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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE The Dilemma of Media Art: ABSTRACT
Cybernetic Serendipity One year after the 1967 Summer of Love and at a time at the ICA London of considerable political unrest throughout the United States and Europe, Cybernetic Serendipity—The Computer and the Arts opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London Rainer Usselmann to much critical and popular acclaim. This paper outlines the conceptual framework of this seminal exhibition and looks at some of the accompanying press reception in order to address a key question: how media art deals with its own he coming together of digital communications the concept, realization and media T historicity and the underlying technology and art in the second half of the 20th century has reception of this important show. socioeconomic forces that attracted a considerable amount of debate. Throughout the By identifying some opportunities render it possible. Presented 35 early years of what is now called media art, a sense of great op- missed in the wake of this exhibi- years ago and still paradigmatic timism about the possibilities of the new medium prevailed. tion, I want to raise a number of key for the ever-shifting boundaries between art, technology, As recently as 1997, during the halcyon years of the technol- issues concerning media art in gen- commerce and entertainment, ogy boom, a sense of genuine excitement was palpable among eral. Cybernetic Serendipity epito- theorists and practitioners. Hans-Peter Schwarz, one of the mizes some of the complicated founding directors of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien- dynamics that delineate the gamut of media art today. technologie (ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany), described media art HAPPY ACCIDENTS as an “explosive charge” at the gates of traditional artistic es- One year after the Summer of Love tablishments [1]. and at a time of considerable polit- A few years later, in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble, ical unrest throughout the United States and Europe, Cyber- Schwarz’s explosive charge turns out to be a dud. The art es- netic Serendipity opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art tablishment has not been blown to pieces; on the contrary, if in London on 2 August 1968 (Fig. 1). Under the curatorship anything, the enthusiasm for all things digital has suffered a of Jasia Reichardt, then associate director of the institute, the considerable setback. But perhaps the time has come to de- exhibition brought together work from a total of “130 con- bate the evolution of computer art with a greater sense of his- tributors, of whom 43 were composers, artists and poets, and torical and critical distance. It is my intention to contribute to 87 . . . engineers, doctors, computer scientists and philoso- this debate with a review, 35 years after the event, of “Cyber- phers” [3]. One of the ICA’s most successful projects, Cyber- netic Serendipity—The Computer and the Arts,” an early land- netic Serendipity drew an audience of between 45,000 and mark exhibition of computer art at the ICA in London. Often 60,000 [4]. According to Reichardt, the exhibition “had visi- regarded as a key event in the institutionalization of media art, tors of all ages, all types, all nationalities, all classes” [5]. The Cybernetic Serendipity has been the subject of a growing num- exhibition closed on 30 October 1968. ber of papers [2], to which I would like to add a critique of The title of the exhibition suggested its intent: to make chance discoveries in the course of using cybernetic devices, or, as the Daily Mirror put it at the time, to use computers “to Rainer Usselmann (art historian), 5 Normandy Street, Alton, Hampshire GU34 1DD, U.K. find unexpected joys in life and art” [6]. It was structured into E-mail:
Fig. 1. “Cybernetic Serendipity,” front of exhibition invitation by Franciszka Themerson. (© Cyber- netic Serendipity)
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other, and sound insulation proved a major problem. Compared with those of traditional projects, the difficulties in- volved in keeping the exhibition in work- ing order were greater by several orders of magnitude. Owing to the unprece- dented cost involved in mounting Cy- bernetic Serendipity, the need for corporate involvement was considerable, possibly stifling a more critical approach. After some initial reluctance on the part of industry, funding, benefit in kind and participation was secured, most signifi- cantly from IBM, Boeing, General Mo- tors, Westinghouse, Calcomp, Bell Telephone Labs and the U.S. Air Force research labs. All in all, the resounding success of the exhibition seemed to vin- dicate the project. The media reception of Cybernetic Serendipity was on the whole extremely favorable. In a review symptomatic of much press coverage, the Evening Stan- dard enthused: “Where in London could you take a hippy, a computer program- mer, a ten-year-old schoolboy and guar- antee that each would be perfectly happy for an hour without you having to lift a finger to entertain them?” [7] The Guardian agreed that it “lured into Nash House people who would never have dreamed of attending an ICA exhibition before” [8]. Cybernetic Serendipity promised fun for the whole family, not just an elite of art connoisseurs. “Chil- dren, scientists and the simply curious could spend fascinated hours in this world of computer art” [9]. The press cel- ebrated the exhibition as an event that “guaranteed to fascinate anyone from toddling age to the grave” [10]. Even the writer in The Lady felt compelled to urge that “one must go to the present exhibi- tion at the INSTITUTE OF CONTEM- PORARY ARTS ...not to understand in the least what is going on but to experi- ence that particular tingle which is in- herent in an act of threshold-crossing” Fig. 2. Andrew Rawlinson, computer poetry, 1968. (© Andrew Rawlinson. Photo © Cyber- [11]. Art critic Jonathan Benthall de- netic Serendipity.) clared that Cybernetic Serendipity would be remembered as a “landmark,” not least due to its “breeziness and catholic- generated graphics, film, music and po- monochrome paintings of IBM comput- ity” [12]. Others agreed: “For breaking etry (see Figs 2–4). The second section ers. Presentations by General Motors and new ground, revealing new fields of ex- provided a showcase for cybernetic de- Boeing concluded the exhibition. periment, seminal importance, sheer vices, such as interactive installations, ro- The level of logistic complexity in- hard work and enormous organization, bots and painting machines. The third volved in organizing, mounting and the exhibition Cybernetic Serendip- area was a “learning zone,” which dealt maintaining the show was unprece- ity . . . is arguably the most important ex- with the history of cybernetics and the dented. Instead of handling traditional hibition in the world at the moment” demonstration of uses for computers artifacts, the administrators and curators [13]. According to Brent McGregor, “the (see Fig. 5). The list of contributing at the ICA found themselves in charge of status of the event was such that Umberto artists included Bruce Lacey, Wen Ying extremely fragile computer soft- and Eco came from Italy to view its wonders” Tsai, James Seawright, Nam June Paik, hardware, which proved difficult to set [14]. Jean Tinguely, John Cage and Lowell up and run. Interactive systems in neigh- Aside from the almost unanimous con- Nesbitt, who exhibited a series of opaque, boring exhibits interfered with one an- sensus that Cybernetic Serendipity was
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uine Mondrian painting from a com- listen to speakers and earphones issuing puter fake of a Mondrian painting: “59% sounds and information” [23]. The of the people who were shown both the Evening Standard characterized the exhi- Mondrian and one of the computer ver- bition as “a kind of homage to electron- sions preferred the latter, 28% identified ics, with the emphasis on fun rather than the computer picture correctly, and 72% art or technical achievement” [24]. Kath- thought that the Mondrian was done by arine Hadley commented that “if the computer” [19]. exhibition’s artistic achievement is con- troversial, for the sheer enjoyment of playing with some of 1968’s most inge- COMPUTERS ARE FUN! nious computer toys, Cybernetic Seren- Lingering doubts about the merits of dipity is unrivalled” [25]. Michael “artistic” experiments with computer Shepard of the Sunday Telegraph described hard- and software aside, many observers “the most sophisticated amusement ar- emphasized the sheer fun that could be cade you could hope to find around, an had by putting art and science together. intellectual funfair without parallel” [26], Nigel Gosling remarked that “this exhi- while John Russel from the Sunday Times bition ...could have been mounted with saw “computers at playtime” [27]. equal validity in the Science Museum, and discussed with equal ...understanding by a science correspondent” [20]. DISSENTING VOICES The ICA’s Leslie Stack declared: Overall, the praise for Reichardt’s un- dertaking seems almost unanimous and We want people to lose their fear of com- Fig. 3. Plotter print-out. Computer graphics the near absence of critical debate by Peter Milojevic, McGill University, Mon- puters by playing with them and asking treal. Milojevic created his graphics program them simple questions. ...So many peo- equally striking. Could it be that the ICA’s in Fortran on an IBM 7044, which was con- ple are afraid that computers will take “happy accidents” flourished so well be- nected to a Calcomp 565 plotter. (© Peter over, but in this show they will see these cause they were staged in an atmosphere Milojevic. While every effort has been made machines will only do what we want them of breathtaking naïveté? Only a few lone to. . . . Happy accidents . . . can happen to locate the copyright holder for permission voices seem to acknowledge the more se- to use this image, we have been