The lasting influence of Cybernetics in Contemporary Art; theory into praxis

In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline provides an account of why cybernetics, as a term and discipline, all but disappeared from North American consciousness following the “cybernetics craze.” According to Kline, this was a time of intense attention on cybernetics in the cultural milieu where it became “a fad among artists, musicians and intellectuals in the 1950s and 60s.” Without disputing Kline's central claim—that the parlance of cybernetics greatly diminished with the rise of an “information age narrative”—this paper demonstrates that this ‘informational turn’ had little effect on artmaking, where cybernetics continued to be of critical interest to artists working with technology long after the post-war period. By mapping a trajectory of cybernetics in art from sculpture and performance in the 1960s through new media art in the 80s and 90s up to post-Internet artmaking today, a practical conception of cybernetics is articulated, in which communication and information are thought of as material and social processes. This embodied understanding of cybernetic systems is positioned as unique to contemporary art practice, unshared by other disciplines.