Session I Report //// Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity: A Catalyst for Research Breakthroughs
In opening the first session, Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity: A Catalyst for Research Breakthroughs, Roger Malina offers the provocation that we “look back, look around and look forward” in order to deepen disciplinary knowledge and create bridges across disciplines in order to embrace and foster hybridity; or, as Malina terms it, an amphibian sensibility. This panel calls for the transversing of disciplinary bounds, from Patrick McCray’s suggestion that Jasia Reichardt celebrated disciplinary ambiguity in the curation of Cybernetic Serendipity, to Curtis Wong’s work in the production of technology-based art databases, and finally with Sara Diamond’s exploration of OCAD University as a space for art-science collaboration through strategic foresight and innovation planning and research methods.
Given by panelist Patrick McCray, the title of the first presentation All Watched Over and All Watching Machine of Loving (& sometimes Terrifying) Grace, is a play on a well known piece of poetry describing cybernetic theory and its implications in the 1960s. The focus of McCray’s paper is to think through the ways in which computers can become both menacing and exhilarating, and opened with Edward Ihnatowicz’s The Senster, 1969–70, a performative human-modeled and enchanting robot that expresses its inner workings and reflects a new direction in the development and aesthetic in robotic art of the period. The Senster, arguably the most iconic work of the Polish cybernetic sculptor, was a large hydraulically actuated robot that sensed and responded to its environment. The fifteen-foot lumbering bot was built to resemble a massive mechanical lobster claw and occupied a space of 1000 cubic feet. Built into the structure of the head were sensitive microphones and motion detectors that allowed the creature to sense its environment. Environmental stimuli were processed by a digital Philips minicomputer in real time allowing it to playfully engage with those around it. The Senster’s body was formed of six independent electro-hydraulic servomechanisms with six degrees of freedom in their movement. The work represents one of the earliest examples of behavior autonomy in art, and is an evocative point of departure for McCray’s exploration of the early work of Cybernetic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt in 1968, and the blurring of lines between art-science boundaries.
McCray sets the stage for the period during which the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition came to be mounted at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The exhibition was conceptualized and realized during a time of global unrest, and at the peak of the second wave of the feminist movement. Situated in a period of great social and political turmoil, uprising, and thriving developments in countercultural movements and activism, according to McCray, exhibition curator Jasia Reichardt embraced ambiguity to productive ends. She did this through a curatorial decision not to display the disciplinary backgrounds of the makers of the works being exhibited. The exhibition was also heavily influential as a pedagogical experience of new technologies at the time. Cybernetic Serendipity gave many people the chance to see a computer for the first time, featured a learning zone that explained how to use computers, illuminated their histories, and included a lecture series. For McCray, the exhibition performed pedagogy in its programming and through now iconic works such as Gordon Pask’s The Colloquy of Mobiles, 1968—an installation of communicating and learning objects that interacted with one another. McCray delves deeper into some of the criticism of Cybernetic Serendipity, as the exhibition was publicly discounted in part because of the artists who were deemed to have compromised both their aesthetics and ethics by working with engineers and scientists and using technologies developed by the military and through funding from large corporations. However, Cybernetic Serendipity used new technologies to rethink, and work within, the bounds of collaboration and control. McCray leaves us with the provocation to consider that art and technology “comes in waves,” pointing to periods of (re)surgence in the 1960s, 1990s, and the present that, he suggests, are caused in large part by debates about higher education and new ruptures in the bounds of disciplines.