unable to do between art and technology [21]. so. Photo © Cybernetic Serendipity.) rious and inevitably unhappy accidents The Daily Mirror duly delivered a pop- that litter the history of cybernetics. “Do ulist note: “Computers don’t bite, for it not be fooled,” cautioned Michael worth seeing, two recurring themes can is a joyous exhibition” [22]. Mario Amaya McNay of the Guardian in a rare critical be identified in the reception and pre- seemed to capture the atmosphere of Cy- review of the exhibition: “Norbert sentation of the exhibition. bernetic Serendipity, describing it as “a Wiener ...knew better. He published veritable Luna Park of sideshows, display the first treatise on the new science not booths, and fun-houses, inviting visitors very long after the holocausts of Hi- THE END OF ART? to touch, push buttons, talk or sing into roshima and Nagasaki, yet he felt able to Mario Amaya, in the Financial Times, microphones and television screens, or predict for cybernetics a destiny as fate- pondered: “I am left with the sneaking suspicion that much of this exhibition has little to do with art as such. In fact, Fig. 4. Installation view. To the left, Sidebands by Hugh Riddle and Anthony Pritchett, 1968. These graphic forms are stills from a kinetic sequence using oscillographic techniques, which the show seems to be telling us more are used for frequency measurement. The system on display was originally developed to about what art is not, rather than what it generate graphics for the television trailer of the BBC science-fiction series “Out of the could be” [15]. More to the point, Unknown.” (© Cybernetic Serendipity) Michael Shepard in the Sunday Telegraph found that “this exhibition ...serves to show up ...a desolation to be seen in art generally—that we haven’t the faintest idea these days what art is for or about” [16]. Robert Melville from the New States- man went even further: “The winking lights, the flickering television screens and the squawks from the music ma- chines are signaling the end of abstract art; when machines can do it, it will not be worth doing” [17]. According to Leslie Stack, the ICA’s information offi- cer, “people will not know what has been created by the scientist and what comes from artists” [18]. Reichardt related an experiment, carried out under the aus- pices of Michael Noll at the Bell Tele- phone Laboratories, in which a sample audience attempted to distinguish a gen-
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tion of scientific know-how, however, did not simply lead to a re-valorization of the art object and the materials that could be made of it. On the contrary, the integra- tion of technology engendered a grow- ing interest that went beyond a strictly object-oriented approach toward prac- tices that focus on process, ideas and (inter-) actions. Concomitant with ex- periments in participation and interac- tion, with happenings, performances, land art and conceptual art, media art is often regarded as a conclusion of the de- materialization of the art object [33]. What better way to conceptualize the art object than to program a machine in a grammar of pure electronic differences [34], zeroes and ones? Back in the 1940s, Norbert Wiener’s new science of cybernetics evolved from Fig. 5. “Highlights of the History and Technology of IBM Computers from 1890 to the Pres- military experiments with feedback loops ent.” The display was produced by IBM for an exhibition entitled “History and Technology [35]. Wiener devised a tracking mecha- of Computers,” which was held at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., in 1967. The IBM section won the gold medal as the most outstanding exhibit of that year at the 1967 nism for anti-aircraft guns, feeding in- International Display World Competition. (© IBM/Cybernetic Serendipity) formation about the predicted flight path of an enemy plane back into the sys- tem so that the gun could change its ful as for the atom” [28]. McNay correctly pleasure” [32]. Does this total lack of crit- position accordingly. The whole con- pointed out that “these words do not ap- ical engagement with the socioeconomic traption, including the gunner, could be pear in the promotional literature for the sphere point to a wider dilemma in defined as a goal-driven, dynamic system exhibition, but in their shadow the jokes media art? that responded to environmental take on a pallid look” [29]. The writer in changes in order to achieve predeter- New Society put it more succinctly: mined objectives. The anti-aircraft gun- TECHNOLOGY, ART ner as part of an integrated, nervous—if The conclusion is a rather sinister one AND OLITICS ROM P : F not downright twitchy—system (Wiener’s for those who believe that cybernation is ORBERT IENER TO THE not a neutral development, but an in- N W “hunting” [36]), an early cyborg of sorts, strument of a growing technocratic au- MILLENNIUM DOME constitutes a striking image for the thoritarianism, which deserves the Far from being the first exhibition to emerging theory of cybernetics (see critical