Panel Statement

This panel examines specific moments in which theories of complex systems, cybernetics, and chaos have contributed to the conceptualisation and production of works of media art. From the 1960s onwards, many artists found a resource, in scientific ideas of instability, mutual causation, transformation, and openness, for the questioning of established aesthetic values and cultural institutions. Complex systems, as a subject of conceptual thought and scientific investigation, intensified following work by Weiner, Prigogine, Lorenz, Bertalanffy, Bateson, Varela and Maturana and so forth in the mid-twentieth century. These recalibrations of scientific thought ignited artists’ interests in science, shifting attention away, as they did, from ontology (things as they are) to ontogenesis (how things emerge) – from deterministic and mechanistic forms of thinking, to a sense of the world as indeterminate, dynamic, non-linear, and filled with behavioural complexities. By drawing together art historical studies in open systems and cybernetics with contemporary thought about ecologies, the various papers will suggest that history remains a viable lens for understanding the development of particular strains of contemporary art. We test this claim in relation to specific artworks, and most importantly, we extend this argument by examining the environmental import of art produced under the sign of open systems. The panel will focus on a selection of art and technological activity in the 1960s-70s, for example: Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue, Fluxus, British structuralist film making, the Harrisons and critical developments in perma-culture and hacker culture networks. The focus is on works in which the artist is but one agent, alongside other natural and technological phenomena, in the system of which he or she is a part. As a panel of writers and creative practitioners, we propose that these historical works anticipate, by other means and through concerns avant la lettre, contemporary ecological approaches to media art.

• Dr. Janine Randerson, School of Design and Visual Arts, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand