground altered the physical working relationship between artist and artwork from a vertical plane to a horizontal one, in which the artist looked down on the canvas from a bird’s eye view. In so doing, this method of working contributed to the reconceptualization of painting from a “window on the world” to a cosmological map of physical and metaphysical forces.
3. Ascott’s theories of art and cybernetics also directly informed his creation of a method for teaching art based on the same principles—a cybernetic pedagogy. In 1964, he described the continuum between his work in the studio and his work in the classroom, which he felt complemented each other: “In trying to clarify the relationship between art, science and behaviour, I have found myself able to become involved in a teaching situation without compromising my work. The two activities, creative and pedagogic, interact, each feeding back to the other. Both, I believe, are enriched.” It is no coincidence that he used the language of cybernetics to suggest how his art practice and pedagogy interacted, “each feeding back to the other,” as part of a mutually reinforcing system. As artist and critic Eddie Wolfram wrote in 1968, “I do not know of any other artist/teacher who projects such a high incident of integration between his teaching ideas and the art-hardware that he makes.”
In the classroom, cybernetics offered a clear model for reconceptualizing art and education—and their roles in a larger social system—by suggesting the organization of art education curricula in terms of a behavioral system of feedback and control. The course of study Ascott implemented at Ealing beginning in 1961 focused on these cybernetic principles. Students collaborated as elements of a system that regulated their artistic behavior as an integrated whole. For example, as Ascott himself explained, forming groups of six, each student would be “set the task of acquiring and acting out . . . a totally new personality, which is to be narrowly limited and largely the converse of what is considered to be their normal ‘selves.’” A student’s preconceptions about his or her personality, strengths and weaknesses as an artist, and about the nature of art itself, were not only thrown into question, but were actively transcended through the forced adoption of different behavioral characteristics and a rethinking of art-making and art as process and system. Because their individual behaviors had to be integrated into a coherent group process, each member would be “of necessity interdependent and highly conscious of each other’s capabilities and limitations” in order to accomplish together the “set goal of producing . . . an ordered entity.” In this way, students learned about the principles of cybernetics as applied to art through their own behavioral interactions as part of a cybernetic art system in which the controlled exchange of information organized the overall structure.
4. In conclusion, Ascott drew on cybernetics to theorize a model of how art could transform culture. He was particularly insistent that cybernetics was no simple prescription for a local remedy to the crisis of modern art, but represented the potential for reordering social values and reformulating what constituted knowledge and being. In 1968 he wrote:
As feedback between persons increases and communications become more rapid and precise, so the creative process no longer culminates in the art work, but extends beyond it deep into the life of each individual. Art is then determined not by the creativity of the artist alone, but by the creative behaviour that his work induces in the spectator, and in society at large. . . . The art of our time tends towards the development of a cybernetic vision, in which feedback, dialogue and involvement in some creative interplay at deep levels of experience are paramount. . . . The cybernetic spirit, more than the method or the applied science, creates a continuum of experience and knowledge which radically reshapes our philosophy, influences our behaviour and extends our thought.