resistance and not the consoling fellowship of our artists. When we ignore showcase art and technology in the post- Fig. 6 for an exhibit that provided a pre- the total social context in which they war years, Cybernetic Serendipity was scient connection with cybernetics in the work, and begin to accept the after-hours one of many high-profile events staged case of “Joey”). fun and games of IBM technicians as art, towards the end of a first phase of inno- Owing to its broad remit, cybernetic we are not all that far from admiring the vation and experimentation. But perhaps thinking lent itself to an extremely wide aesthetic surface of thermonuclear mushroom clouds and ballistic missiles more successfully than any other exhibi- range of interdisciplinary practices and [30]. tion at the time, Cybernetic Serendipity, scientific discourses. Cybernetics prom- with naïve enthusiasm, managed to cap- ised to constitute nothing less than an in- The fact that Cybernetic Serendipity ture a snapshot of art, entertainment, sci- tegrative lingua franca, which biologists enjoyed tremendous popularity in the ence and politics, all mixed up in a and mathematicians, economists and an- late summer of 1968 in London, while, curious amalgam that came to be known thropologists were invited to take up and in the words of its curator, “the same ven- as media art. use [37]. By the mid-1950s, artists and ture in Paris would have needed police In the decades immediately after composers also began to explore and en- protection” does indeed raise some im- World War II, an increasing curiosity and gage with cybernetic thinking. Unlike portant questions [31]. Critics might competence began to emerge among mechanical technology, however, elec- argue that, in the United Kingdom, the artists, focusing on technology as a new tronic hardware could only be obtained subversive momentum of 1968 never un- means to facilitate exploration of and in- and manipulated in collaboration with furled in the same way, with the same teractions with the physical environment. industrial corporations. Engineers, force, as it did in continental Europe or An interest in the use of industrial mate- whose help became indispensable, began the United States; that Britain’s pathetic rials, chemical processes and state-of-the- to develop an interest in the work of “revolt” hardly left the campus of the art engineering practices characterizes artists. London School of Economics. Still, at many artistic experiments in the 1950s When E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and a time of heightened global political and 1960s. In the wake of these explo- Technology) formed in 1967, it was awareness, not least in the wake of the rations, artists appropriated modern founded on the strong belief “that an in- American war in Vietnam, it seems ex- materials, equipment and scientific dustrially sponsored, effective working traordinary that the ICA did not deem it know-how, often in partnership with busi- relationship between artists and engi- necessary to make any statements other ness corporations, research institutes, neers will lead to new possibilities which than that “computers can be used for technicians and engineers. The utiliza- will benefit society as a whole” [38]. In-
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dicative of the pitfalls that lie ahead when art, technology and entertainment are married under industry patronage, the Fig. 6. The Mechanical Boy, E.A.T. project climaxed with the com- drawing by Joey. In 1959, Bruno mission to build the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion Bettelheim published an ac- at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair. Literally count of “Joey,” a boy who thought of himself as a robot. an inflatable edifice of smoke and mir- Joey constructed machines in his rors, E.A.T.’s dome merged the psyche- bedroom and attempted to delic with the corporate, resulting in an connect himself with imaginary experience akin to imagining Richard wires to power outlets in order Wagner on acid. Gene Youngblood’s call to perform basic bodily func- tions. Bettelheim argued that for a “practical utopianism” by means of Joey’s autism was caused by his “perpetual fog banks and krypton laser unloving parents. Joey’s drawing rainbow light showers” [39] adds an al- shows a man whose body is most tragicomic footnote. formed by electrical wires. (© “Joey.” While every effort has In the British art scene, it was perhaps been made to locate the copy- one individual, more than any others, right holder for permission to who contributed to the spread of cyber- use this image, we have been netic thinking. In a letter to the editor of unable to do so. Photo © Cyber- Studio International published in July netic Serendipity.) 