Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image 9781350985414, 9780857728074

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Charissa N. Terranova is Professor of Aesthetic Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas, USA. She is the author of Automotive Prosthetic (2014) and the co-editor of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2021) and has published articles in Leonardo, Art Journal, Urban History Review, and Journal of Urban History, among others.

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“Charissa Terranova follows the development of the modernist design movement from Bauhaus to MIT and discovers a smart, healthful, and integrated view of humans and nature. Gone is the monolithic view of modernism as environmentally and socially destructive. Instead, Art as Organism offers a thoughtful piece of scholarship that reverses conventional design and art history, thanks to its novel affective lens.” Peder Anker, Associate Professor of History of Science, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, USA “In this innovative text, Charissa Terranova exposes the crucial impact that biology, systems theory and cybernetics had on twentieth-century art and the significance of that influence for aptly understanding the modernist narrative. By meticulously tracing the emergence of the digital image through the lens of science and technology, Art as Organism beautifully recounts the prehistory of contemporary visual culture.” Hadas A. Steiner, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA “Terranova has written a book both brilliant and necessary. She successfully bridges what seemed to be an historical chasm between Moholy-Nagy’s biocentrism/biofunctionalism on the one hand, and digital art on the other, using Kepes, von Bertalanffy and Lynch, systems theory and its offspring cybernetics, Op Art, as well as what she terms—invoking Benjamin—the ‘haptic unconscious’ as the principal beams in her truss structure. She has thereby, as she puts it, demonstrated ‘the biological underpinnings of the digital image in art.’ I have long pondered this arc, and posed the very question in 2014. Terranova has now answered it. She has traced the lineage and has convincingly argued for it. This is a major achievement within art history as well as the history of culture in general, and is, in addition, of great importance to contemporary cultural practice and thinking. The book is also of theoretical importance, as in her thinking, via Massumi’s ‘affective turn’ and more specifically, the ‘phenomenological shift in critical theory’ as she terms it, Terranova emerges from the chrysalis of postmodernism and specifically as it was applied to architecture and the city, into the light of a combination of the more traditional AST, its more recent reconfiguration as STEAM, and an embodied, ‘wet perception.’ This is an achievement that only she, with her particular background and interests, could have attained. Beautifully written, argued with panache and originality, this is a tour de force that is a game changer when it comes to the history of modernism.” Oliver A. I. Botar, Professor, School of Art, University of Manitoba, Canada

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or a ga s nis m

ar t

Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image

Charissa N. Terranova

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I dedicate this book to my husband and best friend, Trent Straughan.

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published as a hardback in Great Britain 2016 This paperback edition first published 2022 Copyright © Charissa N. Terranova, 2016 Charissa N. Terranova has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Alicia Freile, Tango Media Cover image © László Moholy-Nagy and István Sebök, courtesy of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-7845-3430-1 978-1-3502-7097-8 978-0-8577-2807-4 978-0-8577-2894-4

Typeset by Newgen Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Table of Contents

1 2

3

4

5

List of Images Acknowledgments Preface: Modernism after the Affective Turn

vi xi xii

Introduction: The Haptic Unconscious: László Moholy-Nagy’s Organismic Aesthetics

1

Bauhaus Biology: The Beginnings of Biofunctionalism

19

György Kepes and the Light Image as Bio-Image: Pop Art-and-Science, Integration, and Distribution

67

The Distributed Image of the City: The Collaboration between György Kepes and Kevin Lynch

124

Wet Perception: Op Art and New Tendencies, between the Gestalt and Ecological Psychology

163

The Digital Image in Art: The Generative Turn, Computational and Biological

198

Epilogue: Political Paths—Past and Future

242

Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

249 256 293 309

v

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List of Images Image 1 Image 2 Image 3

Image 4 Image 5 Image 6

Image 7 Image 8 Image 9a Image 9b Image 10 Image 11

Image 12

Image 13

Ernst Haeckel, Acanthrometra, from Die Radiolarien (Berlin, 1862). Page from Merz no.8/9 (April/June 1924), edited by Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky, titled Nasci. László Moholy-Nagy and István Sebök, Kinetic-Constructive System: Structure with Movement Track for Play and Conveyance, 1922. Vladimir Tatlin, Maquette of The Monument to the Third International, 1919. Friedrich Schumann’s tachistoscope c. 1900. László Moholy-Nagy, Light-Space Modulator, also known as Light Prop for an Electric Stage, 1930. László Moholy-Nagy, Score for Mechanized Eccentric, 1925. Otto Neurath, Wohndichte in Großstädten (Metropolitan Density), Leipzig, 1930. Curricular wheel of the Bauhaus (1922). Curricular wheel of the New Bauhaus (1937). László Moholy-Nagy, Study for “Spatial Relations” in The New Vision (1938), p. 165. Tomas Flake, Tactile Table in Four Rows of Sandpapers and Corresponding Diagram, Second Semester Bauhaus Dessau, 1929, from The New Vision, p. 27. Alexander Corrazzo, A Tactile Symphony in Three Rows, First Semester New Bauhaus, 1937, from The New Vision, p. 33. Francis Fairweather, Tactile Chart Held In Balance On Metal Springs Performing A Swinging Movement When Used, Second Semester New Bauhaus 1938, from The New Vision, p. 33.

27 29

31 32 37

39 41 45 51 53 55

56

56

57

vi

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List of Images

Image 14 Charles Niedringhaus, Smell-o-Meter. For mixing six different odors six tubes are used and an electric fan blows the smell into the opening for the nose, Second Semester New Bauhaus, 1938, from The New Vision, p. 34. 57 Images 15–20 Film stills from Design Workshops (1944) directed and filmed by László Moholy-Nagy. 58 Images 21–25 Film stills from Do Not Disturb (1945) written, filmed, and edited by students of the Motion Picture class of the Institute of Design, directed by László Moholy-Nagy. 64 Images 26–28 Pages 128–29 from The New Landscape in Art and Science, ed. György Kepes. 71 Image 29 Moholy-Nagy book cover design for J. G. Crowther’s An Outline of the Universe (1930). 76 Image 30 Diagram by Trent J. Straughan of diverse contributors to Kepes’ anthologies. 83 Image 31a and b Pages 130–31 from Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film. 84–85 Image 32 Cover of Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (1937), edited by J. L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo. 86 Image 33 Karel Honzik’s photograph of “phytogenic” form in the Victoria Regia, from Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (1937), p. 260. 89 Image 34 Karel Honzik’s photograph of concrete construction in the Fiat Factory in Turin, from Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (1937), p. 261. 90 Image 35 Aby Warburg, blackboard from Mnemosyne: Atlas of Memory (1924–29). 92 Image 36 Le Corbusier, Mundaneum – the main library, 1928, note organic shape and reference to the golden section. 93 Image 37 André Malraux selects photographs for La Musée imaginaire (The Imaginary Museum, 1947). 94 Image 38 Will Burtin, Scientific Visualization comparing impact of Penicillin, Streptomycin, and vii

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Image 39 Image 40 Image 41 Image 42 Image 43a Image 43b Image 44

Images 45–48 Image 49

Image 50 Image 51 Image 52 Image 53

Image 54

Neomychin on a range of bacteria; appeared in Scope, Fall 1951. 100 Will Burtin, Cell, 1958, meeting of the American Medical Association, San Francisco. 101 Will Burtin, The Brain, 1960, meeting of the American Medical Association, Miami. 101 Will Burtin, Metabolism, 1963, meeting of American Medical Association, Atlantic City. 102 Pages 210–11 from The New Landscape in Art and Science, ed. György Kepes. 107 Renderings by John Piper for Conrad Waddington’s Organisers and Genes (1942). 111 The Rise of the Dovey by John Piper, oil on gessoed canvas mounted on board. 113 Diagram of Centralized, Decentralized, and Distributed Networks from Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks. 128 Thumbnail sketches from the margins of Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City. 129–30 Drawing of a “Geneva stop,” from György Kepes’ The Nature and Art of Motion, Vision + Value Series. 133 Pol Bury, “Erectile,” 1963. 134 Heinz Mack, Light Rotor, 1960, mixed media. 135 The “Motational” system of symbols by Lawrence Halprin. 136 Page 145 György Kepes, ed., The Nature and Art of Motion, Vision + Value Series, Viking Eggeling’s “Three moments from the paper scroll titled Horizontal-Vertical Mass, 1919” and Hans Richter’s “Three moments from the paper scroll, Preludium, 1919”. 138 Drawings by Mr. Gardner Formann of the “city floor” and “play areas” in Alvin K. Lukashok and Kevin Lynch, “Some Childhood Memories of the City,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 22, no. 3 (1956), 142. 147 viii

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List of Images

Image 55 Wolfgang Ludwig, Cinematic Painting, 1964, oil on composition board. 171 Image 56 Gruppo N, Unstable Perception, 1963, mixed media. 172 Image 57 Almir Mavignier, Concave-Convex Planes, 1963, oil on canvas. 175 Images 58–59 Plan and diagram of Julio Le Parc with members of GRAV, Labyrinthe, 1964–65. 185 Image 60 Diagram of Entropy versus (geometrical) Order, from Rudolf Arnheim’s Entropy and Art. 193 Image 61 Philip Galanter, diagram of Complexism. 206 Image 62 Georg Nees, “23-Ecke,” 1964, ink on paper. 208 Image 63 A. Michael Noll, Gaussian Quadratic, 1965, ink on paper. 209 Image 64 Frieder Nake, Polygon Drawing, 1965, ink on paper. 210 Image 65 Michael Noll’s comparison of his computer-generated drawing and Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Lines, 1917, ink on paper and reproduced image of Mondrian from original comparison by Noll. 213 Image 66 Example of a complex sound communication channel, diagram from Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, 1958. 216 Images 67–69 Steve Paxton, Physical Things (1966). Performance presented as part of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, The 69th Regiment Armory, New York, NY, United States, October 13–19, 1966; Still from the factual footage shot in 16 mm film by Alfons Schilling; The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering fonds. 224–25 Image 70 Steve Paxton, Physical Things (1966). Performance presented as part of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, The 69th Regiment Armory, New York, NY, United States, October 13–19, 1966. 226 Images 71–74 Robert Rauschenberg, Jim McGee, Bill Kaminski, Mimi Kanarek and Frank Stella, Open Score, tennis racket from performance of 9 Evenings: Theatre and ix

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Image 75 Image 76 Image 77 Image 78 Image 79

Engineering, 1966; The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering fonds. 227–28 EAT, Pepsi Pavilion shrouded in fog from Fujiko Nakaya’s fog machine, 1970. 231 Plan of EAT, Pepsi Pavilion, 1970. 232 György Kepes, kinetic outdoor neon light mural for Radio Shack, Boston, 1950. 236 György Kepes, programmed light mural for KLM, 5th Ave. office, New York, 1959. 237 Pulsa, Installation diagram for installation of Public Garden project in Boston, 1968. 241

x

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Acknowledgments An author is a collective, and one is truly many. While I did the hard labor of researching and writing Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image, the greater project involved enumerable people. These people constitute the infrastructure of this book. I first thank the staff of editors at I.B.Tauris in London for their patience and unending support in the creation of this book. This list includes Baillie Card, Lisa Goodrum, and Anna Coatman. I thank Vanessa VanAlstyne, my stateside and Texas-based assistant who, with great persistence and eloquence, helped amass high-resolution images and rights to them. The ground from which this project sprung is made up of an association of dear friends and colleagues: the dispersed but tightly connected international community of artists, architects, and scholars working in the greater field of biology in art and design. This includes a diverse array of practitioners, including Oliver A. I. Botar, Meredith Tromble, Patricia Olynyk, Ellen K. Levy, Hadas Steiner, Anna P. Sokolina, Sarah Bonnemaison, Christine Macy, Peder Anker, Marie-Pier Boucher, Christina Cogdell, Mitchell Joachim, Philip Beesley, Zenovia Toloudi, Sara Franceschelli, Ted Krueger, Philip Ross, Dawna Schuld, Arnaud Gerspacher, Margo Handwerker, Stefan Helmreich, Sophia Roosth, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Jennifer Johung, Anna Dumitriu, Dorothy Santos, Brittany Ransom, Jane Prophet, Kathy High, Adam Zaretsky, Rachel Mayeri, Ken Rinaldo, François-Joseph Lapointe, Candas Mehmet, Roger Malina, and Dave Wessner. Of this list, I must uniquely acknowledge Oliver A. I. Botar, the preeminent scholar of László Moholy-Nagy, colleague, and good friend. Without his foundational research on biocentrism in the writing, pedagogy, and art of Moholy-Nagy, absolutely none of this would have been possible. Botar’s Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts (2014) takes up many similar ideas. In many ways, Botar articulates in his own words and imagination what I call in this book the “haptic unconscious.” Finally, I owe so much to my husband, Trent Justin Straughan. Without his steadfast backing on a daily basis, my life as an author would not exist. xi

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Preface Modernism after the Affective Turn Book projects have several points of origin—deep and far, low and near, and across and entangled. The following book emerged respecting this logic. It has come from my deep academic training, a set of connections revealed in my first book, and, less personal and more collective, from the recent turn in critical theory toward a wet biological paradigm. The circularity of a feedback loop is set in motion. The last of these perspectives, the affective turn in critical theory, brought to life a set of historical connections in the last century. At the same time, that history—the untold biological wellspring of the digital image in art almost a century ago—foreshadowed current philosophical trends within the humanities as well as recent discoveries in cognitive science and psychology. To be more precise, modern artist László Moholy-Nagy’s pedagogy of biofunctionalism at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s was a precursor of contemporary critical theories of affectivity, embodiment, emergence, and second-order cybernetics within the humanities and scientific discoveries concerning distributed cognition and the unconscious. I arrived at this discernment of the past not by any linear set of footsteps, but a process of emergence: by going back and forth in time repeatedly, interpreting the significance of science and technology within art of the last century ever more keenly as I read theories of the present into the future and researched recent scientific discoveries on perception, cognition, and the unconscious. I use the word “emerge” above in terms of biofunctionalism, as it refers to the contemporary discourse on emergence and the way an organism autopoetically takes shape: how a living form develops according to the diverse energies of self-organization. Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image coalesced like this, out of several sources coming out of different trajectories in time and space. According to biological emergence, parts relate to the whole, functional hierarchy is non-linear, and biological xii

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forms take shape according to asymmetrical paths. Larger shapes and patterns of regularity and order arise out of smaller elements that do not predict such organization. As Steven Johnson explains, an emergent complex system uses “local rules between interacting agents to create higher-level behaviour well suited to its environment.”1 Our brains function according to processes of emergence, with thoughts and actions unfolding by way of a host of electrical connections between smaller components interconnected with the central nervous system spread out across the spinal cord into the body. The biologist Francisco Varela called this progression “connectionism.”2 Connectionism names the shift in cognitive science some twenty-five years ago toward the idea that consciousness and mind are not contained but distributed across the brain, body, and environment. In the case of Art as Organism, a “connectionist strategy,” to use Varela’s phrase, unfolds in that I make new connections between art, science, and technology based on information that had been once obfuscated. In short, the book is a work of revisionist modernism. I focus on cybernetics, systems theory, and biofunctionalism within the development of the digital image, modern art, and aesthetic theory of the mid-twentieth century that, in my earlier scholarly experience, had been camouflaged by trends in interpretation—namely, the linguistic focus of postmodern critical theory. Due to the sway of postmodernism, I could not discern, understand, or value the important role of science and technology within certain modern takes on “vision,” much less their fundamentally synesthetic and polysensual nature. I  lacked the language to identify the seminal elements and meaning of scientific and technological complex systems within the modern art of the middle twentieth century. This is because my generation of graduate students within the academy—in the era of Deconstruction—was taught that modernist vision within art, architecture, and design was uniformly monolithic, hegemonic, and a matter of Cartesian dualism. Science and technology according to the linguistically based critical theory of postmodernism are foremost the incarnation of power, will, and ratiocination: instantiations of the military-industrial complex and laissez-faire capitalism, and the result of a mind–body dualism in which living organisms are machines. The postmodern credo foreclosed a vast body of scientific and technological thinking—including cybernetics, General Systems Theory, xiii

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information theory, evolution, embryological development, theories of morphology, the organismic Gestalt, etc.—to this generation of thinkers. The books of modernism and modern art, especially those engaging science and technology, could at best be understood by textual disaggregation, folding words inward onto themselves in order to destabilize the text and reveal the biases of the author. At worst, they got shelved. We ignored them, relegating the midcentury modern theories of dynamic vision unifying science, technology, and art to the dustbin of history. Luckily the detritus of time past does not just rot at the bottom of a barrel. Rather than settling in a pile, lost in inertia, it courses through the chutes of duration, making way toward reinterpretation and revision. It moves with the dynamism of time itself. Yet I  must clarify, having cut my critical-thinking teeth in the era of academic postmodernism on Deconstruction, it is only because of the perspicacity and endurance honed through these modes of reading that I am ultimately able to look back, and identify with aplomb the cybernetics and systems theory within art–science–technology hybrids. This is by no means a confession of regret, but rather the tracing of ideas, paradigm shifts, and getting beyond academic postmodernism. Now that postmodernism within the academy is fully metabolized, we can move on, while going back to take another look at the texts of mid-century modernism. The turn within critical theory late in the last millennium away from postmodern theories of language to affectivity, embodiment, emergence, and second-order cybernetics resuscitated this material. It set in relief a new mode of deciphering humanism and the human as more broadly ecological in nature according to the living organism. In revealing the way technological and scientific tools make human thinking external to the brain and body—protruding and exteriorizing “mind” out into the world—the affective turn in critical theory offered new epistemological moorings for the present and past alike. Mind and body are one, a holistic monism through which to interconnect with the world. Affect theory names “those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—than can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension.”3 Philosopher Brian Massumi spearheaded the affective turn with the pivotal 1995 essay, ‘The Autonomy of Affect.’4 Building on the ideas of Baruch xiv

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Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Benjamin Libet, Massumi laid the groundwork for a new way of understanding human consciousness as in-process and, to use his word, “autonomic.”5 Knowing, awareness, and putative consciousness are deeply in-sourced and outsourced from the body. They are haptic and rooted in embodied events. “Modulations of heartbeat and breathing,” Massumi explains, “mark a reflux of consciousness into autonomic depths, conterminous with a rise of the autonomic into consciousness.”6 The intake and output of information circulate in a feedback loop, the movement of which is “a measure of their participation in one another.”7 The individual-cum-organism engages the world within and through a stream of things:  by way of a series of connected events and images that have varying degrees of quality and intensity. This process is emergent in organization, as “the event of image reception is multi-levelled, or at least bi-level.”8 It is also biologically wet in that the skin “at the surface of the body” is the “interface with things.”9 Massumi’s thinking on the corporeal fluidity of consciousness shook the grounds of critical theory, opening a chasm while also creating a bridge. Massumi’s exegesis on affectivity, embodiment, and the extra-consciousness signaled a move away from linguistic-based critical theory. It connected the humanities to the larger world of the wet sciences, including but not limited to the cognitive sciences, biology, and genetics. It marked the closure of one philosophical toolkit and the opening of another. Affect theory demotes consciousness, the ego, and the “I” of the “cogito,” re-registering them laterally as significant forces among many other significant forces, all of which are systematically related within an emergent hierarchy of collateral relations. From this perspective, the importance and existence of human consciousness are set in question. Consciousness tumbles from the top of the constructed linear hierarchy known as The Great Chain of Being into the complex and emergent systems of biological evolution, becoming a matter of relations to other species. As a result, because of the cybernetic framing of science and technology, one moves beyond the idea that consciousness is a human privilege, contained in and emanating out of the human brain. One queries, do plants have consciousness? Or, does inert, desiccated matter bear the properties of the living? Interrogating the possibility of consciousness in plants and where life begins and ends, we find that any such human consciousness happens xv

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as a process between fields of life rather than contained within the brain of an individual. The affective turn provided the virtual goggles to see and understand the profound significance of systems thinking, cybernetics, and information theory within mid-century art–science–technology hybrids. Theories of affectivity and emergence in the twenty-first century cast new light upon the significance of Moholy-Nagy’s biocentric art pedagogy of the twentieth century. The complex systems theory rooted in biology and biofunctionalism at the base of his thinking resound with new importance. We better understand his interest in biological holism and prosthetic perception in part because of the phenomenological shift in critical theory of the new millennium. Further afield, discoveries beyond the humanities within the social and cognitive sciences have also amplified the significance of Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus-based biofunctionalism and polysensual take on the sense of vision. Contemporary discussions of distributed cognition, societies of mind, and extended mind resonate with Moholy-Nagy’s quest during the first half of the twentieth century to unite art, science, and technology.10 His training program of the arts in which tools, emotions, and tactility holistically play out the integral human spirit—putative mind and consciousness—through materials and the technological shaping of form, is but an earlier take on current hypotheses about distributed cognition. For theorists of extended mind such as Andy Clark and Bruno Latour, cognition is spread out between humans and objects within situated environments, enabled by both analog and digital tools, from paper and pen to the computer, between people, plants, and things.11 Moholy-Nagy’s belief that understanding unfolds across fields echoes new discoveries about the biological workings of the unconscious within cognitive psychology. In experiments that invalidate “free will,” scientists have proven that decision-making does not follow a cause-and-effect timeline but is rather emergent in order, starts in preconscious activity, and progresses automatically several seconds before action. Descartes’ famous dictum “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I  am,” gives way to “Relationes usurpandi sui,” “Relations overtake the self.” A new systems-based logic takes hold in which cogitation and mind are a matter of preceding, intermittent, and following interconnections and flows. The desire to move xvi

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one’s body, act upon the world, or think through a concept emerges before ratiocination. The will to perform happens across fields. It wells up within the unconscious and precedes forthright brain activity in various durations of time.12 Two decades ago, philosopher Massumi built his ideas in part on these breakthroughs in human physiology, the cognitive sciences, and clinical psychology, basing the theory of affectivity on Benjamin Libet’s groundbreaking research on the embodied temporality of consciousness. Massumi referenced Libet’s thinking when he elicited the temporal process of knowing in terms of “the mystery of the missing half-second”: the split-second where knowledge coalesces in the unconscious brain as part of its passing-through.13 Rather than being an origin point, the brain acts something like a sieve. It is a place where the world and body meet and the electricity of conscious awareness is en route. Conscious knowing is autonomic and relational. It is becoming and in passing—crossing through the body by way of the nervous system, then spanning out into the world.14 Ratiocination exceeds the brain and connects entrails to ex-trails. Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has proven in related fashion that “the brain is a predictive organ,” which is to say that immediate brain activity is based on a pre-existing fabric of memory and habit rather than the direct perception of reality.15 Connecting back to the affective turn in the humanities, Dr. Barrett calls this idea “affective realism,” underscoring the role of antecedent subjective memories in the brain. “A majority of your brain activity,” Dr. Barrett explains, “consists of predictions about the world—based on your past experience.”16 These forecasting elements are temporal and make up “unconscious anticipations.”17 Stretching Moholy-Nagy’s aesthetics of distributed cognition into ever greater territory, present-day scientists have proven that olfactory senses are dispersed across the skin and that brain activity is truly a matter of “gut instinct,” in that the bacteria within our microbiome is a source of healthy brain activity.18 The deepest roots of Art as Organism are less within the shared discourses of critical theory and recent scientific scholarship and more personal in nature. The book builds on my advanced training in architectural theory and history, in particular my graduate academic work at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where founding Bauhaus director Walter xvii

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Gropius headed the architecture department from 1938 to 1952. As a book that follows the influences of Hungarian Bauhausler Moholy-Nagy and his acolyte, the artist and fellow Hungarian György Kepes, it is a story of the diaspora of Weimar-era Bauhaus pedagogy into the new world after World War II. This book about biology and the digital image in art emerging from Bauhausler Moholy-Nagy’s influences follows logically after Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject:  The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilbersheimer (1995), a book by my dissertation advisor at Harvard, K. Michael Hays, which in part reframed the New Objectivity functionalism at the Bauhaus under the director Hannes Meyer. In the most empirical sense of research, I  arrived at the central idea within the book, the “haptic unconscious,” some time after my graduate training, through relations I  discerned in my first book, Automotive Prosthetic: The Car and Technological Mediation in Conceptual Art (2014). There, I  teased out the presence of technology, cybernetic connections, and systems aesthetics within conceptual art, in particular by way of the automobile. I  intended to move the rather cramped and narrow discussion about conceptual art away from linguistic theories into the realm of prosthetics in order to play out the “connectionism” of conceptual art as a set of expanding, interconnected, and technologically mediated systems. There was a nagging clutch of overlaps and similarities that came together from this new mode of framing that I simply could not get my mind around. Why, I repeatedly asked myself, do two disparate thinkers who figure into Automotive Prosthetic, the MIT urban design and planning professor Kevin Lynch and artist, art critic, and curator Jack Burnham, seem so similar in their thinking? Why do these two men with such distinct modes of expertise describe aesthetic experience—of the city and art—as a matter of the Gestalt-based ideas of relations, which are organismic in nature and central to mid-century General Systems Theory? How did they, coming from distant academic arenas, arrive at a concept of the “image” as a matter of distributed technological forces across space and time? As though pulling up a buried guy with rope from fertile ground, in Art as Organism I  traced this shared penchant for experience, the Gestalt, and distributed image to György Kepes, a professor of visual design in the School of Architecture (1945–77) and the founding director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS/1967–77), both at xviii

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MIT. Kepes collaborated with Lynch in the late 1950s during the development of Lynch’s pivotal book, The Image of the City (1960), and brought Burnham as a resident fellow to CAVS in 1968. I am not suggesting that Lynch and Burnham were passive vessels of Kepes’ pedagogy and aesthetic philosophy. Rather, in the logic of emergence, their pre-existing interests in distributed relations, for Lynch within the design and planning of the city and for Burnham within contemporary systems art, were cultivated to greater intensity through collaboration with Kepes. Kepes was a legatee of Moholy-Nagy, a pedagogue and impresario spreading the importance of Moholy-Nagy’s ideas about sensual aesthetic experience by way of science and technology within art, or what I call the haptic unconscious. More tugging at the guy rope thus led back in the end to Moholy-Nagy’s art pedagogy of the senses, science, and technology at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. The story of a relational organismic take on the light image started almost a century ago with Moholy-Nagy and continued by way of Rudolf Arnheim, György Kepes, Conrad Waddington, Kevin Lynch, and Jack Burnham, among others. It materialized in an array of art, including kinetic art, Op Art, New Tendencies, early computational prints, Experiments in Art and Technology, and a vast assortment of light and early computational art at the civic scale. In sum, Art as Organism is a product of contemporary concerns— the biological origins of the digital image within art. It is the telling of a forgotten history of modern art, the Bauhaus, and biofunctionalism in the United States after World War II:  a story only made visible by way of looking back from the fresh lens of the present. Our contemporary world awash in digital imagery makes distinguishing twentieth-century cybernetics and systems—both biologically produced modes of thinking—within the rising generative aesthetic of computational art a bit easier to see.

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Introduction The Haptic Unconscious: László Moholy-Nagy’s Organismic Aesthetics

I. Identifying the Haptic Unconscious The internet has made the digital image ubiquitous. Just how many an individual sees in a day, much less a lifetime, is difficult to quantify and comprehend. In 2012, one researcher estimated that Facebook users uploaded 300 million images a day.1 Studies on individual reception vary wildly, with one claiming that every person sees between 3,000 and 20,000 images a day.2 Another study cited the number of 247.3 What percentage of these colorful images is intended to be art? And, when in history did artists start using electricity and binary code to create art? Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image tells the story of the emerging digital image in art within the longue durée of technology. It is a “deep” history especially as seen from the point-of-view of inventors and artists at the center of contemporary media practices. It opens onto the stage of 1920s Berlin with a central cast of characters both techno-medial and human in nature, including photography, cinema, the ever rising tide of mechanization, and their critics and interpreters. The vital energy of this tracing is, to be succinct, biomechanical:  a concern for the interaction between mammalian and artificial lives and the suffusion of the human into machine and vice versa. This is a view onto the digital image in the present built up on a past not of the cold tectonics of 1

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Cartesian rationale, but of the warm and wet mind and body together, both immersed in the matrices of a world environment. Emotions, tactility, movement, and experience are central to this telling of the light image—the digital image in its manifestations across the twentieth century—as a matter of light and heat, from flame to photo to electronic and binary screen-borne picture. Here, the term “light image” is a broader, more inclusive reference to the digital image. This relation, that the digital is borne from within the light image, approximates evolutionary biology’s recapitulation theory, which is German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law of 1866 that states, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”4 Recapitulation theory within biology is based on an isomorphism of forms: the idea that the shape-shifting of embryological development in a given species repeats the successive stages of evolution of their deep ancestors. This technological nesting—the idea that one is within the other (the digital within light) while also being synonymous (digital as light)—resonates with the embedded developmental sense of Haeckel’s now outmoded idea.5 In culture and art, this transitioning and transformation of the light-to-digital image unfolds in the twentieth century, a century after Haeckel’s biogenetic law. The light image becomes the digital image, appearing as an art form in three articulations in the 1960s: as a two-dimensional digitally produced printed image; as an image of performance in which artists and engineers collaborated, using early electronic and wireless technology; and as a civic image in which artists installed urban-scaled works of art using lights, sounds, and analog and digital computation. I call the philosophy and training linking people to art forms of light in the twentieth century the “haptic unconscious” because it rides on an idea that knowing is not just something happening via the brain. Understanding, rather, happens across fields. Thinking and putative “mind” are extended, a matter of proprioceptive bodily grasping into the environment. In the phrase “haptic unconscious” I  recognize and name the specific evolution of an aesthetics of the light image as it developed in the twentieth century from photography, through kinetic art, the city, Op Art painting, the rise of the TV and computer screen, and multi-media art performance, by way of a very particular group of actors. 2

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Introduction

According to this teaching, introduced in large part by artist and pedagogue László Moholy-Nagy, the electricity of the light image works something like an envelope. Ourselves so many sparks, we are enveloped within charges of light: the living corpus is set in relief by the flows of light energy that ensconce her. The mind and body are made felt and physically present through luminosity and movement, positioned within an ecological network of relations. Here, the light of the digital does not turn the mind inward toward avatars acting in landscapes of would-be connection but outward into worlds of tangible interaction between bodies and things. The flows of light and electricity extend mind beyond the brain, across the envelope of the body, into the living and non-living material of the world. Light is the extension of the mind: its full deliquescence into and becoming one with external matter. The fundamental connection to be made here is between the haptic, light, and the complex biological system of life: bodily experience, electricity, and biology across subjects, plants and animals alike. The word “bodily” in this telling reads not so much beyond but from out of and within philosophical phenomenology, setting in relief its root-base that is the micrology of cells, macrology of the biosciences, and the greater environment of distributed and interconnected signs, symbols, images, and organisms. I  introduce the haptic unconscious here first in embryo in the context of Germany during the Weimar Republic. This story follows a rarefied thread within modernism linking art, science, and technology that has gone remarkably overlooked, its connections to the emergent digital image in art circa 1962 and the image-world of the internet in the twenty-first century having lost footing in the face of other now exhausted academic trends in critical theory. The language-based philosophies predominant within the humanities during the last three decades of the twentieth century—Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and the overarching semiotics of postmodernism—reified science and technology, simplifying and making them monolithic. From this perspective, science and technology could be considered nothing other than the midwives of capitalism and war. By contrast, the history told in Art as Organism has been set in relief by more recent turns in critical theory. The expansion of phenomenology in the new millennium, including discourses on affectivity, embodiment, emergence, and second-order cybernetics, has made it possible to move beyond the two-cultures divide. We can now look back 3

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upon the scientifically and technologically generated art of the twentieth century and see the eminent importance of cybernetics and General Systems Theory. With this knowledge in hand, a new story crystalizes. In the twentieth century the haptic unconscious was a poetic means of pragmatism and an extremely imaginative way to deal with the teaching and aesthetics of modern photography as it effloresced into kinetic, light, and early computer art. A  hands-on arts pedagogy and poetics of romanticism made useful, it was at its core a collision of opposites:  an abstraction of thought combined with a materialism of the body; the evanescent and dematerialized light image borne upon the sensual mind in action. While this incarnation of the light image in art fully emerged as digital form in the 1960s, its roots lie in the 1920s reception of the photograph and emergent theories of the human–machine interface. The phrase that I have coined, the “haptic unconscious,” thus arises in nuce from the fermentation of ideas in interwar Berlin, from the dialectics of Hungarian impresario and Bauhaus educator László Moholy-Nagy and the German writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin and their shared fascination with the effects of the camera on the human sensorium. Though there is no evidence of ongoing direct interaction between the two men, their ideas nonetheless collided. Their thinking also coalesced and ricocheted with the causality of Moholy-Nagy’s intellectual influences on Benjamin largely as yet unnoticed.

II. A Circle of Influence: Moholy-Nagy–Benjamin–Moholy-Nagy They wrote almost a century ago with passion and precision about the early twentieth-century percipient, the image apparatus, and the new, super presence of photographic and cinematic light images. Benjamin and Moholy-Nagy were citizen-intellectuals in an ever more automating world of flickering signage and seamless moving imagery: two men born alongside the new communication of kinetic pictures called film and into a world fast becoming saturated by the technics and logic of photography. After one hundred years of evolution, the photograph was at once the basis for the new moving-image technology of film and, according to its own medial 4

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Introduction

properties, a mass-produced, omnipresent light image in print and signage. I introduce the haptic unconscious—a blind spot of modernism—by way of a short study of the two thinkers’ interactions around the question of the photograph. Two overarching themes are present in this investigation of the haptic unconscious: biology and totality, the human as organism and the image as a Gestalt distributed across time and space. The word “Gestalt” in its most literal German sense means “shape” or “form.” It is a holistic idea referencing a perceptual whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. For artist and impresario Moholy-Nagy the percipient of art was precisely a matter of biology: he identified her as an “organism.”6 A sophisticated protoplasm of sorts, she experienced the photograph and film in almost normative fashion, which in turn transformed her into more than herself, an integral segment within a machine–mammal, image–person interface that was equal parts functional and organic. Life properly understood for this percipient, in its fullness and totality, was a careful balance of sensual attention and, once again, an organic strain of functionalism, emotional attunement, and hands-on skill. Moholy-Nagy often used the word “integration” to describe the art-worker-designer’s larger goal of life-equilibrium in the workplace. Uniting psychological reflection and the pragmatism of functional tasks, Moholy-Nagy demanded smart, healthful, integrated work, in which “personal growth and not a mere training in skills for the purpose of profit” was central.7 Above all, whether artist, viewer, educator, or critic, the art percipient was an individual, a free-standing, free-acting, freely talented member of a society configured something like a distributed net of interrelations. Everyone has the “biological capacity” to create and invent useful form.8 By contrast, the percipient for Benjamin was part of a roving collective in the city, immersed in a dialectic of distraction and mobility. Ensconced in the group, here walking along the sidewalk as part of the urban masses and there seated with the audience in a movie theater, she is an agent of political change within a loosely knit revolutionary collective.9 “The masses are a matrix from which all customary behaviour toward works of art is today newborn,” Benjamin explains. “The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a different kind of participation,” in which the distracted percipient remains mobile because she takes the art with her literally absorbing it into herself from city streets and filmic experiences.10 5

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Despite these significant differences, that Moholy-Nagy was an individualist and Benjamin a collectivist, Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin understood the power of new visual technologies to transform the human body, its physiological and cognitive habits. Here, in two rather lengthy but poignant quotes, we find overlapping their belief that photo-technology constituted a prosthetic extension of mental capacities, the senses, and, most notable to this investigation, the unconscious. In brief, photographic technology exteriorized humankind’s cognitive capabilities, forging a rethinking of mind, consciousness, and the hierarchy of being. No longer simply contained in the skull, the mind, its consciousness and unconscious, had been stretched outside the body by technology. My identification and naming of Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic aesthetic the “haptic unconscious” emerges from the following passages of their writing: The camera has offered us amazing possibilities, which we are only just beginning to exploit. The visual image has been expanded and even the modern lens is no longer tied to the narrow limits of our eye; no manual means of representation (pencil, brush, etc.) is capable of arresting fragments of the world seen like this… We are only beginning to exploit them; for— although photography is already over a hundred years old—it is only in recent years that the course of development has allowed us to see beyond the specific instance and recognize the creative consequences. Our vision has only lately developed sufficiently to grasp these connections. (László Moholy-Nagy)11 Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette light or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is

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Introduction through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. (Walter Benjamin)12

Each man testifies to the transformative technology of the camera and its image, the photograph. Its effects were aesthetic and physiological; with its increasing presence conferring on art a newfound malleability and interpretative porousness, while unfolding the body’s perception outward into the world. The camera coupled with the mass media and film created a new light image that, more than the sum of its parts, was conceptually and physically ample. In using the term “light image,” the literal translation of the German word Lichtbild meaning “photograph,” my intention here is to get at the telos inside the term, its biological but not necessarily inevitable evolution toward becoming some four decades later both a digital screen image in art and a memory image coalesced from distributed actions—that is, people performing with machines and emergent wireless technology. Bigger than itself, hence, the light image was at the same time a figure, a figment, an icon, or an idol that came alive in its necessary reliance on technology and the network of the human body and its relations. A triangulation of forces—technology, the body, and art—had proven the two-dimensional light image to sustain more than its flat-screen or poster-picture self, to bear supplements in the form of space and time. The photograph allows one to “see beyond the specific instance,” as Moholy-Nagy explains, opening our minds and extending ourselves both internally and externally, revealing to each of us our “optical unconscious,” to use the famous phrase of Benjamin. The photograph shows us an “unconscious” world, details about which we did not realize we could see and minutiae visible only by way of the technological extension of the camera. By connection, the camera bestows a certain spatiality on the light-borne image. Moholy-Nagy distills this capaciousness when he says, “The visual image has been expanded and even the modern lens is no longer tied to the narrow limits of our eye.” One does not simply see the light image, the photograph and its cascading alliances in form, but one smells, hears, and tastes it. Here, both synesthesia and science take hold in aesthetics, foreshadowing related 7

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cross-wirings such as the discovery in the new millennium that olfactory receptors are found throughout the body.13 One experiences the haptic unconscious in a body extended across space and interconnected to and in the world. The unconscious of vision moves outside of the isolated sense into a net of sensations cast across time and space in order to show that there is more to the unassuming act of knowing. The senses with the light image show great breadth to the unconscious of knowing, that there is a beforeworld and afterworld that together create a Gestalt. In keeping with this sensual opening out, Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin outlined an ambiguous if not expanded sense of vision in which the optical and tactile came together to create a hybrid and roomy sensual unit. Here vision is metaphorically tickly and fingered, a matter of what Viennese art historian Alois Riegl described as taktisch, a German term meaning both “tactical” and “tactile,” translated into French and English as two different terms: tactile and haptic.14 Benjamin’s thinking on the senses and technology, including his famous identification of the optical unconscious, emerged in part from close readings of Alois Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry (1901). Benjamin found much use in the almost three-decade-old study. Riegl’s focus on normative perception and aesthetic experience during a seemingly minor period of history, late Roman Antiquity, jibed well with Benjamin’s will to open up the art criticism, art history, and aesthetics of his own historical moment to greater contemporary cultural transformations and new technologies. In its focus on a “minor period,” Riegl’s study was somewhat unorthodox but indeed innovative for its time. His was not an analytics focusing on a high epoch of golden artistic development but rather the seemingly ancillary period of late Roman Antiquity, both its foremost architectural monuments and applied arts. The goal was to see this outlying period not in terms of diachronic decline from an already passed aesthetic and socio-political pinnacle but rather of its own synchronic singularity. And, in particular, it was a study that showed how changes in history transform equally art form, representation, and perception and the human senses. Riegl accordingly divided antique art into three perceptual paradigms: the tactile or haptic; the tactile-optical; and the optical.15 Riegl’s thinking on the senses is thus at base bound up with rethinking historical formation and conditioning. Similarly, in homing in on the changing human sensorium and the taktisch 8

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Introduction

as haptic, Benjamin set in relief how history in the form of new technology produces new subjects and, more importantly, new cognitive capabilities. Tobias Wilke looks in particular to the influential role of Riegl’s neologistic term taktisch in Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay.16 In the word taktisch—variously translated as “haptic,” “tactile,” and “tactical”—we find the philological kernel of the haptic unconscious, its linguistic source which is profound in its variance and ambivalence. Taktisch bestowed physical hybridity on the act of seeing, making vision a matter of touch and thus, in turn, establishing knowing as bodily and fundamentally aesthetic in nature. In his own work, Riegl introduced the word taktisch to describe a mixing of the senses in the perception of certain ancient art, such as in the foreshortening and shadows in ancient Egyptian art whereby artists emphasized tactile qualities by optical means.17 On the representational plane, the taktisch or haptic objects are experienced up close with eyes almost touching the surfaces like hands. The closeness implied in Riegl’s use of taktisch corroborates Benjamin’s deployment of a new technologized sensorium:  his emphasis on the shift from a ruminative distance within the traditional aesthetics of painting to the combined immediacy, distraction, and closeness of photographic filmic, architectural, and urban aesthetics.18 For Wilke, the term taktisch insinuates an avant-garde tactic or strategy of action occurring by way of a tactile or haptic means of aesthetic experience.19 This fruitful ambiguity—a hybridity of terms implying the fluid movement of energies between and across the senses out into the world—is central to the haptic unconscious. Far from uniform or hegemonic in its oneness, modernist vision is manifold and multi-vectoral. Its ticklish roots of modernist vision are in the lambent space-time of the taktisch. If for Benjamin, the new image was part capitalist phantasmagoria and part revolutionary catalyst, for Moholy-Nagy it was one element among several, a mutative icon within a complex bio-organic totality. The new technological image arguably played an eschatological role for Benjamin. Under the right circumstances and in the right form the image, its apparatus, and audience were the midwife of political transformation—of revolution writ large. In a like spirit, Moholy-Nagy thought the images of mass advertising—the lights of projection, cities, billboards, film, theater, and retail display—could make us better, more insightful and creative people if 9

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deployed within art and design in a just, balanced fashion. These everyday, often commercial forms were the means for Moholy-Nagy of technological communication—makers and bearers of bright light images—which, in turn, bore a functionalism that was biological in order. Light images were for Moholy-Nagy components of biological integration within a natural totality, and neither political nor a revolutionary vehicle as they were for Benjamin. Yet, Moholy-Nagy did see radical newness and possibility in the light image of photography and cinema. The human–technology interface bodied forth a new kind of experiential image, blowing the two-dimensional image up and out, extruding it into the shared, lived world, where the techno-optics of the camera—photographic and moving-image—gave ballast to the image not flat but in three and four dimensions. It is an image of multiple dimensions and varied valences: the image of a film still showing a horse mid-gallop or two dancing women mid-sway; the image as an experience of the evanescent refraction of color through smoke or a cloud; the image as a mental Gestalt of a photograph, deep memory, and thoughts just past; the image as the cognitive map made while wending one’s way by sign and path through a city; and the image as people performing an intermedia event using early wireless technology. This polyglot of noise, aroma, kinesis, and pictures is the image sensually opened up, enabled by technology—light from the bulb to the projector to the spark of a transistor to the pixels of the screen image. For Moholy-Nagy, this image is part of an open totality, a Gestalt, first registering consciously, then always re-registering and registering more and again unconsciously. It is the image as optic, sonic, and haptic: a perceptual understanding of sight as sticky, felt, and heard, a “visual” experience unfolding in time and in the world. It is a matter of the optical and the intuitive, vision as tactile, and the senses as they deliver knowledge before, through, and after the mind. And for Moholy-Nagy this new understanding of the image was something to be taught, a matter of heuristics: “The task is to give the student enough opportunity to use his brain together with his emotion potential: to provide for sensory experiences of eye, nose, tongue, and fingers, and their transformation into controlled expression.”20 Moholy-Nagy viewed art education in terms of the totality of the brain and senses, mind and emotions—and, in brief, as a cognitive matter. 10

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Introduction

He began developing this cognitive aesthetic, both a process and pedagogy of art, in the 1920s, early in his career as an artist and arts educator.21 The ideas would live beyond him, exceeding his premature death in 1946 and influencing pedagogues and artists through the twentieth century, culminating with Jack Burnham’s relational and kinetic epistemology of art and the digital image within art in the 1960s. This aesthetic unfolds across the greater oeuvre of Moholy-Nagy’s writings, and is encapsulated in his insistence on total process-thinking (Gedankengestaltung) and the human as a complex biological organism, making art through the mind that extends across emotions, sensations and the phenomenological experience of light and kinetic form.22 If the optical unconscious is solely the technological extension of eyesight, the manner in which the camera allows one to see more than one thought capable, the haptic unconscious refers to the technological image as a full-body experience and full-body knowing before knowledge arises singly from any one sense or the mind contained in the skull. The haptic unconscious is in many ways a cognitive aesthetic rooted in intuition. I identify this approach to art as a “cognitive aesthetic” because of Moholy-Nagy’s insistence on the complex brain-body-emotion-technology totality, and also because of its basis in interaction and response rather in than any such conventional aesthetic, which promises expert opinion on static form and beauty. In keeping with the bioethical thinkers of Moholy-Nagy’s time and greater context (Ernst Haeckel, Raoul Francé, and Kurt Goldstein discussed in the first chapter) it is “cognitive” insomuch as the mind and consciousness are, similar to the emergent technological image, more than themselves, constituents of a Gestalt, part of nature and society as a changing whole. I use the term “cognitive” here as it refers to a sense of knowing something without causal cognizance, knowledge without conscious awareness. I  use the phrase “haptic unconscious” to describe a means to art, science, and technology that began with Moholy-Nagy and, as one finds in the book that follows, is traceable through the twentieth century, extant in the practices of György Kepes, Kevin Lynch, Rudolf Arnheim, Ernst Gombrich, a bevy of Op, New Tendencies, and GRAV artists, the artists of EAT and Jack Burnham, among others. In short, it is a monist means-toart: art-knowing, art-feeling, art-thinking in which sensing, emotions, and 11

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ratiocination are united. Knowing comes from—is part of—emotional and sensual experiences in the world created and mediated by art. Or as Moholy-Nagy pithily put it, “art is the grindstone of the senses.”23 As I have shown, the haptic unconscious is based in part on Benjamin’s idea of the optical unconscious, a coupling of terms from the above excerpt that pays direct homage to Freud and indirect homage to Moholy-Nagy’s thoughts on the technological enhancement of the senses. In further excavating the roots of this aesthetic, a circle of rather redundant influences takes form. That is to say, in seeking the origin of Moholy-Nagy’s singular cognitive aesthetic that I  have called the haptic unconscious, one passes through Benjamin’s writing and winds up back at Moholy-Nagy. It is a surprising turn of research simply because Benjamin’s brilliant and unique take on technology, art, and the reproducible image, viz. the optical unconscious, is more profoundly, and perhaps more correctly, a product of a rich system of cultural interconnections of which Moholy-Nagy was a significant component. A certain generation of scholars—artists and art historians—will rightfully understand the concept “haptic unconscious” and this book as a productive riposte, at least in title, to Rosalind Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious (1994).24 In this frame, the “haptic unconscious” also argues for a careful reanalysis of modernist “vision” and the various modernisms of the middle to late twentieth century—the ideas of László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, Rudolf Arnheim, Jack Burnham, G. C. Argan, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy among others—in order to better scrutinize and understand their ideas of vision, opticality, the Gestalt, art–science–technology hybridity, and the role of the biological complex system therein. In the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy knew Benjamin’s work and Benjamin knew Moholy-Nagy’s. They moved in the same avant-garde circle of artists, architects, poets, and writers in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Close in age, Benjamin born in 1892 and Moholy-Nagy 1895, they were members of the same generation of modernists. Benjamin submitted essays to and translated for G:  Material zu Gestaltung, a cross-disciplinary German Dada-Constructivist magazine, and i10, a Dutch journal. Moholy-Nagy worked as an editor for both.25 Though there is no evidence of outward friendship or intimate familiarity between the two men, Benjamin cites Moholy-Nagy as an influence on a page within one of his notebooks.26 12

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Introduction

Moholy-Nagy’s name dangles at the bottom of a sketched arrangement of lines and roughly forty-five appellations interconnected something like a large chemical compound. Surrounding identities include Linda Müller-Lehning, Else von Stritzky, Ernst Bloch, and Hugo Ball. This mapping of information sits halfway on the page written the opposite direction of a text at the top, which runs from left to right. Benjamin was parsing his thoughts, of which Moholy-Nagy was a part. While not located in a central strand of this diagrammatic, Moholy-Nagy’s voice is centrally present in Benjamin’s writings on art, technology, and reproducibility from the 1920s and 1930s. Beyond the editorial relationship that might have existed around text, they would have met in person during the early to mid-1920s at any of the ateliers of the avant-garde group surrounding the avant-garde journal G in Berlin, including Moholy-Nagy’s.27 This was around the time Moholy-Nagy published Painting, Photography, Film, a text inspired by new technologies and their effects on the human sensorium. In this 1925 publication, Moholy-Nagy develops further his thinking on the human-machine, nature-function integration, concentrating on the shift “from painting with pigment to light display projectors with a reflector,” from static to kinetic optical composition, and from production to reproduction back to production again.28 It was a text Benjamin had closely read.29 Though Benjamin’s writings are not riddled with quotations of Moholy-Nagy’s writings, the influence and shared ideas are present. One essay in particular resonates at several different levels. In Benjamin’s “News about Flowers,” a review of the nature photographer Karl Blossfeldt’s book, Orginary Forms of Art: Photographic Images of Plants (Urformen der Kunst: Photographische Pflanzenbilder) published in 1928, he focuses once again on Moholy-Nagy’s thinking on technology and the senses as well as Moholy-Nagy’s close alignment of the scientific and artistic image, linking the “plant cell under the microscope” to the work of Klee and Kandinsky.30 Benjamin deploys Moholy-Nagy’s thinking on the pioneering, prosthetic-like transformation of vision by way of photography. He praises Blossfeldt for having “proven how right the pioneer of the new light image [Moholy-Nagy] was when he said, ‘the limits of photography cannot be determined…Technology is, of course, the pathbreaker here. It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future.’ ”31 13

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Benjamin expresses his intellectual proximity to Moholy-Nagy directly and indirectly. It is written frankly and also proffered by way of the figure of Blossfeldt, a biocentric photographer whose work connects to Moholy-Nagy’s practices through technology and Life Doctrine (Lebenslehre), the naturalist subject matter of the images. The two thinkers overlap once again in the thematic space of “instincts.” Benjamin briefly discusses the “instinctual unconscious” after invoking the optical unconscious in “The Work of Art” essay. Benjamin says, “It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.” Here psychoanalysis is to the camera as the instinctual unconscious is to the optical unconscious. The camera is a quasi-scientific tool revealing the optical unconscious; and psychoanalysis, for some also a quasi-scientific tool, interrogates the frothy mental waters of the instinctual unconscious. While for Benjamin the theme of “instincts” was not a sustained force of interest, Moholy-Nagy wrote consistently about instincts, highlighting their central role within art and, more precisely, as part of the cognition of making industrial objects and light effects. Instincts in fact play a unique quasi-mechanical role in the creative act. It is through the instincts that the maker transitions from over-determined rationalizing to sensual automatism. The artist-maker goes on autopilot, as it were, through ineffable drives. She gets in the zone or starts to Zen while in action, to put it more colloquially. Essentially following the logic of the haptic unconscious, she lets go of the will to over-determine and allows the knowledge of proprioception to kick in. Moholy-Nagy describes the creation-reception-perception of objects according to the instinctual in The New Vision:  “In every creative work there is a sphere in which a certain freedom is left to the intuition. The creative problem enters at the point where the freedom begins, where the visible function no longer determines, or at least not wholly determines, the form. In such cases an instinctive sureness of perception is required, and this is nothing more than the end result of complicated processes going on the subconscious, but in the last determined biologically.”32 Instincts reinforce one’s own status as an organism while reciprocally naturalizing technology. By turn, Moholy-Nagy’s percipient has biocentric agency, a penchant for resistance and critique of industrialization bound up with the fin-de-siècle discourses of nature-and-life and emergent ecological 14

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Introduction

thinking. Benjamin’s percipient, by contrast, gleans agency from urban group action. Benjamin nonetheless develops a dialectic around the instinctual unconscious not unlike Moholy-Nagy’s sense of instinct modulated by technological and scientific function. The instinctual unconscious for Benjamin is the path to a certain “psychic immunization” against dangerous and violent technologization.33 Writing in a decisively utopian manner, Benjamin claims “collective perception” and “collective laughter” have the power to appropriate and thwart the mass image of violence. Though in different ways and to different effects, both thinkers delegitimate standard concepts of humanism in their rethinking of the power and path of the human being in the age of mechanical technologization. If for Moholy-Nagy the mass light image bears hope for humanity in the common bio-naturalism that is electricity itself, then for Benjamin it is humanity acting together that bears the hope, the collective of critical, laughing perception absorbing the art of life in the streets and movie theater. Art as Organism traces the former, Moholy-Nagy’s thinking over roughly fifty years, in its protean form as it shifts and mutates but remains consistently a matter of the living complex system. It is a story of the Bauhaus spreading and living as a diaspora of ideas in the United States after World War II, uniting art, science, and technology as a world of possibility and a means to enliven the humanities.

III. The Organization of Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image The book Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image follows this unique and forgotten bio-aesthetic of the light image from roughly 1920 to 1972 in five chapters. Its organization is an enactment of its topic: it works like a closed but dynamic complex living system. While linear in chronology, its function is recursive and nonlinear. I establish certain points in the history of the digital image in art and then repeatedly loop back to them. Recurrent themes here include: the Bauhaus, complex biological systems, holism, the Gestalt, intuition-based biocentrism, the Unity of Science movement, art–science–technology hybrids in the fine arts and publishing, cognitive mapping in the city, and the distributed light image. The first chapter focuses on the sources of Moholy-Nagy’s biocentrism, looking to the various holisms at work in the shaping of an 15

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organismic take on the light image. Biocentrism (Biozentrik) is a strain of biologistic Neo-Romanticism, which materialized in Germany as a form of education by way of natural forms and oneness with nature. Biocentrism in Moholy-Nagy’s thinking is driven by themes of intuition, idealism, holism, and the unity of the mind and body. This chapter starts with philosopher-scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s morphological methodologies, then looks to Hungarian botanist Raoul Francé’s “biotechnics”; Kurt Goldstein’s organismic take on Aufbau, or the “up-building,” of living form; Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler in Berlin; and the Viennese Unity of Science movement between Europe and the United States. The study connects the ideas of “form” and “totality” by way of the German term Gestaltung, meaning “form,” “formation,” “becoming,” and “design,” as it materialized through Moholy-Nagy’s teaching at the Bauhaus in Berlin and the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The last section dissects the troubled history of the Bauhaus in its last titular incarnation stateside, comparing the German and American curricula and faculty, looking in particular to the deep camaraderie and intellectual exchange between Moholy-Nagy and fellow Hungarian, light-artist, and pedagogue György Kepes. Chapter 1 covers the development of the haptic unconscious from roughly 1920 to 1946, tracing the idea’s elaboration through Moholy-Nagy’s activities from Berlin, through London, to Chicago, where he died. The second chapter covers the work of György Kepes from his time with Moholy-Nagy in London, to Chicago’s Institute of Design (the final incarnation and name of the New Bauhaus), to his early days as Professor of Drawing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this chapter, I delve into the development of the haptic unconscious as it was influenced by the interaction between Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, and the Theoretical Biology Club, a London-based group of biologists, embryologists, and geneticists who came together over shared research and political activism against the rise of fascism on the Continent. The short but intense interlude from 1935 to 1937, called the London Bauhaus by Peder Anker, informs the ensuing rest of the book.34 This two years of exchange marked an important empowering and invigorating passage of Moholy-Nagy’s German biocentrism. Moholy-Nagy continued communication with the scientists stateside, until his death in 1946. And, Kepes would remain friends with most 16

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Introduction

of the scientists in this group, publishing writings by the scientists alongside those of artists in his nine mid-twentieth-century anthologies, seven of which made up the seminal Vision + Value series. These hybrid publications created the foundation for a long, healthy, and interesting dialog between fields of expertise—art, science, and technology. In this chapter, I establish the breadth and vision of Kepes’ series of anthologies, in particular looking to its hybrid art–science–technology ethos as essential to the haptic unconscious. Through themes of integration, distribution, morphology, and epigenetics, this chapter follows the story of the haptic unconscious from 1947 to 1966. In the third chapter, I focus on the collaboration at MIT between Kepes and his protégé, the urbanist Kevin Lynch. I elaborate here on the development of the electric and code-based light image as “distributed” through urban experience in the city, looking to Lynch’s research and writing of the Image of the City (1960) and to the work of Lynch, John R. Myer, and Donald Appleyard titled The View from the Road (1965). This chapter follows Kepes and Lynch’s collaboration, in teaching classes on the role of the senses in perception and phenomenology in urban planning at MIT, and in their writing of a Rockefeller Foundation grant to cover research for the project in Boston, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. The fundamental raison d’être of this chapter is to provide a strong definition and example of “distribution,” as it is a working rubric across media and professions, from telephonic communication to urban design to the digital image in art. I trace the influence of J. C. R. Licklider, Alfred North Whitehead, Susanne K. Langer, and Kenneth E. Boulding on Lynch’s “distributed urban image,” and conclude with wet, biological cognitive mapping. This chapter follows the development of the haptic unconscious from 1954 to 1966. The fourth chapter returns to the central concern of art, looking to the haptic unconscious within the realm of early global contemporary art as it developed between American Op Painting and the European New Tendencies movement. I  connect hardedge geometric painting to emergent computer art by way of perceptual theory, the Gestalt theories of Rudolf Arnheim, Kurt Lewin, and G. C. Argan and ecological perception of J. J. Gibson. This chapter loops back to Gestalt psychology in order to trace its influences forward from the early part of the century on the artists and critics involved with mid-twentieth-century kinetic, optical, and early computer art both in the 17

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United States and Europe. It starts with the Op Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New  York, Responsive Eye, curated by William Seitz in 1966, and looks to the New Tendencies Movement of the same artists and time period in order to argue that there exists a holistic connection between the two genres of art. This wholeness exists in particular by way of theories of the Gestalt. I conclude the chapter by arguing for a subtle but significant evolution in perceptual theory from the Gestalt to an ecological paradigm. This chapter focuses on the middle of the decade, looking to the development of the haptic unconscious from 1964 to 1970. The fifth and final chapter brings the story to a conclusion with the full emergence of the digital image in art. I focus on the image’s distribution in varying degrees according to a theme of the “generative” within computational and biological science and theory. First, I discuss the materialization of the digital image in art in the work of three artists in 1965: the digital prints of American computer artist A.  Michael Noll, which showed that year in an exhibition in New York, and Germans Georg Nees and Frieder Nake, which were also in two exhibitions in Stuttgart. Second, I trace the distributed digital image in art through the fleeting but revolutionary engineer-and-artist performances of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT). I follow EAT’s uses of a variety of technologies, including video projection, infrared lights, wireless FM transmitters and amplifiers, Doppler sonar, and telephone lines, in particular looking to two seminal exhibitions—9 Evenings:  Theatre and Engineering at the Armory in New  York in 1966, and the Pepsi Pavilion at the World’s Fair Exposition in Osaka, Japan in 1970. Third, I reunite Moholy-Nagy and Kepes by looking to the fruition of the former’s vision of an urban-scaled light image within the latter’s late-career philosophy and practice of civic art. I  conceive of the digital image as further distributed across time and space at the scale of the city through Kepes’ civic art engagement, the fount of which was the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), founded in 1967. I conclude the book in 1972, with Kepes’ final volume of the Vision + Value series and the computer and program-based art collective Pulsa. Returning to Moholy-Nagy and Kevin Lynch, the final chapter loops backward and forward, tracing the development of the haptic unconscious from 1961 to 1972. The book closes with a glossary of pivotal terms. 18

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1 Bauhaus Biology The Beginnings of Biofunctionalism

I. Introduction: The Holisms of Bios—Biology, Biocentrism, and Biotechnics This chapter traces the development of the haptic unconscious through Moholy-Nagy’s work at the Bauhaus, both in Germany and the United States. There, he began developing Bauhaus biofunctionalism: a design philosophy in which the creation of art, architecture, and industrial design mimics the function of living organisms. Organized in three sections, this chapter is a study of the origins of a biotechnical holism that was, for Moholy-Nagy and legatees to follow, a means of expressing the power—socio-intellectual, formal, and aesthetic—of the kinetic light image, from chemical photography to the digital art-form and advertising image. In short, “holism” is the belief that the mind and body are united in acts of putative consciousness. It is also a practical approach to making art in which science and technology are elemental. Holism in art identifies this unity of fields. We find the deep roots of biotechnical holism here in the biological romanticism and holistic vision of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Like other moderns, László Moholy-Nagy thought in holistic totalities, but he was not a totalizing thinker. His interest in wholes was neither hegemonic nor totalitarian in character, but rather a rare combination of the tool-like, functional, and biological. As a tool, “totality” could repair brokenness; as biology, it could ecologically balance 19

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and knit disparate people and societies together into an open and mutating oneness. Moholy-Nagy’s totality was an idea of fullness rooted in empathy, natural differences, and a broader history of bio-naturalism going back to Goethe.1 He inherited from the historical past a quest for unity in nature which would work contrapuntally against mechanizing forces, balancing man, nature, and industry in a creative holism. In his own day, he sought a way to express the wave-like and at times destructive effects of modern technology on the world. Historian of Science Anne Harrington writes about the tendency to develop holisms in Germany. Such inclusive, aggregative thinking worked to philosophically correct the scientific fracturing of a natural whole, coalesce the disparate duchies and states of Germany into an empire in 1871, and balance socio-cultural and economic imbalances brought on by mass production and industrialization.2 Resonating thus in the voice of Moholy-Nagy is the German Romanticism of Goethe, his holistic views of a “rich and colorful world shaped by aesthetic principles of order and patterning” that opposed the “meaningless fragmentation of Newton’s universe.”3 While an inheritor at some level of certain longstanding historical German ideas, Moholy-Nagy was not German. He was a Hungarian who, having arrived in Berlin in 1920, adapted with great avidity to the avant-garde cultural climate of interwar Berlin. Which is to say, he was an immigrant assimilating German traditions with a spirit of resistance in the context of Dadaists, Constructivists, and writers such as Walter Benjamin. For a good portion of the fourteen years he spent in Germany, from 1920 to 1934, he was an activist pushing for changes in German art pedagogy and art and in aesthetic traditions. With members of the avant-garde G-group, such as Hans Richter, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, George Grosz, Frederick Kiesler, and Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy envisioned a radically different approach to art directed by the changeful, more all-encompassing concept of Gestaltung, a term that translates as “form,” “formation,” “becoming,” and “design.”4 Influential in the development of Moholy-Nagy’s fascination with kinetic art, Gestaltung is a noun as well as noun-in-action, equally suggestive of the ever modulating “biology.” In 1923, at the invitation of Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy joined the faculty of the Bauhaus, a design school that was severely critical of the past and tradition as it took form in historicism and historicist architecture. He inherited historically important 20

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German ideas in order to break down German tradition while pioneering new ways of German-cum-universal thinking. His subject position as a Hungarian insider-outsider, an avant-garde groundbreaker living in Berlin, then at the Weimar Bauhaus, and then at the Dessau Bauhaus, lent itself to brilliant revisions of German concepts. A holism of the bio-organic order with an eye toward the future, for example, emerges from the tweaking of Richard Wagner’s concept of the total work of art. Moholy-Nagy changes the Gesamtkunstwerk to Gesamtwerk, expanding the word by negation, removing “kunst,” or art, and thus rethinking the total work of art holistically as “life:” “What we need is not the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ alongside and separated from which life flows by, but a synthesis of all the vital impulses spontaneously forming itself into the all-embracing Gesamtwerk [life or life work] which abolishes all isolation, in which all individual accomplishments proceed from a biological necessity and culminate in a universal necessity.”5 The operatic concept is nested amidst the robust language of the biological-as-holism. “Life flows” as part of the epigenetic, the self-forming, and origin-less, with “all the vital impulses spontaneously forming itself [sic] into the all-embracing ‘life.’ ” The term “epigenetic” refers to the environmental forces that affect the phenotypic expression of the genome. The environment ranges in scale from cellular to ecological. With respect to the greater ecological network, I  stretch “epigenetic” in this book to the cultural realm, as it basically means interaction, change, and the interactive relationship between the whole and constituent parts. Because it describes the metabolizing body of “biological necessity,” the biological is also the noyau of the haptic within the “haptic unconscious.” It is, in short, the conceptual crossing at the heart of this tactile becoming-aesthetic. The biological is an evolving idea in Moholy-Nagy’s thinking, discursively yet regularly present in texts published between 1925 and 1946. Around it he developed a vocabulary of naturalist concepts that, in addition to “biology,” includes “biotechnics,” “the organic,” and “the organism.” The pervasiveness of this rubric among discussions of art practices, such as photography, kinetic art, architecture, and theater, and the tutelage of painting, sculpture, and design, is prima facie baffling. Yet Moholy-Nagy developed the ideas contextually, often connecting the biological to the biotechnical by way of the biocentric theories and discoveries of botanist 21

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Raoul Francé, whom I discuss below. The puzzling yet imaginative qualities of Moholy-Nagy’s invocation of the biological within an art pedagogy seem more normative when set within the greater historical framework of what Oliver A. I. Botar calls “biocentrism,” trends in fin-de-siècle German and Austrian popular philosophies of science. Botar describes biocentrism (Biozentrik) as a strain of biologistic Neo-Romanticism: “A reaction to what was seen as the excessive positivism and materialism of nineteenth-century science.”6 Moholy-Nagy’s biological is driven by themes of intuition, idealism, and monism, the belief that mind and body are one, all of which constitute a platform for the critique of the imbalances of life brought on by industrialization.7 A monist, like Francé and the biologist Ernst Haeckel, the progressive pedagogue Moholy-Nagy found mind-over-body rationalism antithetical to Lebenslehre, so much so that he regarded “dualism” as an “expletive” (Schimpfwort).8 Monism is a philosophy of oneness. In Art as Organism it describes the mind–body unity. Since the biological was, more precisely, a matter of the objective (Sächlich) within Moholy-Nagy’s approach to design, it made better sense as a functioning implement in a time of new technology, while nonetheless inflected by traditions of Goethe’s Romanticism. The biological is thus a dynamic dialectical concept for Moholy-Nagy, proving he “was a spiritual materialist seeking to bind oppositions in harmony.”9 The biological as such was a soft concept within the matrices of hard instrumentalization, an element within a system of pedagogy operating as a counterbalance to the mechanization of craft and design. Biology was programmatic and necessary for his goal of teaching design as a matter of making an object through bodily experience and as part of a life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie). It did not simply represent human physiology but was the embodiment of a holism: “biology” was in so many words a praxis of making and theorizing, construction and philosophy. The concept called upon thinking through the design process as a haptic, experiential act. Moholy-Nagy set these ideas in motion in the design classroom with The New Vision, a Bauhaus textbook originally published in 1928 under the title Von material zu architektur. An iconic ledger of the history of the Bauhaus, the book is organized around a poetics and epistemology of the senses which gives way to a more direct pedagogical structure that 22

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includes direction in materials, tactility, volume, and space.10 In comparing the original German version to the English translation, a pattern of conceptual development emerges within the rubric of the biological. Between the 1928 and 1930 version, there is a shift in language from the organic to the biological. In 1928, he describes the artist-percipient in terms of man as he is “organically growing in the community” (in der Gemeinschaft organisch wachsenden). This becomes in the later English version man’s development “along the lines of his biological functions.” In both instances, Moholy-Nagy uses biocentric language to illustrate the healthy subject living a holistic life. Yet the shift from the “organic” to “biological” also marks a slight distinction:  the turn toward a more resolute use of the biocentric and a stronger argument for softening the body–machine interface. Here we find evidence of Moholy-Nagy’s interest in yet another holism, the push for harmony in the German workplace that took form in the research movement called “industrial psychotechnics.”11 In this European science of work, researchers monitored the physiology and psychology of the individual worker, measuring energy exertion for an “energetic labor law” (energetisches Arbeitsrecht) intended to uphold standards of health for laborers.12 Moholy-Nagy’s discourse on biology and interest in industrial psychotechnics worked in tandem as part of a greater reaction to the individual and social fragmentation caused by over-specialization within modern industrialization. In the same years, architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier wrote with great zeal about the possibility of rapidly produced design—cars, houses, and mass housing—based on highly rationalized manufacturing systems, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management and Henry Ford’s assembly-line production.13 The rigid codification of human movement and time within these structures of production, however, runs counter to the relativistic, pliable, and permeable ethos of Moholy-Nagy’s biocentric philosophy. In response to the industrial segmentation of flesh, Moholy-Nagy writes, “the future needs the whole man,” the human subject unparceled by “specialized training” (sektorenhafte Ausbildung):  “A specialized education becomes meaningful only if a man of integration is developed along the lines of his biological 23

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functions, so he will achieve a natural balance of his intellectual and emotional power instead of on those of an outmoded educational aim of learning unrelated details.”14 The Bauhaus textbook worked something like a magic writing tablet for the development of Moholy-Nagy’s biological rubric, a place where small changes, subtractions, and additions show the evolution of his biocentric philosophy. Though not radically changing overall the original text of Von material zu architektur, Moholy-Nagy nevertheless added a new section in the first part of the English version called “Biological Needs.” Here he deploys the biological as a limit, a threshold of life for humans that must be respected and upheld. The biological in this instance becomes an expressed ecology of resistance: “In this book the word ‘biological’ stands generally for laws of life which guarantee an organic development… In reality the basic biological needs are very simple. They may change and be deformed through social and technical processes. However, great care must be taken that their real significance should not be adulterated. This often happens through misunderstood luxury which may thwart the organic satisfaction of the biological needs. The oncoming generation has to create a culture which does not weaken but strengthen the genuine biological functions.”15 A life of extremes, either made abstemious and rote by machines or distended and haphazard from consumer excess, perverts the organic balance implicit in the phrase “biological needs.” Biocentric thinking is by no means absent from the original German version of the book, with Moholy-Nagy introducing “biotechnics as a method of creative activity” (die Biotechnik als metode schöpferischer Tätigkeit) in the materials, surface treatment, and painting section. He quotes at length the Hungarian-born botanist Raoul Francé, elaborating in particular on his concept of “biotechnics.” Francé was an essential member of the vitalist community in Central and Western Europe and a founding member of the Monist League, having moved to Germany for the post of Director at the Munich Biological Institute in 1908.16 His work crossed boundaries and disciplines, rankling scientists, piquing Darwinists and Neo-Lamarckians, and inspiring artists and architects. A  generation older than members of the avant-garde of interwar Berlin, Francé cultivated ideas that spoke directly to them. As Moholy-Nagy did, El Lissitzky, Hannes Meyer, Raoul Haussmann, Ernõ Kållai, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe read the work 24

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of Francé, incorporating his biotechnical theories into their functionalist design philosophies and, where possible, into their practices as well.17 Francé’s thinking appealed to modernists because of its yielding sense of totality and poetic rational logic. His plant-based bio-functionalism created a holistic take on design while also injecting the standing realities of functionalist manufacturing with a desirable openness and compassion for other ecological life. Roughly a century ago, Francé was known well and received as a genius, with his books selling millions of copies in the 1920s.18 Casting a view onto current discourses, his thinking was extraordinarily prescient, as his broadminded ideas on the organic–artificial interface and mobile and mind-bearing plant life, though for the most part unknown today, jibe well with contemporary theories of ecology and “extended mind.”19 This last phrase identifies the externalization of cognition and consciousness from the brain outward across the body through tools into the environment. Extended mind situates putative consciousness within a lateral set of systemic relations across and outside of the body. In the 1920s, it was Francé’s concept of biotechnics that in part inspired Moholy-Nagy’s “biology.” Referring generally to the interface between the natural and artificial, biotechnics is more specifically “the art of applying the knowledge of the functions of living systems to technical problems, i.e. a biological engineering science.”20 Motivating Francé’s research was the belief that the “mechanical elegance of living beings should inspire engineers to a new perspective on technology.”21 His direct message to engineers and scientists does not obviate the larger social repercussions of his thinking. Francé’s “biotechnical” is base systems-oriented and ecological, a network-like concept of the interconnectedness and similarities between the organs of plants, animals, and humans. Creatures are connected for Francé not by a metaphysical force but by the very material reality of biological function. Certain of their organs are strikingly similar because of their common purposes. “The same necessities produce the same structural-technical solution notwithstanding if it involve[s] plants, animals, or humans,” writes his wife Annie Francé-Harrar in a recollection of her husband.22 In a biological variation on Occam’s razor, a medieval theory of minimalism and efficiency, “every function creates its own optimal structure.”23 Francé found connections and mirroring elements between plants and humans, provocatively identifying a vegetal consciousness, 25

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or “germs of mind in plants.”24 Rethinking consciousness in terms of lateral ordering rather than the vertical arrangement of hierarchies, Francé argued plants exhibited a life of dynamism and sensuality parallel to animals and humans. “One thing can not be concealed,” he explains, “and that is that in the sense-life of plants we are very close to the beginning of all knowledge.”25 In this framework, a thesis of plants thinking is no more preposterous than the broad category of mammals thinking. It reframes “thinking,” moving it away from linear causality to the enveloped workings of a biological complex system. Biotechnics is a monism, pivoting according to the oneness, lateral relations, and dynamism of all creatures. Living creatures move through life according to self-organization and a shared vital energy, what Henri Bergson called l’élan vital. Unique to the monism of Francé—doubtless a source of Moholy-Nagy’s monism—is its openness, as it extends outward to include the artificial, manmade and technological. This techno-organicism is traceable to Ernst Haeckel, the naturalist, biologist, doctor, and monist of whom Francé was a student and great admirer. Famous for his taxonomic study of radiolarians (single-celled marine protozoa), and infamous for some of his developments on “race,” Haeckel also wrote about monism, claiming there is an “essential unity of inorganic and organic nature, the latter having been evolved from the former only at a relatively late period.”26 Francé’s botanical experiments, his development of soil biology, and his writings on the potential consciousness of plants made for a great elasticity of how science receives and acts upon the body-mind continuum. He created a flexibility in which the biological worked reciprocally with the functional:  insomuch as the organic nature of plants could be stretched, opened, and shown to bear elements of consciousness, so too could function be stretched to include the capabilities of existential morphing. Consciousness might thus be redefined as mutable, site-specific, externalized, and extended across body, tools, and environment. Under the umbrella of Francé’s biotechnics, Moholy-Nagy fixed a string of subjective concepts within the functionalist process of making useful designs, telling students of Bauhaus pedagogy: “Of course ‘function’ means here not a pure mechanical service. It includes also the psychological, social and economical components of a given time.”27 26

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Image 1 Ernst Haeckel, Acanthrometra, from Die Radiolarien (Berlin, 1862).

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In addition to affecting modern design philosophy and pedagogy, Francé influenced the literal shapes and appearances of design. He set forth form-principles the imprint of which is felt in the typography, collage, photography, and architectural design work of the 1920s German avant-garde. These principles work something like a Gestalt, similar to parts within a whole—a Ganzheitskomplex, or “holistic complex”—which Francé also named the bios.28 Under the subheading “Geometrical and biotechnical elements” within The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy writes of these elemental forms, Francé’s “seven biotechnical constructional elements: “[the] crystal, sphere, cone, plate, strip, rod, and spiral (screw),” and their core necessity in the making of biotechnical design.29 For Moholy-Nagy, and other members of the interwar avant-garde, these forms were building blocks. And for Francé, Moholy-Nagy writes, “these are the basic technical elements of the whole world.”30 While perhaps reductive, architectural theorist Detlef Mertins sees in Francé’s forms a force of open creative energy, a logic of epigenesis coalescing in biological self-creation. In Francé’s extruded geometries “form is not an a priori; it’s not predetermined. Form is seen as the result of a process. That opens the door to the question of what kind of processes and media or means are involved in the making of form.”31 The simplicity and epigenetic potential for serial production—for producing difference from within their repetition—makes Francé’s forms flexible and useful for design, especially contemporary computer aided design. They are clean, spartan geometries of the bios, bringing to mind the educational building blocks of Frederick Fröbel and the concept of “crystallization” within D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), both of which influenced modern architecture and design.32 Francé’s seven units were so popular among artists, one finds them referenced across a variety of materials and media, from experimental typographical abstraction to photographic comparisons of animals and machines to mock-ups for large-scale interactive sculpture. In 1924, El Lissitzky published a typographic work juxtaposing Francé’s “seven Ur-forms of creation” and a Proun composition. It appeared in the special “Nasci” issue of the avant-garde journal Merz. In harmony with the dynamic ecological monism previously discussed, “Nasci” means “nature” and, as Mertins points out, is translated in Latin as “becoming,” which is synonymous with the German Gestaltung, meaning both form and formation.33 Creating a more 28

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Image 2 Page from Merz no.8/9 (April/June 1924), edited by Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky, titled Nasci, courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

strictly formalist but no less profound network of connections, Oliver A. I. Botar locates Moholy-Nagy’s use of the seven “ur-forms” in the photographs of Painting, Photography, and Film and exhibitions organized around the biocentric ideas of The New Vision.34 Moholy-Nagy referenced, for example, Francé’s originary forms in the photo-juxtaposition of a flock of geese and aircraft flying in a V-formation, two photos on facing pages of Painting, Photography, and Film. In this coupling, Moholy-Nagy parallels the iconic formation and functionalism of flying birds and machines, while methodologically carving a place for the amateur photographer, using the non-art snapshots of scientific imagery. For Botar, the photographs prove to bear a “novel aesthetic value inherent to images not intended as works of art… they are exemplars of the naturamorphic analogy, that is the analogy between art and unfamiliar natural forms.”35 Beyond these works of art, typography, and gallery installation, the most obvious and intense reference to Francé’s forms, in particular the spiral or screw, is the Kinetic-Constructive System:  Structure with Movement Track for Play and Conveyance (1922), a multi-storied adult 29

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jungle gym conceptualized by Moholy-Nagy and the Hungarian engineer István Sebök. The mixed-media drawing that was the basis for a work of sculpture intended to be the size of a small building was the companion piece to the 1922 manifesto he co-wrote with Alfred Kemény, titled “Dynamic-Constructive System of Forces.”36 Expressing the technovitalism of Francé and Moholy-Nagy’s biocentric thinking, the first line of the manifesto reads, “Vital construction is the embodiment of life and the principle of all human and cosmic development.”37 Though intended as cultural-cum-political game-changers, the manifesto and Kinetic-Constructive System remained largely ideas on paper, conceptual rallies in the art and design world. It is thus perhaps apropos that the manifesto calls ultimately for the dematerialization of the work of art into a pure energy—a post-technological élan vital.38 Kinetic-Constructive System exists today in its original form, as a small but effective object:  a photomontage-collage and architectural drawing as précis. Its rendering as a “planometric oblique projection” provides a sense of its large scale, proportions, and, most poignant of all, kinetic experience.39 The collage is a series of layered pictures in photomontage, India ink, and watercolor:  spirals and a vertical pole-like volume within a larger spiral and small photographic cutouts of men moving inside and along its edges. Tower-shaped and enormous in its vision, it is also influenced by Vladimir Tatlin’s corkscrew-cum-ziggurat shaped architectural wonder that was never built, the Constructivist Monument to the Third International (1919–20). Moholy-Nagy and Sebök’s Kinetic-Constructive System would have been an open steel structure with an outer ramp along its edges for slow deliberative ascent, an inner ramp at a steep declination for rapid exodus, and a spiraling passage running vertically through the center which would function like both a fireman’s pole and a tightly skewed stairwell. If realized, it would have been, as Moholy-Nagy explains, “a structure with paths of motion for sport and recreation”:  an element within an urban playground—a blown-up version of Francé’s archetypal biological form, the spiral—singly meant for the unfolding of an aesthetic experience, namely the haptic unconscious.40

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Image 3 László Moholy-Nagy and István Sebök, Kinetic-Constructive System: Structure with Movement Track for Play and Conveyance, 1922, courtesy of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne.

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Image 4 Vladimir Tatlin, Maquette of The Monument to the Third International, 1919.

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II. Holisms of Relations: Gestalt, Aufbau, and the Unity of Science Movement As Anne Harrington shows, there was an efflorescence of holisms in Germany between the reign of the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II (1888–1918), and the rise of Third Reich under Adolf Hitler in 1933.41 Such holisms directly and indirectly gave form to Moholy-Nagy’s biocentrism, while seeding the theory of the haptic unconscious. They arrived in various configurations and emerged from diverse disciplines and vocations, including the scientific, psychological, and linguistic. The bio-psychological work of neuroscientist Kurt Goldstein creates a bridge between the energetic biophilosophy of Moholy-Nagy, Gestalt psychology, and the “up-building,” or Aufbau, of the Unity of Science movement, the last of which would influence the pedagogical practices of the Bauhaus in Dessau and Chicago, thus linking the old world to the new. Though Moholy-Nagy does not mention Goldstein by name, they shared place and language, both active in 1920s Berlin and choosing the bio-clinical word “organism” as a holistic substitute for “man” and “mankind.” By using the word “organism” in his 1934 book Der Aufbau des Organismus (translated in English as The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man [1939]), neuroscientist Goldstein intended to frame the patient’s problem and improvement according to the holism of her body and brain together, as well as her active and broader situation. Based on his studies of severely wounded soldiers of World War I, men mostly with head injuries and cognitive impairment, Goldstein argued for a new holistic approach to neuroscience. In contradistinction to the standing analytic of the wounded brain, in which scientists viewed the injured area of the brain to be the direct and only bearer of its full rejuvenation, Goldstein argued the injury should be studied in its greater context, with the focus being the brain in its entirety as part of the human nervous system and the body implanted in a specific context in the world. Goldstein’s organism was “a creature driven to achieve coherence (wholeness) and prepared to confront anxiety and vulnerability to do so.”42 In choosing the word “organism” Goldstein thus named another holism based on the monism of brain and body, the linchpin of which comes from the outside: “the influence of the peripheral processes on the function of 33

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the nervous system.”43 The nervous system of the organism, for Goldstein, functions as a whole and not in parts. In short, Goldstein’s holism was a matter of both phenomenology and the Gestalt. While trained as a neurologist and psychiatrist, Goldstein worked professionally within the field of Gestalt psychology, collaborating with the Gestalt psychologist Adhémar Gelb in Munich and Gestalt theorists Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler in Berlin in the 1920s.44 From the union of philosophy and science—phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and neuroscience—he saw the interconnection between the injured brain and fractured communication: he discovered “disease and damage to the brain led to a breakdown in th[e] capacity to create Gestalts… resulting in uncoordinated behavioural patterns from a larger pattern or plan.”45 It followed that the cognitively impaired were best understood according to a full “picture of the organism”—of the organism acting fully, in a healthy balance of the functional as well as the emotional—extended out into its environment. Goldstein’s was a “self-actualizing brain.”46 Something like Mertins’ epigenetic take on Francé’s forms, Goldstein believed the organism’s brain was driven by a force to “actualize itself according to its inner essence.”47 Which is to say, the brain rejuvenates according to an existential equilibrium of physical and psychological forces. Such physico-psychological energies are internal and external, welling up from within and impinging upon the organism, its genesis, life, and death. Goldstein argues: “The environment of an organism is by no means something definite and static but is continuously forming commensurably with the development of the organism and its activity. One could say the environment emerges from the world through the being or actualization of the organism… An organism can exist only if it succeeds in finding in the world and adequate environment— in shaping an environment (for which, of course, the world must offer the opportunity).”48 While touched and transformed by external forces, the organism is at once autonomous and autopoetic within the greater context of these effects, which is, in so many words, the totality of the Gestalt. The organism shapes its own environment—is epigenetic and autopoetic, or self-organizing—as long as the world offers an opportunity. Acting as patient for Goldstein and percipient-artist for Moholy-Nagy, the “organism” played a common role for the two thinkers: it was any-man universalized by his biological functions and ecological relations. By contrast, 34

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the Gestalt theory of Goldstein was only faintly present in Moholy-Nagy’s work. In fact, Moholy-Nagy circumnavigated Gestalt theory, often seeming to express it as though by way of osmosis rather than any such conscious engagement. A brief discussion of the meanings of Gestaltung and Gestalt is in order, for between the two terms we find on the one hand historical parallels and a lively coexistence fruitful for this study and, on the other, evidence of more recent methodological prejudices. Though similar in the shared presence of “Gestalt,” the meanings of Gestaltung and Gestalt are distinct. As previously established, Gestaltung means “form” and “formation.” It is a concept of “becoming” that exists between noun and verb, referring to the “projection of forms into the world.”49 Gestalt means literally “shape” or “form,” and in its everyday use can refer to totalities. In a more theoretical turn, as Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels described it and as it would become the basis for a specific take on epistemology and aesthetics, the Gestalt refers to a perceptual whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.50 The Gestalt is a holistic organizational concept, meant in its original moment over a century ago to counter the noise of chaos—the disequilibrium of German politics and society during the Weimar Republic. It is a system of “form perception” in which “a dynamic process of organization [plays out] that entails the active recognition of meaningful patterns and whole-relations in the stimulus array.”51 In the development of his concept of “bioconsctructivisms,” Mertins highlights the words’ distinctions, reminding his readers that the Gestalt “settl[es] chaos into an order that presumes to transcend it,” and thus goes against the chaos-welcoming, process-oriented, and becoming nature of Gestaltung.52 Here Mertins reads the Gestalt/Gestaltung nexus according to value-based retrievability: the Gestalt is an irretrievable concept of modernism, while by contrast Gestaltung is retrievable. Gestalt is “bad” because it has been deemed a closed system of vision, universalism and totality, while Gestaltung is “good” because it is an open system of the polysensual, site-specific, and contingent. The former is modern while the latter invokes postmodernism. Howard Singerman similarly compares Gestalt and Gestaltung, focusing more on their historical uses rather than theoretical in order to tease out their role in the development of seminal Bauhaus ideas. Singerman points to the manner in which philosopher Conrad Fiedler, 35

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whose ideas “the Bauhaus would inherit,” translated Gestaltung as “free Gestalt-formation.”53 Fiedler’s translation highlights how the terms are inseparable. The Gestalt dwells within Gestaltung both in spelling and figure—both literally and conceptually.54 Though different words with different meanings, “both terms were clearly involved in a ‘psychological aesthetics,’ the experimental search for a psychological foundation of good forms.”55 The Gestalt/Gestaltung nexus is a duality I wish to move beyond in this study, choosing to view the two words as embedded rather than opposed. While thus maintaining Fiedler’s nesting of terms, the idea that the Gestalt is inside of Gestaltung, I would like to decouple the Gestalt’s aforementioned “psychological aesthetics” from the “foundation of good forms.” To be more precise, I would like to focus our attention on the Gestalt as a potential psychological aesthetics not simply intended for the identification of “good form,” but rather characterized by the dynamism and open-endedness of biocentrism, biology, the organism, and the other holisms of its context.56 Let us at this juncture connect a biocentric Gestalt to Moholy-Nagy’s practices while briefly casting our gaze forward into the greater scope of the study to follow. Gestalt theories play a central role in the unfolding of the theory of the haptic unconscious during the twentieth century, in particular in the work of a chain of figures and art movements connected to Moholy-Nagy:  including his friend and colleague György Kepes as well as those whom he influenced over time, such as Kevin Lynch, Rudolf Arnheim, Jack Burnham, and the genealogically related light-based temporal art that includes Op Art, New Tendencies, kinetic, early computer and digital art. Though holistic and image-oriented, the Gestalt is not simply a formalism or “psychological foundation of good forms.” Rather, in keeping with Moholy-Nagy’s biocentrism and the haptic unconscious, the Gestalt is an open, changeful, and experiential vision of totality. The Gestalt is wet and living. Beyond simply constituting a way of reading good form—seeing and identifying immediately a “single shape or image” within a given design—the Gestalt is flickering, temporally open, and extended.57 It is an imagistic intermingling of the elements of perceptual flow.

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Image 5 Friedrich Schumann’s tachistoscope c. 1900, courtesy of the Adolf-Würth Center for the History of Psychology, University of Würzburg.

