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12/10/2014

Cybernetic Serendipity

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

"Where in London could you take a hippy, a computer programmer, a ten-year-old schoolboy and guarantee that each would be perfectly happy for an hour without you having to lift a finger to entertain them?" 2 August 1968, Evening Standard

Cybernetic Serendipity, the landmark exhibition curated by Jasia Reichardt in 1968, is being celebrated in the Fox Reading Room with a display of documents, installation photographs, press reviews, invitation cards and publications.

Attracting the attention of the national and international press at the time, Cybernetic Serendipity was the first international exhibition in the UK devoted to the relationship between the arts and new technology. This groundbreaking exhibition, designed by Franciszka Themerson, presented the work of over 130 participants including composers, engineers, artists, mathematicians and poets. The exhibition ran from 2 August - 20 October 1968 and was seen by some 60,000 visitors.

Its aim was to present an area of activity which manifested artists' involvement with science, and scientists' involvement with the arts; in particular to show the links between the random systems employed by artists, composers and poets, and those involved with the making and the use of cybernetic devices. Cybernetic Serendipity dealt with possibilities rather than achievements, especially since in 1968 computers had not yet revolutionised music, art, or poetry, in the same way that they had revolutionised science. Nearly 50 years later, at a time when our relationship with computers permeates every aspect of visual culture, this exhibition offers documentation of Cybernetic Serendipity to highlight its impact and continued relevance today. The ICA continues to explore the relationship between art and technology through the events programme.

The exhibition was divided into three sections:
1. Computer- generated graphics, computer-animated films, computer-composed and-played music, and computer poems and texts.
2. Cybernetic devices as works of art, cybernetic environments, remote-control robots and paintingmachines.
3. Machines demonstrating the uses of computers and an environment about the history of cybernetics.

It was argued that new media, such as plastics, or new systems such as visual music notation and the parameters of concrete poetry, inevitably alters the shape of art, the charact
eristics of music, and the content of poetry. As Jasia Reichhardt stated in the original exhibition introduction, this has happened with the advent of computers. The engineers for whom the graphic plotter driven by a computer represented nothing more than a means of solving certain problems visually, have occasionally become so interested in the possibilities of this visual output, that they have started to make drawings which bear no practical application, and for which the only real motives are the desire to explore, and the sheer pleasure of seeing a drawing materialize. Thus people who would never have put pencil to paper, or brush to canvas, have started making images, both still and animated, which approximate
and often look identical to what we call 'art' and put in public galleries.

For more information visit this unofficial archive organised by artist Yuri Pattison http://cyberneticserendipity.net/

The Fox Reading Room was made possible by the generous support of the Edwin Fox Foundation.

Image: Cybernetic Serendipity Exhibition poster, Institute of Contemporary Art (I.C.A.), 2 August – 20 October, 1968

Press contact:
Naomi Crowther Tel: 020 77661407 Email: naomi.crowther@ica.org.uk

Institute of Contemporary Arts ICA
12 Carlton House Terrace London SW1Y 5AH
Opening Times: 11am – 6pm, except Thursday, 11am – 9pm.

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