1968, Roy Ascott claimed precedence “as the artist responsible for first introduc- ing cybernetic theory into art education in this country (Ealing 1961) and for hav- ing disseminated the concept of a cyber- netic vision in art through various art and scientific journals in recent years” [40]. Ascott’s Groundcourse, a unique pro- gram of study at Ealing School of Art (1961–1964) and later at Ipswich Civic College (1964–1967), incorporated in- novative methods, such as behavioral psychology, chance operations and in- tices or for outdated methods on either in 1965 to encourage the growth of com- teractive collaborations. Groups of six side of industry” [42]. If Britain were to puter usage in the U.K., “might well take students functioned as integrated units remain a player on the world stage, it a leaf from the ICA’s book” [43]. Beard of self-regulation, who had to react to en- would have to embrace modern tech- attested to a widespread lack of “com- vironmental stimuli according to prede- nology, modern practices and modern puter appreciation” in society and en- termined parameters. Ascott’s 1964 show thinking. dorsed the ICA exhibition as “required “Diagram Boxes and Analogue Struc- Against this backdrop, Cybernetic viewing,” since it achieved “in an instant” tures,” at the Molton Gallery in London, Serendipity fitted in extremely well, as it what the unwieldy, technocratic NCC presented “a cybernetic model of art as offered a lighthearted view of the mod- could only dream of: a “re-definition” an interactive system” [41]. For Ascott, ern world without raising too many (if without which it was “undoubted that the the participatory nature of his art sug- any) objections or stirring fears. Rather computer will remain in an exclu- gested a model in which environment, than focus on the technocratic, threat- sive ...field which the bulk of the next artist and audience were all part of the ening or plainly vacuous elements in Wil- generation will no more understand than same system. Tellingly, however, Ascott’s son’s vision, the exhibition merged we do” [44]. Judging from the public innovative practice was not considered science and technology with great enter- reception of the exhibition, Cybernetic suitable for Cybernetic Serendipity. tainment and a dash of art. Staged when Serendipity certainly succeeded in Nonetheless, the exhibition’s pseudo- computers consisted of large, centralized increasing “computer appreciation.” progressive message, wrapped up in a mainframes guarded by a caste of stern More interestingly, however, it did so by fun-fair of blinking, hooting robots, hit programmers, Cybernetic Serendipity transforming the austere “modernist upon an impressionable sociopolitical succeeded in injecting an overdue ele- computational aesthetic” [45], with its and cultural environment. For the first ment of fun into the information- mainframes and technician program- time since the end of the war, Britain was technology sector. Perhaps for the first mers, into a new kind of cool, entertain- experiencing a rapidly rising standard of time, it could be considered “cool” to be ing and decidedly postmodern spectacle. living and the emergence of youth cul- involved with computers. Especially for Over 30 years on, Britain’s trendy ture. Labour’s election victory in 1964 the young and impressionable, Cyber- media and IT industries were once again had put a modernization program at the netic Serendipity provided a sense of ex- at the heart of government drives to pro- top of the political agenda, and the citement, much needed if Britain was mote an image of cutting-edge art and prime minister’s call for a technological going to compete successfully in the new technology as national assets. Tony Blair’s utopia is unforgotten. Outlining his vi- age of digital computing. “Cool Britannia” project and a plethora sion of a modern Britain, Harold Wilson According to Roger Beard in a 1968 of new art and technology initiatives put described a country “forged in the white issue of Technical Education & Industrial New Labour’s new millennium into heat of this revolution” where there Training, the National Computing Cen- sharp relief. From dotcom start-ups would be “no place for restrictive prac- tre (NCC), a government agency set up around London’s Hoxton Square to the
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newly built Wellcome Wing of the Sci- constraints coalesce to limit the poten- Cold War a strong “partnership” was en- ence Museum, the alliance between com- tial of the device radically to disrupt pre- couraged between the military and the puters and art was portrayed once again existing social formations. I will refer to academic community [51]. The main this particular “concentration” of deter- as integral to the notion of a modern na- mining social factors as the “law” of the driving force for military-technological tion with a bright and prosperous future. suppression of radical potential [47]. developments was the Advanced Re- New Labour’s Millennium Dome proj- search Projects Agency (ARPA), which ect, however, came to epitomize the fal- The success of an invention or a pro- was founded in the aftermath of the Sput- lacy of “irrational exuberance” [46] and totype, according to Winston, depends nik shock of 1957: empty political rhetoric, a bubble that upon its perceived