The reduction of the Gestalt to an ossified totality and a simple figure–ground measure of perception only serves to shut down rather than open up inquiry. Such a framing of the Gestalt, I would like to argue, arises not so much from a misreading but a disproportionate reading of Gestalt theories. Here, I refer to the focus on Gestalt-thinking as a formalist totality at the expense of its being an experiential holism. Both descriptors are accurate accounts of Gestalt theory. Understood in its fullness, as formal and experiential, as an open totality and accretive image, Gestalt theory is another of the German holisms within Harrington’s study. For Harrington, Gestalt theory shows “that the scientific study of mind and consciousness, no less than of the physical world, could reconnect with the dynamic, whole-processes that people cared about because such processes corresponded to their lived experiences.”58 While movement is a key element in defining the Gestalt, the concept is built not so much on the movement of parts, but “the essence of motion itself ” and “pure dynamic phenomena” evidenced by the union of “scientific method and the claims of intuition.”59

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The perceptual light-and-movement experiments of Max Wertheimer, one of the original founders of Gestalt psychology along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, distill well the role of kinesis in Gestalt totalities. Working in a lab in Berlin during 1912, Wertheimer borrowed his teacher Friedrich Schumann’s tachistoscope, a machine that, akin to the movie camera of cinema, projects light through a moving disc of images in measured fractions in order to study perception. Wertheimer discovered the basis for his take on the Gestalt while watching the displacement by light of simple geometric figures through this machine. In the motion of figures, Wertheimer witnessed “the curiosity of ‘pure movement’ that connect[ed] the figures, but is not itself an object.”60 Here Wertheimer experienced the perceptual dissonance-consonance of the human–cinema interface, in which the percipient’s visual response outlasts the visual stimulus by a second. Referred to also as “persistence of vision,” he named the experience of the tachistoscope the phi/̤effect, with phi/̤meaning “phenomenon.” The phi/̤effect designates “the perception of motion without perception of a moving object.”61 Gestalt perception as such takes place as a flow of bits independent of enclosed consciousness. Automatic or unconscious, like the haptic unconscious, the Gestalt implies that consciousness or mind is extended from person through experience to object and group, with perception coalescing, de-coalescing, and re-coalescing again in the form of “incoming pieces of information that ha[ve] an independent psychological reality.”62 From his experiments with the machine, “Wertheimer concluded the effect of apparent movement,” or what the psychologist himself called the phi/̤effect, “is generated not so much by its individual elements as by their dynamic interrelation.63 Let us imagine the Gestalt and phi/̤effect biofunctionally:  in terms of a biomorphic mental diagram, according to an animated pulsating cellular whole, the edges of which morph, undulate, and shift as pierced apertures open and close, facilitating the arrival and departure of new chains of information. The Gestalt functioned as a micrology of Moholy-Nagy’s macrological take on design as bios—art as life. It is a means within the process of the haptic unconscious that does not so much lead to an end but simply makes way for life as kinetics and interrelation. Like icons, images, and ideas moving in a ray of tactile motility, “vision in motion is simultaneous 38

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Image 6 László Moholy-Nagy, Light-Space Modulator, also known as Light Prop for an Electric Stage, 1930.

grasp,” Moholy-Nagy explains. Echoing the ideas of Gestalt theory, he further claims, “simultaneous grasp is creative performance—seeing, feeling, and thinking in relationship and not as a series of isolated phenomena.”64 Linking art to science as was Moholy-Nagy’s wont, Wertheimer’s experiment with the moving light beam and rotating wheel of the tachistoscope brings to mind another set of lights and rotating wheels, namely Moholy-Nagy’s famous kinetic-light sculpture, Light-Space Modulator (1930). They are both perceptual devices, the tachistoscope used to observe perception through measured movement, light, and flickering images and the Light-Space Modulator creating dematerialized perceptual effects by light refracted through rotating perforated plates. Light and movement within art, for Moholy-Nagy, captured the totality of the modern experience—the Gestalt of thinking and movement, the artist at work in the world, and the street lamps and signage of the city. In fact, light 39

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itself—arguably his preferred medium above all—bears the quintessential qualities of the Gestalt, with bowing, vibrating, and spectral wavelengths unfolding in time like so many percepts of information within the changeful images of art and life. While Moholy-Nagy did not write extensively about the Gestalt, he did write with verve in 1925 about the theater of totality and stagecraft (Bühnengestaltung), the Gestaltung of which included an array of technological and sensual catalysts, from film projection and experimental stage illumination to amplified voices and percussion and wind instruments. He envisioned a multi-functional stage where acts of polymorphic perversity unfold in “total stage action” (Gesamtbühnenaktion). An experimental theatrical performance and example of theater of totality, Moholy-Nagy’s Mechanized Eccentric (1925) distills the avant-gardism of the German interwar period, a time that saw the rethinking of drama, theatrical direction, and the architecture of stagecraft for a new mass audience. These were the years of Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator’s “epic theater,” Oskar Schlemmer’s mechanico-expressive Triadic Ballet (1922), and Walter Gropius’s experimental architectural design concept, “Total Theater” (1926), the kinetic nature of which lent it a living, biological quality. As the coupling of the words “mechanized” and “eccentric” elicit, technology enables flesh in Moholy-Nagy’s work, giving force and form to a “synthesis of form, motion, sound, light (color), and odor.”65 The stage would function something like an expanded and extruded version of the Light-Space Modulator, the alternative title of which is appropriately Light Prop for an Electric Stage. Like this kinetic sculpture, the stages necessitated “mirrors and optical equipment… used to project the gigantically enlarged faces and gestures of the actors, while their voices could be amplified to correspond with the visual magnification.”66 More engaged with modern technology than conventional theater or opera, Mechanized Eccentric created a new medial space for the work of art located somewhere between theater and performance. Its hybridity foreshadowed the multi-media happenings and performances of artists in the 1950s and 1960s, including the hijinks of the pan-European avant-garde group Fluxus, John Cage, David Tudor, and Robert Rauschenberg’s Theatre Piece No. 1 (1952) performed at Black Mountain College, and EAT’s 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (1966) which took place at the Armory 40

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Image 7 László Moholy-Nagy, Score for Mechanized Eccentric, 1925.

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in New  York.67 Similarly prefiguring John Cage’s course on experimental music composition at The New School in New York (1956–61), the score for Mechanized Eccentric is a masterful reinvention of the medium of “score” itself.68 It is a conceptual tour de force on paper, showing Moholy-Nagy’s illimitable imagination and brilliant skills in graphic layout and typography. Underneath a heading of “Sketch for a Score for Mechanized Eccentric: Synthesis of form, motion, sound, light (color), and odor,” there floats a diagrammatic of the stage. It is a De Stijl-esque axonometric showing the intersection of four planes, signifying three stages and a projection screen. Beneath it, colorful ribbon-like vertical columns run down a long sheet of paper, showing the notation for each plane of action. The symbols correspond to the legend-like “sequence” on the preceding page.69 Stage I is devoted to “form + motion,” which is given direction in the first column showing colored arrows, circles atop grids, and a faucet raining glow-light down on an abstract body-heap of wrestling figures. In the next column, a few arrows and a projector casting a shaft of light tell of the more minimalist body action of Stage II, which is devoted to “Form + Motion + Film.” In column three, there are stacks of blocks and broad lines in bright color, yellow, blue, red, and black, creating a communication in stripes of the light effects on all stages. Column four is given over to intermittent patches of staff paper, minimally marked for accompanying sounds. Blocks of color, a graphic assortment of arrows, whirling circles, miniature gridirons, and lines in tension together signify escapade in this theater of “concentrated activation” (Aktionskonzentration).70 While never performed, in the mind’s eye one follows the Mechanized Eccentric as a Gestalt-like unfolding, a total theater-image of stunts, action, and shouting to behold. Bodies move through space, light rains down, shifts in color change moods, voices are mechanically amplified, and the haptic unconscious is felt, an aesthetic totality made up of the many advancing in time and space together. Coalescing similarly in the 1920s, the final holism of focus in this section is the Unity of Science movement, also known as the Vienna Circle, Logical Positivism, and in terms of the word Aufbau, or “up-building” and “construction.” Rarely if ever referred to as a “holism,” the Unity of Science movement has very little to do with the biocentric holisms central to this study. I include it nonetheless because, similar to the other holisms previously discussed, the Unity of Science movement bears significant influences 42

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on Bauhaus pedagogy, both in Dessau and Chicago, and like a holism it is a universal totality intended to replace philosophy with “one unified science.”71 Perhaps most important of all, its staunch anti-metaphysical skepticism and the materialist overlap between Constructivism and Aufbau, or “construction,” connects us back to the haptic unconscious. Its physicalism, to use a word coined by Vienna Circle philosopher Otto Neurath, roots the anti-philosophy in epistemologies of the senses, body, and experience shared by the haptic unconscious.72 Philosophers such as Neurath and Rudolf Carnap in interwar Vienna and Charles Morris in postwar Chicago argued for a scientific rationalizing of communication, a breaking-down of discourse into simple linguistic terms in order to up-build (Aufbau) a cogent structure founded on materialist principles. They called for “a unified structure of science in which all knowledge—from quantum mechanics to Marxist sociology to Freudian psychology—would be built up from logical strings of basic experiential propositions.”73 These philosophers, also known as Logical Positivists, were drawn to the Neue Sachlichkeit, new functionalism/objective design, at the Bauhaus because it followed similarly rarefied principles. The call for minimalist language and design was for both groups a rejection of the political corruption of the Weimar Republic and the rising metaphysical rhetoric of Volksleben. Together theirs was a call for the “transparent construction” of buildings and ideas, architecture and government.74 Functionalist design and Logical Positivism would have no frills and no metaphysical bearings. The conceptual interaction of Bauhauslers and Logical Positivists created a to-and-fro of influence in the late 1920s, wherein for example Carnap was influenced by exhibitions at the Dessau Bauhaus, gave talks there, developed further his anti-philosophical thinking, and became a dialectically constructive force in the shift toward ever stricter functionalism in the Bauhaus curriculum.75 Like the terse empirical language of the Vienna Circle, the new functionalist architecture of the Bauhaus would be “a manifest building up from simple elements to all higher forms that would, by virtue of the systematic constructional program itself, guarantee the exclusion of the decorative, mystical, or metaphysical.”76 In these words, historian of science Peter Galison brings the Unity of Science term Aufbau to bear on the Bauhaus, extracting the term from Carnap’s 1928 magnum opus Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical 43

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Structure of the World), and stretching it out into the avant-garde design world of Dessau, Germany. Aufbau thus means the clear, transparent, and honest “construction” of ideas within language as well as the functionalist “construction” of a building. If the former meant simple, logical sentences and a fusion of math and language, the latter came to fruition through the latest technology used to execute boxy, often white buildings made from modern materials of glass and steel. Present also in the German title of neuroscientist Kurt Goldstein’s book discussed previously, Der Aufbau des Organismus (1934), the word Aufbau has many translations, including structure, development, establishing, up-building, and construction. Though Moholy-Nagy departed from Dessau one year prior to Carnap’s lecture there at the Bauhaus in 1929, the concept of Aufbau brings to mind the materialism of Constructivism, the Russian avant-garde movement Moholy-Nagy had aligned himself with, along with Belarusian artist and writer Lazar El Lissitzky, in Berlin some eight years prior. In the trilingual journal Veshch / Gegenstand / Objet (Object) in 1922, El Lissitzy wrote of Moholy-Nagy’s work in simple geometric forms and basic materials, such as wood, nickel, and glass. Lissitzky identified in these works Moholy-Nagy’s attempt “to arrive at construction,” meaning his will to move beyond the more metaphysical German Expressionism in painting and architecture of the moment.77 While the dispassionate pragmatism of Aufbau is the polar opposite of the fiery idealism of Constructivism, these two movements shared a motivation to develop culture—language, ideas, art, and architecture—by way of an anti-metaphysical materialism. The rise of an industrial mass public—a growing new class of laborers coupled with a stratifying middle class—must not be underestimated here in the configuration of ideas. It is this modern public—the mass audience, which Benjamin believed had messianic power—that Constructivists aimed to influence, for which Moholy-Nagy wrote his avant-garde theater piece the Mechanized Eccentric, and for which Unity of Science philosopher Otto Neurath developed the “isotype.” Perhaps the most activist-leftist of all members of the anti-philosophy of Logical Positivism, Neurath developed a simple pictorial language, later named the International System of Typographic Picture Education (ISOTYPE), intended to “educate the working class about the broader 44

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Image 8 Otto Neurath, Wohndichte in Großstädten (Metropolitan Density), Leipzig, 1930, from Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft:  Bildstatistisches elementarwerk (Society and Economics: Elementary Statistical Images).

systems of order at work in the contemporary city.”78 These systems used simple visual symbols to convey “quantitative, social, and political” information.79 In a grammar of isotypes, Neurath set out to educate the masses about the forces of power around them, using the museum exhibition as his vehicle of choice. In the fall of 1923, Neurath established Vienna’s Museum of Settlement and Town Planning, renamed Museum of Society and Economy in 1925, which disseminated information on labor, public housing, and welfare. Simplified and codified, the human figure appears as an anonymous symbol on Neurath’s boards of information for museum exhibitions. Humans are simple symbols, enumerated and networked in patterns of information. While not entirely shorn of regional properties, they are intended to be universal subjects, communicants to all and elements within a visual Esperanto accessible to the world. Neurath’s work in typography, graphics, and art complemented his role as an anti-philosophy philosopher. Words were the pure material of language and making form:  the stuff of symbols. While not necessarily bringing his actual Unity of Science ideas down to the level of a populist 45

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audience, he synthesized information otherwise too complex and distilled it in the form of isotypic pictograms, thereby activating Logical Positivism as a tool (not a philosophy) for an audience beyond the academy. Instead of whiling away time in an ivory tower, Neurath interacted with the public, combining theory and practice in a striking instance of praxis through his museum exhibition work. “Science endeavors to transform the statements of everyday life,” Neurath pithily said.80 He translated his philosophical vision from concepts to action, using simple material components—isotypes—to up-build (Aufbau) Viennese society into a more just, transparent whole. In many ways the materialism of the isotype is equally the materialism of Neurath’s holistic “unified language of physicalism.”81 By focusing on materialism here, my intention is to emphasize in particular a social reformist activism present in both isotypic language and Logical Positivism. Neurath explains, “The statements of physicalism are based on statements connected with” the basic perceptual units of “seeing, hearing, feeling and other ‘sense preceptions’ ([such] as physical events), but also with ‘organic perceptions.’ ”82 Physicalism was the language of Logical Positivism given tactile form in simple philosophical units akin to isotypes, both of which bear a physiological effect on the percipient. Neurath explains: “As a percipient he is a physical structure: he must localize perception, e.g. in the central nervous system or in some other place. Only in this way can he make predictions and reach agreement with others and with himself at different times.”83 Words and symbols bear a cognitive effect on the full nervous system—not simply on the brain separate and isolated from the body, but the brain active within a monist configuration. Like the haptic unconscious, Neurath’s physicalism is triggered by the sparks of cognitive experience and comes to light according to the materialism of bodies actively in communication. Moholy-Nagy’s connection to Neurath and other Unity of Science figures was interrupted in the late 1920s, by both local and national politics. Most immediately, there was the radicalization of the Bauhaus in Dessau that caused Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius to leave in 1928. They both returned to Berlin and stayed until 1934, from where Moholy-Nagy went to Amsterdam and Gropius to London. Under the directorship of Hannes Meyer (1928–30), the Bauhaus became increasingly rigid, driven by radical leftist politics and a strict interpretation of functionalism in the form 46

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of the Neue Sachlichkeit. The extremism of the Bauhaus, however, is only fully understood in terms of the broader framework of national politics. The radicalizing of the Bauhaus came as a collective counterforce to the rising power and influence of the völkisch right-wing policies of the Third Reich, the offices of which would intervene and finally close the school in 1933. The separation between Moholy-Nagy and Unity of Science thinkers was temporary, however, for after nine years and the many moves of all figures involved, Moholy-Nagy reconnected with progenitors of the anti-metaphysical anti-philosophy as Director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937.84 In conjunction with the University of Chicago, where members of the movement found shelter as professors, Moholy-Nagy recruited Carnap, Charles Morris, Carl Eckart, and Ralph Gerard for lecturing and teaching positions in the science curriculum of the New Bauhaus.85 In Chicago, Moholy-Nagy would continue teaching the pedagogy of the haptic unconscious, reconfiguring his penchant for holisms in terms of language, describing his “new vision” in the United States in terms of “integration” and his Unity of Science colleagues there as “integrators.”

III. New Bauhaus: The Haptic Unconscious Stateside From the biological to the psychological to the linguistic, the holisms of this study would be present in varying degrees in Moholy-Nagy’s artwork and pedagogy during his nine-year stateside venture in Chicago which started with the directorship of the New Bauhaus in 1937. The tortuous path of these holisms after Moholy-Nagy’s death in 1946 is deeply significant for the longer study of the haptic unconscious. For it is in certain of these holisms—the biological, bios, and the Gestalt, for example—that we find the radices of what might be otherwise considered the abstruse ideas of the haptic unconscious, such as György Kepes’ tactile sense of “vision,” Kevin Lynch’s phenomenological “image of the city,” Rudolf Arnheim’s understanding of Op Art in terms of Gestalt psychology, Jack Burnham’s systems-based “relations,” and the computational and biological nature of the “generative” that describes the digital image in art. While not directly recognized as such, it would be these holisms—which are largely the materialization of a certain abstraction of mind coming from German 47

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Romanticism—that made many of Moholy-Nagy’s propositions inscrutable to the American industrialists who were on the board of the New Bauhaus in its various incarnations. In many ways, it was the total vision of art, science, and technology carried out according to the original Bauhaus structure of open-ended student–master mentorship that was just simply unacceptable to the literal-minded and bluntly pragmatic board members of the Institute of Design, the name of the New Bauhaus as of 1944. At the beginning of his time in the States, before such misunderstandings, Moholy-Nagy wrote his wife Sibyl in July 1937, telling her he found the Chicago benefactors friendly, heavy drinkers, and without “the slightest influence of modern taste.”86 Confused by “Madonnas all over” a philanthropist’s home, its “strange draperies and imitation Louis Quinze furniture,” he writes frankly, “I am bewildered, Darling. Do they know what they’re doing?”87 Moholy-Nagy was not alone in moving to the United States. His travel was part of a sweeping emigration of German and Austrian intellectuals during the 1930s. Following the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933, the architects Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Ludwig Hilbersheimer, furniture designer Marcel Breuer, graphic designer Herbert Bayer, light-artist and photographer Moholy-Nagy, and painter Josef Albers—all members of the Bauhaus faculty—moved to the United States.88 Mies van der Rohe taught and started an architecture practice in Chicago, where also Hilbersheimer taught with Mies and headed Chicago’s city planning office; Bayer and Breuer opened design practices in New  York; Albers arrived at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and ultimately ended up at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; and Gropius went directly to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gropius might have gone to Chicago as well. In 1937, the Association of Arts and Industries in Chicago approached him about starting a new chapter of the Bauhaus, offering him the directorship, but Gropius had already accepted a position teaching architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Gropius referred the Association to Moholy-Nagy, whom the executive secretary Norma K. Stahle approached in June 1937, inviting him to launch the school in the fall.89 Moholy-Nagy accepted the position of director and the New Bauhaus opened on October 18, 1937.90 After a tumultuous nine years of activity 48

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and three changes of name—from the New Bauhaus (1937–38) to the School of Design (1939–44) to the Institute of Design (1944–present)— Moholy-Nagy would end his tenure due to no decision of his own. That termination, rather, developed from imposed, external forces—board members, friends, and colleagues—in what is known as the “Moholy-Nagy Affair” (discussed below), and, more tragically, from his failing health and ultimate death from leukaemia. Before turning our eye to the sad and premature end of Moholy-Nagy’s life and work at the Bauhaus, let us once again tease out the forces of the deeper past, those that created the circumstances into which he would enter in Chicago. We find there a network of interrelations and precedents that are similar to the holisms that form Moholy-Nagy’s thinking, in that they function as pointers and influences in the making of the haptic unconscious. In short, the ideas whirling about in Chicago circa 1898 would mold Moholy-Nagy’s footing there in 1937 while, at the same time, mirroring the ideas of Bauhauslers in 1920s Germany. At the turn of the last century in Chicago there coalesced an arts-andcrafts crusade, fueled by ideas about manual labor and the importance of making useful form, which would evolve into a full-blown functionalist industrial arts movement. This cascade of ideas in action was, in many ways, similar to the shifts in thinking about art and design that unfolded around a predecessor of the Bauhaus, the German Work Federation (Deutscher Werkbund), active in Munich from 1907 to 1933.91 Similar to the rising movement in Chicago, the German Work Federation brought together designers and businessmen—artists, architects, and industrialists—in an attempt to forge an alliance between art and industry, labor and business power. Unlike the German context however, there was no single unifying movement in Chicago, but rather many disparate organizations with the similar mission of teaching better design through the concept of craft and use of industrial tools. Further distinct from Germany, the movement in Chicago was for the most part influenced by the English Arts and Crafts Movement, the ideas of William Morris and John Ruskin. It was only with the arrival of Moholy-Nagy in 1937 that the collective push for better design through the industrial arts would turn toward a Sachlich-influenced functionalism. Constituting a genealogy of arts, crafts, and industry in Chicago, many important institutions preceded the Association of Arts and Industries, the 49

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offices of which conceptualized the revitalization of the German Bauhaus in Chicago and the hiring of Moholy-Nagy. These include the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society (1898), Industrial Arts League (1899), Manual Training Movement (c. 1899)  and the Chicago Manual Training School (1907), which would become part of John Dewey’s University of Chicago Lab School (1896), Bradley Polytechnic Institute in Peoria, Illinois (1897), The National Art Service League (1918), the American Arts and Industries Society (1921), and the Association of Arts and Industries (1922).92 The seeds for the American Bauhaus lay in the attempted collaboration between the Association of Arts and Industries (AAI) and the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) starting in 1922. The two institutions came together to create a school of industrial design in Chicago. While their collaboration was a failure, it is in the bifurcation of ideas between the two institutions that one finds a crystallization of certain of Moholy-Nagy’s concerns. Conflict between the two institutions emerged most profoundly in pedagogical approaches unfolding around inductive and deductive methods, with an isolated sense of art as stationary Cartesian act giving primacy to drawing as opposed to design as a hands-on tactile and mechanical experience with materials. Fundraising ensued, and in 1927 the AIC hired an art deco-modernist, sculptor and designer Alfonso Iannelli, who famously worked with Frank Lloyd Wright on the Midway Gardens on the South Side of Chicago. A  designer working between sculpture and landscape, Iannelli headed the Department of Design at the AIC, preparing the school for the coming opening of the School of Industrial Art there in 1931.93 Iannelli had worked for the AIC before, but found it too much to handle with a busy design office in Chicago, so left for a three-month survey of design schools in Europe, subsequently resigning from the AIC. In his time in Europe, Iannelli went to the Bauhaus in Weimar. When he returned to the AIC in 1927, Iannelli brought ideas with him from Weimar and, in complementary fashion, developed a strong bond with members of the AAI in Chicago, judging industrial design exhibitions for them as well as simply sharing the same philosophical point of view on craft and industrial design. It was a philosophy that quickly and harshly clashed with the ideas of the AIC. Iannelli organized the training of students around workshops similar to the Bauhaus, reflecting his time spent 50

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Image 9a Curricular wheel of the Bauhaus (1922).

there. Within the context of the arts-and-crafts crusade in Chicago, his pedagogical practices marked a turn away from craft toward function, with student-designers acting as artist-laborers working with an array of materials and tools in workshops. The labor-themed approach to art did not sit well with the Beaux-Arts ethos of the AIC.94 Iannelli left the AIC once again in 1929, two years prior to the opening of the School of Industrial Arts at the AIC. Starting in 1932, a year after the opening of the joint venture, serious disagreements emerged between the two institutions concerning pedagogical approach and funding. The AAI believed the AIC was not following the original shared mission to train designers by way of tactile, 51

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hands-on experience with machines and a variety of materials. In 1936, the AAI demanded the return of funds held in a trust by the Art Institute but raised by the AAI for the joint venture.95 The popular press in Chicago distilled the substantive pedagogical differences in reporting:  “The chief difference between the two institutions is in methods of teaching. The Art Institute method is to teach by drawings on paper. The new school will give the students actual material to handle in machinery, textiles, and furniture.”96 We see forecasted here in the phrase “actual material to handle in machinery, textiles, and furniture” the imminent arrival of a new way of approaching design, namely Moholy-Nagy’s methodology of materials, intuition, and experience. The joint venture was dropped from the curriculum of the AIC in 1936, at which time the AAI “set about to plan its own independent school.”97 Within a year, Stahle, executive secretary of the Association of Arts and Industries, also an artist, drew up notes concerning the Association’s desire to launch a school “along practical and real lines… much the type of school you had at Dessau,” meaning, of course, the Bauhaus.98 Moholy-Nagy arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1937 to implement a new version of the original Bauhaus pedagogy from the Weimar Bauhaus of 1922, only slightly but nonetheless decisively tweaking it for a new cultural geography.99 In a comparison of the curricular wheels we find several changes, in the outer ring of preliminary courses (Vorlehre), at the iconic center, and in the surrounding rings of advanced training and materials. With the exception of “scientific subjects,” which Moholy-Nagy added in the 1937 version, the terms are the same in the outermost ring designating the preliminary coursework (Vorlehre). Though minimal in presence in the wheel, “scientific subjects” is a significant addition, relating both to the anti-metaphysical anti-philosophy of the Unity of Science movement and to biocentrism. Sitting icon-like at the center of Gropius’s 1922 wheel, the philosophically weighty and boldly printed “BAU,” or building, and the related terms “site,” “testing,” “design,” and “engineering science” (Bauplatz, Versuchplatz, Entwurf, Ingenieur Wissen) mark the culmination of design studies after three years. In Moholy-Nagy’s version, the center has been streamlined, with a different group of words codified into two halves. “Architecture, Building, Engineering” summarize past goals and occupy the top half of the central circle. “Town Planning” 52

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Image 9b Curricular wheel of the New Bauhaus (1937).

and the “Social Sciences” reveal new directions and occupy the bottom. The turn toward town planning and the social sciences marks at once a diversification and bureaucratic shift in the curriculum. A translation of modern German planning ideas, such as Hilberseimer’s Vertical City (1928) and Gropius’s Minimum Dwelling (1929), the urban interests in the new wheel reflected the functional side of building in America, with centralized urbanism in which public housing towers would be built and outer-ring urbanism where suburban single-family homes developed. The non-design oriented social sciences worked existentially, to describe and explain the various new ways of urban living. Unlike the original wheel, science and art history are present in the advanced studies of the new curriculum, rounding out the educational experience into a full totality. Together science and art history 53

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constitute a materialist dialectic of design knowledge, teaching students to think about design critically and anew through the coupling of vastly different types of empiricisms. Most notable of all is Moholy-Nagy’s changes in the “materials” section of the wheel, with the new additions of light, photography, film, publicity, display, exhibition, stage, and fashion expressing not simply a new cartography of mores and a distinct marketplace, but also Moholy-Nagy’s evolution as a teacher and thinker. In Germany, light, photography, and film, while taught in the Bauhaus, were not yet central to the school’s overarching philosophy; in the United States, they become essential, indispensable organs of the biological vision in the new world of Chicago. We see thus that though Moholy-Nagy had always intended biocentrism to work as a soft, organic functionalism built on a critique of the extremes of industrialization, here biocentrism practiced in the belly of the beast—in the free market of the United States—meant a host of new market-centric platforms. That is to say, by including most notably display and publicity, as well as film, photography, light, exhibition, and stage in the New Bauhaus curricular wheel, Moholy-Nagy accommodated sectors of the free market of the United States, including advertising, entertainment, and mass media communication, while also bringing a biocritique to bear through his philosophies of teaching. While there are many instances in Moholy-Nagy’s pedagogical writings that seem quintessential to the haptic unconscious, his thoughts on light within art are in many ways the most significant, because of the time-shaped, kinetic, optical, and ultimately digital nature of light. His idea that light is matter, that it constituted a “material” in the curriculum for students to mold and use as paint, is a leitmotif of the greater study at hand. Light is, in short, an abstraction of form made tangible, tactile, and real. Though central to the energy of the abstract image, Moholy-Nagy nonetheless represented light as an element in aesthetic understanding among others, including tactility, relations, and space. We see this network of forces in a collaged photogram of hands Moholy-Nagy used to explain “spatial relationships.”100 Two silhouettes of hands, presumably his, float one atop the other in this mixed-media image. Their outline has been captured from the reaction to light of light-sensitive chemicals on the fleshy, rolling surfaces of two hands. Cut-out, made flat, and placed one atop the 54

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Image 10 László Moholy-Nagy, Study for “Spatial Relations” in The New Vision (1938), p. 165.

other and alongside stenciled arrows, the layered hands tell that “spatial relations” are “found in physics—‘space is the relation between the position of bodies.’ ”101 Space is made up of varying degrees and kinds of matter: the stuff of light moves through a reticulum of open, perforated form, creating spatial relations. Moholy-Nagy’s philosophies of light, form, and relations were brought to bear in the lab-like workshops of the New Bauhaus, where the fulcrum of learning was between the human senses and materials. In addition to the life and physical sciences, students studied basic design by way of “exercises to develop the aptitudes of the senses” in which “touch and sight were primary” but sound and smell were also important.102 Education in both the preliminary courses and specialized workshops was thus a matter of bodily reactions to hands-on interaction with wood, glass, steel, and textiles, and to the effects-in-motion of tension, compression, equipoise, and rays of light on surfaces, folds, and shapes. In their investigations of touch and materials, students of both the German and New Bauhaus made 55

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Image 11 Tomas Flake, Tactile Table in Four Rows of Sandpapers and Corresponding Diagram, Second Semester Bauhaus Dessau, 1929, from The New Vision, p. 27.

Image 12 Alexander Corrazzo, A Tactile Symphony in Three Rows, First Semester New Bauhaus, 1937, from The New Vision, p. 33.

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Image 13 Francis Fairweather, Tactile Chart Held In Balance On Metal Springs Performing A  Swinging Movement When Used, Second Semester New Bauhaus 1938, from The New Vision, p. 33.

Image 14 Charles Niedringhaus, Smell-o-Meter. For mixing six different odors six tubes are used and an electric fan blows the smell into the opening for the nose, Second Semester New Bauhaus, 1938, from The New Vision, p. 34.

tactile meters consisting of various materials, mounted on flat, undulating, and rotating surfaces. Here, the “Bauhaus student in his initial exercise studie[d] the material principally by means of his sense of touch.”103 Second-semester student Charles Niedringhaus’s Smell-o-Meter is evidence that New Bauhaus pedagogues considered the olfactory sense also 57

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Images 15–20 Film stills from Design Workshops (1944) directed and filmed by László Moholy-Nagy.

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Images 15–20 (cont.)

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an important epistemological vista. Niedringhaus’s metric system of odors looked something like a robotic hat with six tubes protruding from it. The school made a showcase of this haptic-based teaching, with the promotional film Design Workshops (1944) showing individual students at work making sculpture; a public exhibition of student design work; and, the most emphatic expression of the centrality of tactility, students delicately caressing fabrics, handheld wood sculptures, and a swatch of bright red plastic placed atop a transparent molded plastic form.104 Spatial relations, light and tactility were together part of a pedagogy driven by a goal of direct experience with people and objects in the world. With the New Bauhaus, the lived experience of art pedagogy would take new turns, informed by the philosophies of University of Chicago professor John Dewey. The ideas of Moholy-Nagy and Dewey, in fact, complemented one another, with Moholy-Nagy finding “in Dewey’s work the theoretical foundation and justification of his own pedagogy.”105 Dewey’s idea of the “situation”—life understood as a series of interactive events between the individual and her environment—fit well within Moholy-Nagy’s biocentric vision of the world.106 The two men shared a lexicon of bio-sensual terms, with Dewey discussing the importance of “organic participation” and expressing a monistic point of view: “There are no intrinsic psychological divisions between the intellectual and the sensory aspects: the emotional and ideational; the imaginative and the practice phases of human nature.”107 The actual presence of Dewey’s thinking in the workings of the New Bauhaus, though, came in the Product Design workshop at the Institute of Design (the name the New Bauhaus assumed after 1944) where students were obliged to read Dewey’s Art as Experience.108 As within any advanced educational framework in the arts, there is always basic institutional mediation prior to experience with the outside world. Direct experience materializes incrementally, in the form of engagement in the studio—or workshop at the German Bauhaus—with new ideas, tools, and materials. Fine-tuning the concepts of the German Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy in fact redefined the workshops at the New Bauhaus as “laboratories” manned by “artist-engineers.”109 Moholy-Nagy intended the language of “labs” and “science” to reinforce the direct and focused labor of working with metals, plastics, light, and celluloid. He had no intention of creating a vocational school.110 Rather, the curriculum and professors together gave the 60

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school a feeling of speculative experiment, as though it were a school for the deliberative study of the philosophy of industrial design. For the first year of the school, 1937–38, Moholy-Nagy put together a team of professors from Europe and the United States. Past compatriots, Hin Bredendiek and György Kepes had worked for Moholy-Nagy in Berlin at his design office prior to reconvening their talents in Chicago at the New Bauhaus.111 A former student of Moholy-Nagy’s as well, the German Bredendieck headed the wood workshop and taught courses on industrial design and typography. Fellow Hungarian light artist Kepes ran the photography workshop and taught the introductory course on graphic design. Henry Holmes Smith assisted in the photography workshop; Alexander Archipenko headed the modeling workshop; and David Dushkin headed the music workshop.112 American Unity of Science philosopher Charles Morris taught intellectual integration and the coordination of theoretical unity; Ralph Gerard taught life sciences; and Carl Eckart taught the physical sciences. All three were on the faculty of the University of Chicago.113 There were shifts in faculty over Moholy-Nagy’s nine-year directorship, with many talents passing through the school: Werner Drewes later taught art; George Fred Keck, Buckminster Fuller, and Ralph Rapson taught architecture; and John Cage taught experimental sound. Light-artist Kepes, central to the study of the haptic unconscious, taught photography, graphic design, and the camouflage workshop, departing from the School of Design in 1943 first for the University of North Texas, then for a position at Brooklyn College, and finally MIT. After a relatively calm first year of directing the New Bauhaus, MoholyNagy was regularly met with institutional challenges. Tribulations came in the way of financial troubles, World War II, criticisms of his teaching philosophy, low student enrollment, and finally failing health. The first cause tragique in an advancing narrative of contretemps, the New Bauhaus:  American School of Design closed in 1938 after only one academic year. The Association of Arts and Industry withdrew support after a miniature crash in the stock market. Shocked but undaunted, Moholy-Nagy and his design colleagues garnered enough funding to reopen in February 1939 in downtown Chicago under the new name, the School of Design. The School of Design continued to function as an experimental design institution, graduating its first class of five students in 1942.114 61

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Amid the upheaval caused by fluctuations in funding and location (the school moved three times during Moholy-Nagy’s tenure), the United States entered World War II.115 Within weeks of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the mayor of Chicago invited Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes to join a committee for the study of camouflaging Chicago. Together they surveyed the city with diligence, flying over Chicago several times through many different weather fronts studying its light patterns as they gauged ways to camouflage the city.116 In response, they conceptualized “a system of floating islands and a false shoreline” to help disguise Chicago.117 In late 1941, Moholy-Nagy and his colleagues partially revamped the coursework of the school, adding new classes in order to make the school and its curriculum more pertinent to the needs of a country at war with returning veterans. The School of Design introduced National Defense Courses, that included Camouflage taught by György Kepes, Visual Propaganda in Wartime taught by Robert J. Wolff, and a survey of Social Usefulness of Twentieth Century Art and Its Relation to a Nation at War, twelve lectures given by members of the faculty.118 The announcement of wartime courses included also a notice for a lecture on “Site and Shelter: A Contemporary Problem” on February 6, 1942 by Walter Gropius. In the camouflage courses, the school hewed close to its regular curriculum, using the tools of the color and light workshop headed by Kepes. In the larger scope, the camouflage course brought Moholy-Nagy’s theories of light, space, and relations to bear on a reality of war. The course included a research laboratory, discussions of the basic problems of visual perception, theories of visual perception and camouflage, camouflage in nature, and technological applications, including mechanical aids for detection, bombing, and smoke devices.119 Extensively expanding the modus operandi of the school, Moholy-Nagy also introduced courses in Rehabilitation and Occupational Therapy as part of the war effort. Providing an overview of this new path of coursework, Moholy-Nagy brought his bio-life philosophy to bear on wartime issues, claiming “Rehabilitation (and included in it psychological, social, recreational, and occupational therapy), has to be more scientific and more intuitive at the same time.”120 The course description brings to mind Kurt Goldstein’s holistic neuroscience, in its global view toward both the handicapped and future rehabilitators of the handicapped as well as the vision of art-integrated rehabilitation. Moholy-Nagy expanded art-praxis to include 62

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the medical and psycho-medical sciences of rehabilitation, practicing art as life, design as a matter of health and science, and instituting another holism of sorts. The course overview includes a list of social and medical problems that were, though far-reaching for a design school, appropriate in Moholy-Nagy’s eyes for the school to cover in its courses during war. This list included occupational therapy, physical education, scientific motion studies, social services, fatigue and monotony, preventive aspects of delinquency, alcoholics and other addicts, and rehabilitation of the blind.121 Despite intentions to remain necessary and relevant, the School of Design faced only further difficulties during wartime, as materials and funding were diverted for war use.122 During these years, Moholy-Nagy’s close friend and benefactor Walter Paepcke, president of the Container Corporation of America, began to seek a new institutional home for the School of Design in the form of a large well-established university in the Chicago area.123 In 1944, Paepcke succeeded in persuading Moholy-Nagy to appoint a board of directors that would remove the burden of administrative duties from him as well as better align the school with Chicago’s businessmen.124 They changed the name of the school to the Institute of Design, while Moholy-Nagy continued as director and Paepcke took the position as president of the board of directors. It is also in this moment that the school transitioned from an open-ended experimental laboratory to a more conventional college.125 Though beleaguered at first, Moholy-Nagy ultimately agreed to the changes initiated by Paepcke and the board. The school was, in short, en route to regularization, to looking and functioning like other schools. Rationalization included the standardization of the teaching staff and courses; formulation of a clearer curriculum; professionalization of practice; and withdrawal of the open-ended mentorship paradigm which had been in place since 1919.126 Despite his role as founder and director, Moholy-Nagy began to be edged out of discussions about the running of the school and the development of its curriculum. Board members from, for example, the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and the Rockefeller Foundation had queries and anxieties concerning the Institute’s lack of conventional organization. This placed Paepcke in a hot seat of apologia and explanation. And so began the unfolding of what Siegfried Giedion once called the “Moholy Affair,” a quick series of events in which Moholy-Nagy lost direct 63

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Images 21–25 Film stills from Do Not Disturb (1945) written, filmed, and edited by students of the Motion Picture class of the Institute of Design, directed by László Moholy-Nagy.

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Images 21–25 (cont.)

control of the Institute of Design and then died.127 Just as Moholy-Nagy was coming to terms with the new proposal to subsume the Institute of Design within a larger university, the “affair rebounded,” with a meeting called by Herbert Bayer, to include Gropius, Giedion, Paepcke, and notably not Moholy-Nagy.128 The meeting, intended to “get Moholy out of the ditch,” was never held due to scheduling conflicts. The curriculum was 65

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reorganized “to conform with the new ‘style’ of management” for the fall semester of 1946.129 Moholy-Nagy died 24 November, 1946 at the age of 51. The story of Moholy-Nagy in America is one of pathos and lost opportunities:  a tale of a visionary quest for revolutionary design in America thwarted by divergent world-views. Moholy-Nagy blithely enveloped himself in the City of Broad Shoulders, large industry, and fast money, only to experience an exorbitant share of life’s turbulences there. His romantic bio-technics of life was simply too far-flung, utopian, and abstract for a board of directors that wanted hard evidence of potential and of potential realized as success. With its turns and twists of design-world genius, expectation, miscommunication, and disappointment, the story that unfolded in Chicago around the New Bauhaus, School of Design, and Institute of Design is worthy of a film script, novel, or perhaps even an opera of its own. Famous for his optimism, though, Moholy-Nagy maintained his poetry of science and aesthetics—his thinking on the haptic unconscious—until the end, directing the experimental color film Do Not Disturb in 1945. Written, filmed, and edited by students of the Motion Picture class of the Institute of Design, the film uses many of the filmic tropes of avant-garde cinema from the early twentieth century, such as jump-cutting, double exposure, and montage. Different from the historic avant-garde, it is cast in the bright sheen of Hollywood color, the light-heartedness of bobby soxers, and the sexual suggestion of cigarette smoke, flashing kleig lights, and young romance. It is avant-garde cinema shot through the lens of American hyper capitalism, unmoored by expansive social promises, and made exuberant and beautiful by the touch of Moholy-Nagy’s cognitive aesthetic of the haptic unconscious. Playing on the sexually suggestive title of Do Not Disturb, a young man walks through a wall of fire and young couples embrace, kiss and deliquesce into dark fathomless space. A  wall is at once a bulletin board for layers of magazine-print pin-up girls and a small screen for a talking head. Here we see the haptic unconscious, its reverie of the light image made tactile and kinetic, having come through the lineage of the old then new Bauhaus to young students practicing in the mid-1940s at the Institute of Design in a new world, the regularity and predictability of which they transformed, at least for the moment, into something remarkable and uncanny. 66

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2 György Kepes and the Light Image as Bio-Image Pop Art-and-Science, Integration, and Distribution

I. Introduction: The Commingling of Art and Science and the Biologically Inflected Light Image The aesthetic of the haptic unconscious mutated in the years after World War II into an unmitigated scientific endeavor. The light image became a matter of science girded by the philosophical, or “theoretical biology”: a holistic take on the field that coalesced a century ago out of the need to go beyond the dualism of life as mechanized or vitalistic.1 That is to say, the incipient digital image in art was inflected and driven by speculative studies of organicism, evolutionary biology, and epigenetic life, once again foregrounding shifts in critical theory at the turn of the millennium toward an affective paradigm. Moholy-Nagy and Kepes’ development of the light image in these years came together around a concept of bio-life as a matter of “emergence,” part of an evolving set of properties in which “complex forms of organization produce new forms of causation” wherein “causality is ‘circular’ functioning something like a feedback loop.”2 Life in this framing is neither reducible to the metaphor of mechanization nor an irreducible matter of vital energy, but rather “emergent”:  always in the process of non-linear organization, the logic of which is dynamic and scalar, moving between the microscopic and macroscopic. A  unique exchange between 67

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artists and scientists—a mingling of modern art on the one hand and embryology and early genetics on the other—took root in the heated context of pre-World War II Britain in the London Bauhaus, where the same scientists dedicated to rethinking biology as holistic organicism coalesced politically to resist the rise of fascism on the continent. In short, artistic avant-gardism met scientific avant-gardism before the war through the meeting of apostate modern art and renegade science. It was but the beginning of an exchange and coupling, the metamorphosis of which would continue after the war. During their brief time in London in the second half of the 1930s, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes came under the sway of this group of British scientists. The men that helped hew a unique genre of cultural expression, what I call here “pop art-and-science,” after the war were activists for change on both scientific and political fronts prior to the war, participants in the Theoretical Biology Club and members of the anti-fascist dinner club Tots and Quots.3 Scientists such as Ross G.  Harrison, Joseph Needham, Paul Weiss, Joseph Woodger, Dorothy Wrinch, J. D. Bernal, John Haldane, and C.  H. Waddington formed the Theoretical Biology Club in order to gain momentum modernizing the field of biology. Their collective goal was to move the field away from the metaphor of the machine and metaphysics of vitalism to the empirically driven philosophy of organismic biology.4 The name of the second group, Tots and Quots, was an intentional perversion of the Latin “quot homines, tot sententiae,” meaning “As many opinions as there are men.”5 The goal of the group was to encourage scientists to engage in the realm of doxa, or opinion, by taking an open and aggressive political stance against fascism. Both the Theoretical Biology Club and Tots and Quots were materialist endeavors—modes of engagement—the first more confined to laboratory life as swaddled in the academic “gown” of revolutionizing biology, while the second was immersed in the social concerns of the “town” that merged in the face of war and the fight against fascism. While each alliance was distinct, with the former dedicated to the developmental holism that is organismic biology and the latter mobilized by the common belief that left-leaning scientists could push back fascism in Europe, many of the scientists shared activities and activism in both groups. While no doubt inspired by the scientist’s will to politicize science in the name of pragmatism, common sense, and the defeat of the Third 68

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Reich, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes found common interest in the scientists’ morphogenetic ideas about form. Moholy-Nagy and Kepes translated the scientists’ holism of theoretical biology into their own work, channeling it by way of the extant theme of biofunctionalism into a new evolutionary concept of “landscape” within Kepes’ curating and publishing practice. In this instance, it was the scientists’ determination to advance a rounded take on the relations across sciences between cellular, embryonic, and species development, which directed the formation of the haptic unconscious. Moholy-Nagy’s early biocentrism found energy and propulsion by way of this unique cross-fertilization of artistic and scientific minds in London on the cusp of World War II. As a result, the light image would become by mid-century in the United States and in the hands of Kepes a matter of biological processes and biotic promises. And the vehicle of this transfiguration would be print. This chapter of the story of the haptic unconscious rides on Kepes’ indefatigable publishing exploits after the war, as he worked as an educator, artist, and influential impresario of an omnibus art-and-science publishing enterprise within postwar America. In a tour de force of the third culture that is science melded into art, Kepes published several volumes in the US containing essays by manifold scientists, many of whom he knew through his time in England, including Lancelot Law Whyte, James J.  Gibson, J.  Bronowski, C.  F. A.  Pantin, Norbert Wiener, Paul Weiss, Heinz von Foerster, Lawrence K.  Frank, Conrad Waddington, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy. These essays appeared alongside writings by doyens of the art and design world, including Rudolph Arnheim, Will Burtin, Sigfried Giedion, Marcel Breuer, Jean Arp, Saul Bass, John Cage, Naum Gabo, and Fernand Leger. Such a bio-aesthetic mix of participants indicated a kind of radical change in itself. While these connections illuminate the reasoning behind Kepes’ books, they—the contents, coordinates, and themes of the books—are nonetheless somewhat confounding. Scrutiny of them brings many questions. Who had ever seen such a mix of luminaries together, collectively addressing the postwar “crises” of image and form through topics of “self-regulation,” “topology,” “morphology,” and the Gestalt? Based on the scientific writings alone in the nine anthologies edited by and published under Kepes’ guidance between 1956 and 1972, the standards of formal measurements within art shifted from static formalism to dynamic living form.6 The shape, form, 69

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color, and contents of a work of art emerged in these writings as a matter of biological morphogenetics and cybernetic autopoiesis, or self-regulation. I use the term “cybernetic” generally to define art and architecture dynamically situated within systems of relations between the living and nonliving, organismic and technological. “Morphogenesis” is a term within developmental biology that refers to the growth of an organism from beginning blastocyst to mature adult. Within art, the adjective “morphogenetic” describes composition and form that is dynamic and changing. Such artistic quantities went from existing as evidence of an absolute sense of being and truth to a shape-shifting understanding of becoming and organization. They went from occurring as elements of a vertical top-down hierarchy within art, placing the object in a timeless vacuum, to that of a roaming emergent hierarchy of functional relations, advance, retrenchment, meiosis, mitosis, and ordered arrangement, situating art within a soft environment of vectors. These books carry the development of the haptic unconscious further into the matrix toward the full-forced digital image within art. In Kepes’ books, the rising digital image in art takes symbolically distributed form. While seemingly still images, they are a matter of the time-based movement of light and life’s process captured and stilled in photographs: information across space and time coalescing momentarily in the form of reproduced images of modern painting, drawing, sculpture, and scientific data. Kepes identified this combination of art, science, and technology within images as “the new landscape” in a 1951 exhibition at MIT of the same name.7 In this phrase, Kepes identified landscape not as a bucolic reverie or view onto idyllic nature but a set of interconnected and shifting nodes. Something like the elements of a cybernetic system distilled in pictures, “landscape” here is a site, scene, and process in which change is signaled, motivated, and, most forthrightly, embodied as a scientific image—the light image in the form of X-ray imagery, informational charts and tables, aerial photographs for cartographic surveying, three-dimensional visualization, and various other diagrammatic realities. The scientific images within Kepes’ books are stills of life in process, living matter becoming other form; they mark a rethinking of aesthetic form as living matter in motion. From this perspective, art form is evolutionary and epigenetic: rooted in “an embryological concept that celebrates interaction, change, emergence and the reciprocal relationship 70

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between the whole and component parts.”8 Kepes’ work here highlights how the rising digital image within art mimics life, moving within and between two, three, and four dimensions. This living paradigm elegantly precedes the flowing currents within the combined networks of our own present world within the internet. What follows is an outlining of the evolution of the haptic unconscious within the career of György Kepes. In particular we look to Kepes’ movements across geography, his collective work within book media, and the ongoing forces of bio-scientific logic throughout. The geography here moves between England and the United States, from London to Chicago,

Images 26–28 Pages 128–29 from The New Landscape in Art and Science, ed. György Kepes.

