Welcome Lecture Report //// Jasia Reinhardt: The Innovations of the Sixties Owe a Debt to the Fifties
In the opening talk for the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity, art curator and critic Jasia Reichardt spoke of her inspirations for Cybernetic Serendipity, the 1968 exhibition of cybernetic art at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts that forms the groundwork of interdisciplinary exchange for this year’s colloquium. However, rather than reflecting on the advances in artistic and scientific collaboration in the fifty years since, Reichardt elected to look backward from Cybernetic Serendipity to recognize the innovators of the 1950s who inspired her curation. “Despite the grimness of that decade,” she stated, “it had an undercurrent of newness and excitement.” While early computer art and video belonged to the 1960s, Reichardt noted that the process leading to such media innovation was gradual.
Reichardt reserved the majority of her opening address to reflect on three key communities of development in the 1950s: Paris, Tokyo, and London. Paris was the epicenter of the kinetic art movement; however, the makers there did not share a common agenda. She cited the ways that artists like Vassilakis Takis, Jean Tinguely, and Frank Malina incorporated industrial design, wire, motors, and electric light. Nicolas Schöffer in particular created the first autonomous cybernetic structure, CYSP 1, which was incorporated into a new ballet choreographed by Maurice Béjart for Avantguard Art Festival of Marseilles in 1956.
By contrast, in Tokyo, the innovation was group-oriented from the start of the decade. Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) consisted of fourteen members including artists, composers, a printmaker, a lighting engineer, a scene designer, and a poet. None, Reichardt said, had formal art education. Their early presentation of Joie de Vivre was made to coincide with Picasso’s exhibition in Tokyo in 1951. They pioneered the synthesis of tape-recorded electronic music with automated slide projection, a moment of artistic and technological development that Reichardt claimed was nothing short of revolutionary.
Finally, Reichardt spoke of the Gaberbocchus Common Room, a club founded in a London basement in 1957 that was designed as a space to combine the seemingly separate cultures of art and science. Co-founder Stefan Themerson believed scientists and artists were jointly “investigators and explorers of the universe” — from the furthest reaches of outer space to the inner life of another person. Their early programming included talks on cybernetics, math models, poetry, theatre criticism, films, and the philosophy of science. The Common Room gave rise to C. P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, “The Two Cultures,” which argued that the continued separation of the arts and the sciences into separate disciplines was destined to inhibit the type of visionary renaissance-like collaboration that could capably solve intractable problems.
I am particularly inspired by Reichardt’s address to this colloquium for her gratitude to her collaborative predecessors considering she is herself emblematic of a moment of Leonardo-like collaboration in her Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition. She notes correctly that very few things are one-hundred percent new, and the history of collaborative innovation is exceedingly important. I am likewise encouraged by colloquium organizer Ben Shneiderman’s observation that teamwork is the new normal and that teamwork makes for better research. As a theatre artist steeped in collaborative creation, I also agree that our work needs to be human-centered. While the embrace of technology enhances our ability to communicate across geographic distance and cultural difference, this colloquium rightly foregrounds the idea that in-person exchange (coffee break, anyone?) allows for the types of serendipitous imaginings that may reveal the solutions of tomorrow.