threat to institutional When the space program acceler- burst soon after the millennium fire- politics and associated business interests on the one hand and its perceived bene- ated ...in 1957, digital computers be- works had gone off. Packaged as a family- came an integral part of that activity as friendly exhibition of digital wizardry fit on the other. Only if an unequivocal well. The more sophisticated the various and sponsored by corporate business, the supervening social necessity becomes ap- military systems became, the greater the parent can the invention enter into the demands placed on their computing el- Dome project failed to recoup its cost ements [52]. and remains, to this day, a liability to the phase of diffusion. Powerful factors, public purse. The magic formula that however, jeopardize the success and dis- Responsible for coordinating the aca- combined, in one big spectacle, science, semination of the invention for some demic research effort in electronics and entertainment, art and politics seemed time. Winston argues: “Understanding engineering was ARPA’s Information to have lost its pulling power. However, the interaction of the positive effects of Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). in science museums, educational estab- supervening necessity and the brake of According to Norberg and O’Neill, three lishments and media art institutions the ‘law’ of the suppression of radical po- major branches in computer science ben- around the world the spirit of Cybernetic tential is crucial to a proper overview of efited from the massive injection of gov- Serendipity lives on. Interactive theme how telecommunications technologies ernment money through the IPTO”: parks and digital teaching aids have be- develop” [48]. computer graphics—“the fundamental come standard fare, except that, after Babbage’s analytical engine could not concepts behind the remarkable com- over two decades of exposure to digital have been built in 1833, due to the ab- puter graphic images we encounter every consumer products, the visiting public is sence of a supervening social necessity. day emerged primarily from research perhaps less impressionable. If you own Only with the increasing complexity of projects funded by the IPTO’; artificial a PlayStation 2, why get excited about an the American population census in the intelligence—“IPTO ...was the largest interactive museum display unless you late 19th century and the emergence of funder of AI in the world for at least a de- get blown away by more bang for your a modern business culture could an im- cade and a half after 1962—providing an buck? petus emerge. Yet it had to come to the amount far greater than the total pro- “firing table crisis” in the United States vided by all other groups”; and network- and the ENIGMA blackouts in Britain ing—”It is well to remember that the during World War II for Winston’s “law” CYBERNETIC SERENDIPITY, basis for this program to connect us to of the suppression of radical potential to the ‘Information Superhighway’ is only SUPERVENING SOCIAL be crushed by emerging supervening so- NECESSITY AND DATABASE the latest chapter in the story of inven- cial necessity [49]. The need for military tion, development, and implementation POLITICS processing power had become over- of networking, a technology begun by Contrary to the assumptions made in Cy- whelming. Towards the end of World IPTO” [53]. bernetic Serendipity, science and tech- War II, the first electronic computers Here, then, we have the “happy” in- nology are not self-sufficient, immune were operational, ready to be fully de- gredients of Cybernetic Serendipity’s suc- from outside influences, political pres- ployed in the nuclear arms race of the cess: funny-sounding robots, interactive sures and economic interests. On the Cold War. The military-industrial com- computer graphics, simulators and sys- contrary, technological developments plex had become the main driving force tems that react to the environment; in a are symptomatic in character, and the so- in the development of computer science. word, a re-packaged and sanitized arse- cioeconomic conditions that drive scien- Michael De Landa warns that nal of high technology, straight from the tific progress must be understood if we may easily dismiss the role that the laboratories of the American military- technology is to be brought to bear military played, arguing that without the industrial complex. And not a single within artistic practice. intensification and concentration of ef- mention of the real driving force behind Why is it, for instance, that Charles fort brought about by the war, the com- puter would have developed on its own, computer technology of the 1940s, 1950s Babbage’s proposals for an analytical en- perhaps at a slower pace. And I agree that and 1960s can be found in the exhibition gine in 1833 were only realized some 100 this is correct. On the other hand, many catalogue or in most of the accompany- years later in Vannevar Bush’s Differen- of the uses to which computers were put ing