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Images 26–28 (cont.)

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Illinois, through Denton, Texas and Brooklyn, New  York, and finally to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The book media unfolds across several volumes, a variety of expertise, and different knowledge bases, between modern art and theoretical biology, as a means of revealing the bios, or life, of the light image in the form of scientific information and picture. Perhaps most interesting of all, the scientific logic coursing through this chapter materializes aesthetic form anew, shifting the classical art image away from formalist conventions of static and absolute proportion to a dynamic, changeful, and living sense of image-as-species. Let us now return to the two Hungarians behind it all, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes.

II. György Kepes’ Vision + Value Series as Pop Art-and-Science Though the role of Bauhaus teachings within Kepes’ work in the United States is a source of debate, it is undeniable that Kepes’ time spent before mid-century with Bauhausler Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, London, and finally Chicago left its imprint on the man.9 Moholy-Nagy and Kepes shared origin and intensity, hailing from the outlier’s post of Central Europe that was Hungary. They also propagated the truly cosmopolitan vision of an art philosophy-cum-pedagogy rooted in the monist theme of mind and body united. The capturing of knowledge for Moholy-Nagy and Kepes was a unified endeavor, a matter of gleaning information from the world by way of the senses, emotions, and practical experience and the vehicle of aesthetics, science, and technology combined. Light-art and science were the planks in a two-timbered bridge linking the men. If the kinetics of light moving through space was their primary artistic concern, a similarly buoyant and dynamic life-energy connected them in a shared fascination with biology. We find connections here between Moholy-Nagy’s biocentrism and Kepes’ interest in the socio-philosophical power of the biosciences, which coalesce in the Hungarian artists’ shared involvement with activist biologists in 1930s London.10 After Moholy-Nagy’s death in 1946, Kepes carried many of his beliefs and practices from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s into a new postwar social climate that brought together systems organization and cybernetic scholarship on the one hand and consumerism and advertising bombast 73

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on the other. Altogether, these diverse energies might be understood according to a new form: a dispersed world made quasi-whole through the distributed light image. In the word “distribution” I invoke engineer Paul Baran’s digital packaging system of 1962 that was a major component in the early development of the internet and, more precisely, the image as a set of relations made up of coursing energies.11 Think here of ecology having come to life in the form of pictures: group acts or art performances using early wireless technologies, light installations spreading out over urban space, and the art-and-science visuals within Kepes’ books which activate a tactile sense of vision in the one act of knowing. The cold mechanics of Bauhaus functionalism rooted in the Neue Sachlichkeit philosophies of Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer gave way on the other side of the Atlantic to a warm, soft, and wet bios-based functionalism: a Bauhaus biology, as it were, that was truly ensconced in Moholy-Nagy’s thinking. Undoubtedly Moholy-Nagy left many impressions on Kepes even beyond such biofunctionalism, including the formalism and politics of a unique strain of Constructivism cultivated during their time spent in Berlin and London; the hybrid union of commercial design and activist science struck in London; and the willful recasting of the German Romanticism deep within the passionate intentions of the Bauhaus, for a new world of pragmatism and profit in their time spent together in Chicago. Looking to its beginnings in the writings and teachings of Moholy-Nagy, the haptic unconscious bore within it a certain material directness; from the start it was a technological concern. Its genesis out of photography and film places the idea centrally in the realm of machines, tools, and the sensuous interface with humans, broadly understood. In this chapter we find further development of its other wellspring that is biology. Science met technology and art in this context to create a fantastically innovative bio-technical conceptual triangle. To repeat, the science of biology discussed in this chapter transmogrifies the light image in art into a living image. Something like Allessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani’s eighteenth-century frog whose legs quivered and kicked by way of charged electrodes and electricity channeled by metal, and Victor Frankenstein’s nineteenth-century creature coming to life through electrical charges, the light image was integrated into the world and took on living characteristics.12 But it was explicitly the model 74

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of biology, and only implicitly electricity, that made it a living organism under Kepes’ aegis. That is to say, the role of biology in the morphing of the haptic unconscious during the mid-twentieth century gave it life—made it seem an important matter for scientists in theoretical biology, physics, and cybernetics. Here I focus on the embodiment and unfolding of the haptic unconscious in Kepes’ books, including Language of Vision published in 1944, the anthology The New Landscape in Art Science published in 1956 (based on the 1951 MIT exhibition called The New Landscape), and the seven anthologies that make up Kepes’ Vision + Value Series published largely in 1965–66 (with the exception of Arts of Environment, which was published in 1972). I identify in the many pages of this rich endeavor yet another holism in Kepes’ encyclopedic will to encapsulate an enormous amount of information. The totality of this holism comes to bear in what seems virtually to be Kepes’ attempt to grab, calibrate, and contain all related knowledges on the senses and aesthetic experiences of the light image in his postwar moment. These publications mark the effort to create a universal image emporium in books and an all-encompassing library of form in pictures—or, an image laboratory with “both industrial and academic affiliations.”13 We were first introduced to Kepes in Chapter 1 as a teacher at the New Bauhaus.14 Moholy-Nagy invited him to Chicago in 1937 to join the faculty of the New Bauhaus from London, where he had been living since 1935. In the fall of 1937, Kepes taught photography with Chicago-based commercial photographer Henry Holmes Smith, and the following year he was slated in the course catalog as head of Drawing and Photography.15 Prior to their pedagogical collaboration at the New Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy met Kepes first in Berlin in 1930, where they intermittently worked together until 1934 in Moholy-Nagy’s makeshift design firm. Starting in 1935, they again collaborated in London, working together temporarily in Moholy-Nagy’s British design studio. It is here where they would come in contact with the avant-garde British scientists, in particular by way of a design project. Leftist-populist British scientist J. G. Crowther commissioned Moholy-Nagy to design the book cover for An Outline of the Universe (1931).16 As discussed in greater detail below, Crowther’s holistic effort to unite everyday life and the universe by way of science jibed well 75

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Image 29 Moholy-Nagy book cover design for J.  G. Crowther’s An Outline of the Universe (1930).

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with the greater pulsion toward wholeness within both Moholy-Nagy and Kepes’ pedagogical practice. While both Moholy-Nagy and Kepes were from Hungary—Kepes was born in 1906 in the northeastern quadrant of the country and Moholy-Nagy in 1895 in the south—there is no solid evidence they knew each other there.17 Nonetheless, that this passage of movement for Kepes in the 1930s, from Berlin to London to Chicago, occurred under the behest of Moholy-Nagy further underscores their closeness and mutual influences on each other.18 In many ways, they forged together the haptic unconscious out of German Romanticism, Bauhaus traditions, and the interactions with leftist-activist theoretical biologists in England, one posthumously carrying the mantel of the other. Because of institutional instability and the war, Kepes left the Institute of Design (formerly New Bauhaus) in 1943 for two short stints at other institutions of higher education—North Texas State Teachers College (now the University of North Texas) in 1943 and Brooklyn College from 1944 to 1946—before starting a long trajectory of teaching and life work at MIT in 1946.19 Kepes’ position as Associate Professor of Visual Fundamentals and Visual Design in MIT’s School of Architecture ensconced him in a rich integrated context, where scientists sought checks and balances after the atom bomb and World War II through outside, humanist expertise.20 Vigilance and oversight in science arrived through the extension of its objectivity, practicality, and empiricism into the more subjective realms usually masterminded by poetry, literature, art, and design. Kepes moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, determined to extend the practices of critical thinking inherent in such abstraction, bringing philosophical skepticism, literary hesitation, and aesthetic delectation into the many and varied scientific fields at MIT. Kepes’ hybrid ideas instrumentalized the general poetics of the humanities, making praxis through the sciences out of theories of perception, aesthetic experience, and biological form. The university setting was particularly propitious for this. Kepes’ new collaborative ways of thinking and teaching worked well with Dean of the School of Architecture William W. Wurster’s push to modernize the curriculum through combining the social sciences with architectural studio and design. Within the first months of his time at MIT, Kepes’ post as Associate Professor shifted from Freehand Drawing to Visual Fundamentals and Visual Design, a change in terminology that reflects the school’s move 77

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away from staid Beaux-Arts traditions.21 Outside of Kepes’ post in architecture, the Nucleus School and Radiation Laboratory further created a context of experimentation and cross-pollination. Created in 1932, the Nucleus School was a system of organization made up of the Schools of Engineering, Science, and Architecture and Divisions of Humanities and Industrial Cooperation.22 And the Radiation Laboratory, also known as the Rad Lab, was opened in 1940 to improve and expand the function of radar.23 The grounds were open and fertile for creative alliances, overlaps, and exchanges. Yet it would not be easy. While Kepes arrived from Brooklyn College prepared for the task of interdisciplinary integration in the halls of MIT, he found colleagues there to be not simply competitive but at times oblivious to the specific nature of art and design.24 As the bar was higher so too were the stakes of his work. In his new post at MIT, Kepes learned as he went. Though his knowledge and experiences in design practices in Berlin, London and at the Institute for Design in Chicago provided him a solid base for teaching, MIT marked a new beginning: renewal through self-evolution, ongoing self-reflexivity, and a retooling of some of his ideas. Kepes remarked of this time, “I was forced to face myself anew and to check what I knew and did not know about the world in which I was living.”25 Kepes’ was indeed a productive doubt, the wavering of which gave way to an enlightened understanding of the power of popular art-and-science. Kepes had a unique position as educator of subjectivity—teaching courses such as Visual Fundamentals, Light and Color, Graphic Presentation, and Painting at MIT—within an institution fundamentally devoted to objective, empirical analysis and the creative endeavors of engineers.26 From this interstitial space, Kepes launched the Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1967 at MIT. Kepes built on his knowledge of the Bauhaus, gained both in Europe through Moholy-Nagy, and in the United States working on his own in developing this advanced-guard art institution within a space formed by technology and science. Its mission, which I  discuss at greater length in the final chapter, was to support artists creating projects at the scale of the city. Such civic interventions would usually take form as media art—as large-scale urban planning, light, or kinetic projects. An artist-in-residency program was central to CAVS. Under Kepes’ directorship, an array of multi-media artists and curators—including Maryanne Amacher, Stan van 78

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der Beek, Lowry Burgess, Peter Campus, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Yvonne Rainer, Jack Burnham, and Alan Sonfist—spent extended time at MIT, collaborating with students and professors.27 With Kepes situated in the timeline of our story, I  would like to turn again to the objects at hand—Kepes’ books—as it is here where we find the most elegant and exact incarnation of the intricacies of the haptic unconscious at mid-century. I would like to focus attention on identification and category; on how best to understand the nature, or, to put it more bluntly, the literal what-ness of Kepes’ books. As a total unit, what exactly are the many anthologies conceived and edited by Kepes during the middle of the twentieth century? How are we to understand them as things? What was and is their function? Here, by way of “unit,” I refer to the nine anthologies overseen by Kepes from 1954 to 1972. Excluding the visionary Language of Vision (1944), authored solely by Kepes in Chicago, the list includes, to repeat: New Landscape in Art Science (1956) based on the 1951 MIT exhibition of the same title; The Visual Arts Today (1960); the seven anthologies that make up Kepes’ Vision + Value Series (1965–66), with a seventh published later, Arts of Environment (1972). While nine books do not seem daunting, surely what is inside of them is. Without including the enumerable images and marginal quotes from artists, ancient, medieval and Renaissance poets and philosophers, and known and anonymous scientists, they contain essays by almost 130 different authors, some of whom published more than once, coming from the hard sciences, soft sciences, and humanities. We might look to other collections of pictures, or what I  have here referred to as image emporia, for sources of both direct and indirect influence on Kepes’ unique book concept and design. To begin, there are two books with which Kepes would have had immediate contact, both of which bear striking resemblances to his anthologies. First, there is Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film (Malerei, Fotografie, Film) of 1925, the eighth of fourteen volumes published in the Bauhausbücher series launched by Walter Gropius in 1919 at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Though written solely by Moholy-Nagy and thus not an anthology, it combines text and scientific images in order to create not simply a vibrant collage in book form but the inchoate inscription of the light image—photograph, photo-gram, X-ray image, and sundry other images of reflective light-displays/light-games (Reflektorischen Lichtspiele)—as 79

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living image. Paving the way for Kepes’ peculiar fusion of art and science within the anthological book format some years later, Moholy-Nagy integrated the scientific image into the world of avant-garde photography and Constructivist typography. Reminiscent of the optic-haptic sensual hybrid rooted in the neologism taktische, Pepper Stetler insists Moholy-Nagy’s foray into the Bauhausbücher series was a matter of full-body perception rather than “exclusively the visual realm.”28 Kepes’ wont to instantiate pictures as part of a larger distributed network of relations comes, in part, from this book by Moholy-Nagy in which “a photograph is a perceptual model that induces particular sensations, stimuli, and responses.”29 Like Moholy-Nagy in Painting, Photography, Film, Kepes in the Vision + Value Series “defines photography as a productive medium, one that expands the world of the visible and leads to a transformation of human perception.”30 The second most direct forebear of the Kepes anthological form is the 1937 publication of Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art.31 Created while Moholy-Nagy and Kepes resided in London, the publication includes essays and images of art, sculpture and architecture by a wide array of practitioners, including modernists Naum Gabo, Piet Mondrian, Herbert Read, Le Corbusier, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Maxwell Fry, Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Karel Honzik. Intended to be the inaugural issue of an avant-garde journal, Circle was ultimately a one-off publication disseminated from London. Its goal was to define the appearance and parameters of the British Constructivist movement across media, within painting, drawing, sculpture, and design. The publication feels more like an art book than magazine because of its large size, at almost 300 pages, and intellectually sophisticated contents, which combined images of modern art, architecture, and sculpture with the writings of artists, architects, cultural critics and one scientist, the leftist-populist British molecular biologist J. D. Bernal. While with Circle he expanded his field of influence to include the realm of modern art and design, Bernal was trained as a scientist, a member of the Theoretical Biology Club, and attended dinner meetings of Tots and Quots. Bernal’s essay in Circle, “Art and the Scientist,” encouraged interaction between the two broad fields of expertise, with the goal being a move away from objectification within the arts (the making of individual art objects) to the more collectivist ordering of life. Bernal proffered a socialist 80

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message to prioritize artistic making directed toward the betterment of the group rather than the profit of the one. He called for the unity of artists and scientists not in the marketplace but in a visionary, communist-leaning “social construction.”32 Under such circumstances, the isolation of practitioners in both areas would be overcome by the ongoing cultivation of shared intellectual projects and commingling social relations—much of which was reflected already in the realities on the ground with groups such as Tots and Quots.33 Science here is a political vehicle for collectivizing citizens, artists and scientists alike. Scientist Bernal demanded a certain social responsibility from artists and notably did not seek to re-inscribe art form as bioform. Roles reversed as the biological thrust of information in Circle came, in fact, from artists. Within Circle there are two essays on light art and biotechnics that inject a subtle but decisive biological charge to the book which is similar to the scientific-cum-bio-aesthetic vigor within Kepes’ Vision + Value Series. Appearing in a section of the publication with a banner head of Art and Life, Moholy-Nagy’s “Light Painting” and Czechoslovakian architectural theorist Karel Honzik’s “A Note on Biotechnics” infuse the anthology with a theme of light-art as bio-life. Published in 1937, remarkably the same year he arrived in Chicago to launch the New Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s essay calls for the creation of an “Academy of Light” based on the cognitive teachings rooted in the biological wellspring of color— how we see and experience light as color. Moholy-Nagy clarified:  The preliminary condition of such teaching is that the apprehension of colour should be valued as a primary biological law, just as necessary and indispensable for human beings as the fulfillment of other biological functions. The harmonious use of colour is of primary importance as a vitalizing and constructive factor.34

Light and color work together in creating a situated aesthetic experience in which the lines of electricity connect human to human and bodies to living context, as with kinetic works of art, large-scale urban signage, and aerial views onto the electricity grid from airplanes. Bringing us back to the discussion in Chapter  1 of Raoul Francé and the seven functional geometries of nature in Chapter  1, Honzik’s “A Note of Biotechnics” explores the biofunctional roots of aesthetic form. Born in France, Honzik was educated at the Czech Technical University. He 81

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developed his ideas on biofunctionalism as an artist, architect, writer, and educator working with other avant-gardists in Czechoslovakia. Like the Hungarian-born botanist Francé, Honzik “understood form as an ecological process, in which it was the result of the interaction of internal and external forces.”35 In the Circle essay, Honzik focuses in particular on the “phytogenical” detailing of leaves in order to show how functional form originates from plants. His example was the Victoria Regia, the water lily with preternaturally large and strong leaves that inspired Joseph Paxton’s ferrovitreous designs for the Crystal Palace in London. Honzik’s close-up photographs of leaves from the Victoria Regia lily are among the few scientific images in the book.36 Through such illustrations, Honzik guides his readers to the biological roots of good architectural design in order to emphasize good form not in the sense of classical beauty but of robust and fit structure in the evolutionary sense of the term. Locating the roots of functional form within bioscience, he claims, “Biology is already familiar with a variety of natural organic forms that closely resemble forms that have been devised by man.”37 Comparing the biomorphic shapes of the plant to the concrete ramp system in the Fiat factory in Turin, Italy, and the veins of the plant leaf to reinforcements within the concrete, Honzik queries the nature of the relationship between form and function. He deploys the language of balance and self-regulation more typical to a cybernetician than a designer: “It seems as though form preceded function, or anyhow outlived it. Between them there is a continual oscillation, as between the two scales in a balance; and we feel, or seem to divine, that both aspire to an ideal permanence of equilibrium in which their separate identities would be fused.”38 Though Honzik gives over finally to a goal of balance and symmetry within the shifts of form, stating there is always a natural equilibrium struck between form and function, the process en route is not absolute or even predetermined but one of epigenetic shifting, or the “tropisms… instincts… [and] craving” of life.39 Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film and Martin, Nicholson, and Gabo’s Circle:  International Survey of Constructive Art left indelible marks on Kepes’ later stateside exercises in publishing, in particular by way of provocatively eclectic contents:  the art-and-science hybridity introduced by Moholy-Nagy through scientific imagery in the Bauhaus book and the culling of art and science writings in Circle. It must be kept in mind, however, 82

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VISION AND VALUES HARD SCIENCE 

HUMANITIES 

Math Gerald Holton Jay W. Forrester Dennis Gabor Kathleen Lonsdale Paul Weidlinger Bruno Rossi



Physics & Physiology Albert Szent-Györgyi Felix Deutsch Ralph W. Gerard

Philip Morrison Norbert Wiener Stanislaw Ulam Arthur Lee Loeb Andreas Speiser Henry Dreyfuss 

Brain Science



Genetics/Geology

Pier Luigi Nervi Jacob Bronowski Lancelot Law Whyte Heinz von Foerster Cyril Stanley Smith Gerald Holton 

Microbiology



Zoology

Richard Held

Gyorgy Kepes Gillo Dorfles Kazuhiko Egawa Stanley William Hayter Johannes Itten Tomás Maldonado 

Carl Pantin 



Psychology



Rudolf Arnheim Joan Erikson Wolfgang Metzger Hans Wallach William J. J. Gordon

Henry S. Stone Jr. James J. Gibson Abraham H. Maslow Heinz Werner Erik H. Erikson

Anthropology



Edmund Carpenter Robert Gardner Edward T. Hall 

Christopher Alexander Leonardo Ricci Lawrence B. Anderson Michael J. Blee Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz R. Buckminster Fuller Le Corbusier Pier Luigi Nervi Alison Smithson 

James T. Burns, Jr. J. P. Hodin I. A. Richards

Richard Wilbur Leo Marx James T. Burns

Charles W. Morris

Suzanne K. Langer

Philosophy



Curation & Museum Directors

Graphic Design

Peter Smithson Dolf Schnebli Eduardo Terraza Fumihiko Maki Masato Ohtaka Max Bill Ernesto Nathan Rogers Richard J. Neutra Walter Gropius

Saul Bass Will Burtin Karl Gerstner Rudolf Modle Paul Rand Robert Gessner Marcel Breuer Hans Richter



Musicians & Music Theory



Filmmakers



Photography

Julian Beinart

Kevin A. Lynch

Gordon B. Washburn

John Cage Boris Kaufman

Frederick S. Wight

Ernö Lendvai Maya Deren

Edward Steichen

Urbanists Donald Appleyard



Jean Arp



Paul Weiss 

Architecture

Richard Lippold Naum Gabo

Lawrence K. Frank

DESIGN 

Margit Staber P. A. Michelis

Poetry & Criticism· Dore Ashton Herbert Read Gillo Dorfles Marshall McLuhan

Social Science

Rudolf Arnheim Werner Schmalenbach

Sculptors George Rickey Mirko Basaldella

SOFT SCIENCE

Jean Hélion

Anthony Hill Francois Molnar Ad Reinhardt Richard Paul Lohse Fernand Leger Robert C. Osborn

Robert Preusser Pulsa Robert Smithson Ann Rand

Art History Theodore M. Brown Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr. Katharine Kuh

René Dubos

Conrad Hal Waddington

Painters & Artists

IndustrialDesign Henry Dreyfuss



Semiotics S.I. Hayakawa

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Image 30 Diagram by Trent J. Straughan of diverse contributors to Kepes’ anthologies.

Willem Sandberg

Image 31a Pages 130–31 from Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film.

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Image 31b (cont.)

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Image 32 Cover of Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (1937), edited by J. L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo.

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that beyond being a single book or a work within a publishing endeavor overseen by another editor, Kepes’ mid-century publishing extravaganza was a multi-tome proposition over which he worked as the sole editor and which came to full fruition in some nine anthologies over a two-decade period. What is felt here in Kepes’ multivolume project, perhaps beyond and unique from Painting, Photography, Film and Circle, is a certain will to capture and hold all knowledge; to create a vast and total image and information emporium of the world that remarkably foreshadows the conceptualization and workings of the internet. But, before we can get to the full-fledged inter- and extra-workings of the digital image within art, there are other precedents in the twentieth century of this push to catalog all knowledge, ones which Kepes might have known about but did not outwardly cite as influences. Two particularly visionary projects from the 1920s come to mind as further precedents of Kepes’ books, especially because of their corralling of pictures as data in the attempt to create an accessible “totality” of knowledge: Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1926–29) and Otto Neurath, Paul Otlet, and Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum (1924–28). Named for the Greek muse and personification of memory, Mnemosyne is a universalizing and shape-shifting atlas of images (Bilderatlas) put together by the German art historian Warburg.40 Warburg used the hundreds of images that make up Mnemosyne to think through past and present emotional symbols, arranging and rearranging the pictures on sixty-three large wooden panels covered in black fabric, some forty of which survive in the present. The collection of images included reproduced fragments of ancient art from across cultures, anthropological photos of Native Americans, details and full reproductions of masterworks from the Italian Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age, contemporary newspaper cutouts of military marches, and advertisements of quotidian products. In this ongoing mounting and moving of images without words, Warburg sought to create a mutable cartography of the afterlife (Nachleben) of the classical language of gestures within Renaissance art and beyond.41 While physically more loose in its configuration than Kepes’ anthologies from some decades later, there is a similar effort at work in both collections to propagate the reproduced image as a polysensual instrument of knowledge: the picture as a motivator of pathos and, by turns, the visual as an exercise in touching. Christopher D.  Johnson locates this sense of lifelike mobility within the broad scope 87

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of Warburg’s atlas. “Dating from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany, these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, were meant to foster immediate synoptic insights into the Nachleben of pathos-charged images depicting ‘bewegtes Leben’ (life in motion).”42 Warburg’s images thus bear a tragic dynamism, or what is referred to in German as a Pathosformel, a formula for pathos. Warburg believed the images, also known as “dynamograms,” triggered a certain feedback loop of virtual temporal movement, linking the past to the present by way of memory distilled as image: the paintings and pictures of ecstatic gesture and emotion-laden physiognomy. In this sense, Warburg’s images seem alive, so many bearers of the same bio-life coursing through the unfolding digital image in art within Kepes’ books.43 Not simply phenomenological, Warburg’s pictures connected space and time, linking the present to the past by way of the industrially reproduced yet philosophically embodied image. Similarly pivoting according to the reproducible image, the Mundaneum, or World Museum, also of the 1920s, was proposed by Austrian Unity of Science economist Neurath, Belgian author Otlet, and Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier as a means to encompass and make accessible all the world’s knowledge. Not only a reproducible museum intended as an architectural prototype repeatable around the world, the Mundaneum would bear reproducible units of knowledge in language and pictures: it would mark the consolidation of knowledge into “a single, common database.”44 The architectural project was motivated by Neurath’s earlier universalizing push to make a visual language readable by all people in the form of the “Isotype,” the rarefied symbol for basic function that today survives in a vast array of simple directional cues, such as gendered door signs for male and female bathrooms, figures on pedestrian crossing signs, and most forms of transportation communication. Discussed in Chapter 1, Neurath’s Isotype, or “International System of Typographic Picture Education” was the basis for the Mundaneum, a building that would, along with the evolving grammar of Isotypes, provide uniform programming and methods for educating the industrialized masses. Think here of the perverse possibility of a big-box discount internet café reproducible around the world, or what it might look like if Walmart met the internet in a philanthropic investment of giving knowledge out for free within the shelter of disinterested space. Unlike Walmart, 88

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Image 33 Karel Honzik’s photograph of “phytogenic” form in the Victoria Regia, from Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (1937), p. 260.

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Image 34 Karel Honzik’s photograph of concrete construction in the Fiat Factory in Turin, from Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (1937), p. 261.

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however, the Mundaneum was a design project in which architecture, typography, and world knowledge integrate to create a richer sense of “life.” Though originally identified in the single architecture typology as an exhibition hall that was to be a “museum of man’s development” by Otlet in 1924, the Mundaneum was designed on paper by Le Corbusier in 1928 as a complex of buildings, including a university, library, museum, and public gathering hall. Over time it was duly referred to as the World City. The Mundaneum was to be, according to Otlet, a “scientific association, museum, library, university, and institute… [which would] assume the functions of research, documentation, discussion, collaboration, and teaching.”45 Indeed the Mundaneum differed fundamentally from the publishing exercises of Kepes later in the century in that it was an architectural and urban proposition. However, one might argue that this earlier instance of three-dimensional materialization (the extrusion of Kepes’ later will-to-amass and will-to-gather information into the would-be realities of architecture and urban form) is but a more tangible way of achieving the bio-image in full form. Here, all knowledge becomes a distributed and lived image—the vécu as both memory and lived experience – in three-dimensional brick, mortar, concrete, and steel. Though a powerful theoretical project and great foreshadower of Kepes’ anthologies, Neurath, Otlet, and Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum was never built. With an eye onto these precedents from the period prior to World War II, it would seem that in the creation of his large publishing project in postwar America, Kepes was in constant dialog with the prewar period. While children of an earlier period, his books were nonetheless cutting edge and futurist in their vision of art, science, and technology united. Looking to the postwar period, other parallel thinking and modes of publication include André Malraux’s “museum without walls” and, perhaps the most populist of all, the Life Science book series. Both vibrate in their populism as homologs to Kepes’ anthologies. For French novelist and Minister of Cultural Affairs Malraux, photography democratized art, making all images—from both inside and outside of the western cannon of art—available at ease and low cost. In the spirit of Kepes’ multivolume world of art-cum-scientific images, “a museum without walls has been opened to us,” Malraux first explains in the late 1940s, “and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their 91

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Image 35 Aby Warburg, blackboard from Mnemosyne: Atlas of Memory (1924–29).

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Image 36 Le Corbusier, Mundaneum – the main library, 1928, note organic shape and reference to the golden section.

walls: in answer to their appeal, the plastic arts have produced their printing process.”46 While Malraux predicted very well the technologically driven image and, by connection, coming democratization of the art work, he did not account for the power of interdisciplinarity, such as within British scientist C. P. Snow’s mid-century call for the commingling of the “two cultures” of science and art and the rising tide of science within art that, though powerfully present in Kepes’ books, is being felt most profoundly now.47 Democratized knowledge did not ride simply on the reproducible picture of art but also the reproducible picture of art-and-science. The populism of Kepes’ publishing endeavor thus must be seen on a print–culture spectrum somewhere within and between Malraux’s prescient words in Museum 93

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Image 37 André Malraux selects photographs for La Musée imaginaire (The Imaginary Museum, 1947).

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Without Walls and the development of a popular science movement within the twentieth century. Two decades after Malraux and from 1963 to 1968, in the same years that Kepes’ Vision + Value Series were published by the George Braziller publishing house in New  York, Life Magazine published its Life Science Library.48 The editorial board, including microbiologist Réné Dubos, physicist Henry Margenau, and the chemist-cum-novelist C.  P. Snow, vetted the editorial work in each volume, choosing experts in both science and public communication, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan, to edit individual volumes. The series consisted of twenty-six volumes, each of which included exegetical texts from scientists and, unlike Kepes’ books but similar to Life Magazine, had copious images in a rich spectrum of color. The editors organized the volumes around an array of themes, including machines, man and space, the mind, matter, energy, food and nutrition, light and vision, the engineer, water, and time. But there was no “art” in the conventional sense of the term, neither in picture nor analytical contents. The editors of the Life Science Library did not likely see the value in collaboration between artists and scientists. It was a market-based rather than utopian avant-garde venture. With respect to Kepes’ books, I  would like to steer clear of this designation—utopian avant-garde—because it suggests the unreality and impossibility of a no-place, or utopia. Far from unreal and impossible, Kepes’ books exist: very real and possible, they came into full fruition, opening up a new territory within publishing that was not simply pop science but pop art-and-science. Like the volumes of the Life Science Library, Kepes’ books popularized the writings of scientists, in part, by way of using scientific images. But in using scientific images within the context of art books, Kepes intended to both change the ideas of form and formalism within art while fostering a new realm of critical inquiry born upon the dynamism of theoretical biology. Kepes’ books are popular art-and-science books that, unlike the Life Science Library, bear within them the subtle resonances of high academic studies. They are reverberations felt not so much in terms of writing style, as the prosody of the texts is overall quite readable and accessible, but in terms of the nature of the object. That is to say, the art-and-science concept at the core of Kepes’ anthologies is a unique combination of scholarship and populist intention rooted in the Romanticism of the Bauhaus and 95

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inflected by the Marxist activism of the British scientists, many of whom Kepes published in the books. J. G. Crowther, one of the most outspoken leftists of the activist scientists, was at the center of influence in this exercise. As discussed above, MoholyNagy and Kepes had worked with Crowther, the first science journalist in English journalism, in the design of the cover of his first book, Outline of the Universe.49 Published in 1931, the book inscribes scientific knowledge as a totality of relations, interconnecting the universe to bacteria to cells to modern society. Looking back on these years in 1972, Kepes called Crowther his mentor.50 Fellow leftist activist J. D. Bernal, who published the essay ‘Art and the Scientist’ in Circle, wrote a similar book in 1939 attempting to present a total scientific view of the universe for a popular audience, titled The Social Function of Science. In addition to Crowther and Bernal, Kepes came in contact with many populist English scientists. The list of experts and their work includes: J. G. Crowther, An Outline of the Universe (1931); J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (1939); William H.  George, The Scientist in Action:  A  Scientific Study of His Methods (1938); Joseph Needham, Order and Life (1936); Conrad H.  Waddington, The Scientific Attitude (1941); Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unitary Principle in Physics & Biology (1949); Martin Johnson, Art and Scientific Thought (1949); and J.  Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science (1958). Kepes either commissioned separate essays for publication within the anthologies from these authors or cited them in his own writing. Of the group, Bernal and Crowther were the most outspoken political activists, connecting popular science with popular politics by way of socialism and communism. Kepes carried forward into the postwar period the collective leftist communist-socialist will of the prewar British scientists to make science a popular discussion. But he did so without the leftist fervor. A note of distinction thus must be made on the theme of leftist politics, for the liberal tenor and acceptability of these ideas in the United States and UK were far different before and after World War II. In fact the vital leftist tenor of the 1930s was all but gone and its acceptability null and void after the war, muffled and censored by rampant McCarthyism in the US and a generalized xenophobia in the UK (perhaps best instantiated by the circumstances surrounding the suicide of the brilliant and gay computer scientist Alan Turing). I would argue, however, that the political activism was not dead, 96

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but simply transmogrified for a new world. Kepes channeled the fervent political populism that ran parallel to the avant-garde scientific theorization of biology during the 1930s not simply into themes of morphogenetic and evolutionary form for art, but also into the very creation of the pop art-and-science book. The leftist thinking in the 1930s British scientific community evolved into an art-book paradigm: a model of a living, mutating activist art form and its vehicle of delivery that was the Kepes anthology. The medium was the message. The leftist political avant-gardism of the 1930s evolved over the years into a cybernetic and biological view of art in the 1960s, which was further embodied and documented in the art-and-science hybrid book. And what was once housed in the laboratory, by way of the gown, was now openly disseminated in the streets, or the town, by way of Kepes’ many books. It is by way of this unique form—the pop art-and-science book—that Kepes’ anthologies were more than simply texts:  they were images that implied a world of tactile experience. As vehicles of the haptic unconscious, they describe and enliven living, three-dimensional and four-dimensional senses of the art form. Published in Education of Vision (1966), one of the initial six volumes of Kepes’ Vision + Value Series, Will Burtin’s essay “Design and Communication” offers an incisive example of this populist form of the haptic experience growing out from the pages of the text. A German graphic designer who had immigrated to the United States in 1938, Burtin focuses on the importance of communication within the essay, opening with a salvo of sorts:  “From stone-age cave paintings to Dead Sea scrolls, from Gutenberg’s typographic innovation to the binary system of the electronic computer, there is a steady development toward the refinement of meaning and the mechanization of communication.”51 Burtin was dedicated to facilitating the simple, friendly communication of seemingly daunting and complicated scientific information. In the essay for Kepes, he cited the staples of such communication: the need to rapidly relay complex information through simple bits of information, by way of deploying all the bodily senses of viewers, readers, and consumers alike.52 Communication should be easy and polysensate. Burtin gave language here to the “scientific visualization” he developed as a designer working for the Upjohn pharmaceutical company starting in 1947.53 Advancing their “corporate identity,” Burtin used the company’s 97

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Scope magazine as a platform to experiment with an early vocabulary of visual form that would be identified today as “data visualization.”54 In Kepes’ book, Burtin concentrated on several three-dimensional models he had designed for Upjohn between 1949 and 1963:  a “generalized human red blood cell” in resin and light; an audio-visual system intended to make experiential the act of “thinking about thinking” or consciousness within the brain; and an “electronic exhibition sculpture” of the metabolic process.55 While Burtin intended for the models to give vision to scientific ideas, it must be noted that his concept of “vision” was similar to Riegl, Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy, and Kepes’ hybrid optic-haptic take on the act of seeing. With a layered sense of vision, Burtin extruded the scientific image into three- and four-dimensional space. Burtin designed each model large enough for people to experience by way of walking through and amidst their parts. Visitors to the Cell exhibition unveiled in September 1958 at the American Medical Association’s meeting in San Francisco walked through transparent plastic matrices, making their way to the center where “the sole light source… was inside the nucleolus.”56 The cell seemed alive, as Burtin further explains: “Rhythmic illumination of high and low intensity was employed to create an illusion of expansion and contraction, as if the structure were ‘breathing.’ ”57 Following the great popular success of the Cell, Burtin designed an experiential model of thinking, using audio-visual cues to guide viewers in their experience. Referred to in the press release as a “model of how the brain works,” Burtin’s second model for Upjohn debuted in Miami Beach at the 1960 meeting of the American Medical Association. Burtin originally intended it to be an omnibus sensual experience.58 He sought to integrate “all senses of perception—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—in one model.”59 But Burtin felt limited by space. “The scale of such a demonstration may have to be many times larger than the one employed in the existing ‘brain’ model,” Burtin explains, “so that it can explain not only the order of five sensory experiences but their constantly changing interactions as well.”60 The third and final model Burtin designed for Upjohn, Metabolism, the Process of Life, premiered in 1963 at the meeting of American Medical Association in Atlantic City. The exhibit felt once 98

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again like a light-art sculpture, with its blinking illuminations bestowing on the work a sense of living, breathing form. It had electronically controlled graphic displays that “demonstrated critical, life-sustaining, biochemical reactions.”61 Burtin deployed the haptic unconscious in these exhibitions of bio-life. So many extensions of the images in Kepes’ book, the actual models made experiential, body-borne knowledge out of scientific facts. Burtin’s installations are embodied knowledge and examples of the scientific image distributed across space and time. At the same time, the work at Upjohn that Burtin describes in Kepes’ volume seems in many ways to be the postwar culmination of prewar ideas, namely the call to popularize science. While not a direct heir to the British scientists of the prewar era, Burtin is enlisted in Kepes’ texts as part of the ongoing popularization of science initiated by Crowther, Bernal, Needham, Whyte, Waddington, et al. in the 1930s. And like these figures, Burtin sought to link the universal to the specific. and the macrological to the micrological scale, by way of the lyricism of giving form to the common biological function of the human in the singular experience of a populist scientific installation. Executing a similar unity of disciplines, science writer and Smithsonian curator Philip C.  Ritterbush wrote in the 1960s and 1970s of “the art of organic forms” and “the public side of science.” Connecting German Romanticism to popular art-and-science endeavors in the twentieth century, Ritterbush curated an exhibition titled The Art of Organic Forms at the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institute in 1968. In the accompanying catalog, he brought together the organic and incipient systems thinking of Schlegel, Schelling, and Coleridge and the abstract organic forms within the painting of Gorky, Matta, Baziotes, and others as a means of arguing for the powerful overlap between science, literature, and art. It was imaging that connected the three areas of expertise, as he argues: “It is my contention that the history of biology cannot be understood without reference to the development and the scientific and esthetic standing of images which have been held to represent living things scientifically.”62 Not only do the fields create together a united arena of inquiry, but also a unity of the picture-as-life, the light image as an ecological bios. Like Kepes, Ritterbush believed it was the duty of the public intellectual—the 99

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art professor, scientist, and curator—to bring this holistic embrace of art and science to the public. Ritterbush seemed to be stitching together the political will of the prewar English activist biologist and the innovation of Kepes’ postwar pop art-and-science publication. Ritterbush queries, “How can a society function in a coherent fashion as a democracy if no more than 15 percent of its citizens embrace scientific methods of reasoning?”63 Kepes enforced the same question within his books, if implicitly, and tweaked for a different way thinking about knowing itself. For Cartesian reasoning was not Kepes’ primary concern, but rather understanding the experience of the light image as a form of body-borne knowledge—as part of the unfolding of the haptic unconscious.

Image 38 Will Burtin, Scientific Visualization comparing impact of Penicillin, Streptomycin, and Neomychin on a range of bacteria; appeared in Scope, Fall 1951.

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Image 39 Will Burtin, Cell, 1958, meeting of the American Medical Association, San Francisco.

Image 40 Will Burtin, The Brain, 1960, meeting of the American Medical Association, Miami.

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Image 41 Will Burtin, Metabolism, 1963, meeting of American Medical Association, Atlantic City.