Taking up this interest in pedagogical and learning spaces around art and technology, Curtis Wong, Principal Researcher at Microsoft, presented some of his own work in developing artistic and technology-based learning tools in his talk Learning from Leonardo; Art & Science as the Virtuous Cycle of Rendering and Understanding the Natural World. Wong is interested in the importance of storytelling through a practice of applying scientific knowledge to make art. He looks to the work of Leonardo DaVinci for inspiration. As Wong suggests, “Leonardo wouldn’t think about science and art as separate,” rather, science is a form of knowledge DaVinci used to produce his artwork. Wong presented three of his technology-based artistic pedagogical tools; his most contemporary is an online astronomy learning device, the second is a CD-ROM archive of the Codex Leicester produced in 1997, and the earliest is his CD-ROM A Passion for Art from 1995. This CD-ROM navigates through Dr. Barnes’ art collection of modern art by way of multiple navigation modes, and remains an incredibly sophisticated pedagogical tool today. The database of artworks can be navigated through an index (listed by title), a timeline, and through an in-situ virtual mock up of the collection as it was housed. Wong spoke of the importance of being able to perceive the scale and context when viewing a work of art, something crucial to the development of his CD-ROM work, and offers a personal anecdote about seeing Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884) in prints as a child and thinking the work was small in scale until, much later, he saw the work in person and was shocked at how much the scale and context changed his understanding of the piece. I too have had a similar experience with Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, which I had studied for years in art school and seen only on large slide projectors until I finally encountered the work in person and was able to understand the complexity of detail in the small scale painting. Wong’s A Passion for Art offers a solution to many of the barriers imposed in art history education at the university level. This work is evocative of the importance of considering curatorial methods and the impact context has on a work of art. Curatorial methods gain traction by way of mapping things onto one another. Curatorial moments can be instigated in conversations between objects, these conversations surge with new ideas and energy that occurs through the friction of two, or more, things bristling up against one another–like the works of art displayed together to scale in Wong’s virtual database. Erin Manning and Brian Massumi describe this action in terms of rippling water. They observe in their theorization of research-creation, “A stone dropped into a pond produces a ripple pattern. Two stones dropped in the same pond produce two ripple patterns. Where the ripples intersect, a new and complex pattern emerges, reducible to neither one nor the other.” The collaborative puddles, or conversations, between rippling patterns are the generative spaces produced by way of both curatorial practice and art-science creative collaborations.
Sara Diamond opened her presentation by looking back on an early chapter she wrote calling for repositioning of the art school as embodying a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge. In advocating for the benefits of collaboration she calls to an array of 21st century projects that have generated productive interdisciplinary collaboration. Diamond was passionate in her call to incorporate contemporary and futuristic Indigenous knowledge systems in our art institutional lexicons. She returns throughout her paper to the work of AbTeC, Skawennati Fragnito and Jason Lewis’s Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, in order to illustrate how we must continue to embrace the present and also look forward; in line with Indigenous knowledge systems she suggests we look forward seven generations into the future. Mohawk multimedia artist Skawennati Fragnito builds future worlds for Indigenous peoples in her work in Second Life, and has been filming experimental machinima in the VR platform since its early days. Her first machinima (a mode of filming using computer graphics engines from video games), TimeTravellerTM is a nine-episode series of activist art. The machinima is a critique of colonial, Western, and imperialistic historical narratives that retells actual historical events from an indigenous perspective and imagines a vibrant future for indigenous people. Diamond points to the importance of art-science collaborations as they foster ethical and caring relations, and work to combat the black-boxing of scientific knowledge. In this discussion, and through Diamond’s presentation of Janet Prophet, Cell (2003) in her talk, I am reminded of the work of many bio-artists. In the laboratory, during a work’s production, and through the maintenance and pedagogical practices of public display, feminist bioartists work to impart their knowledge of scientific processes and their caring empathy for nonhuman life. These artists posit that by acknowledging our deep, bodily connection with microbes, and by extension our environment, we may foster a stronger, more sustainable and empathetic relationship with our ecosystem as a whole. This figuration can allow care and empathy to transcend the museum or laboratory into a much larger networked ecology. Diamond, like McCray and Wong, also calls to the pedagogical importance of art-science collaborations and the productive disciplinary shifts that may instigate, bringing new materials to art and empathy to science.
In conclusion, the Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity: A Catalyst for Research Breakthroughs panel of the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences explores and explodes what it means to collaborate creatively in the context of art-science-technology hybrid practices. Roger Malina’s opening proposal that we imagine ourselves as amphibians, transversing land and water or disciplinary bounds, is reflected in McCray, Wong and Diamond’s calls to considering points of intersections and cross-sections in art and science and productive sites for pedagogical exchange. When thinking of an intersection my mind is drawn to a convergence of two seemingly separate things. In the distinct fields of art and science, one might think an intersection would be highly improbable, or even impossible. Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity truly does revisit the avant-guard propositions of the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition to explode disciplinary boundaries between art and science, to consider what it means for artists to engage with scientific and technological practices, and for scientists to engage with the arts.