press coverage: the demands of the after the war illustrate the other side of tial Analyzer? According to Brian Win- U.S. war economy. Concerning com- ston, technology is far more implicated the story: a direct participation of mili- tary institutions in the development of puter technology’s supervening social in the social sphere than is usually ac- technology, a participation which actu- necessity of the late 1960s, Cybernetic knowledged. He proposes a model that ally shaped this technology in the direc- Serendipity excelled only in its conspic- illustrates his point: tion of uniformization, routinization and uous silence (see Fig. 5). This glaring concentration of control [50]. In this model, the “accelerator” is the su- omission is particularly poignant at a pervening social necessity transforming While it may be simplistic to maintain time of heightened global tensions, war the prototype into an “invention” and that computer-scientific activity took in the Far East and political unrest in pushing the invention out into the world—causing its diffusion. But there is place exclusively for and within the mil- most major Western capitals. Cybernetic also a “brake”: this operates as a third itary sector, Arthur L. Norberg and Judy Serendipity, without doubt, failed to ad- transformation, wherein general social E. O’Neill point out that throughout the dress what needed addressing; it did not
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balance the potential for entertainment database politics as the site for critical References and Notes with the need for critical reflection. It practice, operating from within an all- 1. Hans-Peter Schwarz, “Discourse 1: Media Muse- created a huge amount of enthusiasm encompassing “information paradigm” ums,” in Rebecca Picht and Birgit Stöckmann, eds., about technology without revealing its [56]. At a time when the interface be- Media Art History (New York: Prestel, 1997) p. 11. hidden agenda or indeed its true poten- tween human and computer begins its 2. P. Brown, “30 Years On: Remembering Cybernetic tial. evolution into an alluring, multi-sensory Serendipity,” Outline, The CTIAD Journal 6 (Autumn 1998) pp. 3–5; Mitchell Whitelaw, “1968/1998: Re- Clearly, an analysis of the aesthetics of spectacle, not least thanks to willing thinking a Systems Aesthetic,” ANAT (Australian Net- media art must recognize and acknowl- media artists such as Youngblood, Cy- work for Art and Technology) (June 1998)
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29. McNay [28]. 44. Beard [43]. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000) p. 1. 30. “Aesthetic Gadgetry,” New Society (8 August 1968). 45. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen—Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; 52. Norberg and O’Neill [51] p. 4. 31. Reichardt [3]. originally published 1995) pp. 18–36. 53. Norberg and O’Neill [51] pp. 151–197. 32. Talbot [18]. 46. Alan Greenspan, Speech to the American En- terprise Institute (1996). 54. A compelling example of disruptive strategies can 33. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7, be found in Brecht’s “Epic Theatre.” Rejecting “culi- No. 1 (September 1968) p. 31.; Lucy R. Lippard, Six 47. Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society—A nary” consumption, Brecht favored interruption Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York: History: From the Telegraph to the Internet, (London: over intoxication; he juxtaposed more than he fused Praeger, 1973). Routledge, 1998) p. 11. For a diagrammatic rendi- together in order to make the audience realize, rec- tion of Winston’s model, see Figure 7 on p. 14. ognize and respond, rather than dream and escape 34. Roy Ascott, “Is There Love in the Telematic Em- in theatrical pseudo-reality. See Bertolt Brecht, “A brace?” Art Journal 49, No. 3 (1990) p. 241. 48. Winston [47]. Short Organum for the Theatre,” in John Willett, ed. and trans., Brecht on Theatre—The Development of an 35. Norbert Wiener, “Introduction,” in Norbert 49. For the production of so-called firing tables, a Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1990; essay originally Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in huge number of differential equations had to be cal- published 1948) p. 194. the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT culated. Goldstine recalls that “a typical firing table Press, 1999; originally published 1948) pp. 11–12. required perhaps 2,000–4,000 trajectories” and 55. Natalie Jeremijenko, “Database Politics and So- quotes from a working memo from the Ballistic Re- 36. The term “hunting” is used in mechanical engi- cial Simulations,” in Barbara London, ed., Technology search Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, of 1 Feb- neering to describe pathological oscillations between in the 1990s: Natalie Jeremijenko, MOMA (2000) [orig- ruary 1944, stating that “‘even with the personnel two fixed points. The mechanism, due to its initial inally published 1995];
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