III. Morphogenesis: Kepes’ Epigenetic Landscape The final two sections of this chapter are devoted to the concept of “integration,” another theme of holism emerging from the Bauhaus in its American incarnation. In these two sections, I focus on the theme of integration as it creates part of the scaffolding for a concept of the light image that is a matter at once of centripetal and centrifugal forces:  on the one hand, interdisciplinary inclusion and totality of form and, on the other, a dialectical distribution of components across space and time that constitutes an open totality with related parts. If integration is the centripetal force at work here, then biological morphogenesis homes in on the dynamism of the interrelated elements. With respect to morphogenesis, integration functions to create a totality of relations otherwise known as the Gestalt. Semiotician, philosopher, and University of Chicago graduate Charles W. Morris taught a class called Intellectual Integration at the New Bauhaus in 1938. In the course description he sent to Moholy-Nagy on April 2, 1938, Morris explains “integration” in terms of the merging of expertise in the academy: “The purpose of this course is to get as clear an idea as is 102

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possible of the main human activities (grouped under the general headings of art, science, and technology).”64 Morris was an important link between the Viennese and American chapters of the Unity of Science movement. From this perspective, words like “integration” and “unity” are interconnected, both elemental in the evolution of what is commonly known today as interdisciplinary studies. As part of the Unity of Science call for clear communication shorn of any metaphysical suggestion, Morris promoted art as a linguistic system. For Morris, this regard brought a critical view onto artistic value judgments such as “good,” “better,” and “best,” placing them in an integrated and practice-based spectrum of art, science, and technology instead of within the hypostatized realm of artistic beauty. The goal here was one of functionalism: to bring clarity of meaning and opinion to art through the logical up-building (Aufbau) of terms and, in keeping with the core motivation of the Unity of Science movement, to create a unified language of philosophy and science.65 Through the integration of different disciplines of study and making, Morris sought to bring together questions of “technology” and “morality” in the course on Intellectual Integration in order “to show the relation of the arts and the sciences to technology [with] the ‘applied’ arts being the point of fusion of the fine arts and intellectual arts.”66 In the years after Morris’ class at the New Bauhaus, Kepes realized “integration” through another pedagogical venture:  the teaching of “civilian defense.”67 In 1942, Kepes taught the Principles of Camouflage, a sixteen-week course that cost $30.00 at the New Bauhaus, which by this time had changed its name to the School of Design.68 Officially appointed by the United States War Department after having undergone eighty-five hours of specialized training in camouflage during July of 1942 at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, Kepes saw the course as a testing ground for the praxis of Morris’ “integration” realized in the careful analysis of perception and form in the field.69 While camouflage might be another “applied art” from Morris’ point of view, it is also part of the ongoing development of the phenomenology of the light image. Camouflage, Kepes taught, involved the study of “how light is reflected from plane surfaces, from angular surfaces, and from rough-textured surfaces,” in the careful dissimulation of urban footprints from the aerial view up above.70 Certainly an admirer and aficionado of city lights seen from the fly-over perspective, Kepes famously boarded a 103

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plane with Moholy-Nagy and city dignitaries, and flew over the city in the effort to “re-pattern the light structure of Chicago for camouflage purposes.”71 Integration here is a matter of realizing design in a massive scale in the name of national defense, notably by way of a machine in the sky above. For Morris and Kepes, the idea of “value” was thus deeply embedded in the greater rubric of “integration.” Value is situated, systematic, and relational rather than a priori. It was part of the hands-on practicing of design in the world, influenced as much by the Unity of Science movement as the experiential epistemology of John Dewey, who had taught at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1904.72 One understood value—made value judgments—by way of relational experience and through understanding structural connections between people, places, institutions, and nations. Kepes wrote of “value” in The Language Vision, his first book published in 1944, using functional language that was similar to Morris’ appraisal of the term. He described value as “that which renders anything useful.”73 To soften the strict instrumentalization seemingly at work here I would like to emphasize that such functionalism was not strictly a matter of reified use but, more precisely, part of a Gestalt in motion and, within that logic, an order bearing dynamic Heraclitian change. For Kepes, “values are, in human terms, the recognized directives toward a more satisfactory human life. They are the comprehended potential “order” in man’s relationship to nature and to his fellow man… Order for our time can only be formulated in the concrete terms of the dynamic field of the present social forces. Only if we encompass in thinking and in seeing the dynamic forces the present contradictions in biological and social processes, shall we be able to resolve them.”74 While the theme of “value” here and within the Vision + Value Series is in part owed to Morris’ development of the concept, Kepes’ ideas are clearly influenced as well by Moholy-Nagy’s biocentrism and the thinking of Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler.75 Kepes brought Morris’ theme of integration nonetheless into play in The Language Vision, with Morris’ ideas obviously present in the title of the book. S. I. Hayakawa, fellow Chicago-based semiotician teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology, wrote the introduction to Kepes’ first book, titled “The Revision of Vision.” Situating Kepes’ “language,” Hayakawa summoned the cool logic of linguistic structuralism, I would argue, somewhat 104

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mis-framing Kepes’ book solely in terms of “grammar” and “syntax.”76 Kepes was indeed interested in structuralism at the time, but with an inclusive and integrative sense of the relational philosophy of structuralism that, as Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget would later show, brought together the biological theme of organicism and Gestalt psychology along with linguistic structuralism.77 This combination of hard and soft, dry and wet, manifested itself in a polysensual take on vision within Kepes’ book: seeing a biological “system of virtuals” modeled after “embryology” within the “field of forces” that is the cognitive experience of perceptual psychology, to use the language of Piaget.78 The visual for Kepes was markedly a matter of the Gestalt, an experience of the viewer in which her perceptual shifts are central in the making and overall experience, or completion, of the work of art. The word “making” here thus includes concept, craft, and interaction. “To perceive a visual image,” Kepes argues, “implies the beholder’s participation in a process of organization. The experience of an image is thus a creative act of integration.”79 Far from static, the image accordingly becomes complete through collaboration with and within a “field of spatial forces.”80 Using the language of biology, Kepes argues images are living organisms that move and shift but maintain a constancy of form: “As the wheels of a bicycle stand erect only through perpetual movement, so the organism keeps its form through constant motion.”81 Kepes compares the mobility of the image-organism to the fluid workings of the nervous system. Similar to Honzik above, Kepes reveals the influences of cybernetic thinking, which, as discussed in greater detail in the following pages, was the basis for paralleling communication networks and the human metabolism, and modeling smart bombs after the feedback loop of the nervous system. Here in his biological view of the image, Kepes states: “The limitations of our nervous system define not only the number and extension of individual optical units which can be perceived as a whole, that is, the space-span, but also the life-span of the visual experience. One cannot look at a static relationship long without losing interest any more than one can survive for long in a sealed room where the supply of oxygen is soon exhausted. The image as a living experience cannot long exist in a frozen structure. For the image to remain a living organism, relationships within it must be constantly changing.”82 Once again, we find a key element 105

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of the haptic unconscious that is vision as both tactile and becoming, a matter of taktische and an integrative act in the unfolding of the light image within art across space and time. Including an essay by Morris in his next book, The New Landscape in Art and Science, Kepes continued building on his Unity of Science-inflected ideas of structuralism and semiotics, disabusing them of vestiges of Wittgensteinian formalism by way of a new biological alignment. From this perspective, Kepes moved between the structuralisms outlined by Piaget, bringing Morris’ cool linguistics into line with warm biology and Gestalt psychology. Kepes homed in on the combined flexibility and all-encompassing nature of Morris’ ideas, placing his essay “Man-Cosmos Symbols” under the heading of “Image, Form, Symbol,” and alongside of themes of “The Industrial Landscape,” “The New Landscape,” “Transformation,” and “Morphology in Art and Science.” Published in 1956, the book was the belated catalog of Kepes’ 1951 exhibition titled The New Landscape at the Hayden Gallery at MIT.83 In the exhibition, Kepes hung a diverse arrangement of reproduced black-and-white images of scientific photography. The images seemed to float, mounted from within a thin white metal grid with large open spaces.84 It is within the context of the exhibition and catalog combined that Kepes rethought “landscape” in terms of circulation, change, and perverse and profound imagistic adjacencies: art-and-science groupings that within both the show and publication included a nineteenth-century diagram by engineer Clerk Maxwell’s governor, prehistoric cave paintings, and Hans Haffenrichter’s cellular drawings in graphite as well as Herbert Matter’s distillation of falling water, Portrait of an Alternating Current (appearing in Life Magazine), and an ink and wash painting by fifteenth-century artist Sesshu Toyo.85 Kepes plainly stated in the preface of the catalog, “The book is a landscape.”86 Landscape for Kepes was, at the same time, a virtual space of relations between seen and unseen luminescent light waves and diverse energy forces. Kepes expanded his definition: “Or, more correctly, it is the first sketch of a new landscape which seems to me rich in promise, a landscape I  am moved by and have confidence in.”87 He defined “landscape” even more broadly in the fourth section of the catalog through themes of “Magnification of Optical Data,” “Expansion and Compression of Events 106

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Image 42 Pages 210–11 from The New Landscape in Art and Science, ed. György Kepes.

in Time,” “Expansion of the Eye’s Sensitivity Range,” and “Modulation of Signals.” Kepes here describes the new horizon that loomed “beyond the familiar human landscape” within an “ultrasensory world.”88 The language of the virtual meant, at the same time, the new landscape imagined in the most literal sense of the word “image”:  given form in technological images by way of X-rays, radio waves, and magnetic fields, or the “artificial sense organs [constructed] by scientific man.”89 Perception is essentially extended and prosthetic. Kepes mounted the MIT exhibition notably in 1951, the same year that the British Pop artist Richard Hamilton curated On Growth and Form at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. Hamilton organized the show around seventeen categories based on the British scientist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book of the same title, On Growth and Form (1917), each of which looked to a unique structure of dynamic growth within nature. Hamilton developed his curatorial energies out of Thompson’s studies of biomorphism, the trajectory of force, and pure math. Like Kepes’ exhibition, Hamilton created a total art-and-science environment using scientific images as a means to re-inscribe artistic form as experiential, empirical, and living in the world rather than a matter of 107

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a priori Platonic solids and absolute essences. Hamilton and his Art Brut and Pop artist-colleagues in the Independent Group used across their exhibitions what were at the time both unorthodox images and modes of installation, hanging scientific pictures from the ceiling, leaning them nonchalantly along the floor against the wall, and projecting X-ray and micro-photographic images alongside films about crystallography.90 A scientist working between physics and biology, Lancelot Law Whyte edited an anthology of essays as part of a catalog for the exhibition titled Aspects of Form. Similar in tenor and contents to Kepes’ anthologies of the same years, though without any images, Whyte’s volume contained articles by British scientists C. C. L. Gregory, C. H. Waddington, Joseph Needham, Gestalt psychologist Konrad Z.  Lorenz, and Gestalt-based art historians Rudolf Arnheim and E. H. Gombrich. In the editorial preface to the 1968 edition, Whyte cites the importance of the work of Kepes, for whom he wrote “Atomism, Structure, and Form: A Report on the Natural Philosophy of Form,” a lengthy essay in Structure in Art and Science in the Vision + Value Series.91 This international network of publications and scholarly interconnections at midcentury must be seen as an extension of relations set in place in prewar London. A biological and morphogenetic concept of art form was born from out of this nexus. Taking cues from scientists, artists developed not simply a biological concept of form, but an epigenetic one, introducing a tweaked sense of Darwinian evolution into aesthetic precepts. In that his books brought together scientists and artists, Kepes’ overall project was epigenetic in nature: generally speaking, the goal of the volumes was to reveal to readers the transformations scientific discovery wrought upon culture in quasi-genetic fashion. More universal definitions of “epigenesis” are a matter first and singly of genetic and, only second, cultural magnitude. Epigenesis is a central concept within a theory of evolution that both precedes the work of Charles Darwin (1809–82) in the evolutionary theories of French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and follows with nineteenth-century neo-Lamarckism and the contemporary idea that we are “evolving ourselves.”92 Time is key in the distinction between the two hypotheses, with Lamarck’s theory of evolution rooted in the shallows of time and Darwin its depths. To summarize, Lamarck’s theory of evolution allows for phenotypic change as a matter of “heritability of acquired characteristics” or “soft inheritance.”93 That is to say, Lamarck’s evolution 108

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occurs rapidly, evidenced by way of shifts in the appearance of living beings that are rooted in shifts in genetic change as caused by environmental influence over a short period of time, for example, within and between one or two generations. Influenced by his friend and colleague Charles Lyell, the foremost geologist of the nineteenth century, Darwin by contrast developed a theory of evolution based on the phenotypic registering of ontogenesis, or genetic changes that occur extremely slowly within and between species over hundreds of thousands and millions of years. Kepes deployed a language of epigenesis arguably in all of his books, as did Whyte in the anthology Aspects of Form. Kepes and Whyte’s was collectively an epigenetic enterprise:  art and science together worked to shape living form in a Gestalt of relations—cultural and otherwise. Getting at the morphological consequences of changes affecting a given creature both inwardly and outwardly, Whyte described the eleven essays in the catalog-anthology for On Growth and Form as commonly “concerned with different aspects of spatial form, including both external form or visible shape, and internal form or structure, as well as transformation.”94 The play of forces inside and outside of the biological form here signals internal shifts based on external (ecological and epigenetic) changes. Equally of note, the British developmental biologist Conrad Waddington—inventor of the “epigenetic landscape”—published in both Whyte’s anthology for the 1951 exhibition in London and Kepes’ Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm, one of the original six volumes in the Vision + Value Series. Waddington’s is the second essay in Kepes’ volume. Titled “The Modular Principle and Biological Form,” Waddington’s essay follows synergistically from the first essay of the anthology, “The Modularity of Knowing” by physicist Philip Morrison. With Morrison focusing on electronic modules as pulses flowing within early computers and Waddington on biological patterns in few-celled organisms such as the pediastrum, the two essays create a Frankensteinian coupling of sorts, with bio-life coming to fruition out of electric pulsation.95 In this spirit, I overlay poetic science atop science-inflected art. Resonating well with both Whyte and Kepes’ thinking at mid-century, Waddington first advanced the idea of an “epigenetic landscape” some years earlier, in 1942.96 Bearing in mind these many direct and indirect instances of collaboration, it seems only logical to consider Kepes’ idea of “landscape” in terms 109

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of Waddington’s take on the term. Like Kepes’ idea of the new landscape, Waddington’s epigenetic landscape was metaphorical:  the embryologist described the epigenetic landscape as “a rough and ready picture of the developing embryo.”97 A cell is given the likeness of a ball rolling down an incline into a hilly landscape, taking various paths along its undulating mounds.98 The cell-as-ball has many possible trajectories it could take toward differentiation, making its way along the unfolding of ontogenesis. In reality, the ridges and grooves within the landscape are the striations and furrows along the surface of the dermatic layers of flesh within a developing biological form. Waddington showed a talent for language in the description of the epigenetic landscape, creating two neologisms in the process:  “creode” and “homeorhesis.” Both terms describe change within change, as if to give conceptual form to process within process, or nested becoming. Waddington states that the system of the epigenetic landscape always strives for equilibrium, not a static sense of balance but one “centered… on a direction or pathway of change.”99 Waddington named the trajectory eventually taken by the cell a “creode,” meaning “necessary path,” from the Greek roots for “it is necessary” and “a route or path.”100 The overall “equilibrium-property” bears literally a flowing sense of balance in the condition of “homeorhesis,” a word Waddington crafted from the Greek meaning “to flow,” rather than the unchanging state of “homeostasis.”101 Movement occurs within an always-shifting landscape affected by both external environmental factors and mobile, internal forces of regulation and assimilation. As though hinting at the contemporary development of cybernetics based precisely on such biological systems, Waddington explains his metaphor with yet another metaphor, that of the smart bomb: “The path followed by a homing missile, which finds its way to stationary target, is a creode.”102 This artificial example of the creode sheds light on the nature of its movement: the creode is more a feedback loop than unidirectional path, self-correcting itself as or as if part of a self-regulating nervous system within a biological creature. The painter John Piper’s renderings of the epigenetic landscape appeared in black-and-white reproduction in Waddington’s The Strategy of Genes (1957). There are three primary images by Piper that constitute the “epigenetic landscape.”103 First, there is a drawing bearing a magnified view of a crevice within what appears to be an earthen landscape but which is actually intended to be a field of fleshy, living tissue. Second, and perhaps the 110

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Image 43a Renderings by John Piper for Conrad Waddington’s Organisers and Genes (1942), courtesy of ARS, NY/DACS, London.

most famous, there is a drawing showing a ball rolling down a bumpy hill, which was meant to approximate a cell making its approach through a living

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epigenetic landscape to gene expression at the bottom. Finally, and most diagrammatic of all three, there is the drawing of the activity at work beneath the landscape. This image functions almost like an architectural section, showing the guy ropes attached to genes at the bottom, the pull of which creates the undulating valleys above. Waddington described this complexity in terms of emergence, as it unfolded across several dimensions of space and time within a “multidimensional… phase space.”104 Fluctuations are tempered by the autopoetic functionalism of the biological system: “As the composition of the system changes the point will move along a certain trajectory. In a canalised system of the kind we have been considering, trajectories starting from any point within a certain volume will converge to a single end point which is the corresponding steady state, while trajectories starting within some other volume will converge on a different point.”105 Piper’s pictures are indeed helpful in simplifying Waddington’s highly intricate genetic concepts for a lay audience, even though scientists continue to consider them inexact. Yet, at the same time, Piper’s renderings of the landscape are quite similar to realistic landscape paintings he made during the 1940s and 1950s. Here we find Piper using the same visual vocabulary—a hilly earthen landscape—in rendering two distinct takes on developmental temporality, one generational and epigenetic and the other gradual and of deep time. Piper’s Welsh landscape paintings, such as The Rise of the Dovey (1943) and Rocky Valley, North Wales (1948), reveal the artist’s penchant for singular and age-old formations of craggy earth, which in turn seem bound to a fascination with the earth’s prehistoric age. His dun-colored landscapes of shoreline rocks and cliffs in Wales recall similar landscape paintings from the nineteenth century, such as Gustave Courbet’s Roche de Bayard (1855) and William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay:  A  Recollection, October 5, 1858 (1858), which were painted under the sway of Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell published Principles of Geology between 1830 and 1833, a three-tome set of books proving the earth’s crust was far older than the biblical 6,000 years. Darwin built his theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species (1859) on Lyell’s evidence of the earth’s profound geological age.106 Foremost, Piper’s landscapes reveal him to be an astute realist painter and, more importantly, a naturalist similar to Lyell and Darwin. 112

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Image 43b The Rise of the Dovey by John Piper, oil on gessoed canvas mounted on board, courtesy of ARS, NY/DACS, London.

Let us call, thus, Kepes’ landscape an epigenetic landscape. In naming it as such, my intention here is not so much to suggest that the new landscape—of art-and-science and the scientific image within the context of art—is literally genetically transformative within one or two generations of a species. Rather, Kepes recreates art form as an epigenetic landscape constantly in the process of morphogenetic change: art that is alive with modification, the definition of which is up for grabs and always affected by technological, scientific, and socio-political turns. In bringing Waddington’s “epigenetic landscape” to bear upon Kepes’ “new landscape,” I tease out the latent reorganizing of form at work in the exhibition, catalog, and subsequent volumes of the Vision + Value Series. Here I focus on the shift in the conceptual organizing of artistic form in terms of a vertical hierarchy to a totality in flux: form characterized by the lateral shifts in the growth of “crystals, fabrics, and fields,” to use the forms 113

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of accretive development in the title of Donna Haraway’s book-length study of theoretical biology in 1930s England. Joseph Needham, a figure in Haraway’s study and colleague of Waddington’s, confronted the challenges of simple top-down hierarchical order within biology by identifying the “spatial hierarchy” of an organism requiring a new unity of expertise. Needham defined the system of order “spatially” in lateral terms and by way of specialization: the cell understood according to the “higher or coarser levels… correspond[ing] to the domain of morphology and anatomy,” the “intermediate levels” belonging “to histology and cytology,” and the “lower or finer levels to biochemistry.”107 This enveloping of forms, which Needham further connects to colloidal or dispersed relations, is equally a catalyst for carefully thinking through causality and process, both in scientific and artistic terms. Accordingly, structural relations come from all directions and within all gradations—above, below, and parallel as well as through textures that are coarse or fine—causing movement and shifts that are stochastic, or unpredictable. And so it follows for Needham, like Waddington and as I am suggesting here Kepes, “the relations of members to the levels above them in the hierarchy are just as important as their relations to their components below.”108 Hierarchy is re-inscribed spatially and structurally, as a “system of transformations,” a matter of “wholeness” and the “idea of self-regulation.”109 Waddington devoted a fair bit of his later academic career to a related synergy that is here strong in imagination but itself embryonic, namely that of art and science. He published an inarguably Kepes-influenced art book, Behind Appearances: A Study of the Relations Between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century, in 1967. The book in its second printing by MIT Press contains 136 color plates of artworks by artists, ranging from Monet to Rauschenberg, alongside Waddington’s writings about the “hybrid Argus” of “scientists and society… physics… and biology…”110 Waddington believed in “communication systems” whereby worlds of artists and scientists overlapped and existed simultaneously. It is through the osmosis of two expansive disciplines at once—art and science—that new territory opens. Writing in the inaugural issue of Leonardo, Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Technology in 1968, Waddington identified the communication between art and science in terms of the haptic unconscious:  114

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György Kepes and the Light Image as Bio-Image “When artists have tried to learn direct lessons from science, copying the visual phenomena turned up by scientific research or technically based industry, not much of value or profundity has been produced. The notions which have been more fructifying are those which have been absorbed by empathy, through the pores, as it were. And they have been expressed again by the artists not so much in any explicit exposition or diagramming of scientific ideas, but rather by living a life of implicit incorporation into a work of art—an artifact—from which the spectator again absorbs them by in-feeling more than by analysis. It is at the deep levels of the human psyche, where these kinds of communication operate, that there is the closest unity between science and art.”111

It is not simply that Waddington lays out here the logic of the haptic unconscious as first inscribed by Moholy-Nagy and then Kepes, but he does it to show us an example of non-objectified empirical knowledge within the context of science broadly; that is, imaginatively, and poetically, conceived. For Waddington, intuitive knowledge—knowing gained through the “pores”—offered a non-hierarchical and non-instrumental mode of utility. It gave forth a “usefulness” precisely from the cross-disciplinary workings of art and science that are often not measurable, not to be reified by counting, not technocratic but simply a matter of disinterested intellectual quality: understanding as part of the Gestalt of life that is an endless path of curiosity and invention. Waddington’s thinking on art-and-science links the haptic unconscious to the present as it bears upon the usefulness of the broad humanities in the present. The scientist Waddington here identifies the space of inquiry created through the unique combination of art-and-science that does not “prove” its “usefulness” by profit in the market—as an immediate job, commodity, or increase in profit margin—but simply through being part of a “communication system,” as it is part of critical thinking between people. For Waddington critical thinking came out of recognition of social relations. Smart and acute art-and-science hybrids, be they works of art, architecture, or books, make palpable our ecological setting, revealing to us that “we live in surroundings and conditions that we ourselves make… [where] everything ‘has a feeling for’ (prehends) everything else; things have fuzzy edges.”112 As for Kepes and

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his anthologies—and the development of the light image within art as a bio-image—his was an epigenetic Whiteheadian endeavor.

IV. Integration-Distribution: The Light Image from Gestalt to Cybernetics In the final portion of this chapter, I return to Charles Morris, the idea of “integration,” and Morris’ role as propagator of the Unity of Science within the United States after World War II. Here, I  springboard from Morris’ “integration” to the concept of “distribution,” fully playing out the centripetal and centrifugal forces in the evolution of the light- or digital image within art. By describing the movement between centralizing or integrable components on the one hand and decentralizing and diffusive elements on other, I am describing the “image” in the most literal sense of the term; as it can be a two-dimensional picture on a computer screen or a threeand four-dimensional lived event unfolding in real time between people, thereby becoming an image of memory. As examples, think here of some of the earliest digital images on computer screens designed by engineer A. Michael Noll and contemporary net art versus the light image within performances of the engineer-artist collaboration Experiments in Art and Technology [EAT] and the contemporary urban light exhibition, Nuit Blanche. On the face of things these light images move between integration and distribution, with the screen instantiating a flat two-dimensional integration of pixels and media-art performance creating a distributed image by way of radio waves, electricity, and humans interacting in space. In general, I  define the “distributed image” as multi-dimensional; it can be on paper created by technology, stored in the body as a memory of a performance, or part of a cognitive map which orients people in urban contexts. In reality all examples introduced here are dialectically integrated and distributed images. While any use of electricity marks the distribution of flowing charges, electronic art is communal, a matter of coalescing ideas and people in space. As the light image moves toward ever greater distribution, it is a distribution built on the vision of total cultural communication. Integration and distribution are related, if not one. In this concluding section, I demonstrate that the models of the integrated and distributed light images within art have roots in the science-cum-philosophies of Gestalt 116

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and cybernetics, the linchpin between them being the Unity of Science movement in the United States. Semiotician and philosopher Morris was an important link between the old and new world for the Unity of Science movement, having collaborated with founding member Rudolf Carnap and taught at the University of Chicago.113 Morris’ idea of “integration” that spread through the design world by way of his course at the New Bauhaus in Chicago bears a logic similar to that of “unity” central to the Unity of Science movement. The two words were signals for clarity of argument as well as unity of language; for logic and combined expertise as well as rational objectivity and interdisciplinarity. The original ethos of functional, empirical knowledge at the core of the Unity of Science movement emerged as a rejection of the metaphysical race-based ideology that flourished in Weimar Germany. During and after the war, the center of the movement shifted to the United States, with Carnap teaching at the University of Chicago 1936–52 and spearheading the visionary publishing venture that was Otto Neurath’s multi-volume Encyclopedia of Unified Science at the University of Chicago Press, and the founding of the Institute for the Unity of Science by Philipp Frank in Boston.114 In this transition, the “Americanization” of the Unity movement, the group “rapidly expanded” and became an “inter-scientific discussion group.”115 Cybernetics guru Norbert Wiener, biophysicist John Edsall, and sociologist Talcott Parsons spoke at stateside meetings of the group at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By the late 1940s, the focus of the Unity of Science movement had shifted from the philosophy of Logical Positivism to the “war-boosted interdisciplines,” which included “cybernetics, computation, neutronics, operations research, psycho-acoustics, game theory, biophysics, [and] electro-acoustics.”116 No longer concerned with the universal language of “isotypes” or up-building [Aufbau] and functional communication, the Americanized Unity of Science movement coalesced around “the new sciences of Los Alamos, the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the stored-program computer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.”117 The totality given form in the Gestalt of integration gave way to a new sense of totality incarnated in a logic of distribution that is rooted in cybernetics and the distributed communication network of the incipient internet in the early 1960s. 117

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Bearing directly on the work of Kepes, we look to two figures in particular to trace the movement between Gestalt psychology and cybernetics:  Viennese biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–72) and American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), both of whom have been referenced in passing above. Bertalanffy and Wiener published under the editorial aegis of Kepes in his books and, indubitably, Kepes was under the sway of both thinkers’ writings. While the collective scientific vocabulary of the two men peppers Kepes’ books, with words such as “structure,” “system,” “part,” “whole,” “nervous system,” “organism,” “Gestalt,” and “cybernetic” appearing throughout Kepes’ mid-century publications, the most literal presence of the two thinkers in Kepes’ epigenetic enterprise is in their essays. In “Pure Patterns in a Natural World,” published in Kepes’ catalog for The New Landscape in Art and Science, Wiener takes on the function of a talking microscope, describing seven scientific photographs of abstract form. For each, Wiener analyzed the mathematical bases of the sensual attraction artists have to non-objective patterns.118 Bertalanffy’s essay appeared later, in 1966, in a tome within the Vision + Values Series, and focuses on the algorithmic and epigenetic role of “symbols” within “The Tree of Knowledge,” the title of his contribution.119 Bertalanffy argues algorithms create a “magic” that is also referred to in terms of “science and scientific technology,” while symbols live like memes, within an almost “autonomous life,” as figures that are seemingly “more clever than man.”120 The essays by Wiener and Bertalanffy are poetic reveries that reveal wide-ranging talents of the two scientists, such as an ability to write using clear and poetic prose and to confidently engage art all within the realm of culture. The two essays are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to each man’s intellectual oeuvre. Their inclusion in the Kepes publishing enterprise, however, must be seen as part of a larger intellectual constellation. Let these pithy essays within Kepes’ anthologies connect us to the greater body of work developed by Bertalanffy and Wiener, for it is there that we find the wellsprings of ideas informing Kepes’ overall publishing project. For both thinkers, the Gestalt provided a platform structure of thinking “totality.” Elements of Gestalt perceptual psychology are present in Bertalanffy’s first book on theoretical biology, Modern Theories of 118

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Development (1933) [Kritische Theorie der Formbildung, 1928], and in his more famous mid-century text on systems theory, General Systems Theory (1968). Wiener devotes a chapter in his famous book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), to the subject of the Gestalt. Titled “Gestalt and Universals,” the chapter focuses on the “problem of the prosthesis of one lost sense by another,” or replacing sight, when lost, by sound in the creation of a total percept, or image.121 Together, the Gestalt and cybernetics fall under the greater rubric of systems theory, of which Bertalanffy was a founding figure.122 Both philosophies—the Gestalt and cybernetics—are fundamentally dynamic “systems” characterized by interrelated parts that create an organic whole. In Gestalt psychology, the aggregate is the human situated in a perceptual context in the process of experiencing and observing an image. In cybernetics, it is the paradigmatic role played by the biological nervous system, with cyberneticians in many ways building on the Gestalt, interpreting the holistic process itself in terms of the flows and feedback loops of the human nervous system. Here, thus, the Gestalt is a metabolizing circle of energies. The two systems of thinking are ultimately distinguished by use, with the former framed, delivered, and utilized for the most part by experts in the fields of behavioral and perceptual psychology and the latter a mode of thinking deployed in the harder sciences of math, physics, and computing. I focus first on Bertalanffy’s book, Modern Theories of Development, as it sutures together rather elegantly the beginning and end of this chapter, since many of the British activist scientists and theoretical biologists discussed in the beginning read Bertalanffy’s first book.123 Following from Bertalanffy, scientists in the Theoretical Biology Club argued for an organicist rather than a vitalist or mechanical approach to biology. Both older approaches were insufficient: the vitalist approach was metaphysical and the mechanical was reductive. For British scientists such as Woodger, Needham, and Waddington, neither form of practice within biology was holistic:  “both [the vitalist and mechanical approach] maintain that the study of the parts does not suffice to explain the behaviour of the whole.”124 While Bertalanffy cites the concepts of “figuration” or Gestalten and “maximum formation” or Gestaltung, using the language of turn-of-the-century Gestalt psychology in his treatise on theoretical biology, the totality of the 119

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Gestalt is best felt in the Austrian biologist’s overall approach. And here the Gestalt is a system of organization that would function as the basis of theoretical biology. Theoretical biology, Bertalanffy argues, is a “science of law” that was at the same time “the crown of the whole structure of the science of life.”125 Bertalanffy called for the creation of a unifying vision, a Gestalt, based on a combination of fact, feeling, and aesthetics. Using Newton’s theory of gravity and the legend of apple falling from the tree, Bertalanffy argued for scientists to base their empirical findings on broad if not visionary methods, the energizing seed of which he identified as “a happy intuition.”126 He argued that there is an important place for instinct in science, since it is in part the basis by which material evidence meets abstract thought. One makes a hypothesis “from all ‘perturbations,’ ” or empirical findings. Coupled with “the eye of genius,” such as that of Newton, happy intuition sets in motion the discernment of “the essential features of an event behind the complex multiplicity of phenomena and produces the hypothetical statement which brings the facts into order as it were at one stroke.”127 Many years before the arrival of technocratic science, Bertalanffy seems to be arguing against its presence here in reduction of human capability to only the measurable and countable. Going back to Newton, he argues: “Hundreds of thousands of apples, registered with every possible accuracy, would never yield the great law of gravitation. It is foolish hope to suppose that by the accumulation of innumerable single cases great laws will finally emerge, like Venus from the nebulous sea.”128 Similar to Conrad Waddington’s later call for the use of empathy in the empirical approaches of both scientists and artists, the Austrian biologist conjures an open, flexible space for biologists to expatiate and imagine, to exploit their instincts and empathy: “It is not true that empirical knowledge, however extended, suffices for the foundation of a well-systematized science. The latter can only be reached by the close cooperation of experience and deductive-hypothetical thinking.”129 The Gestalt is here both an organic paradigm to understand a living creature or an object, and a holistic method for practicing a field of inquiry. It is a means to understand perception and the form of living organisms on the micrological scale as well as an approach to a field of discovery on the macrological scale. The Gestalt in either instance is a porous but 120

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closed entity based on “completion.” The percipient, for example, “completes” the act of perceiving a picture, and in so doing, becomes part of and creates an imagistic totality. The organism, by slight contrast, as a Gestalt is an organization of shifting relations, made “complete” through the self-regulation and function of all necessary parts. The Gestalt brings totality to the light image, integrating components that function in unique ways and on different levels in the totality of one. Like the Gestalt, the cybernetic system is a circle of self-regulating relations. Distinguishing the two systems of thinking, the Gestalt involves the viewer-percipient in the fulfillment and equilibrium of the system, while cybernetic systems can be completely autonomous of humans.130 The word “cybernetic” comes from the Greek kybernetes, meaning “governor” or “steersman.” While Wiener coined the term in 1947, the mathematician’s intention was to recognize the precedent-setting article by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell form 1868, ‘On Governors,’ which explained the workings of a regulatory valve on a steam engine.131 Wiener invented the cybernetic approach during World War II, while working to improve anti-aircraft artillery, basing his ideas on the biological function of the nervous system. Wiener extrapolated the cybernetic system from an imagined interface between a pilot, plane, and flight patterns in the process of avoiding or firing a missile. Wiener sought to invent a machine or algorithm that, in short, predicted the curvilinear path of a flight—a mechanism, or “prediction operator,” that accounted for past, present, and future trajectories of a flight path as part of the process of “usurp[ing] a specifically human function… the execution of a complicated pattern of computation.”132 It would be a machine that mimicked the logic of the sensual, living being, using a full armamentarium of feelers, including the unconscious feely-digits of proprioception and the similarly involuntary reflexes of anxiety that are part of successful performance under undue stress.133 In a more accessible permutation of the cybernetic process using human movement, Wiener in fact refers to “proprioception,” explaining the logic of the cybernetic system in terms of a set of fleshy connectors that describes in many ways the haptic unconscious: the process of picking up a pencil. “Once we have determined on this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet 121

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picked up is decreased at each stage.”134 It is a process that, upon the brain reporting to the nervous system, shifts between conscious and unconscious communication, according to “the amount by which we have failed to pick up the pencil at each instant.”135 We find here a set of moving and seemingly invisible variables that, I would argue, occupy a similar realm of “will” inducement as Waddington’s “empathy” and Bertalanffy’s “happy intuition.” Will, intention, and proprioceptive movement constitute a unified chain, a Gestalt of sorts: instead of the linear movement between desire or need and consummation or fulfillment, however, we find a feedback loop of relations. The epigenetic forces from outside the enclosure force the loop into openness, creating what Waddington called “fuzzy edges” and a distributed network of relations. In conclusion, I  would like to focus on a diagram of distributed relations used to illustrate the logic of the internet in its incipient form in 1964. Let us imagine the coming digital image within art as a set of distributed relations like the third diagram in engineer Paul Baran’s trifecta of drawings. Once again, let us imagine that image in terms of distributed electronic flows:  as it unfolded in Kepes’ books as an art-and-science picture, as an image on a screen, and as a set of actions between people instrumentalized by wireless technology in a media art performance or within a moving-image art exhibition at the scale of a city. The three diagrams appeared in Baran’s memorandum prepared for the US Air Force by the RAND Corporation, a not-for-profit organization originally set up during World War II as a research arm within the military.136 Titled “On Distributed Communications: 1.  Introduction to Distributed Communication Networks” Baran’s text was the first of eleven volumes on the subject of “distributed communication” and national defence. Using a mix of cybernetic and design language, he addressed it to “those in the military concerned with automating command and control functions… and designers having need to transmit digital data.”137 In a later interview, Baran also described the system in terms of the organic Gestalt, calling it an “organism”—the “overall reliability [of which] would be significantly greater than the reliability of any one component.”138 In the 1964 memorandum, Baran addressed the need to radically transform the national communication network from centralized or decentralized to distributed as a means of fortifying national communication. Baran’s 122

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overarching goal was to create a communication complex that would survive subsidiary network outages due to foreign incursion through bombing. Later in the 1960s, defense concerns expanded to include potential destruction caused by domestic insurrection. Baran described the distributed network as part of a “future all-digital-data” system that would supersede analog phone communication.139 Because the “centralized network is obviously vulnerable as destruction of a single central node destroys communication between the end stations,” and the decentralized network is only less vulnerable, Baran argues; the “hopes of building ‘distributed’ communications networks are of paramount interest.”140 Describing the system according to the “hot potato doctrine” of data movement, Baran explains, “If the instantaneous load exceeded the capacity of the links then the traffic is automatically spread through more of the network.”141 The system was eventually simply referred to as “packet switching.” While not characteristic of the whole of the internet, Baran’s hot-potato switching system is a necessary element at its core and origination, conceptually connecting the contemporary internet to writings on the Gestalt and cybernetics. Like the light image itself, integration and distribution here come together by way of the switching system in the open totality of the internet borne on the lifelike flows of electricity. It thus follows that the internet is equally a matter of integration and distribution, an open totality of flows and connection. Kepes’ capacious and visionary art-and-science publishing enterprise from mid-last century was the embryonic development of today’s distributed network of communications, using images within books to create a vast if not global community of images in the ongoing making of art-and-science as an epigenetic landscape: an ecology of pictures wherein unity is distinctly a matter of difference, variation and individual bodies experiencing life in situ. Kepes’ books set in place a model of virtual embodiment—a materialist politics of the image for the information age.

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3 The Distributed Image of the City The Collaboration between György Kepes and Kevin Lynch

I. Introduction: The Urbanism of the Haptic Unconscious We have witnessed in the last chapter the haptic unconscious come to fruition in a broad range of forms within Kepes’ work, as exhibition, pedagogy, and an extended if not heroic run of publishing. In his early years at MIT, the idea also emerged as a concept of urban order, composition, and navigation—a matter of spatial understanding—by way of Kepes’ collaboration with MIT professor of city planning Kevin Lynch. This chapter focuses on the materialization of the haptic unconscious as it emerged from the intellectual alliance of Kepes and Lynch in terms of the “distributed image of the city.” Mind is exteriorized across infrastructure, sidewalks, highways, cars, and the city. Here I further develop a paradigm of the image spread across space and time as urban and experiential—the image as “wayfinding” and “cognitive mapping”—which paves the way for the multidimensional digital image to come.1 Connecting back to the discussion of Baran’s “distributed image” of communication, my take on “distribution” in this chapter is informed by the writings of environmental geographers, sociologists, philosophers, and economists. Building on the paradigm of an image 124

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constituted by the circulation of electrically charged bits of information, we find here the same logic of Baran’s image of distributed energies created from hot-potato switching extruded to the scale of the human body into the realties of immediate experience and place-making in the city by way of routine movement, spatial orientation, and memory. The pattern and logic of the first digital matrix and its image is extended here to include urbanism, how one maneuvers within and remembers a city, and how both orientation and memory, in turn, mold individual feeling, understanding, and self. In the phrase “image of the city” I invoke Kepes and Lynch’s take on the image as urban: at once light-borne, kinetic, and cognitive. The Image of the City is also the title of Lynch’s 1960 book on urban design and planning, which was the culmination of collaboration between the two men during the 1950s. While the book is informed by a broad range of texts, the methodologies of a specific set of disciplines—sociology, architectural design, and urban planning—give form to the image of the city within Lynch’s book, setting in place an “image” that unfolds as a matter of the cognitive experience of the built landscape within lived time. In this take, the image at the same time comes to fruition as accretive cognition or understanding stored in deep time. The image is alive and makes accordion-like movements, expanding, respiring, sounding outward, collapsing inward, taking in air once again only to repeat the cycle of movement as the individual roves around a city. It is emergent. In keeping with its status as living, for Kepes and Lynch, this image was a matter of cascading reactions to the urban environment, a combination of “immediate biological response, perceptual response, and conceptual response.”2 Moving from the two-dimensional to the three- and four-dimensional, it coalesces in space and time as a result of one’s movement through the city. Life in motion—walking, cycling, driving, or taking a train through the city—is layered, a matter at once of the cellular motility within the microcosm of the body, which is the essence of bodily mobility within the macrocosm of urban context. The light image of the city takes on a distinctively “wet” quality in this telling, which is to say the image of the haptic unconscious is cognitive and alive. Wetness here signifies biological life, ecological relations, and a philosophy of becoming. The image is cognitive in the decided sense that 125

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“mind”—cognition and knowing—extends beyond the brain into the body and through a network of interconnections between things within a given location, in this case urban locales. The image, as I discuss in greater detail below, is a matter of “wetware,” based on the conception of cellular function as computational and, by connection, the mind extended outward into the world from a cyborg being who is biologically alive while technologized.3 It is dispersed through the urban milieu while based on a feedback loop of positioning and repositioning: the mutating self and environment of the walking and driving percipient roaming through matrices of urban infrastructure. That The Image of the City was truly the result of collaboration is present only tangentially in the book, with Lynch humbly claiming in the preface, “One name should be on the title page with my own, if only he would thereby not be made responsible for the shortcomings of the book. That name is György Kepes.”4 Lynch maintained that “the detailed development and concrete studies” were his own, but recognized Kepes as the source of the “underlying concepts,” which included the idea of the image as spread out across space and time, while also a matter of direct experience informed by intuition and emotions, or what I am calling the haptic unconscious.5 Much of Lynch’s language in the book is familiar to our study in its biological, cognitive, and mobility-inflected verbiage. Getting at the meaning of “imageability”—Lynch’s word for the city’s overall clarity and legibility—he explains that “structuring and identifying the environment is a vital ability among all mobile animals.”6 Urban place-making and positioning are constituent elements in this process of understanding and forming the image of the city. Lynch explains that there are “many kinds of cues” including “the visual sensations of color, shape, motion, or polarization of light, as well as other senses such as smell, sound, touch, kinesthesia, sense of gravity, and perhaps of electric or magnetic fields.”7 Creating the image of the city is a reciprocal act between pedestrian or driver and environment. “Environmental images,” Lynch elaborates, “are the result of a two-way process between the observer and his environment,” with urban context suggesting “distinctions and relations, and the observer” selecting, organizing, and endowing “what he sees… with meaning.”8 With Lynch’s approach, urban planning and design took on a new organizational logic, becoming bottom-up and even multi-directional as he 126

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interviewed locals and documented their habits of navigation around extant roads and monuments. Along with the writings of Jane Jacobs and Herbert J.  Gans, Lynch’s piecemeal approach to understanding city form marked a turn away from the top-down modernist precepts of urbanism espoused by members of the International Congress of Modern Architecture [CIAM], such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Hilbersheimer, which had been codified in Le Corbusier’s Athens Charter (1933). Jacobs, Gans, and Lynch’s sociological street-view of the city signaled a turn away from modernist planning and, in turn, the beginnings of a postmodern backlash in urban thinking. Their views on what makes a city important—the fabric of traditional neighborhoods—collectively indicated a radical shift away from a thirty-year-old tradition of modernism that, by the 1960s, was being realized in perverse and bastardized form in the towers and small, open green spaces of American inner-city urban renewal projects. Rather than promulgating modern urbanism rooted in tabula rasa designs (the practice of building new cities from destructive creation—the leveling of old neighborhoods), Lynch’s book studied the relationship between people and place within the layers of old extant urban areas, looking to how pedestrians understand their surroundings through five specific types of place-makers: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.9 Using thumbnail drawings as illustrations and copious data gleaned from interviews with citizens on the streets, Lynch presented the image of the city as communal and gradual. He set forth a lighter touch to urban management. Rather than destroying old areas and building anew in the quest for rational order, he asked his readers to “learn to see the hidden forms in the vast sprawl of our cities.”10 In order to glean a diverse array of information, he deployed this process of urban understanding in three different cities—Boston, Massachusetts; Jersey City, New Jersey; and Los Angeles, California—each of which begged for unique forms of navigation and, concomitantly, were cause for different modes of imageability. While indeed Lynch’s take on the city emerges at base from a tradition of urban planning that goes back to the turn-of-the-century organic “townscape” paradigm of the city given shape by British engineer and town planner Raymond Unwin, I focus here on a different network of thinking informing Lynch’s distributed image.11 By looking to a broader array of authors within Lynch’s bibliography, many of whom are often overlooked, we find textual sources from outside of design, architecture, and urbanism 127

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Image 44 Diagram of Centralized, Decentralized, and Distributed Networks from Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications:  I.  Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks, courtesy of the RAND Corporation.

shaping Lynch’s sense of the city as “a state of mind” and a matter of “sentimental history.”12 By way of, in particular, the writings of J. C. R. Licklider, Alfred North Whitehead, Susanne K.  Langer, and Ken Boulding, I  cast Lynch’s “image of the city” in the light of not simply philosophical influence, but, more precisely, as an idea of the distributed image rooted in bio-cognitive thinking on symbols and communication between organisms, the centrality of intuition and feelings within cognition and mind, and General Systems Theory. Licklider, Whitehead, Langer, and Boulding are conceptual lodestars within a constellation of thinkers proffering an idea of the image as an incremental evolution across time rooted in experiences that create memories and understanding. From this perspective, the image is behavioral, exploratory, biologically alive, ecological, mutative, and molded and catalyzed by technology.

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Images 45–48 Thumbnail sketches from the margins of Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City.

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Images 45–48 (cont.)

II. The Movement Movement: Contextualizing the Kepes–Lynch Collaboration Architect Nathan Silver’s book review essay ‘The Movement Movement’ hews a space of intellectual experimentation, shedding light on the context of the Kepes–Lynch alliance. Appearing in the December 1966 issue of Progressive Architecture, Silver’s review included analysis of four books from a variety of disciplines including Lynch, John R. Myer, and Donald Appleyard’s The View from the Road, Kepes’ The Nature and Art of Motion from the Vision + Value Series, Frank Popper, Stephen Bann, Reg Gadney, and Philip Steadman’s Kinetic Art, and Lawrence Halprin’s Freeways. For 130

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Silver, these publications are part of the “Movement Movement,” which I define more broadly here as an autopoetic and discursive fabric descriptive of the dynamism of life which had been in the making since the 1940s. The ‘Movement Movement’ included artists, architects, and designers— and Kepes and Lynch’s collaborative enterprise which started in 1951 therein—focusing on “movement” as a matter of physics and poetry, hard causal effect and the speculative expression of random change. The theme of movement at work here is a matter of the concrete and the hypothetical. They communicated “movement” in terms of the literal denotation that is people and objects in uncomplicated motion and, at the same time, the strata of connotation that make up ontological becoming—life as changeful, and mind as extended and relational. In many ways, this theme of Whiteheadian melding and interconnections, what the embryologist Waddington described in the last chapter as the “fuzzy edges” of things, makes for a certain unity of opposites or what might be referred to as an argument for the union of high and low culture. This philosophical underpinning of life-as-change reveals itself not only in sacred epiphany but, perhaps to even greater effect and with more consistency, within our experiences of everyday life, here given form in kinetic art, the road, car, highway, and general movement in and around the city. This union of the profound and prosaic similarly streams through the Kepes and Lynch collaboration. Authorship overlaps between publications in the review as Silver references the books of Appleyard and Lynch, while also referencing their writings within Kepes’ anthology. Which is to say, among a certain coterie of artists, architects, and scientists active in the middle of the twentieth century, the theme of movement was omnipresent. Yet, it was not simply “in the air,” a matter of incestuous intellectual reverie and trendiness; rather it represented a common and pressing philosophical concern for a diverse group of intellectual actors. Within this arena, “movement” was an idea informing the soft sciences and humanities— art, architecture, urbanism, anthropology, sociology, the philosophy of science, and General Systems Theory—based on a feedback loop of an ever expanding mechanical world shaping and enveloping living organisms. The theme of movement was biological and organismic as well as mechanical and technological. From this perspective, the vivacity of the city, its tentacular growth by way of highways out into an expansive quilt 131

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of suburbs, is a concern of bio-life, relational consequences, and tumbling ecological shifts. Likewise, the dynamism of kinetic art is not simply a matter of the machine making inroads into art but a matter of reflecting the transformative nature of life itself—as it is both technological and biological. It is a sense of bio-life mimicked and made understandable to humans by way of artificial landscapes and the machine. Everyday life in the middle of the twentieth century, according to Silver’s reading, had become a matter of fluid mechanical movement expressed across cultural media. Encapsulating this flow of energies, Silver placed a symbol of mechanical movement in the heading of the article, a drawing of the Geneva stop: a gear device consisting of three simple components—a drive wheel, pin, and driven wheel—used in watches and film projectors. Silver borrowed the iconic graphic from kinetic artist George Rickey’s essay in Kepes’ anthology, “The Morphology of Movement: A Study of Kinetic Art,” only to add that he “hope[d] they [would] redraw [it]… so that it works.”13 Silver referred to the illogic of the drawing, the way the jagged edge of the driven wheel did not reasonably match up to the curving open shapes of the drive wheel. Silver’s snarky tone does not detract from the poignant contents of the article, namely the way it reveals even if unwittingly a diversity of forces from art, design, and urban planning coming together at mid-century to identify a new heuristic of the changeful and incremental image. Silver took the name of his article, “The Movement Movement,” from Rickey, who in Kepes’ anthology identifies the shared interests of Hans Richter, Len Lye, Karl Gerstner, and himself in terms of a “school” of the same name—the “Movement Movement School.” Rickey described the “medium” of movement as limitless, using as illustrations works by Belgian sculptor Pol Bury and German Zero Group artist Heinz Mack. With the matter of motion, artists choose from an array of synaesthetic possibilities: “He may use time like a spectrum of colors, space like an open ocean, the clock in everybody’s brain to give a sense of scale, materials like an Escoffier or objects like a dump-picker.”14 In meditating on the “Movement Movement” review decades after its publication and in the context of the story of the haptic unconscious, it elicits a reading of the broader category of mid-century modernism beyond simple identifications of late functionalism, atomic style, and 132

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Image 49 Drawing of a “Geneva stop,” from György Kepes’ The Nature and Art of Motion, Vision + Value Series.

out-of-date optics. The theme of “movement” in all of its complexity, as philosophical becoming, a matter of Whitheadiean relations, and highway infrastructure, crystallizes in the work of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, whose Freeways is one of the four books reviewed. For Silver, the primary intention of Halprin’s book is to foster “highway aesthetics,” careful rumination on road grading—whether the freeway should be “at grade, depressed, elevated, stacked, tunneled, or on embankments”—as well as intellectual calibration of the manifold emotional experiences of the road.15 Contextualizing Halprin’s book within his larger oeuvre reveals the work to be more than merely “pretentious,” as Silver would have it. In addition to his greater creative practice as a landscape architect and sculptor, Halprin’s Freeways is part of his work as landscape and architectural theoretician, and relates in particular to his concept of “motation,” which Silver mentions parenthetically in the review.16 Halprin developed “motation,” a system of notation for landscape design rooted in musical and dance composition, in order to distill and develop the fact that “environments change their qualities with the variation of speeds they generate.”17 As if to distinguish the emergent and nested nature of becoming, to show that 133

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Image 50 Pol Bury, “Erectile,” 1963.

the hierarchy of biological function is non-linear and that, in the vein of the Greek philosopher Cratylus’ thinking, our bodies are changing within changing environments, Halprin sensed the need for a new system of symbols in landscape design, because “as we move through them, they move around us.”18 In forming his own system of symbols, he cites as influences the experimental musical notation of Morton Subotnick and John Cage, and Labanotation, a system of symbols used to record and compare the choreographed movement of dancers.19 The forms of Halprin’s language of symbols are also reminiscent of figures within the experimental musical compositions of George Cacioppo and the earlier motion diagrams of Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, the last two of which appear in Kepes’ volume in the review from the Vision + Value Series.20 In Halprin’s system of motation, dots and syncopated lines vie for space amid few words, all of 134

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Image 51 Heinz Mack, Light Rotor, 1960, mixed media.

which are framed like film stills. His intention was for the symbols to “lend themselves to meaningful associations” while communicating the shifts in psychology of the percipient as well as the environment.21 For Halprin, a moving world shapes a moving individual, as “our cities—our whole environment—are perceived and experienced through movement.”22 While fascination with mobility technologies and rapid movement within a mass audience dates back to the nineteenth century with the locomotive and early cinema, the “Movement Movement” coalesces around mid-twentieth-century technologies, such as film and TV, the concomitant rapid-fire image production forming around advertising across mass media, the intricate and sophisticated Interstate Highway System in the 135

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Image 52 The “Motational” system of symbols by Lawrence Halprin.

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United States and, more precisely, its midwifing of a new perceptual experience through individual automotive movement. The putative origin of the Movement Movement might be traced back to 1941, to the middle years of World War II, with the publication of Swiss art and architectural historian Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture:  The Growth of a New Tradition.23 Taking its formative cues from revolutions in the nature of matter and vision of the early twentieth century, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and Cubism, Giedion’s goal was to situate modern architecture within a new culture of dynamism and change. The book concludes with three chapters together focusing on the city in motion, with its penultimate chapters on city planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and ultimate chapter on the nascent highway system given shape in the expanding parkways of New York. There are in the last chapter of the book full-page images in black-and-white of the tangles and loops of concrete and macadam that make up New  York’s modern parkways system, including the Randall’s Island cloverleaf, “The Pretzel,” an intersection of several high-speed thoroughfares, and Henry Hudson Parkway. All aerial views, the images capture the sinuous lines of the roads from the sky above, distilling the dumb, straightforward functionalism of the road in terms of the abstract form of avant-garde painting. Giedion recognized the dialectic of creative destruction at work in the parkway, explaining, “the parkway is the forerunner of the first necessity in the development of the future town: the abolition of the rue corridor.” From modernist urbanism to the highway, Giedion wrote of radical erasure in the name of the new. He continues, “There is no longer any place for the street with its traffic lane running between rows of houses; it cannot be permitted to persist.”24 A design bible for generations of architecture students, Giedion’s book on the rising dynamism of form and perception emerging at mid-century seems the logical forebear of Kepes and Lynch’s later development of the distributed image of the city. Moholy-Nagy’s posthumous book, Vision in Motion, published in 1947 one year after his death, is another building block in the early advancement of the Movement Movement. A  book devoted to Moholy-Nagy’s visionary art pedagogy, it is in many ways one of the most potent and straightforward materializations of the haptic unconscious. In the spirit of John 137

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Image 53 Page  145 György Kepes, ed., The Nature and Art of Motion, Vision + Value Series, Viking Eggeling’s “Three moments from the paper scroll titled Horizontal-Vertical Mass, 1919” and Hans Richter’s “Three moments from the paper scroll, Preludium, 1919.”

Dewey, Moholy-Nagy advocated that artists in training should experiment in their work through direct and active experience with materials, in particular as this process functions to express emotions within the final work of art. After all, for Moholy-Nagy the artist’s role in society was to give concrete material and organization to emotions.25 Moholy-Nagy introduced a distinct philosophical modus operandi for modern art during the middle of the century that was rooted in mobility on the one hand and art-and-science hybrids on the other. Yet, there was another fusion at work in his vision, a hyrbridity bearing the deeper influences of German Romanticism as well as the high-low sensibility discussed above. The idea of “vision in motion” was basic and more: something as simple as walking down the street, which carries with it a philosophical worldview of matter in motion, the relationality of objects, and life as becoming. It “is seeing while moving,” as Moholy-Nagy put it, which is also part of the greater global system of communication, connections, and meaning-making. Vision in motion is integrative, the energy behind “a simultaneous grasp. Simultaneous grasp is creative performance—seeing, feeling, and thinking in relationship and not as a series of isolated phenomena. It instantaneously integrates and transmutes single elements into a coherent whole.”26 At base, Moholy-Nagy’s intentions in this book were “wet,” a matter of cognition in a plenum of interrelating forces and the percipient not just as viewer but as holistic biological being. He makes this intention clear early on in the text, claiming in the foreword, “this book takes as its premise the unity of the arts with life. Thus this book is an attempt to add to the political-social a biological ‘bill of rights.’”27 A biological bill of rights is 138

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fundamentally aesthetic and qualitative: a set of precepts on how our experiences of the world bear cognitive and non-cognitive elements connecting us to a network of energies. This proposed set of organismic-cum-cultural laws sets in relief a political economy of external mind—justice for all species in ecologically grounded practices. In the same years while under the sway of Moholy-Nagy, Kepes wrote about perception in motion in two separate venues. First, in 1944 he issued the book Language of Vision through the same publisher of Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, the Chicago-based Paul Theobald Books. Second, he returned to Chicago from Cambridge in 1947 to present the unpublished lecture “Form and Motion” at the ID. In keeping with the theme of the “haptic” coursing through this book, Kepes’ idea of “vision” is polysensual, a sense rife with the crosspollinations of other senses and full-body experience. Vision here is not subject-predicate oriented, or a matter of the eyes perceiving singly and separately from the other senses a world with certain discrete qualities. Rather the act of seeing is part of a Gestalt in which the perceptual apparatus of the eyes contributes to the formation of the object it sees, the adjectival qualities of which are at once inherent to the object and perceived or constructed by the percipient. Kepes’ ideas give shape to Gestalt theories of perception, Whitehead’s idea of “prehensions,” and Waddington’s invocation of Whiteheadian “fuzzy edges,” as vision is a current and flow within mind extending to and through matter. Kepes informs his reader, “To perceive a visual image implies the beholder’s participation in a process of organization. The experience of an image is thus a creative act of integration. Its essential characteristic is that by plastic power an experience is formed into an organic whole.”28 Kepes wrote of the image as plastic and living, describing its lifespan in terms of the human nervous system, physiology, and psychology.29 Representation in this rubric was also a matter of evolutionary life, fundamentally a matter of movement. The image as such “is kinetic in its very essence,” plastic, and thus an extension of what Kepes called “plastic thinking.”30 Just as vision is a matter of thinking while in motion, a matter of epistemology through a full body of senses, plastic thinking is “thinking with the senses.”31 Kepes coupled his epistemology of the senses with a politics of resistance to Taylorized mechanization, further claiming that thinking with the senses motivates “the desire and the will of men” in their “oppos(ition) to machine control.”32 139

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Kepes developed these ideas further in “Forms and Motion,” the lecture he gave at the ID in 1947. In this unpublished essay, Kepes gave stronger attention to a theme of the crisis of community brought on by an onslaught of new visual technologies. Kepes launched his address on movement in the arts with a theme of relational bridges, arguing that we must develop “bridges” between man and nature, art and science, and within ourselves to work toward sensual and intellectual integration in order to combat the entropic demise of community. Such connections promised to combat the social formlesseness wrought by an over-technologized world.33 Further distinguishing this piece from Kepes’ earlier book, here he argues that the role of science is central in the process of art-and-life integration. Kepes cites the “organizer,” a cluster of cells within mammalian and avian embryos that induces the development of the nervous system, as a metaphorical solution to the social crisis brought on by technology. He likely gleaned this idea from conversations with Waddington, whom he knew from his time in London. Waddington had worked on the “organizer,” originally discovered by the German embryologist Hans Spemann, while a fellow at the Strangeways Laboratory near Cambridge, England.34 In his lecture, Kepes described the organizer using simple terms as a “certain factor common to living organisms,” popularizing an otherwise difficult morphological concept of science for an art-and-design audience.35 “The ‘organizers,’ ” he continues, “are certain cells charged with forms, as an electric battery is charged with electricity. These charges guide the growth of the organism.”36 The organizer offered a powerful embryological metaphor for how art shapes life, thereby centrally positioning “creative experience” within a paradigm of arts-and-life integration that was soft, wet, and premised on biological development. Kepes argues, “Creative experience may be interpreted as the ‘organizer’ of human capacities.”37 In referencing the Spemann organizer shot through the experiments of Waddington, Kepes offered a biological solution to the dehumanization of mechanization. Here, art and science come together to combat the problems of life reduced to technological function. From this perspective, paradigms of efficient function might be conceived as non-linear and a matter of biological emergence rather than according to vertical, top-down ordering as with mechanical Taylorism. 140

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The Movement Movement continued to evolve into the middle of the century, serving as the backdrop to the development of the haptic unconscious. From within this unfolding, the image as ecological, urban, and a matter of lived experience coalesced in the early years of the 1950s, when Lynch began his collaboration with Kepes. Two years after Kepes arrived in Cambridge for his job in the School of Architecture at MIT, Lynch joined the faculty in 1948 as a professor of urban planning. Even prior to sharing common ground at MIT, Lynch’s educational formation—its roots in John Dewey’s philosophy of experience and overall interdisciplinary eclecticism—made him an ideal colleague for Kepes. Lynch was born in 1918 in the Hazel Avenue neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago into an environment well attuned to the politics of Progressivism.38 He attended the Francis W. Parker School, one of the first progressive schools in the United States, founded by Francis Parker, a disciple of Dewey.39 After graduating from high school in 1935, Lynch spent his early college years hopping between programs and universities. First he enrolled in Yale’s architecture program, but left after becoming disenchanted by the conservative Beaux-Arts approach.40 In 1937, he enrolled in Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture program at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin; but he left after a year because he felt his individual ideas were in danger of being usurped into the identity of Wright.41 After a brief stint studying civil engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Lynch joined the Army Corps of Engineers in the South Pacific, finally completing his undergraduate degree in city planning at MIT on the GI Bill after World War II in 1947.42 Shortly thereafter, Kepes and Lynch embarked on an almost decade-long collaboration with the goal of better understanding the “important psychological satisfactions” of the “sensuous form of the urban environment.”43 In reframing urban order according to the soft, wet theme of “sensuous form,” Kepes and Lynch in turn helped to rethink power relations within urban design and city planning. Theirs was a bottom-up if not multi-directional proposition first materializing in April 1951 in a document titled “A Study of the Visual Form of Cities,” in which they set out to study “the importance” of “visual effects” in “shaping the urban environment” and measure “how this well-being or pleasure [might] best be promoted by the visual arrangement” of elements within a city.44 These interests became the noyau of their 141

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later successful grant proposal of 1954 to the Rockefeller Foundation for a study on urban experience and orientation titled The Perceptual Form of the City, which was the basis for Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City.45 An award of $85,000 was granted to MIT for what the Foundation described as a study “of the aesthetic aspects of city planning,” marking yet again an elision of seeming opposites, the artistic meshing with the scientific, the abstract and creative coming together with the concrete and bureaucratic.46 The five-year grant-supported investigation was conducted under the auspices of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at MIT, an office devoted to the interdisciplinary studies of cities and founded in 1958 under the directorship of urban studies professor Lloyd Rodwin.47 Within the eight years between 1951 and 1959, the two men devoted their energies to the theme of The Perceptual Form of the City, creating seminars on the subtopic of “urban form,” interviewing a broad array of people about their wayfinding means on the streets of Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, and recording their own perceptual experiences through writing and photographs of walking and driving through cities. The photographs, field notes, seminar recordings, published essays, and summary report of the Rockefeller grant-supported project altogether constitute a lyrical landscape of urban thinking. These varying sources tell of an idea—an image—of the city as a patchwork, a mixture of pictures, stories, and opinions. Nishan Bichajian, Kepes’ assistant, made almost 2,000 black-and-white photographs of Boston as part of the study.48 While not so much fragmentary, the images are cinematic, forming an overall image of the city as an “interconnected, syntactic chain of urban pictures.”49 In this portion of the archive, photographic points of view shift from looking out across the horizon at oblique angles—onto open plazas, intersections, and the footprints of major monuments, such as the neo-Romanesque forms of Trinity Church designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, and the stately Neoclassicism of the Boston Public Library designed by the firm McKim, Mead, and White—to facing buildings head on, looking straight up into the sky in the creation of stunted architectural vistas. In the latter, we find “frog’s eye views,” or close-up pictures, of townhouses and storefronts.50 These images are abrupt but full of historic innuendo. Shot looking upward to the cornice of the building, each picture shows a different revivalist facade rooted in the nineteenth-century battle of architectural 142

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styles. The images distill the process of meaning-making while moving through the city. They give shape and form to orientation and understanding of place. Kepes described the visual experience of the city in terms of the production of knowledge. The city coalesces in the mind in terms of a back-and-forth relaying of information between the human body and urban landscape. “If we see a building it does more for us than tickling our senses,” Kepes recorded in the field notes of the study.51 “The colors, the shapes, the rhythmical configuration of the fenestrations, the height and length relationships, and the activities occurring there (happening from it) visually are interpreted by us as a sign of certain known facts.”52 These bits of information, in turn, make up the legibility at the heart of a city’s imagibility. A similarly discursive sense of the city coalesces in words, through the motley take on urban experience presented in the notes from Kepes’ winter 1954 seminar on urban form. The city here becomes a matter of experimental musical composition, fiction writing, and photography as Kepes interviewed John Cage, James T. Ferrell, and Andreas Feininger on three separate occasions for the class. Evincing the dynamic variability at the core of the Movement Movement, Cage expounds on the “field” concept within music: the idea that a diversity of sounds is made possible by place, movement, and technology. Cage sets forth new possibilities for music in which whole musical concepts are distributed across time and space. “Sounds alter in character when recorded from different places,” Cage says, “i.e. rather than having musicians at one spot, one can have a situation in which sounds come from various directions or go continuously from low to high with respect to all their characteristics.”53 In response to Kepes’ question concerning the possibility of better utility of urban sounds, Cage describes sound as a complex and nuanced fabric, recalling the famous experiment he conducted in the anechoic chamber at Harvard. Setting in relief a Whiteheadian sense of sound, the idea that the sound of our living, breathing bodies bleeds into and molds the external sounds enveloping us, Cage gives shape to sound as omnipresent and biomorphic. Pure silence is impossible. Cage recalls the “silence” of the chamber was accompanied by the din of his “own body processes.”54 Departing from the aesthetics of sound, Farrell (author of the hard-luck Depression era Studs Lonigan trilogy) is concerned with the 143

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mindset of regular people on the street. In his interview with Kepes, Farrell describes the function of the city as educational, citing the centrality of “public awareness” and a personal sense of agency and activism. For Farrell, it is important for the people to “see how they can make their city beautiful.”55 The son of avant-garde German painter and print maker Lyonel Feininger, the American photojournalist and writer Andreas Feininger tells Kepes in the interview that the city is a once-functioning machine now broken by traffic. Resonating sentiment similar to Farrell’s, Feininger looks to the theme of education, explaining with a grassroots sensibility, “You cannot force ideas on people; you have to educate them.”56 The methodologies of Kepes and Lynch establish urban orientation as multifaceted, a concern of the bodily senses connecting self to the urban fabric of a given city, the stuff of artistic experimentation, and a process facilitated by technology. In terms of technology, the automobile added new layers of perceptual experience to the project. Lynch studied the “sensuous impact of highway driving,” further technologizing the concerns of the original project by framing urban experience in terms of automotive mobility. While providing an arsenal of information distinct from that of pedestrian practices, the car would not be central to Kepes and Lynch’s research summary or Lynch’s publication of The Image of the City. Rather, research on automobile experience was rich ancillary data, foreshadowing the later collaborative project by Lynch, John R.  Myer, and Donald Appleyard titled The View from the Road. Published in 1965 and part of Silver’s review, this book offers a mesmerizing investigation of the automotive imageability of Boston. The car operates in Lynch’s recordings as an objectively mechanical and mobile form of urban infrastructure and an existential extension of self. Lynch performed field research at an office of Checker Taxicab in July 1956, accompanying a cab despatcher named Mr. Carr for several hours. Using only a microphone and pegboard, but notably no map, the despatcher created a volatile image of the city, setting forth temporary and ad hoc paths of waymaking as he connected moving cab drivers to customers distributed across the city on sidewalks.57 Something like a virtual playing field which expands and contracts intermittently throughout a game, navigable patches of the 144

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city shape-shift according to the passage of information and movement of cars and clients. With respect to the latter, as the car functions in terms of a prosthetic extension, here it is elemental in the poetry of rapid movement on the highway. The car when functioning as a prosthetic enhances the human body; at the same time, it offers a more subjective image of the city, as it facilitates emotional responses while driving or being driven. Lynch specifies this techno-human interface in terms of the diverse and dynamic “dramatization of the road itself,” which emerges from the experience of shifting road gradients, syncopated rhythms of contrasting scenery, seamless continuity, and a general “richness of form.”58 Lynch summarized the accomplishments of the project in The Perceptual Form of the City in 1959, one year prior to the publication of his book The Image of the City. In the synopsis to the Rockefeller Foundation, Lynch explained that the five years of research revealed the difficult thorniness of their premise rooted in “sensuality.” Sensuality here reads as variegation and complexity:  a would-be measuring stick to frame the city as a matter of diverse views onto experience rather than using the straightforward and rational measurement of brute functionalism. While a fleshy corporeal sense of the city brought nuance to the project, it made the city “a problem of a new order,” one complicated in new ways by “size and complexity in space and time; the way it enfolds the observer throughout much of his life, and the peculiar sequential nature of perception itself.”59 While possible, it is difficult to develop a concise metrics for the image of the city based on sensuality—and what might be considered Whiteheadian prehensions, relational connections that melt and congeal through time. As evidence of productivity and progress, Lynch cited two articles with precisely such Whiteheadian “fuzzy edges” published during the time of their funded research, both of which encapsulate the beauty of the Kepes–Lynch system of soft urban metrics. The two articles, like Lynch’s subsequent book, establish an aesthetic rooted in sociology embodying urban form as blurred and elided. The formalism at work here is far different from the sharp edged compositions delineated by the urbanism of the Athens Charter. In the first essay, “Some Childhood Memories of the City,” Lynch and engineering graduate student Alvin K. Lukashok recounted interviews with forty people on the question of their spatial memories from childhood. 145

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Lynch and Lukashok asked twenty-two MIT students and eighteen nonstudents, “with occupations ranging from sociologist to cab driver,” questions about their memories from childhood about their home and street, traffic, the neighborhood, and the city as a whole.60 Seven of the forty interviewed were women. Lynch and Lukashok gleaned information from each individual on their memory of the “city floor,” aspects of the ground plane ranging from blacktop to lawns. In their research, they discovered that the ground “surface” was “the most important sensuous element of all.”61 Other questions concerned “texture and color,” “play areas,” “hills,” “transport and traffic,” “space and the sense of crowdedness,” “marks of social status,” “associations,” and “orientation,” making for a decidedly descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to urban planning. “A Walk Around the Block,” the second article, co-written with Malcolm Rivkin, presents the process of meaning- and order-making that unfolds around a simple stroll around a neighborhood superblock.62 As with the earlier essay, the image of the city is piecemeal and deliberate, unfolding across the perceptual experiences of walking around a neighborhood block and a poetry of associations. Kepes and Lynch’s collaboration and Lynch’s subsequent publications are part of a wet, incremental, and ecological take on the light image of the city, and thus part of the unfolding history of the haptic unconscious. On its face, the argument bears little that is political. Because of this, many have criticized Lynch’s approach as politically passive and capitulatory to the economics of laissez-faire capitalism.63 As discussed above, Lynch’s take on the city indeed signaled a turn away from modernist dictates and urban planning as top-down and prescriptive, all of which make up the putative American welfare state. While it stands in stark contrast to related state-led programming within urban planning, I would argue his idea of the image of the city as mutational and alive does not go against regulatory practices but is separate and distinct from and potentially complementary to them. Kepes and Lynch’s development of an experiential definition of the city is rooted in the ecological consciousness and biocentrism that is equally a force of economic justice in its own right. A logical if not hoped for outcome of conceiving the city and our movement through it as part of an ecological network of connections is not simply a matter of relating urban 146

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Image 54 Drawings by Mr. Gardner Formann of the “city floor” and “play areas” in Alvin K. Lukashok and Kevin Lynch, “Some Childhood Memories of the City,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 22, no. 3 (1956), 142.

life to a healthy environment but also better and more careful stewardship of the earth.

III. The Biocognitive Influences on Lynch’s The Image of the City It is remarkable that there are few sources from urban history or design within Lynch’s long bibliography for The Image of the City. The majority of the eighty-three sources come from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, economics, art, and municipal urban planning files, but not from writings on the history of the city or urban form and aesthetics. In 147

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his seminal analysis of this conundrum, Anthony Raynsford argues Lynch withheld the “full range of sources” he used in the writing of the book. What goes missing in the published book, he argues, is evidence of its “origins” within a certain branch of “literature on urban aesthetics,” which reveals how the author “combined [the] aesthetic traditions [of] abstract formalism and picturesque townscape; modernist functionalism and City Beautiful monumentality; Gestalt psychology and Renaissance optics.”64 Raynsford argues that Lynch’s understanding of the city was fundamentally a “cinematic urbanism,” which like film itself is meant to appeal to a broad and diverse audience of readers while also being rooted in a similarly multifaceted array of citizen experiences. The missing influences coalesce within an archival document, Lynch’s annotated bibliography for a seminar on urban form that took place in the early years of his collaboration with Kepes. The list includes books on the “optics of urban design” rooted in English town planner Raymond Unwin’s idea of the “street picture,” which in many ways functions like a film still.65 The ideas of the city as filmic, or a patchwork of changing qualities, are embedded within the precepts of organic and picturesque town planning, in particular the writings of Unwin, Cordon Cullen, and Cronin Hastings that Raynsford argues influenced Lynch. From the view of the English picturesque town, the facets of the city are hard and soft, dry and wet: architectural and cognitive in nature, in that that the stylistic shifts of the architecture in the street frontage elicit a similar diversity of aesthetic responses from town dwellers walking along the streets. For Raynsford, these suppressed resources show that “Lynch’s works suggested a way in which pluralistic urban society, characterized by multiplicity and difference, might nonetheless share a common urban space.”66 Let us focus attention on another rubric of influence, namely the bio-cognitive thinking within General Systems Theory [GST]. Based on the biological workings of the human nervous system, the basic precept of GST is that the study of any given object must be holistic, undertaken in terms of its role within a greater system of interconnections. “It is necessary to study not only parts and processes in isolation,” the organismic biologist and founding figure of GST Ludwig von Bertalanffy explains, “but also to solve the decisive problems found in the organization and order unifying them, resulting from dynamic interaction of parts.”67 The influence 148

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of GST is present across Lynch’s oeuvre and specifically within The Image of the City. It is evinced in the bibliography of the 1960 book, within the sequential publication in 1965 of The View from the Road, and the manner in which the “image” of the city in both books is distributed across a systematic matrix of events and experiences in real time. While The Image of the City has stood singly on its own for architecture students, urban planners, and city lovers alike as a book encapsulating a non-bureaucratic and poetic take on the city, it is better understood as the first in a two-book series, the sequel of which is The View from the Road. There is an obvious overlap in the concerns of each book, which emerges from the fact that Lynch researched the automotive image of the city at the same time he researched the pedestrian image of the city, as underscored above.68 As part of the extended research for The Perceptual Form of the City, Appleyard and Lynch made photographic and written field recordings of driving on the Mystic River Bridge. The prosthetic nature of the car struck Appleyard, as he enthusiastically writes Lynch in 1958: “The car is an extension of the driver and the conquest of space.”69 Naturalizing the car–human interface in terms of mammals moving vector-like through urban infrastructure, Appleyard writes that the car “is not an object clearly separate from the driver, but a positive extension of the driver (or rider) somehow elevating him to the flight of a gazelle or bird.”70 A cyborgian sense of the city and its inhabitants emerges here, along with, in the greater scheme of Lynch’s work, the adjacency of these two books. In the term “cyborgian” I identify the centrality of the human–technology interface, or what I described above as “wetware.” The technology of the car is instrumental in the creation of a driver–car–urbanism Gestalt. In this system of relations, the car mediates, facilitates, and molds individual behavior and cognition in the understanding of place and urban context. By rooting the human perspective of the city in the automobile, the second book adds layers to the technologized sense of self at work already in The Image of the City. Enriching the dynamic technologies of signage and illumination within Lynch’s first book, the car-based perspective of the road asks readers to work with and through technology rather than fearing and shunning it. The importance of the man–machine hybrid is felt elsewhere in Kepes and Lynch’s research. In teasing out the substance of a brief correspondence 149

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between Kepes, Lynch, and J. C. R. Licklider, MIT professor of psychology and pioneer thinker in the creation of the personal computer, we see once again a connection to the idea of the cyborg while also expanding the template of interconnections to include the first instance of digital graphics. Obviously for Licklider, whose expertise in sound and psychoacoustics was complemented by a long-held love of graphics, the senses were part of an integrated self in which the brain, body, and perceptual apparatus functioned as one. He understood well that attention to the individual prowess of each sense was at the base of removing the alienation that went along with the word “computer” in the middle of the twentieth century. This holistic sentiment is present in his advocacy of graphical user interface [GUI], or the integration of human and machine by way of the interactivity allowed through the confluence of vision, tactility, small screens, and attached devices. GUI is fundamental to the workings of the personal computer and today’s smart devices. In its early incarnation GUI functioned by way of a light-pen used to direct graphics on a screen, then later through digital windows, menus, and radio buttons activated by the keyboard and mouse, and today by way of touch screens. This functional synthesis promised, for Licklider, to make humans and computers symbiotic.71 By realizing visual graphics through the computer, machines approximated and mimicked human thinking, creating “mental models” in real time like the images that coalesce as part of consciousness.72 In 1962, while employed by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (or as it was called then, ARPA), Licklider and his colleagues conceptualized the Sketchpad program, which at the time purveyed “the most dramatic on-line graphical compositions” possible by way of a light-pen directed across an x-y point plotter.73 Trained in the field of psychoacoustics, Licklider joined the Psychology Department at MIT in 1950. Prior to his time at MIT, Licklider’s expertise had been formed at the Psycho-Acoustics Lab at Harvard, where he studied technology and speech, in particular the role of radio- and telephone-generated distortion in the transformation of speech patterns.74 When Licklider started at MIT, the Psychology Department was heavily under the sway of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and emerging concepts of computation modeled after the complex functions of the human nervous system. At both Harvard and MIT, Licklider was a force in the rising 150

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primacy of information: the idea that “information” is the linchpin in systems of communication interconnecting “control” and “computation.”75 Marking the advent of cognitive science as a discipline of study within scientific laboratories as well as across the social sciences and humanities within the academy, “information was the concept that promised to make the mind and brain comprehensible.”76 The letter from Licklider to Lynch and Kepes on the subject of The Perceptual Form of the City emerges from this context, with Licklider advising the importance of meaning that emerges from cognitive processes of perceiving the city since, beyond architecture, sidewalks, and roads, it is a matter of an engineering-and-art interface coupled with planetary and atmospheric consequence. In a particularly imaginative passage of the letter, he describes the importance of “the silhouette of the skyline.” Licklider suggests that they be certain to look beyond the artificial built landscape, and all of its whirring technologies of light and motion, to the importance of the heavenly vault overhead. “Except for openwork in the electric signs, etc.,” the skyline offers “a single variable.”77 Here he alludes to the importance of engineers in their project, looking to the Fourier transform, a mathematical function used to show the changes in a continuous signal, as an important aesthetic barometer of sorts. “A possibly interesting hypothesis is that the Fourier transform of the skyline silhouette which one might call the spectrum of the skyline,” Licklider explains, “is relatable to the artistic acceptability, or perhaps to the average city dweller’s reaction to the skyline.”78 From this perspective, he argues, a “reasonably flat spectrum” is aesthetically preferable to “bleak skylines” and “gingerbready skylines” because they are alternately lacking or too strong in their high-frequency components.79 Though rooted in advanced mathematics, Licklider’s thinking on the aesthetics of the city is here, like Kepes and Lynch’s, holistic. One constructs an image of the city within a total environment, as the percipient is embedded in a complex reality characterized by many layers of information including the ground below, the matrices of streets, buildings, and signage spreading out laterally, and the atmospheric cupola above. It is equally a holistic disciplinary endeavor, necessitating the input of Kepes the artist, Lynch the urban planner, and Licklider the psychologist-cum-mathematician. 151

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Licklider further developed this idea of associated and embedded existence six years later in 1960 within what is perhaps his most notable essay, “Man–Computer Symbiosis.” Predicting the seamless relationship between humans and technology in the future, Licklider forecasted, the “man–computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers.”80 He established a wet biological paradigm as the basis for communication and coexistence between humans and the personal computer of the future in his metaphor of symbiosis, the mutual relationship between a wasp and a fig tree. Humans might model their relationship with machines after the wasp and the fig tree, thereby instantiating a quasi-natural cyborgian connection between humankind and the emergent personal computer.81 Like humans extending life through computers, fig and fig-wasp mutualism is a paradigm of life-creating cooperation, as the wasp lives in a fig tree, finding food and shelter there, while also continuing the cycle of life through fig-tree pollination.82 The theme of biology courses through the ideas of the next three influences on Lynch’s writing of The Image of the City—Alfred North Whitehead, Susanne K. Langer, and Kenneth Boulding. Appearing in the bibliography of Lynch’s book, they are also part of the greater emerging field of cognitive science. Yet their bio-life ideas manifest in ways other than Licklider’s cyborgian symbiosis. Getting back to the thesis on the image as extruded through space and time, they proffer paradigms of the living, distributed image. Though of an earlier generation, both mathematician and father of process philosophy, Whitehead is at the same time part of the deep roots of the “dawn of cognitive science.”83 The distributed nature of the image in Whitehead’s process philosophy unfolds by way of his thesis on “becoming,” which shapes his entire metaphysics, including ideas on symbolism. Based on the bibliography of The Image of the City, we can deduce that Lynch read Whitehead’s Symbolism:  Its Meaning and Effect, a pithy book that emerged from Whitehead’s 1927 Barbour-Page Lectures at the University of Virginia. Lynch found there the rudiments of Whiteheadian ontology as well as a rubric on which to base his own “image of the city.” Whitehead’s ontology resonates strongly in Lynch’s work, as they held similar concepts of life rooted in “the world [as] a 152

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vortex of passing events in interaction with one another, each bearing within it ‘images’ of others.”84 Whitehead’s ideas were in some sense Janus-headed, inspired by ancient philosophy and modern science. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, the thinker of life in flux, influenced him while, in the vein of modern biological practices, he named his metaphysical system “the philosophy of organism.”85 Whitehead’s abstractions are persuasive as both metaphysics and science. Perhaps reflecting his roots as a mathematician, his philosophical system is pragmatic. Whitehead’s abstract ideas are privy to concretization in the world. As seen in the previous chapter with the translation of Whitehead’s philosophy into Waddington’s imaginative yet plausible take on gene expression within the “epigenetic landscape,” the philosophy of organism has foreshadowed discoveries of the complexity of cellular function, theories of emergence, and the computational metrics used to understand and predict genetic workings and expression. In the story at hand, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism seems yet another incarnation of the haptic unconscious. So far we have underwritten the concept of the haptic unconscious by way of the broad philosophical field of biocentrism shot through the art pedagogies and aesthetic beliefs of Moholy-Nagy and Kepes. While not central to the tradition of German biocentrism or even part of theoretical biology discussed in the last chapter, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism establishes in this story another base from which emerges an ecological concept of “mind” and “consciousness,” specifically because, like the Gestalt theories discussed so far, it is based on interconnection and relations between things in the world and our perception of them. “Whitehead’s philosophy of ‘organism,’ ” argues David Woodruff Smith, “preached the radical interaction of all things; however, for Whitehead, the ultimately actual entities are neither mental nor physical, but constitute what we know as the mental and physical alike.”86 Moving beyond the once structural binary of mind and body, Kepes and Lynch’s perceptual form and image are Whiteheadian in their monistic holism. The constituent elements of the “image” bear the fuzzy edges of interconnection—or prehensions and concrescence, to use Whiteheadian terminology. From Whitehead’s perspective, atoms are not discrete, separate entities but rather vectors of motion, flowing and “bound together by 153

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prehension: later occasions or actualis(ing) entities prehend or ‘feel’ earlier ones.”87 Objectification is never simply a matter of isolable form, as the “term ‘objectification’ refers to the particular mode in which the potentiality of one actual entity is realized in another actual entity.”88 Avoiding the tendency to reify things and our relations to them, Whitehead identifies the specificity and uniqueness of what we believe to be “objects” in terms of experience:  objects are instances that concresce, that come together as events in time which Whitehead refers to also in biological terms as “cells.”89 Through the “concrescence” of active cells “many actual entities come together to form one actual entity.”90 Here, Whitehead’s sense of becoming takes form in a pattern of unique coalescences or events of prehension and concrescence. So far, we have seen an approximation of this process in quite banal examples, given form in Kepes and Lynch’s take on the image and, more precisely, through their field research, those documents ranging from snapshots of the city to interviews with cabdrivers. The research for The Perceptual Form of the City was fundamentally a Whiteheadian endeavor, a matter of capturing the prehensions of things and their concrescences in the experience and the image-making of the city. The sensual intake of the world is interwoven with the passage of time as epistemology unfolds in experience. Whitehead’s thinking bears a deep-body non-cognitive automaticity—a sense of the haptic unconscious—similar to what Susanne K. Langer called “significant form,” itself a matter of emerging cognition and willful choice.91 A contributor to Kepes’ The Visual Arts Today (an anthology published in 1960, and an avowed influence on Lynch), Langer was a philosophy student of Whitehead’s at Radcliffe College in the early twentieth century.92 While the philosopher Langer dedicated her first book Philosophy in a New Key (1942) to Whitehead, his influences are not present through invocation in name but rather in her burgeoning philosophy of mind. There we see evidence of the metaphor of biological processes from Whitehead’s teachings unfolding in Langer’s concept of the “act,” mind as feelings extended across experience and objects in the world and as a matter of brute experience, intuition, and unconscious behavioral responses.93 As with Whitehead’s thinking, the cognitive consists of the non-cognitive in Langer’s philosophy. “Mental life begins with our mere physiological constitution,” she says.94 Undermining the idea of the cognitive as solely a 154

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bearer of rational activity, the cognitive and the rational are for Langer part of a working brain–body Gestalt. There is no duality between the mind and body. The holism of the body is rooted in the nervous system, which “is the organ of the mind; its center is the brain, its extremities the sense-organs; and any characteristic function it may possess must govern the work of all its parts.”95 The senses are cerebral, she explains: the “activity of the our senses is ‘mental’ not only when it reaches the brain, but in its very inception, whenever the alien world outside impinges on the furthest and smallest receptor.”96 Following this, the images we make of the city, to return to Kepes and Lynch’s research, are both cognitive and non-cognitive in the sense that they are part of this wet system of meaning-making, the flows of fluids and electrical charges across the body. The mapping of the city—the making of images of the city—is a matter of intuitive automaticity which itself is a form of ratiocination. Resonating with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, Langer described the philosophical subject for whom she wrote also as “an organism” whose “substance is chemical, and what he does, suffers, or knows, is just what this sort of chemical structure may do, suffer, or know.”97 The logic of this statement brings to bear a broader take on the definition of knowledge, how and when it occurs, its formation within functional action, and who or what has epistemological capacities. She makes plain that her intention is to underscore the material basis of knowing, adding, “when the structure goes to pieces, it never does, suffers, or knows, anything again.”98 Yet we might deduce another repercussion of this statement, outside and beyond underscoring the inevitability of entropic decay, namely in the very nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge occurs across a scalar spectrum, from within cytoplasm and cells to brain–body holism and the mammals that host this monism. It is part of a “chemical structure,” to use Langer’s phrase. If basic cellular responses constitute “knowing acts” then might we also begin to understand the environmental responses of plants and mammals as forms of knowledge—as cognitive acts—too? Langer’s thinking here is not simply about “mind” but mind as extended and diverse, which would be another of way saying, mind is within context. Or, to be more precise, Langer’s philosophy foreshadows the theory of emergence, insomuch as she describes “the biological conditions for the emergence of mind.”99 And in the word “emergence” I reference the ongoing discourse on 155

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non-linear biological function, which takes form here in Langer’s “naturalistic perspective.”100 Mind from this perspective is part of an emergent set of properties in which “complex forms of organization produce new forms of causation” and, in turn, such “causality is ‘circular’; it involves interacting effects between different levels of natural organization (e.g. between the microscopic and macroscopic).”101 We see Langer, and thus Kepes and Lynch as well, propagating an order of the image that is distributed: it is emergent, living, and thus also one in which “higher-level” human activities might be best understood according to the “biological conditions that prefigured the emergence of those higher-level activities.”102 Lynch quotes Langer in The Image of the City, looking to her relational definition of architecture within Feeling and Form, the 1953 follow-up to Philosophy in a New Key. Langer’s statement with respect to architecture, that “it is the total environment made visible,” gives body to a comprehensive urban image for Lynch.103 In the context of the book, Langer’s holistic take on architecture, that it is the microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosm, offers for Lynch an ordering principle for not just the city, but the sprawling urban region that includes a city center and its suburbs. Langer’s take on architecture provides a way to “grasp” what Lynch describes as the “new functional unit, the metropolitan region,” in proffering another means to the distributed image.104 In The Image: Knowledge of Life and Society, economist Ken Boulding introduced a related concept of the “image” by way of a similar network of interconnecting and synthesizing forces both cognitive and non-cognitive. A  result of Boulding’s time at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1954, the book is included in the bibliography of Lynch’s The Image of the City. There, Boulding describes the image not as a two-dimensional picture but a cascading set of effects manifesting as distributed relations in space. Boulding named the “new science” of image-creation “eiconics.”105 A  discipline notably rooted in the basic empiricism of experience, Boulding launched the science in the introduction of the book by way of the first person: “I know where I am. I see before me a window; beyond that some trees; beyond that the red roofs of the campus of Stanford University; beyond them the trees and the roof tops which mark the town of Palo Alto.”106 He continues on for several pages, describing his situation in time and space. “I am not only located in space 156

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and in time and in personal relationships, I am also located in a world of nature, in a world of how things operate.”107 The image emerges from a full gamut of expressions related to the perception of a given place As with Kepes and Lynch’s study, it is incremental, mutating while in the making. It creates orientation and a sense of self through the emotional, aesthetic, and thus behavioral responses to material surroundings. “Finally,” Boulding tells his readers, “I am located in the midst of a world of subtle intimations and emotions.”108 For Boulding, this cumulative image is fundamentally a matter of behavioral response, thereby instantiating the image with a brute biological force. We create images—memories, thoughts, and correspondences—as part of a behavioral feedback loop between self and environment. Like cells creating knowledge through autopoetic responses, both cytoplasmic and bodily, we respond to the manifold layers of matter in flux around us. The image functions in Boulding’s eclectic philosophy as an organizing mechanism. It is part of his biology-based theory of organization and his greater take on General Systems Theory. Providing yet another take on biological response as knowledge and imagistic, Boulding describes the formation of the image in terms of scale, from micro to macro, beginning his study at the “biological level.” In contrast to the basic closed-system model of inorganic systems, the biological image is an open system, “which is continuously taking in something from its environment and giving out something to its environment, all the while maintaining its structure in the middle of this flow.”109 The biological image is a protean yet also order-creating form and mechanism maintaining its assemblage amid the changes wrought by the basic cause-and-effect movement within an environment. Stepping out from the microbiological into the vast encompassment of GST, Boulding’s “image” contextualizes order within a global context constantly embattled by the larger dialectical movement ensuing from entropy. Boulding argues there are two primary opposing forces within “the image”: entropy, or “the tendency,” on the one hand, “represented by the second law of thermodynamics… for states to become more probable, more chaotic, and for things to run down and, on the other hand, “the tendency for the rise of organization.”110 Creating un fil rouge of sorts, this tension of entropy and order runs throughout Boulding’s writings, uniting his theory of eiconics with an ecological take on the economy, both of which are part of his thinking on 157

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General Systems Theory. Within his philosophical system, the two-headed concept of entropy-and-organization also serves to explain the rising complexity of society, insomuch as the resistance to entropy has created a rise in the development of organizational structures. “In the course of the history of the universe,” Boulding explains, “we observe the record of continually increasing complexity of organization culminating at the present day in man and his societies.”111 In his hypotheses on the complexity-creating dynamism of anarchy and organization, Boulding echoes Kepes’ cries for order in a world made chaotic in the 1947 lecture at the Institute of Design, “Forms and Motion.” Some nine years later, Boulding presented his distributed take on the “image” as a solution to the crisis of community run amok by technology. An incremental mental image is part of this ecological paradigm. Boulding’s “image” is thus a building block in his thinking toward “spaceship earth.” Likewise, Lynch’s image of the city is part of an ecological ethos. The image of the city is distributed insomuch as it follows a pattern of careful thought: deliberation of a given urban context comes before action, and order is biological and emergent rather than linear, top-down or bottom-up. The image of the city emerges as part of a dynamic field of cause-and-effect and entropy followed by organization.

IV. Wetware between Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Mapping Lynch intended his theory of the urban image to create an order similar to the orientation provided by classical cartography, even as its wet, mobilized, and shape-shifting qualities ran counter to the conventional “map.” Prima facie these two traditions of space-making—cartography and the environmental image of Kepes and Lynch’s early research project and Lynch’s later books—seem at odds, one being inert, rather timeless, a means to understand the world while also exploiting power, and the other dynamic, deliquescent, and a tool to grasp a sense of place while also subverting extant power structures within modern planning. Lynch struck out into remote territory, combining the traditional map with cognitive science in the creation of the biologically distributed image of the city, formulating a new kind of cartography in the form of “cognitive mapping.” Yet Lynch did not 158

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recognize the “image of the city” as “cognitive mapping” until thirteen years later, and it was only implicit then.112 Lynch’s essay on cognitive mapping, “Some References to Orientation,” was part of the 1973 anthology Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior, co-edited by Roger M. Downs and David Stea. Collectively, the book is a combination of environmental geography, psychology, architecture, and urban planning. Downs and Stea, professors of geography and architecture and urban planning respectively, chose economist-cum-philosopher and GST expert Kenneth E. Boulding to write the foreword. There, Boulding describes the group of contributors as an “invisible college,” staking out the territory of a new discipline that focuses on a “theory of scientific epistemology.”113 Connecting the anthology back in time to the greater research project of Kepes and Lynch, Boulding relished the fact that his 1956 book The Image figured so prominently in the history of cognitive mapping. Cognitive science and Gestalt psychology figure centrally in the essay included in the anthology by Donald Appleyard, professor of urban planning and design at UC Berkeley and Lynch’s collaborator in The View from the Road. Using language reminiscent of the Perceptual Form of the City in his essay, Appleyard argues not simply for patience with cognitive representations of the city that are “incremental and disjointed,” but for recognition of their importance, contending that the “structure of urban knowledge… is difficult to grasp and full of seemingly contradictory qualities.”114 Taking a related tack, Lynch defines “cognitive mapping” in terms of General Systems Theory in the essay “Some References to Orientation,” explaining to his readers that an understanding of the “environmental image” is distributed across fields. Rather than being a matter of expertise in a single field, logic of the image as distributed or ecological is best gleaned “from ancient and modern literature, books on travel or exploration… newspaper accounts [and] psychological and anthropological studies.”115 In this later development of the cognitive and spatial image, Lynch notably qualifies his idea with the word “environmental,” thereby bestowing it with a logic that is at once systems-based and organic. While lost to the ages, he believes, the distributed environmental image is irrefutable, a part of our biology, and still “a fundamental part of our equipment for living.”116 That Lynch’s distributed image of the city was part of a discourse on “cognitive mapping” did not become common knowledge until much later. Lynch’s work found a renaissance of sorts with the advent of Cultural 159

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Studies in the era of postmodernism. From this methodological polyglot, the literary studies expert and post-Marxist philosopher Frederic Jameson wrote energetically in 1990 of the importance of Lynch’s work in the creation of “cognitive mapping” for a global society.117 Lynch’s take on the image of the city provided for Jameson a means to connect vastly disparate edges of the world and, more precisely, to provide a sense of orientation for the individual within globalization. Unlike Lynch’s study which was for making order at the micrological level of the city, Jameson advances Lynch’s thinking into an overtly political realm, using it as means to give shape to personal agency in a rising global political map of post-national corporate powers. Jameson expands Lynch’s “image,” connecting it to philosopher Louis Althusser’s “redefinition of ideology,” through the linchpin of the Lacanian “Imaginary.” Looking to Jameson’s reinterpretation of “the image of the city,” what for Lynch constituted memories and a way to orient oneself rooted in a network of distributed relations is for Jameson a means of giving sense to an otherwise incommensurable new socio-economic set of relations in the epoch of late capitalism. Scale is important here, with Lynch’s sense of the “map” being fundamentally tactile and local while Jameson’s framing is unilaterally cerebral and international. Cognitive mapping offered Hegelian totality by other means for Jameson:  it “enables a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”118 Jameson heightens the political properties of Lynch’s thinking by eliding it into Althusser’s take on ideology, foregrounding the aesthetic-cum-behavioral endeavor of the Kepes–Lynch research project not simply in the rhetoric of postmodernism but, more precisely, in what Jameson promises is a space of critical distance. “The Althusserian formula,” when brought together with Lynch’s mapping, allows us to think of cognitive mapping according to “social space… social class and national or international context.”119 And it does so precisely by casting a critical view onto science and the Lacanian Real. The Lynch-Althusser coupling “designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge,” the repercussions of which promise class-consciousness.120 In short, Jameson’s postmodern riff injects Lynch with a politics of economic justice, but it does so notably without a concrete or literal roadmap. 160

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Jameson’s redeployment of Lynch’s thinking ignores the eco-politics present in the greater project on the image that has been the center of this study. Here I  refer to the systems-based thinking coursing through the conversation on the image of the city and, by connection, the way in which the “cognitive” within cognitive mapping is always already “non-cognitive,” insomuch as we take into account the ambiguities of the image and symbol at work in the thinkers such as Whitehead, Langer, and Boulding. Rather than injecting Lynch’s thinking with Lacanian psychoanalysis or the Structural Marxism of Althusser, I would like to build on the energies and ideas there that have been invoked through the above philosophies and which are incarnate in the very phrase Lynch was using by 1973, namely the “environmental image.” Its distribution across space and time bears an ethical theme in that power relations shift from being linear to emergent and, by connection, knowledge goes from being the holy grail of top-down humanism to an energy running throughout an ecological network of bio-life. I would like to attach the idea of “wetware” to the environmental image in order to tease out and make more substantial the nesting nature of the non-cognitive within the cognitive. In Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell, popular science writer Dennis Bray claims that the complexities of cellular function can best be understood in terms of computation. The computational function of a cell corroborates its organization as emergent, which is to say the cell seen as computational reveals the basic hierarchical functionalism of life to be multidirectional. Admittedly the term “wetware” bears within it a sense of digital mechanization, as it “has resonance with the rigid hardware of electronic devices.”121 For Bray, wetware is, in fact, living and biological: it is the “sum of all the information-rich molecular processes inside of a living cell.”122 In using the language of computerized mechanization to explain biological properties, Bray uses technology as a means to proffer a wider understanding of “knowledge” and “knowing.” Wetware, from this perspective, is a trope in keeping with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, Langer’s expanded epistemology of mind, and Boulding’s imagistic “spaceship earth,” all of which suggest a sense of consciousness beyond self and brain that extends between cognitive and non-cognitive acts out into the world. If we are wetware, complex beings functioning in a metacognitive set of relations, then we are also connected to the evolution of simple single-cell organisms in deep time. Our cells function 161

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no differently than those of such rudimentary organisms. Their knowing is our knowing insomuch as their autopoetic cellular function—everything from mitosis to chemotaxis to methylation—is a matter of wetware, or knowing as a wide embracing field of information production which shifts from the non-cognitive to the cognitive. The key here is “behavior.” These automatic cellular actions are behavioral responses no different than our own at the macrocosmic scale of the body. Connecting us back to Boulding’s sense of the “image,” behavior here is a spectrum like knowledge itself: it is forthright functional effect as well as complex emotion rejoinder. In conclusion of this chapter, we return to politics. If the politics of the biobased thesis on the image of the city here is not one of class-consciousness, as Fredric Jameson sought to create, then what might it be? It is a politics of bio-life rooted in the discourse of the Perceptual Form of the City and its later incarnation as the environmental image. Here the promise of justice is located in casting a biological view onto the image as living and distributed across space and time, which, to be more precise, comes together around the expansion of mind and, by connection, the broadening of knowing across species. Epistemology—the image of knowledge—unfolds through diverse materials and vectors of wetware, revealing that knowing is at once cognitive and non-cognitive, a matter of rational cogitation as well as intuition. In no sense is the technological metaphor of “wetware” intended to Taylorize life: it is neither to make ourselves in the image of the machine nor to make more efficient our daily acts. In opposition to Taylorization, both mechanical and digital, “wetware” helps us to know ourselves better as deliberative beings: living means within a network connected to a world of other living means.

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4 Wet Perception Op Art and New Tendencies, between the Gestalt and Ecological Psychology

I. Introduction: Op Art and New Tendencies, a Lost Holism This chapter follows the evolution of the haptic unconscious full bore into the contemporary art world of the 1960s, where its qualities materialize in the wet, biological rubric of perception, theories of Gestalt and ecological psychology. I focus in particular on Op Art and New Tendencies, two distinct names for what was in large part the same effort: a movement of artists making painted and three-dimensional geometric abstraction, work with patterns, repetitive monochromatic shapes, and kinetic form. “Op Art” was the American designation for an international artistic proclivity in art of this form intended to interrogate perception through movement.1 On the European side, an art of the same protocol emerged from Zagreb in 1961 under the umbrella term New Tendencies. By the end of the decade, the latter had changed its name to Tendencies and, following its extant call for an art of visual research, devoted its energies to integrating art, the techno-science of information, and rising digital knowhow of the computer.2 Transitioning from urbanism to the contemporary art world of the 1960s, this chapter carries forward the narrative of the distributed image 163

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and body-based aesthetic, focusing on the perceptual theories at work in this art. While the aesthetic theory of the haptic unconscious is manifold in qualities, its attribute as “distributed”—as it is a series of flickering elements unified across space and time, within the light image broadly conceived— grants its diversity a oneness. A habit of circling, doubling back, and recursion becomes clear here, as we return to many ideas from earlier chapters in this and the forthcoming final chapter. In the word “distribution,” I return to electrical engineer Paul Baran’s 1964 diagram of the distributed communication network, which was first introduced in relationship to György Kepes’ anthologies and effloresced in the context of Kevin Lynch’s thinking urbanism through the image. In what directly follows, the distributed nature of the haptic unconscious is borne upon perception—information up-take, to use the language of the psychologist J. J. Gibson—in the interaction between observer and observed, subject and object, percipient and environment. Which leads us to another instance of feeding back into the loop, in that the Gestalt and Gestalt psychology re-emerge here as motivating factors in the appearance of Op and New Tendencies. The 1960s Op Art and incipient computer-generated art of New Tendencies are part of a holistic interrogation of perception. In this chapter, we find artists deploying art as a mode of research into awareness, observation, and the perceptual theories of the Gestalt and ecological psychology. Their collective goal was to better understand the connections between art and epistemology in the postwar medial landscape, while also instantiating a new scientifically generated paradigm of the artist and mechanically automated art. By making art—often as a group—that looked as if it had been made by a machine, with sharp edges and shorn of the drips and free forms of the painterly gesture, these artists pushed into a new territory with moorings in the historic avant-gardism of Bauhaus functionalism and Constructivist materialism. They directed a shared disdain toward expressive non-objective painting of the mid-twentieth century, Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme. Taken holistically, looking to the artists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and in Northern and Southern hemispheres that were part of Op and New Tendencies, this cool-headed creative ethos took form artistically in a paradigm of quasi-scientific research manifesting in the clean repetitive lines, striations, moiré patterns, and structures of painting and three-dimensional form, which later would 164

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give way to a certain strain of dematerialization—the digital image—facilitated by wireless and digital technology. This chapter focuses on the period of the former, the painting and three-dimensional work of Op and early New Tendencies artists from the first part of the 1960s, while the next and final chapter explores the later years of the movement in its incarnation as Tendencies and the full efflorescence of the digital image within art of the last years of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. The psychological theories of Rudolf Arnheim, Kurt Lewin, and J. J. Gibson and the art theory and criticism of William Seitz, Giulio Carlo Argan, Umberto Eco, George Rickey, and Jack Burnham are central to this discussion. While an important protagonist in the final chapter, Kepes is ancillary here, with essays from his anthologies intermittently coursing through the discussion. The core force of the haptic unconscious that is Moholy-Nagy’s German Romanticist biofunctionalism haunts this chapter by way of the figure of Rudolf Arnheim, the Gestalt psychologist and eminent twentiethcentury art historian whose long active life—from 1904 to 2007—carried him across several paradigm shifts, from modernism through postmodernism and the beyond into the new millennium. The moving ahead of this chapter marks an implicit turning back, a return to Berlin during the Weimar Republic which is central to the genesis of this story, where Arnheim attended the University of Berlin, studying with the founders of Gestalt psychology, Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler.3 Before leaving Germany first for Rome in 1933, then to London in 1939, and finally to the United States in 1940, where he would assume several posts as professor of psychology and art history, Arnheim was an active journalist, presumably rubbing shoulders with Moholy-Nagy and Walter Benjamin, who were also writing and publishing art criticism and theory in Berlin during the 1920s. Reflecting his forte in psychological research and perception as applied through media studies, Arnheim wrote film criticism for the ironic monthly, Das Stachelschwein [The Porcupine], and the weekly periodical run by Jewish leftists, Die Weltbühne [The World Stage]. Here we find his Gestalt-inflected take on film and radio to be equally politically inflected, insomuch as his publishers encouraged his subtle and “careful observation” of Weimar politics in his writings.4 While Arnheim has never been considered an overtly political art critic and theorist, it is of notable and often overlooked importance that his public foray into writing was molded by the 165

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politics of Weimar culture, a subject to which I return below in the context of the 1960s. It is also during these early years in Europe, between Berlin and Rome, that Arnheim cultivated his critical position on film and radio, publishing Film as Art (1932) and Radio: An Art of Sound (1936). Another goal of this chapter is thus to frame Arnheim also holistically, to bridge the gap between art history and media studies, forging a strong connection between his work as a Gestalt art historian and media critic and theorist in order to fully understand the impact of his presence on art history, curating, and rising media art during the middle of the twentieth century. The crux of my argument concerns the relationship between Op Art and New Tendencies, in particular as this collective field of art was incorrectly homogenized and bifurcated in the critical response to The Responsive Eye, the exhibition of optical painting and sculpture by artists from around the world in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Regardless of national origin, the artists in the exhibition collectively created art that extruded—made material, palpable, and felt—the temporality, nuances, and certain exactitudes of biological perception. The contentions are layered but concern two primary forces:  avant-gardism, on the one hand, and an ensuing demotion of the Op Art to decoration and kitsch as a result of the American mass media, on the other. To the art-viewing public of 1965, the art of The Responsive Eye was uniformly radical and avant-garde in a populist sense, meaning that it was simply very different from most art they had seen up until that moment. Many who went to the exhibition found the art challenging, with the patterns and colors of the work demanding interactive movement and causing disequilibrium and nausea. The art was radical in its effects on the body and perception, but not in terms of political avant-garde promise. It was uniformly received as “Op Art,” a stylistic moniker coined by the critic Jon Borgzinner appearing in Time magazine one year earlier.5 Without detailed information on the diverse backgrounds of the almost 100 artists in the show, the work became deracinated, uprooted in some cases from original avant-garde intentions. Lost to the American audience were the left-leaning and socialist intentions connected to “scientific research” and the Gestalt sustained by more than one-third of the artists in the show. Coming from the French Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel [GRAV], Italian Gruppo N and Gruppo T, German Zero Group, Spanish Equipo 57, Dutch NUL, and the American Anonima, 166

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most of these overtly political artists had shown already in Europe with these intentions made obvious to the public independently and as part of the New Tendencies art movement. While populist in the United States and political in Europe, the collective avant-gardism of Op Art and New Tendencies has altogether been lost to history. Regardless of avant-garde intentions and varied critical reception, the joint radicalism was late-modern in its timing and periodicity, meaning that, unbeknownst to its creators, it was simply transitional, at the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. While its ethos was all clinamen swerve, an avant-garde divergence from the status quo, its geometric formalism and techno-scientific leanings hitched it to the recent past. Op Art and New Tendencies were part of the putative end of a once-revolutionary era in art, namely, modernism. Theirs was a radical neo-Constructivism within twentieth-century modernism that bore wet, biological moorings in perceptual experimentation, which fell into a historical crack of sorts, displaced and overshadowed by emerging postmodernism and its vehicle of rising linguistic conceptual art. With proximity to the military-industrial complex, the politics of an automated art with mechanized authorship, scientific claims, and roots in Gestalt psychology and General Systems Theory seemed obsolete and politically incorrect in the face of another radical art driven by the language of resistance to technology and the machine of the Vietnam War. In its stead, neo-Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptual Art became the reigning art forms of putative postwar avant-gardism, also referred to as the “neo-avant-garde.”6 Even within this purview, Op Art has garnered a distinct mode of scorn from critics and historians.7 Since the exhibition in 1965 at MoMA, Op Art has been relegated to the dustbin of history, unvaryingly received as a sop of the market: simple and decorative painting that was the basis for patterned fabric, fashion layouts in Vogue, and wallpaper design during the mid-1960s. By contrast, over the last decade New Tendencies has experienced a critical resurgence as an origin of contemporary computer and new media art. In this chapter, I  revisit the context of Op Art and New Tendencies in order to reveal their connectedness by way of perceptual theory and aesthetic experimentation; to reveal their shared qualities, as they are both biological in nature and a matter of metacognition, or mind extended across space, time, and matter. I  reveal that the link 167

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between Op Art and New Tendencies is foremost biological and a concern of perceptual experience, and secondarily technological in nature. While constituted by unique artists from diverse backgrounds, this field of art, I contend, is mistakenly split in half while it should be considered a Gestalt: a holistic unity made up of diverse parts, each of which marks a consideration of the perceptual experience of the viewer and a mode of “wet” epistemology in which mind and consciousness are exteriorized, a matter of experience between people and objects in the world. Its radicality, albeit its avant-gardism, thus neither concerns the simple novelty of patterns nor leftist politics, but rather the biological paradigm of extended mind, which in turn topples the age-old hierarchy ensuing from the Great Chain of Being. It is the avant-gardism, if we must choose to call it such, of Moholy-Nagy’s biofunctionalism and the haptic unconscious. It is in working through the wet, biological nature of Op Art and New Tendencies, all of which has lain dormant in what might be perceived as the haptic unconscious of history, that the connection back to Moholy-Nagy comes to the fore. Let us turn our attention back to the 1960s, to an earlier moment in this process when similar ideas were considered through patterns on planes and in space, theories of the Gestalt, and ecological psychology.

II. The Responsive Eye I embark with the unveiling of midcentury geometric abstraction in the United States, where it was largely framed as apolitical. Unbeknownst to the American audience, many of the international coterie of artists in the exhibition The Responsive Eye had arrived at patterns of repetitive geometric forms suggestive of kinesis by way of a politically fueled take on the Gestalt. From this perspective, to which I return below, the Gestalt is a matter of individual perception as well as that of the social collective. Political or not, the art and culture of the mid-1960s was on the move, metaphorically as much as literally. Instead of using representational figures, optical artists employed geometrical shapes organized serially, creating an art that was demonstrative of movement and change. It materialized the rapid, almost immediate, biological movements of human perception—in turn, making slow, deliberative, and observable both epistemology itself 168

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and extant paradigm shifts in technology, from the machine to information. Capturing the layered nature of mobility at work here, critics such as Nathan Silver, writing about kinetic art and urbanism, as discussed in the previous chapter, named this fascination with motion in the arts the “Movement Movement.” In addition to Silver’s book review, a short article appeared under the same name in Time eleven months earlier in 1966. With an anonymous byline, the article vaunted the popularity of kinaesthetics across the arts, from cinema to television, optical painting to kinetic sculpture. The unnamed writer wrote about the “manifesto destiny” of the “kinetic craze,” capturing the extraordinary effects of optical art on culture at large while building on the public fervor of William Seitz’s curatorial enterprise at MoMA of one year earlier, the exhibition The Responsive Eye.8 The art of The Responsive Eye appealed to a mass audience. It opened February 25, 1965 and won celebrity status in the superlative achievement of being the most attended exhibition at MoMA in its history until that moment.9 The art was symmetrical, ordered, and non-objective, with works such as the German Wolfgang Ludwig’s Cinematic Painting (1964) and the Padua-based Gruppo N’s Unstable Perception (1963) bearing an abstraction of clearly delineated form that queried the logic and parameters of “perceptual movement.”10 With 123 works of art by ninety-eight artists from around the world, the show provided an overview of a global current in art. Far from eclectic, though, the art of The Responsive Eye resolutely pointed to the connections between the development of science and technology and transformations of perception, in some sense calling for a re-inscription of the freighted term “zeitgeist,” spirit of the time, as “biozeit”—the biotechnics of a shared epoch. The curator Seitz specified the show’s inclusivity and overview, stating that it was “concerned not with only one tendency, group or country but with groups and individuals representing tendencies from over fifteen countries.”11 Seitz distinguished the simulated motion catalyzed by these perceptual works of art in this grouping from that of kinetic art and the larger “Movement Movement,” singling out the biological significance of such “virtual” motion by way of a “psychological and physiological” loop of causality:  “Perceptual and kinetic art have an intertwined development that cannot be totally disentangled; nevertheless perceptual, optical, or “virtual” movement—which always 169

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exists in tension with factual immobility—is an experience of a different order. Carefully controlled static images have the power to elicit subjective responses that range from a quiet demand made on the eyes to distinguish almost invisible color and shape differences to arresting combinations that cause vision to react with spasmodic afterimages. The countless possibilities of these mysterious phenomena are almost as difficult to enumerate as their psychological and physiological causes are to determine.”12 Yet, vision as elicited by the eye implied for Seitz more than the single, hypostatized sensation. Resonating with the tickling optics of the taktisch—the visual as sensual, haptic, tactile and tactical—the opticality of Op Art referred to vision as a perceptual system, granting the sense more than itself by what Seitz called “expanded knowledge.”13 “We know how hard it is,” Seitz explains, “to distinguish between seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering.”14 With respect to Seitz’s exhibition, the term “optical” would be provisional at best. The art of The Responsive Eye was at once rooted in and extended beyond the sense of sight. Referencing implicitly the cybernetic nature of aesthesis, the work in The Responsive Eye was “the new perceptual art,” as Seitz put it in an article in Vogue.15 In like terms, the British artist Bridget Riley, whose black-and-white paintings Current (1964) and Hesitate (1964) were in the MoMA show, explained the medium in which she worked as neither optical nor painting, but perception itself. Riley said that her work emerged from careful “empirical analyses and syntheses,” in which, as she stated parenthetically, “neuro-physiological and psychological responses are inseparable.”16 In the black-and-white striations of her paintings, she sought to ignite the immediacy of the “event… an experience at one and the same time something known and something unknown.”17 Riley makes the homely unhomely, turns the familiar into the strange in order to dethrone consciousness from the top of the hierarchy of rational cognition. In the spirit of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Seitz made similar connections but through linking the evolution of technology and perception, connecting the mechanical functionalism of early modernist geometric abstraction to the optical art of 1965. The art of the machine age was giving way to an art of information and the emergent computer. Citing as building blocks the Bell Labs art-and-technology experimentations of engineer A.  Michael Noll, Seitz connected optical 170

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Image 55 Wolfgang Ludwig, Cinematic Painting, 1964, oil on composition board.

art to a future of information technology, viewing the rise of computer art as an affirmative potentiality. “Already used by composers of electronic music, the computer may also become an important medium of the painter, sculptor, and designer.”18 The new art unfolded around opticality spread across the body, eliciting a battery of responses more behavioral and interactive than heroic and expressive in the sense of Abstract 171

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Image 56 Gruppo N, Unstable Perception, 1963, mixed media.

Expressionism. “Without  question,” Seitz explains, “this is a truly new mode, less of expression than of effect—an art of stimulus and response.”19 While its formalism of geometric abstraction arguably might have struck a certain universalist appeal, it was above all Op Art’s vibrant presence in the American mass media that made it a spectacular phenomenon of sorts. That it created waves of populist response from a diverse audience is evidenced by Seitz’s article in Vogue. In a similar vein, The Responsive Eye was the subject of two short films intended for mass audiences, the television reportage of Mike Wallace for the CBS show Eye on New York and a documentary about the exhibition made by Brian De Palma, both made in 1965. In the television footage for CBS, Wallace interviews an array of luminaries, including artists Josef Albers, George Rickey and Benjamin Cunningham, the New York gallerist Dick Bellamy, and the scientist-cum-artist specializing in moiré patterns, Gerald Oster, overall striking a tenor of circumspection. Wallace frames the art of The Responsive Eye, the new art of the 172

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“modern movement,” as at once experimental and alienating, avant-garde and flippant. Interviewing museumgoers as they departed from the show, Wallace found a range of responses, some enthusiastic, others trepid. Certain viewers report to Wallace with great approbation, describing a love of the movement and interaction elicited by the art of the exhibition. Others are dubious. One young woman Wallace interviews claims the work is “not an artistic,” but “a tourist event.”20 The dissonant sounds of jazz drummer and percussionist Gordon “Specs” Powell accompany Wallace’s narration, further propounding the edgy avant-gardism of the art and Wallace’s wary bourgeois tone. By contrast, there is no common-sense journalist functioning as narrator in De Palma’s twenty-five-minute documentary on The Responsive Eye. Rather, the voices of museumgoers, museum officials, and members of the intelligentsia elide with sound and image, striking a slightly more analytical and academic feeling, especially in its inclusion of interviews with the curator Seitz and Gestalt psychologist Arnheim. Yet, similar to Wallace’s television piece, De Palma’s documentary opens with a variety of disembodied voices, not so much as an attempt to disparage the show but to capture its radical nature and avant-garde sensibility. “It’s a whole new way of looking,” a young male voice claims. An older dignified man chimes in, describing the exhibition as “sensationalism run amuck in an affluent society.” A young woman says with abandon, “wild things are happening!” Like the jazz music accompanying the CBS show, these voices establish the populist vanguardism of The Responsive Eye, telling of optical art’s public reception as renegade and other. In many ways, Arnheim’s presence in the documentary by De Palma serves as a linchpin of sorts, linking town and gown and connecting the diverse and porous urban world to the specialized and cloistered ivory tower. Arnheim bridges low and high, joining vastly disparate cultures: one of the everyday American culture of art as public spectacle with another of highly sophisticated European training in Gestalt psychology and art. In playing the role of expert academic consultant to curator Seitz, Arnheim also connects the MoMA show and the greater field of Op Art to the wetness of biology. Almost two decades before the exhibition, in the 1943 article “Gestalt and Art,” Arnheim makes clear his own roots in Theoretical Biology, citing the importance of:  “naturphilosophie and romanticism in 173

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Germany, which revived in a strongly emotional way the feeling of the wonderful secrets of the organism, the creative powers of natural forces as opposed to the detrimental effects of rationalism which praised the emancipation of the brain from vitality and from the elementary tasks of life as the highest achievement of culture. Gestalt theory has a kinship to certain poets and thinkers of the past, the nearest in time being Goethe.”21 Through theories of the Gestalt psychology, he brought this biological tradition to bear on The Responsive Eye. Having published his watershed book on Gestalt psychology and art, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, eleven years earlier, by 1965 Arnheim was an established authority on art and art history in particular, as both areas related to Gestalt psychology. Arnheim appears intermittently in the De Palma documentary, connecting his expertise to the art at hand as he explains the Gestalt principles of figure and ground, the retinal simulation of movement, and the role of the after-image in seeing, in particular by way of Alexander Liberman’s circular painting, Continuous on Red (1960). The film cuts to Seitz pointing to the sixteen-foot-long striped painting by Gene Davis, Black-Gray Beat (1964). Emphasizing the heightened rhythm of walking next to the painting, Seitz underscores the new interactivity of optical painting by telling the viewer, “What is most important is not what is going on in the canvas but what is happening to you the viewer.” It is only with Arnheim’s words on a new paradigm of authorship, however, that we get a sense of the greater political avant-gardism and the profound ontological shift at work in this art from the European perspective. As the camera pans from the Brazilian Almir Mavignier’s Concave-Convex Planes (1963) to Ludwig’s Cinematic Paintings, Arnheim explains that the work belongs to a category of art developing over the twentieth century called “anonymous art,” in that the “art looks like it was not done by anyone in particular.” Arnheim tells the viewer in so many words that this art shuns the conventional model of authorship at work in the preceding generation of artists. The current show of optical artwork, he explains, has to do with “a surrender of the human privilege of expressing meaning, which is a surrender to something outside of the human mind.” In this explanation, Arnheim sets in place the logic of exteriorization at work in optical art. It is an interactive and relational art that engages the viewer in the externalization of mind between object and subject. The space of import is in actuality created by a host of nodes 174

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in a system of perception. It is neither one nor the other, not the subject or the object, but the complex system of perception between percipient and thing unfolding within a matrix of environmental variables that is key, constituting a Gestalt of form in context. Moving beyond the dyad of subject and object, it is a biological rubric of interconnections and a matter of “wet perception.” Toward the end of De Palma’s documentary, the fashion designer and art collector Larry Aldrich appears. Standing in front of Riley’s Hesitate, he nonchalantly tells the interviewer, who remains off-camera and voiceless, that he had fabric created based on four paintings from his private collection, after canvases by Riley, the Hungarian-French artist Victor de Vasarely, and the two Ohio-based Anonima artists, Richard Anuszkiewicz and Julian Stanczak. Aldrich had their paintings reproduced as fabric for dress designs, changing the direction of the patterns in order to accommodate the flow and movement of the human body, likely without permission of the artists.22 Aldrich’s idea was ingenious from a marketplace standpoint, as it triggered a booming trend cycle in women’s clothing, furniture, and interior design. He explains his couture successes with enthusiasm, telling

Image 57 Almir Mavignier, Concave-Convex Planes, 1963, oil on canvas.

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the camera that he made “two evening dresses, one in red chiffon based on the Anuszkiewicz,” and another based on his Vasarely, “made out of a linen-y fabric in pleats. When you walk it is just dazzling!” While Aldrich sought to popularize his preferred art, both critics and artists alike thought his reproduction of the work in fabric to be vulgar. Riley and others found his brash will to profit from their art rude, transgressive, and plainly offensive. Yet, it was precisely Aldrich’s act of reproduction that unleashed the furies of celebrity, for it catalyzed Riley’s rapid turnaround from unknown and callow young artist to famous and sought-after painter and purveyor of fashionable form. This hasty twist of fortune for Riley became emblematic of all the good and bad possibilities of Op Art. For critics and historical interpreters, her overnight sensation, while lucrative, functions as the pivot by which Op Art became the bête noire of 1960s geometric abstraction, the root in many ways of its descent into the shadows of history. Aldrich’s actions and attitude seemed to distill the energies of ravenous American capitalism, as he led the way in the denegation of what was for the some 100 artists of The Responsive Eye, a serious interrogation of authorship, movement, form, and fabrication into the simple kitsch of “this year’s dress length.”23 Like many other artists in the show, Riley tried to distance herself from Op Art, even while the tsunami of press made her famous, increased the value of her work, and resulted in a sell-out exhibition of her paintings at the Feigen Gallery in New  York that same year.24 Riley found herself “bewildered,” angered, and even litigious, as she considered suing a dress manufacturer for illegally reproducing the black-and-white designs of her paintings.25 The reception of The Responsive Eye operated according to an invisible law of inversion in which the greater its popularity became among the wider public, the more it would fall into disrepute among the cognoscenti of the contemporary art world. John Canaday, the reigning art critic at The New York Times, offered a positive review of the exhibition, rare for critics at the time, bestowing a living sensibility on the new perceptual art, citing it as an “art that pulses, quivers, and fascinates.”26 Canaday parsed the origins of the work in Josef Albers’ philosophies and painting traceable to the Bauhaus, gave detailed information on the escalating prices of Vasarely’s work, and provided Op Art an imprimatur of legitimacy by connecting it 176

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to Cubism’s raison d’être of representing in two dimensions the actuality of movement which exists in three and four dimensions. The majority of art reviews, however, were negative. In The Nation, Max Kozloff demoted the energetic embracement of the show by fashionistas and the popular press to hullabaloo, describing the show as a “trend register and an unparalleled catalyst of attention.”27 Thomas Hess writes in Art News that Seitz was placating the public with simple art “you can hang… in the hall,” and that the public spectacle was but an instance of “glad-handing Society” in which the “Establishment had reacted so warmly to these images despite the twinges of vertigo and migraine such hospitality entails.”28 And doyenne Rosalind Krauss hammered home its weaknesses by accusing it of regurgitation. For Krauss, Op Art was simply a rehashing of painterly illusionism of centuries past, but another instance of trompe l’oeil. The exhibition was weak on ideas, while heavy on tabloid bravura, she claimed. Seitz’s essay in the catalog, Krauss deemed, was “hiding largely journalistic inclinations behind stated academic ones.”29 While shorn of anything new, the art of the exhibition was worthy of basic craft-oriented recognition. She threw the exhibition a proverbial bone, closing her evaluation with the assertion, “As in all trompe l’oeil production craftsmanship is extremely important. Op Art is nothing if not impeccably executed.”30 The general air of negativity created some fifty years ago in the art world’s treatment of The Responsive Eye continues to circulate around the topic of Op Art in the present, as evidenced in Pamela M. Lee’s article of 2001, “Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem.” Lee’s argument plays out among virtually the same variables at work in the concept of the haptic unconscious. Just as the haptic unconscious unfolds across a hybridized sensorium, including a tactile sense of vision, Lee argues for cross-sensual synapses in getting at the core of Op Art. Riley’s problem, after all, emerges from the “eye/body” overlay. Lee explains, “Op’s virtual fetish of visuality occasions a reading of the body under the conditions of a shifting technological culture.”31 While the haptic unconscious allows for a return to Op Art in order to better understand the biological roots of Gestalt theory and how it might topple biologically rooted hierarchies, Lee sees that very body as suppressed and thwarted by the technophobia—a fear of technological time—concomitant to technocracy.32 Though Lee reifies time and technology in an instance of 177

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what Mark B. N. Hansen calls technesis, a tendency to simplify all of technology according to a mythos of terror and homogenization, she nonetheless vividly revitalizes many critical voices of the time.33 Stephen Bann’s “Unity and Diversity in Kinetic Art” of 1966, as she cites, bears the most comprehensive and, I would add, fair reading of 1960s geometric abstraction. For Bann, Op Art is part of the greater international wave of kinetic art, which included the “visual research” projects of the Groupe Recherche d’Art Visuel based in Paris, kinetic-sound work of the Paris-based American Frank Malina, Plexiglas mobiles of Buenos Aires-based Italian Gregorio Vardanega and Argentine Martha Boto, reliefs by Paris-based Israeli Yaacov Agam, and the virtually moving paintings of Vasarely.34 In situating Op Art in this rich context, Bann forges a holistic reading of its technological underpinnings as a means to reveal life’s diverse temporalities. For Bann, Op Art and kinetic sculpture showed a world of experience within an expanded field of space and time. Rather than shutting down Op Art in the claustrophobia of conspiracy theories, Bann expands it by relating it to similar creative sensibilities across the world. It is clear, regardless of the origins and intentions of the artists as well as the writings of the critics, Op Art has itself been unilaterally reified, packaged, and stowed away in the annals of time. This is owed not solely to Lee’s more recent technophobic reading of the work, but, more precisely, to the rather common tendency to look only at one side of its reception in the world of mid-1960s art criticism. One article in particular survives into the present in only partial representation:  the seminal and eponymous Time magazine article by Borgzinner, “Op Art: Pictures that Attack the Eye.” Borgzinner is often ridiculed for naming the work “Op Art” and thereby missing its minutiae and complexities, homogenizing the global trend, making the art inert, and readying it for mass retail consumption. However, this opinion of the article overlooks the fact that Borgzinner’s coverage was not simply evenhanded but deep and broad. He reported the art movement’s reach across the globe, citing even if only briefly Op Art’s genesis in the “teamwork” of avant-garde groups and artists in Italy, Spain, Germany, Venezuela, and England, including Gruppo N, Gruppo T, Equipo 57, the Ulm -based Almir de Silva Mavignier, Venezuelan Jésus Raphael Soto, and British artist Bridget Riley. He does not underestimate or miss the intentions of this international wave of hard-edged geometrical 178

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abstract art. In pithy fashion, Borgzinner articulates well its central precepts, claiming that it is inspired by a “mechanical muse” in which the “artist becomes a computer programmer.”35 The English art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway construed both the hyperbole and critical consternation of the moment with aplomb. In “Notes on Op,” an expanded version of his lecture on The Responsive Eye at the Guggenheim Museum on April 11, 1965, Alloway jauntily situates Op  Art in its reverberant moment, connecting it to Pop Art and fashion, reciting the waves it created in Vogue and teen magazines. He at once analyzed and deposed the collective critical voice that gathered in response to the MoMA show. He read the largely sardonic and dismissive tone of criticism, from Thomas B.  Hess, Dore Ashton, and Barbara Rose, as a matter of bitterness from the elites over missed opportunities. Alloway explains, “What happened with Op Art is that it was made famous by all the magazines except the art journals. It was precipitated into the public realm in the United States without the customary procedure of filtering and preparation in specialized journals which accompanied earlier twentieth-century art movements.”36 That Op Art had been greeted and embraced so rapidly by the American marketplace made it, rather counterintuitively, feral: too wild and running amok in the free market, it could not be controlled by the official gatekeepers of contemporary art. Capitalism cast the geometric abstraction of the moment not so much as impenetrable but, somewhat confusingly, all too easy to understand yet at the same time all too unwieldy. The bombast of the market overwhelmed the critics, leaving their heads in a spin. This general inability to accept populist adoration—to see it only in terms of kitsch—resulted unfortunately in a five-decade burial of Op Art, its affiliates, and, most important, the rich wellspring of the work that is a wet, biological concern with perception.

III. Contextualizing Op Art and New Tendencies in Europe: The Political Nature of “Groups” and the Gestalt While the context of geometric abstraction in Europe was distinct from its incarnation in the hands of the American media and Museum of Modern Art in New York, I do not so much align the two movements but ensconce 179

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them as one united front of art. Two primary forces connected the greater optical art movement in Europe:  the coalescence of artists in group formation and perceptual theory, in particular the Gestalt and the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson.37 Forming between 1957 and 1961, such “groups”—including the French Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel [GRAV], Italian Gruppo N and Gruppo T, German Zero Group, Spanish Equipo 57, Dutch NUL, and the Ohio-based Anonima—abjured the vaunted figure of the heroic genius and master artist, maker of masterpieces, in favor of the laboratory collective modeled after scientific research. In this context, the term “research” was rhetorical and real. It recast the work and function of an artist in terms of the natural sciences and the scientist. As research, the subjective forces of moral absolutes—beauty, virtue, truth—and the expressive whim of an artist would no longer dictate the form of art. Rather, art would take shape by way of quasi-scientific inquiry into the processing of knowledge which is perception and, later, the paradigm of computer programming, a subject to which I return in greater detail in the next chapter. Computers, digital computing, and the politicized take on the Gestalt are absent from the American formation of this art as Op Art. My goal is to correct the annals of history by uniting the movement and by revealing that mid-century geometric abstraction was, on the whole, the necessary forerunner of the digital image in art. Perception and programming are thus connected, in that they offered a route to rethink the artist anew as a group instead of single individual, but also in shared epistemological parameters. That is to say, the art resulting from the group research of the early years of New Tendencies, which took form largely as optical and kinetic art, is the analog incarnation of the pursuit of computer programming in its later years. The flickering Gestalt of Op and early computer art both register a subcutaneous temporality—the a priori of knowing—that is the stuff of perception itself. It is a sense of unmeasureable time inherent to the haptic unconscious, similar to Henri Bergson’s “duration,” which emerged in this narrative with Wertheimer’s experiments with the tachistoscope, the discovery of the “persistence of vision,” and Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator; spread across Kepes’ interrogation of art and science in nine anthologies; and took form in terms of Whitehead’s “prehensions” within the lights of the city in Lynch’s 180

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moving urban image. Group formation thus worked as a Gestalt of sorts across various levels of the greater process of art. Artists organized as a living group to create an organismic sense of the artwork, which pulsated, shifted, and changed according to environment and human interaction. Its would-be biological qualities are equally its politics, insomuch as artists intended group formation also to thwart art’s commodity valuation by the market. Striking an economic political gong, “the ‘group’ was purposely chosen as a social unit of action so as to more effectively resist conditioning through mass society than would otherwise be possible for the individual.”38 In addition to renouncing the facile commodification of art through the cult of the individual, such artists used group formation to mediate the process of art. As a group effort, the conventional making of an object was hands-off, indeterminable to one creator. From this perspective, the fabrication of art became a matter of a holistic approach based on the science lab as well as the Gestalt, in that the resultant totality of form is more than the sum of its parts. The singling out of any one artist from the group would yield a misappropriation and misunderstanding of the artwork and ultimate disintegration of the greater system of art. As groups, the artists rejected the hands-on emotionally driven art of painterly abstraction, which in the European context took form as Tachisme, an art of irregular swathes of paint applied to canvases as subjective expression of existential dread. Its roots were French, etymologically speaking, in that the term is derived from tache, meaning “stain,” as well as philosophically speaking, as its vocabulary of expressive marks were also informed by the existentialist writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. It was an art of the 1940s, imbricated with World War II in its contents, timing, and presence of emotion. Many artists also tied such emotionalism to the propagandistic manipulations of wartime authoritarian regimes, including the machinations of the Third Reich and Italian National Socialism. The move to create art by way of the cool and calm logistics of the group was thus equally a move away from the atrocities of World War II into the benign hopes of the future. While the earliest group formation occurred in 1957 with the Zero Group in Germany and Equipo 57 in Spain, the rather all-inclusive New Tendencies movement started in 181

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Zagreb in 1961, with its first exhibition opening on August 3 at the Gallery for Contemporary Art. Twenty-nine artists from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia showed work that was largely neo-Constructivist in nature, an incarnation of clean lines, hard geometries, concrete, and plastic form.39 The exhibition was curated by Almir Mavignier, the Brazilian optical artist living in Ulm, Germany whose work would also be part of Seitz’s The Responsive Eye four years later. New Tendencies would have subsequently four more exhibitions in Zagreb: New Tendencies 2 in 1963, New Tendency 3 in 1965, Tendencies 4 in 1969, and Tendencies 5 in 1973. The decade of the 1960s saw much mutation in the will and intention of the art collective, beginning with its original formation as an international art movement devoted to perceptual art and visual research, followed by the move to greater cohesion with the turn from “tendencies” to “tendency,” then followed by a shift toward greater scientific objectification with the removal of “new” from the original name, which was followed finally by a succinct emphasis on communication and telecommunication with symposia devoted to information aesthetics and computer programming.40 The leading avant-garde voice of New Tendencies was Matko Mestrovic, a critic, art historian, and professor of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb.41 Mestrovic’s highly circulated untitled manifesto of 1963 provided the European perceptual art movement deep political roots within the historic avant-garde, writings on political economy, and the greater plenum of contemporary science. From the past, the New Tendencies movement carried forward “a tradition of pioneers of modern architecture, of Neoplasticists, of Bauhaus followers.”42 The historic avant-garde, the writings of Karl Marx, and perceptual theory created a triangulation of sources, giving shape to: “plastic-visual research, with the aim of determining the objective psychophysical bases of the plastic phenomenon and visual perception, in this way a priori excluding any possibility of including subjectivism, individualism, and romanticism, which burdened all traditional aesthetic systems.”43 Framing science as a matter of social progress, Mestrovic argues, “art should be subjected to a necessary scientization,” for science embodied the political economy of technological transformation in the context of a postwar world. While lost in the delivery and translation of the work to the United States, perceptual research and 182

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information were part of a political program attached to postwar geometric abstraction in the European context. Francois Molnar and Francois Morellet, members of the French research-based art collective GRAV and participants in The Responsive Eye and New Tendencies exhibitions, similarly connected the writings of Karl Marx and abstract art, with the caveat that there existed “progressive and non-progressive abstract art.”44 They were careful to distinguish the geometric abstraction of perceptual art, New Tendencies and Op, from the preceding strain of painterly abstraction, Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism. It is only through the former, the progressive form of abstraction, they argue, that “art would genuinely become ‘the highest pleasure man may offer himself ’ as Marx wished.”45 Similar to Mestrovic, Molnar and Morellet connected economic wellbeing and social dis-alienation to a new progressive abstract art forged according to the precepts of science. The progressive tendency in abstract art would be characterized by rational and logic fundamentals, confidence in progress, mistrust in the cult of individualism, scientific research, adaptation to architecture and town planning, modern industrial materials, and “belief in contemporary art and sudden qualitative change.”46 Echoed here is the idea that the Gestalt could describe the micrological distributed workings of perception as well as the macrological structure and function of social groups. The European perceptual artists viewed the Gestalt not simply in formal artistic terms but as a mode of political activism. Molnar and Morellet related “affective elements in perception,” the new countenance of subjectivity taking form in the wet rubric of biological aesthesis, to holistic “relationships between society and the visual work,” thereby making the Gestalt a political and social program of action as well.47 The interactivity of art offered one way to make this scalar leap, to ascribe the miniscule qualities of the perceptual Gestalt to the living, threeand four-dimensional realities of a social Gestalt. The interaction of people through art approximated the complex system of Gestalt perception, with the deliberative movements of bodies in space—arms reaching out and embracing, legs climbing up, and backs rubbing in crowded spaces—paralleling the rapid and minute cognitive responses of perception. In 1963, GRAV and New Tendencies artist Julio Le Parc gave conceptual form to this translation of the Gestalt in words and form, a text titled “Proposal for 183

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a Place of Action” and the team-driven total environment of Labyrinthe, the first purely collective artwork of GRAV.48 Le Parc explains the goal of the collective work: “The tendency we are advocating strives to open up the work, and to alter the work–spectator relationship. It asks the spectator to play a more active part… The end purpose of our work is to free people from their dependence—passivity—and from their usually individual leisure activities, and involve them in an activity that will trigger their positive qualities in a climate of communication and interaction.”49 The discourse on interactivity within art as an open field materialized in the construction of a long hallway with variously shaped rooms and interactive environments situated in a distorted enfilade called Labyrinth, which GRAV members built at the Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris in the context of the 1963 Biennale de Paris. The space was a winding corridor roughly nine feet wide, sixty-five feet long, and eight feet high. Artists installed a series of interactive props, sets, and landscapes in miniature in the warren of rooms with a greater concern for making material the full-body perception of the abstractions of space and time. The same year, GRAV artists participated in the Fourth Annual San Marino Biennale curated by Giulio Carlo Argan, a critic described by Mestrovic as “the best theoretician I  know.”50 Argan became a voice of interpretation and guidance for the greater New Tendencies movement, but with special connections to the Italian Gruppos. An Italian scholar who wrote about art, architecture, and urbanism, Argan was then president of the International Association of Art Critics and taught history of modern art in Rome.51 He similarly advocated that artists realize the Gestalt beyond the studio-laboratory as a political paradigm within social space. Between 1963 and 1965, Argan wrote influential essays in which he advocated a new form of collectivism called “Gestalt groups” and art as distributed experience integrated as a system of research. Tracing the “Gestalt trends” of the moment back to “the teachings of Moholy-Nagy and Albers at the Bauhaus,” Argan argued that the artist-as-individual must be replaced by the “Gestalt group.” Modified by the perceptual rubric of the Gestalt, group research activity would be wet, scientific, and biological in thrust. “Gestalt research,” Argan explains, “cannot be reduced to technological research because its goal is to verify… if and in what way rigorous, perceptive behaviour can be translated into operative procedure.”52 184

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Images 58–59 Plan and diagram of Julio Le Parc with members of GRAV, Labyrinthe, 1964–65.

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Images 58–59 (cont.)

With its wet moorings in perceptual psychology, Gestalt group formation gave material form to a space within the art–science–technology triad that was not reducible to any single artistic, scientific, or mechanical element. In short, the Gestalt ensured a holistic and organic use of technology within art. For Argan, the Gestalt group made artistic research a communal concern, barring it from incarnation in the “mass” form of techno-bureaucracy. In the spirit of Moholy-Nagy, the biological roots of the Gestalt instilled research with an organic footing obstructing dehumanization from technology. In keeping with the language of biofunctionalism, Argan aligned the Gestalt group with the “organic group,” which is at the same time a “community organized for creative goals.”53 Published in the exhibition catalog for the New Tendency 3 exhibition in 1965, Argan’s “Art as Research” expands the logic of group work while also 186

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connecting optical art to the Gestalt. Distancing optical art once again from technological reduction, Argan claims, “the art which we call optical or Gestalt art… visualizes the content or process of imagination that accompanies the development of abstract thought.”54 Group formation and the Gestalt functioned in tandem in the European context of optical art, instilling the movement with a socio-political foundation that was largely absent in the American context. It is understandable how Arnheim, a German Jew who emigrated from Europe to the United States because of the rise of fascism, would depoliticize any such practice of Gestalt psychology within art. Yet at the same time Arnheim’s thinking was at base formed by the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic and the coming diaspora resulting from World War II. While not overtly present in his take on the Gestalt, politics are otherwise palpable. In the context of a biological reading of Op Art and New Tendencies, the Gestalt configures itself communally following Argan’s thinking. In this framing, the Gestalt instantiates an ecological paradigm of geometric abstraction, which through matrices of perception links the individual to an exteriorized consciousness common to art and world, flora and fauna alike. Looking back onto the moment some thirty years later, William Seitz situates Op Art fully within its political moment, locating The Responsive Eye within the “ ‘explosive’ years of the sixties” which included “Vietnam… war protests beginning in Berkeley, and riots in Watts.”55 Politics arrives in many forms: as a matter of war, technology, economics, and the biology of perception. To round out fully the discussion of context, let us now turn to the interpreters of Op Art, New Tendencies, and kinetic art who wrote in the moment for an eager public concerned with the new contemporary perceptual art: Frank Popper, George Rickey, and Jack Burnham. Popper and Rickey respectively wrote surveys interpreting the new geometric forms in terms of the deeper passage of time. In Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Popper traced the artistic fascination with movement so prevalent in the middle of the decade back to the late nineteenth century, to Impressionism, connecting the latest incarnation of machine art to the formal disintegration of the picture plane some ninety years earlier.56 In Constructivism:  Origins and Evolution (1967), Rickey, who solemnly discusses the problem of “Op Art” as a name for perceptual art in Mike 187

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Wallace’s CBS television show on The Responsive Eye, situated the new geometric abstraction as heir to the early twentieth-century constructivism in Russia and The Netherlands. Yet, of the three formidable figures, it was Jack Burnham who discerned the full breadth of change required by the so-called “Movement Movement.” Burnham’s magisterial Beyond Modern Sculpture:  The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (1968) completely reconfigures the points of orientation for modern art, setting in place a new bevy of parameters for framing kinetic, optical/perceptual art, and the new geometric abstraction of the 1960s. Writing this history for Burnham would not simply be a matter of rearranging the already extant pieces within art history, connecting stylistic shifts from Impressionism to post-Impressionism and beyond to the technologies of mobility, but rather inscribing anew the history of twentieth-century art in relationship to the bellwether moments of science. His reading of the evolution of sculpture in the twentieth century includes integral shifts in formalism, such as the “vanishing base” of sculpture in the early part of the century, as well as the revolutionary and provocative framing that is “the biotic sources of modern sculpture.”57 Burnham teased out elements of bio-life and technogenesis within modern art, situating automata, robotics, kinetics, New Tendencies, cybernetics, and light-art as important forces in the story of modernism—all forms and elements that only now in the twenty-first century are deemed centrally important to the history of art. In this text, Burnham propounds the need to understand the greater perceptual art movement and New Tendencies in terms of the physics-based concept of the “field.” Rather than the paradigm of an inert subject casting her gaze upon an inert object, the art of movement and geometric abstraction necessitated a theory of the field in which art operates according to “a plenum of kinetic effects.”58 From one perceptual rubric to another, Burnham boldly pushed paradigms out and beyond, looking past the Gestalt to the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, explaining that the “art of New Tendency” has been driven by the “attempt… to produce the illusion of fluid patterns (either fixed or moving) by making only incremental differences between the units in a field or network”—a phenomenon, he duly noted, which had been well documented in the scientific writings of James J. Gibson.59 188

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IV. Perception in the Field: Out of the Gestalt Comes Ecological Psychology Burnham was one of several critical voices defining optical and kinetic art in the 1960s according to the “field,” a concept borrowed from physics by psychologists, artists, and art critics alike. We first confronted the idea of the field in the form of embryologist Conrad Waddington’s “phase space,” the multidimensional parameters and dynamic trajectories by which cells move toward genetic expression as part of the “epigenetic landscape.”60 These ideas united within the Gestalt writings of German psychologist Kurt Lewin, who gave shape to a combined field-phase space theory applicable to the living, breathing social spectrum, which would be instrumentalized by New Tendencies and optical artists through the interactive art of the 1960s.61 Lewin’s field-phase space led to his articulation of “psychological ecology” in 1943, the study of environmental effects identified as “nonpsychological data” in order to understand “the boundary conditions of the life of the individual or groups.”62 Like Gibson’s take on perception within the environment and ecological optics, which I explain below, Lewin’s theories based in part on the “field” were part of a shift in the profession toward understanding the subject as ecologically situated, enveloped in a complex system of personal as well as environmental relationships. Here the word “environment” encompasses a broad array of forces, including class, education, the built environment, and the collective political economy therein. From this perspective, the thinking of Lewin, Gibson, and the kinetic and optical artists of the 1960s marks not simply a turn toward Green consciousness but, more profoundly, an epigenetic turn within the cultural realm: an understanding of behavioral patterns and genetic expression in terms of art, culture, and the landscape broadly conceived. Within this rubric, field theory offered a way to mathematically calculate the movements of a complex system, whether in the minutiae of cellular activity within a living body or the bold moves of people interacting with kinetic and optical art in real time. While the art at hand is late modern, paintings and environments of the 1960s, the field theory in physics goes back to the early nineteenth century. Michael Faraday identified the force field in 1832, defining it in terms of electromagnetism as 189

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part of “a mathematical approximation of any discrete standing wave interactions.”63 The force field describes “action-at-a-distance of electrons and protons.”64 An ideal scientific complement to the “Movement Movement” in art during the 1960s, it is a continuous mathematical plotting of the effects of matter on matter in the space around it, which is a description of effects rather than causes. In the 1870s, James Clerk Maxwell, an important contributor to early cybernetic thinking and control theory, elaborated on Faraday’s discoveries, identifying the time-space laws of movement within electromagnetic fields through differential equations.65 Burnham connected Faraday and Maxwell’s theories to the art of New Tendencies, bringing together the ultimate “epistemological transition in physics… to the use of field configurations to show stable and unstable energy states” and kinetic artist Jesus-Raphael Soto’s prioritization of “the World of Relations.”66 Both register matter in motion, one through mathematical calculations, and the other by way of the fabrication of a field of experience in diverse three-dimensional materials. As a means of mathematically calculating the multidimensional effects of vectors moving across a space, field theory visualizes—makes concrete and understandable to the sensorium—the intricate and invisible material forces of movement. While elemental in the Gestalt as a means of capturing dynamism across and within a form, the “field” according to ecological psychology describes the plenum of perception in the world which is the greater environment encompassing a given percipient. The field nevertheless binds the two modes of perceptual analysis as a common identifier of space. Gestalt and ecological psychology are by no means binary opposites of one another, but overlapping, interrelated, and nested. In fact, Gibson, the father of ecological optics in particular, developed his theories of perception in part based on Gestalt psychology. Hence, out of the Gestalt comes ecological psychology. The “field” plays an important role in Arnheim’s theory of the Gestalt, lending it a sense of dynamism while also setting in relief its biological qualities as a complex system. Arnheim deployed the concept of the field in connecting “order” to the Gestalt, using it as a means to prove his argument that human perception is a matter of creating stability and regular form out of chaos. Yet order here is neither inert, nor simple, but rather 190

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a way to understand the function of a self-motivated, multipart system at work as it coalesces, de-coalesces, and coalesces again. Since the brain science of the mid-twentieth century was not yet able to prove his hypothesis, Arnheim turned to the science of physics. “The physicist tells us,” Arnheim explains, “that in any given ‘field’ the forces of which it consists will distribute themselves in such a way that the simplest, most regular, most symmetrical organization results.”67 For Arnheim, the natural attractors within field theory led automatically toward the amalgamation of balance and spatial organization in the process of perception. While Arnheim projected such balance onto the reading of art, his argument was not that the world itself was naturally ordered, but rather that humans perceive the world in orderly “good form,” in a series of gestalts, as a matter of science. Balance, order, and symmetry in the perceptual field are necessary to upright human movement without falling over. In order to walk, for example, the complex system that is the body in motion functions in an organized fashion: according to layers of perception, which include moving outward from the central nervous system, interoception, exteroception, and proprioception.68 I highlight Arnheim’s reading of perception as a matter of organization within the Gestalt in order to distinguish between his persistent reading of good art form as opposed to his understanding of the science of perception. While the former is subjective, a matter of projecting order onto a field of cultural production, the latter is objective, an analysis of the actual workings of the cybernetic system of the living body. Yet Arnheim’s sense of “order” in art and perception is wholly a matter of one significant and overlooked paradigm: the complex biological system. The nature of order as a living system becomes more palpable in Arnheim’s later development of his Gestalt-based aesthetic theory. Borrowing terminology from physics once again, he gave particular attention to the Second Law of Thermodynamics in his 1971 essay Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order. Field and Gestalt theories unite and become one, as Arnheim used language of the one to define the other:  “typical perceptual organization… continues to require field processes in which the parts are determined by the structure of the whole.”69 Qualifying the theory of entropy in its application to the realm of art, Arnheim arrived at a constructive theory of negentropy—building-up and 191

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an inevitable tendency toward making order—citing entropy as but itself another form of order making. “Although it may have come about by dissolution,” Arnheim explains, “it is actually a kind of order:”70 It follows that “the entropy principle defines order simply as an improbable arrangement of elements, regardless of whether the macro-shape of this arrangement is beautifully structured or most arbitrarily deformed; and it calls disorder the dissolution of such an improbable relationship [Arnheim’s emphases].”71 Entropy makes order by way of its connection to equilibrium. En route to balance and stability within any given system, the process of entropy creates information while dissipating energy. Arnheim rooted his entropy-based organizational logic in part on “information,” in particular arguing that the thesis of entropy, in which “total disorder provides a maximum of information,” was nothing but a “Babylonian muddle.”72 He borrowed from physics thus to indirectly criticize the information aesthetics of his contemporaries, the ideas of engineer Abraham Moles and mathematician Max Bense that were important to rising computer artists, a topic to which I return in greater detail in the final chapter. Information theory posed a problem in its aesthetic application, Arnheim argued, because it ignored the role of dynamic structures. In brief, “information theory” is a branch of mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science founded by Bell Labs researcher Claude E. Shannon. Closely related to cybernetics, it describes the flows of information within systems and feedback loops. The isomorphic yet motile structures of the Gestalt fall into a blind spot of sorts in the theory of entropy. To give greater specificity to art form, Arnheim thus introduced dynamic structures into the field. Arnheim’s diagram, titled Entropy versus (geometrical) Order, gives diagrammatic form to his Gestalt-based concept of “order.” Its shapes—a rectangle designating structural order partially covered by the amorphous fields of anabolic and catabolic forces, tension-reduction tendencies, and entropy—combine a vocabulary of art forms with fields of biological emergence. Arnheim brings together the orthogonal lines of a Mondrian painting and organismic shapes of a Jean Arp sculpture, which together approximate the workings of a dynamic, complex biological system. The structural order making a rectangle at the center constitutes something of an expanded nodal point within a system through which anabolic and catabolic vectors pass, by which energy is released, and the “tension reduction 192

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Image 60 Diagram of Entropy versus (geometrical) Order, from Rudolf Arnheim’s Entropy and Art.

tendency” of “ordering” manifests. The Gestalt of good form is not simply symmetrical and balanced in abeyance, but within a field of moving forces.73 It is, in short, morphogenetic and shape-shifting. “The structural theme,” Arnheim emphasizes, “must be conceived dynamically, as a pattern of forces, not an arrangement of static shapes.”74 Field theory in this instance embodies a unity of science, physics and the natural sciences working together to explain the logic of art as form and form-creation. Reiterating the above connections to naturphilosopie, Arnheim clearly echoes a biological wellspring of ideas, including those of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and Bertalanffy, who wrote the guiding text of theoretical biology, Modern Theories of Development:  An Introduction to Theoretical Biology (1933), which is the basis of General Systems Theory.75 In the European context, the artists of New Tendencies came in contact with “field theory” also through the criticism and philosophy of Italian Umberto Eco. At the interstices of text, kinetic and geometric abstraction in the arts, and a mutative medial landscape, Eco developed the idea of the “open work” of art given shape by the concept of the field. While working as senior editor of non-fiction at a publishing house in Milan, Eco became involved with the avant-garde optical and kinetic art collective Gruppo T 193

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based in Milan, which showed with New Tendencies.76 Their practices alerted Eco to the ongoing transformation of the work of art, from inert object to an unbound field of moving forces. Eco based the “poetics of the open work” on field theory as it materialized in this work as well as the experimental musical compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Henri Pousseur, and Pierre Boulez, the writings of Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Franz Kafka, plays of Bertolt Brecht, and the kinetic art of Alexander Calder.77 The “work” as an open field cast art as infinitely diverse and alive:  “When a work offers a multitude of intentions, a plurality of meaning, and above all a wide variety of different ways of being understood and appreciated, then under these conditions we can only conclude that it is of vital interest and that it is a pure expression of personality.”78 Far from subscribing to the “death of form,” Eco identified “form as a field of possibilities,” art as a field of action and interaction.79 Echoing the ideas of Paris-based Julio Le Parc’s “Proposal for a Place of Action,” Eco’s open work was premised on an interactive subject—the viewer, reader, player, and audience—roving with an open field of vectors. She does not so much complete the work as catalyze its life as ongoing motion and continual becoming. While far afield geographically, the Ohio-based New Tendencies artists known as the Anonima Group, including Ernst Benkert, Frank Hewitt, and Ed Mieczkowski, arrived at a similar field concept in their art practices. As experts of geometric abstraction who also showed in The Responsive Eye, they came to the field concept, however, by way of the ecological psychology of James J. Gibson.80 While a Princeton-trained American psychologist, Gibson’s thinking on ecological perception was rooted in the same German wellspring of Gestalt theory that had given ballast to Arnheim’s work. As a professor at Smith College in the 1940s, Gibson became the colleague and friend of Kurt Koffka, an émigré who was a co-founder of Gestalt psychology in Berlin, along with Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler, Arnheim’s mentors in the 1920s.81 Gibson carefully read Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935), eventually building out from Koffka’s thinking in the elaboration of his “ground theory of space perception.”82 In particular, Koffka’s rethinking of “stimulus” as interactive gave impetus to Gibson’s formation of “affordances.” Koffka’s paradigm of stimulus, which situated “real objects in functional relation to a perceiving and acting organism,” became the 194

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kernel of Gibson’s relational functionalism of objects, mediums, and organisms that is the idea of affordance.83 Developed incrementally throughout his career, Gibson’s “affordance” describes in general terms “reciprocity between an organism and its environment.”84 More precisely, an affordance is what any object, medium, or other living creature offers another living creature in terms of function. The medium of “air affords breathing, more exactly, respiration.”85 The substance of “water affords drinking.”86 While objects afford a diversity of uses, depending on shape and size, “the richest and most elaborate affordances of the environment are provided by animals and, for us, other people.”87 Unlike Gestalt thinking, the theory of affordances, borne of Gibson’s ecological psychology, instills perception with a functionalism that literally extends beyond the sense of vision into the realm of the body interacting with a given environment. Where Gibson further disagreed with Gestaltists, and the foregrounding history of sensationalism for that matter, was in the conceptualization of epistemology in terms of the senses, the importance of discrete form, and sensory organization. Gibson argued against perception conceived as passive process of ratiocination in which the raw matter of sensations is interpreted by a higher register of the mind.88 Gibson rejected the causal trajectory that separated sensations from perception and the idea that the “senses receive fragmented or incomplete information about the world that must be enriched by mental processing.”89 Discarding the age-old idea that perception is a process of percepts emanating from objects impressing themselves passively on the human sensorium, which in turn create “retinal images,” he established a completely new way of understanding perception in terms of the active “picking up” of information by way of the full gamut of senses and a body moving through textured plots of space within an ecology of invariants and related fields. Gibson’s thinking was often met with befuddlement because it was not accretive, building on extant theories, but virtually a tabula rasa in sensibility. He rejected the conventions of sensationalism whole cloth in favor of an environment-centered perspective of individual perception. He replaced the hypostatized percipient of the older ways of thinking about perception with the embedded subject-as-vector moving within an environment of shifting relations. The environmental envelope was as important, if not 195

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more so, for understanding perception of the individual. With respect to the Gestaltists in particular, he “accepted and adapted the idea that the most basic problems of visual perception were those regarding the experience of the three-dimensional world, not the flat geometric visual field.”90 Yet Gestaltists found his theories wanting in that an ecological approach ignored the role of “spontaneous sensory organization” in favor of an overall spatial approach.91 Aviation technology functioned prosthetically in Gibson’s research, extending his understanding of perception through mechanical movement within a mutating field. Resonating with Norbert Wiener’s “cybernetics,” based on the metaphor of a fighter pilot dropping a bomb during World War II, Gibson’s theory of ecological perception was rooted in observing aviators while in flight during his stint as researcher for the offices of aviation psychology during World War II.92 In The Perception of the Visual World (1950), he summarized in detail his discoveries of a “ground theory” while working with pilots. The details of flying—ascending, maintaining balance through space while in motion, and descending—were not simply a matter of sensations interpreted by perception or a percipient focusing on a single form, but a matter of the play between pilot and environment as “a continuous surface or array of adjoining surfaces.”93 Spaces, surfaces, and edges defined the perceptual plenum, which was a matter of interconnected fields within the “world” rather than simply within one field of vision. The goal of ecological psychology was not to understand perception as an image or picture but rather as a process of movement within the greater global environment. Gibson further developed his ecological understanding by way of the “system” in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). Working beyond its inception as a disparate unit, the senses functioned as part of “perceptual systems,” which “[include] nerve centers at various levels up to the brain… [they] are ways of seeking and extracting information about the environment from the flowing array of ambient energy.”94 Similar to the haptic unconscious, ecological perception unfolds not simply a priori but independent of putative rational consciousness. “The senses can obtain information about objects in the world without the intervention of an intellectual process,” Gibson explains, “as they operate as perceptual systems.”95 Framing the activity of the senses systematically obviated the need for rational consciousness within the process of perception. The 196

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senses conceived as perceptual systems grants the process of knowing an experiential automaticity useful to art as an environment of collaborative zones. Providing scientific reinforcement of the aesthetic theories of interactive art central to optical art and New Tendencies, Gibson described the senses as actively involved in the perceptual field, seeking information as would tentacles or feelers. Gibson argued that the shift to a paradigm of the “senses” as “active systems” changed how we qualitatively understand perception.96 In another instance of the “dethroning of consciousness,” perceiving becomes “classified by modes of activity not by modes of conscious quality.”97 Hierarchical consciousness is replaced by action writ large unfolding within the complex system of phase space that is itself the realm of ecological perception. From within this scheme, “ecological optics” further reinforced the moving interconnections between elements enabled by the illumination of space; it is a matter of light reflecting off surfaces, refracting through apertures, and giving shape to the textured space of an unfolding situation. The theory of ecological optics, within Gibson’s all-encompassing theory of psychology, describes how the environment structures ambient light.98 The shifts in psychological theory of the mid-twentieth century happened in tandem with the haptic unconscious. In showing how “out of the Gestalt comes ecological psychology,” I  have revealed how the distributed energies of the “image” at work in the haptic unconscious extend beyond the art-object into the greater context of ecology. The distributed image of optical and kinetic art is a matter of humans interacting with art not as a disparate thing but as a set of elements within a field of vectors. In like terms, the bounds of the image break open and move beyond the field to become a series of interconnected grounds, textures, and fields in unbound space. Ecological psychology does not simply approximate the distributed image of Paul Baran, but rather expands the metaphor beyond the form of the Gestalt to the environment of the world.

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5 The Digital Image in Art The Generative Turn, Computational and Biological

I. Introduction: Generative Aesthetics and the Overlooked Periodicity of Complexism In this final chapter, the digital image within art comes to full efflorescence with the theory of the haptic unconscious unfolding by way of the “generative.” In the most basic sense of the term, the generative simply refers to how something grows, reproduces, and recreates itself.1 While a biological term, it can describe the evolution and expansion of the nonliving as well. The word “generative” is part of the digital vernacular of contemporary technology. In this context, it simply refers to software that develops autonomously and self-actualizes. An important distinction must be made here. If the energies of growth within complex living systems are autopoetic, always self-generating and self-organizing, those within artificial complex systems transform and grow through similarly self-organizing algorithmic parameters that are, however, created by humans. The significance of the generative in the history of the haptic unconscious is its fertile location between the artificial and living, computational and biological.2 The word appears as an explicit concern in the writings of German physicist and philosopher of aesthetics Max Bense in the 1950s and, in the following decade, it becomes central to the art practice of his student, the German computer scientist and artist 198

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The Digital Image in Art

Georg Nees, an originator of the two-dimensional digital image in the early 1960s.3 Focusing roughly on the ten years of artistic development from 1962 to 1972, I enlarge the generative to include the performances of the New York based artist-engineer group, Experiments in Art and Technology [EAT], and the urban light images and civic art practice of György Kepes. From this perspective, the generative refers to life and light images given shape by the distributed energies of digital coding and electricity across the decade of the 1960s: from the binary programming that went into the creation of two-dimensional images printed by way of the ZUSE Graphomat Z64, a flatbed drawing machine used by Nees and Frieder Nake, to the memory images created by wireless technologies and engineer-and-artist performances of EAT, to the wet cognitive maps made from the urban light projects of Kepes. The concept of the generative brings this story full circle. In yet another instance of stitching together the parts into a whole, we return to Kepes’ art-and-science hybrids as well as to his subtle though central role in the development of the light image as a cognitive map of the city. The spatio-temporality of “distribution” within the dispersed image is again central. In each section below, the digital image is described according to its distributed nature: first, as a matter of artists entering code into a computer which is then translated via a printing machine into the creation of prints of abstract geometric forms; second, as performance artists and engineers collaborating via physical movement, wireless transmitters, and live video feeds; and third, as curated light art at the civic scale of the city foreshadowing the late-twentieth century urban art festivals known as Nuit Blanche. Within each of these examples, there is a cyborgian human–machine interface, which leaves its trace in the form of distributed “artificial art” [künstliche Kunst]—the digital image—bearing a living, generative logic.4 The generative teases out a certain tension that has been at work throughout the story’s telling. And here I  refer to the dialectical pressures forged between the technological and scientific, in particular as these two modes of inquiry and creativity function to convey biological and non-biological complex systems. The digital image in art, whether a matter of engineering prowess or biological theory, whether it is a printed picture or event, is fundamentally a complex system congealed as abstract art form. I  describe its systematic nature according to three registers:  as 199

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a closed loop within the first section devoted to the digital drawings of A. Michael Noll, Nees, and Nake; as an open loop in the second focusing on EAT; and a hybrid loop that oscillates between openness and closure within the final section on Kepes’ urban light projects. This final chapter looks not simply to the way in which artificial life approximates the living, but more precisely to the way the complex systems of living matter are better understood, more clearly set in relief, by way of computational thinking and the computer. The generative defines the logic of growth and extension within the patterns and laws of the living as well as the systems and algorithms of the computer. Brought into the realm of the aesthetic, the generative refers to an art form given shape foremost by a set of rules created by an artist. The rules, while algorithmic, are not limited to the digital alone. They can be high- or low-tech, digital or analog. They are simply the diktats made by an artist, which, in repetition, create a work of art. It lends to the “work” a sense of programmatic automaticity, distancing it from gestural and hands-on expression. It amounts to a kind of “deskilling” of the work of art: a performative removal of craft in order to not simply give authorial power over to the machine, but in so doing to garner a new paradigm of authorship.5 It is similar to the author-maker given shape by the research paradigm of New Tendencies in the last chapter; with the added biological process of autopoesis, the lifelike ability to self-create. Henry R. Clauser defines the generative paradigm within the making of painted images in the following way:  “The art object is created by following a set of self-organizing principles. More specifically, the generative means consist of a set of ordered relationships or functions between the spatial elements and between colors composing the picture. The painting is the unfolding of this space-time ordering principle. Its content consists not of privately devised shapes and images but rather is the creation of the structuring process.”6 The principles of self-organization, or autopoesis, give authorship a new set of biological purviews, ensconcing the work, maker, and audience within a network of relations and information flows that is the living complex system itself. We thus return to the question of information brought to bear in the last chapter by Rudolf Arnheim. In this chapter, we move out from the ideas of Arnheim to those of premier information theorist and Bell Labs creative Claude Shannon, whose 200

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thinking circulates through the ideas of Bense and French physicist and acoustical engineer Abraham Moles.7 While Bense and Moles drove much of the thinking on information theory at work modeling the art and exhibitions of New Tendencies, a banner under which Noll, Nees, and Nake showed their work, it is by way of the writings of the Austrian physicist Heinz Von Foerster that we connect information theory, computation, and biology. While Foerster’s ideas were building blocks in Bense’s mid-century generative aesthetics, Foerster is best known today as the originator of second-order cybernetics, a “cybernetics of cybernetics,” or what Francisco Varela called “recursive mechanisms in cognitive systems.”8 The recursion here amounts to systematic self-reflexivity:  a sense of criticality given shape by the fact that second-order cybernetics account for the behavior of the agent from within the cybernetic system rather than from without. This marks a pointed departure from original cybernetics, given shape at the Macy Conferences in New York City, 1941–60, of which Foerster was a core participant member.9 While first-order cybernetics articulated the system according to a viewer looking in from a stable hypothetical Archimedean Point, Foerster’s second-order cybernetics collapses that distance and folds it inward, creating a paradigm of the artist-agent as analyzer from within the cybernetic system. Kepes showcased Foerster’s recursive philosophy on the environment as the greater cybernetic container of all cybernetic systems, including his essay “From Stimulus to Symbol: The Economy of Biological Computation” in a volume of the Vision + Value Series published in 1965.10 Foerster established a link between the computational and biological, arguing for a shift from organismic to environmental calculations, and for considering the environment as itself a giant living physiology. The environment framed as a self-reflexive cybernetic system is readable in terms of its behavior, which in turn, is calculable according to “two levels of computation”: “First, computation on the grand scale of evolutionary differentiation which incorporates the environmental constraints into the structure of those networks which, on the second level, compute within the limits of their structure spatiotemporal quantities of useful universal parameters.”11 From these two levels of accounting, Foerster set in place ways to calculate the complexities of the living environment both from the macrological 201

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and the micrological points of view. “Clearly,” he argues, “the first level refers to the species, the second to the specimen.”12 From Foerster’s biological take on artificial and living systems, Bense derived his thinking on self-organization within generative aesthetics.13 Following a similar logic, we home in closer, moving from the macroto the micro-, in order to scrutinize the context of the contemporary art world into which emerged the distributed digital image borne upon generative aesthetics. It was the epoch of “dematerialization,” a time when the once hallowed object of art—albeit “the work” or “the masterpiece,” the object understood as a divine collectable and commodity – metaphorically disaggregated in various ways. The valuable and taste-making object deliquesced into happenings, political events, kinetic form, analog and digital machines, research, information, and algorithmic code, or what Claude Shannon called “bits,” an abbreviation of “binary digits.”14 While art’s disappearing act unfolded according to several critical accounts, the one that survives most hardily into the present is simply the “dematerialization of art,” eponymously derived from Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler’s 1967 article of the same title.15 The phrase has become distinctly associated with conceptual art and the object giving way to language, whether as words printed on a canvas, painted on a wall, or textually announced as part of the rise of cultural studies in the form of “theory.” Critics operating outside of the bell jar of New  York-based Minimalism and Conceptualism described it in various other terms, expanding the putative disappearance of art beyond the rational pretext of Wittgensteinian language games to the “sensory politics” of “tactile dematerialization.”16 Typical of the haptic unconscious, these other explanations of “disappearance” involved a technological and interactive body borne upon the machine. Art critic John Chandler developed his ideas on the dissipation of the art-object in an omnibus review titled “Art in the Electric Age,” which focused on three exhibitions in 1968 of art made from both extant and emerging technology:  Cybernetic Serendipity curated by Jasia Reichart at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age curated by Pontus Hultén at MoMA, and Some More Beginnings curated by members of EAT at the Brooklyn Museum. Chandler told of the role of Claude Shannon’s information theory and Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics in the rise of kinetic, optical, and information art, 202

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tracing the new genre of “electric” art back to Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator (1921–30). Chandler looked to Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic art machine to explain so-called dematerialization in terms of technology and functional effect. Works like this, he argues, were “conceived not so much as things to be looked at as things which interact with their surrounding in such a way that the art is largely in what the object does to it.”17 While rooted in the ideas of biofunctionalism’s pioneering figure, the vaporization of art in the late 1960s was informed by contemporary ideas of entropy and information theory, both of which marked a shift away from static, inherent meaning to dynamic, external structures and relations. French art historian and critic Frank Popper described art’s significant transfiguration in terms of “virtualization,” and located its origins in the kinetic and op art of figures such as George Rickey, Frank Malina, Nicholas Schöffer, GRAV, Yaacov Agam, Jesus-Rafael Soto, and Victor Vasarely.18 Linking social activism to rising digital technology, Popper traced virtualization from this field of invention through action and participatory art in order to arrive at full digital immersion by the end of the twentieth century.19 Influenced by the openness of the work of art described by Umberto Eco’s writing, this international group of artists gave rise to the virtual, which for Popper would come to full fruition in the 1980s. Writing in the late 1960s, Jack Burnham (critic, art historian, and resident artist at Kepes’ Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT), described art’s disappearance in terms of “systems aesthetics” and “real time systems.”20 Through systems thinking, Burnham called upon the art world to eschew the object in order to rethink art as a node of energy within a pattern of distributed relations. Curator of another seminal art-and-technology exhibition, Software—Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970, Burnham described the rise of this new art in which the form and material of the work were secondary to its interpersonal and environmental effects within complex systems. Influenced by the Austrian theoretical biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Burnham found the art of concepts and “superscientific culture” to be no longer a matter of emotionally moving composition and beautiful form, but of the full gamut of behavioral responses, interactivity, and interconnection between people.21 Art’s systematic existence would itself be a matter of recursion; from this perspective it is at once macrologically part of 203

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and micrologically an instance of a biological complex system. Culling thoughts from information theory and cybernetics, Burnham defined a new sense of art in which flows of data replace the classical ownership of objects. In an art economy of ideas, Burnham looked to cybernetic systems to locate dynamic value and meaning in works of art such as Hans Haacke’s Chicken Hatching (1969) and Dennis Oppenheim’s September Wheat Project (1969), both of which deploy the material of complex living systems. With no object to trade, these art works are a matter of mental images, the electricity of brain synapses, and experiments in thinking and information exchange; they tell of art as a living, changing, and evanescent experience. These iterations of “dematerialization” no doubt conjure a sense of art different from the past. Art is a message rather than a thing: it is a matter of information flows rather than the delectation of beautiful objects. Until now, there has been one primary mode of understanding dematerialization in contemporary art. Language-driven, it is more a result of poststructuralist readings of the past than of the past itself, and it constitutes yet another instance of the postmodern misreading of late modernism. If language dominated the reading of conceptualist dematerialization in the 1960s from the postmodernist perspective, then information writ large was its actual engine in what I would like to call “non-stop modernism.” In sum, non-stop modernism names all of media art, its past and present materialization included. The other modes of disappearance from that pivotal moment in the late 1960s—the cybernetic, information theory-oriented, virtualization, and systems-driven—constitute a forgotten means to think through art’s transfiguration; one that, like Op Art and New Tendencies, has fallen into a blind spot of sorts. This forgotten rubric of thinking and art constitutes a form of what Philip Galanter calls “complexism,” which offers another way to get at non-stop modernism.22 Complexism teases out contemporary periodicity beyond postmodernism while connecting back to modernism. Periodicity is a term referencing the logic of the cultural naming of a given epoch—or how culture identifies its own moment in terms of creative production and political economy.23 Something like a modernism that never ended, complexism gets past the current dead-end repetition of avant-garde shock, transgression, nihilism, and irony that are together the essence of postmodernism, while 204

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retrieving useful elements such as holism, the Gestalt, biofunctionalism, and information theory of modernism. This story is, in fact, about non-stop modernism, or complexism unfolding. Rooted in biology and complexity science, Galanter’s complexism approaches thinking in terms of the equilibrium of open and closed autopoetic systems, which are both biological and computational in nature. To function here means to live within a dynamic and non-linear hierarchy of mutual concerns. Uniting modernism’s absolutism with postmodernism’s relativity, complexism is thus a matter of coursing distributed relations. Out of modernism’s progress and postmodernism’s circulation come emergence and co-evolution. Moving beyond the paragon of the author through the meat of the text, complexism gives rise to generative processes in the arts. Yet, instead of it existing only today, in a period we might consider to be after postmodernism, I would like to argue for its elastic periodicity: complexism is at once contemporary and modern, more an ongoing evolution of modernism than any such end, after, or beyond. Complexism is ingrained in an ability to better understand complex biological systems because of ever improving computational tools. It describes how we are able to prove the accuracy of old scientific hunches— concerning genetics, epigenetics and morphogenesis, for example—by way of computation, both within and without an artistic context. Following scientific processes, how we can determine today the significance of the once lost biofunctional modernism that is the crux of the haptic unconscious and the basis of this book? From this perspective, modern biofunctionalism is no longer out of date because of postmodern theories of the “hegemony of vision” and related associations to capitalism and the war machine. Rather, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes’ haptic take on the visual is ever more resonant as we now can understand that the sense of sight they were getting at was part of a Gestalt of relations, a scientific holism made up of diverse matter, and, more precisely, art considered as a biological complex system. The haptic unconscious is better discernible now because of a host of philosophical concepts within contemporary critical theory—affectivity, embodiment, and emergence—which have been made palpable by way of computation. Complexism shows modern hypotheses in biological and evolutionary science—the imaginings of scientific induction and intuition—to be true 205

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Image 61 Philip Galanter, diagram of Complexism, courtesy of Philip Galanter.

by way of contemporary technology. In the telling of the haptic unconscious, the generative capabilities of computation double back to set in relief the complex-systems thinking that was at work in the writings of Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, Arnheim, Bense, Moles, and Foerster, among many others, and in the creation of the digital image within art, circa 1962.

II. A. Michael Noll, Georg Nees, and Frieder Nake: The Closed Loop of the Digital Image in Art Much like preceding revolutionary technologies, such as photography, film, and the telephone, the digital image in art arose simultaneously within different countries.24 Three art exhibitions of digital images took place in 1965, two in Stuttgart, Germany and one in New  York City. First, the digital drawings of Georg Nees were the subject of Georg Nees:  Generative Computergrafik, an exhibition of four days, February 14–19, at the Studiengalerie des Studium Generale [Study Gallery of the General Studies Program] at the University of Stuttgart.25 The following April, A.  Michael Noll showed digital prints in a similar vocabulary of form with the random-dot print stereograms of the Hungarian artist Bela Julesz in an exhibition, Computer Generated Images, at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York.26 Frieder Nake showed an analogous strain of digital 206

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prints with Nees at the Galerie Wendelin Niedlich also in Stuttgart later that year, in November of 1965.27 While Nees and Nake knew each other in Stuttgart, both having arrived at generative art in part by way of the influences of shared mentor Max Bense, Noll had been working on his own in the context of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Noll became well acquainted with the work of Nees or Nake later in the decade, when the three artists showed work in the information exhibition that accompanied the colloquy tendencies 4, “Computers and Visual Research,” at the Center for Culture and Information in Zagreb, August 2–8, 1968.28 Because of the digital algorithms at work in each artistic process, the mid-1960s work of Noll, Nees, and Nake is remarkably similar. So many displays of stoic stochastic markings, the prints show sweeping lines, repetitive squares, and overlapping rectangles, each of which denotes a reinvention of disegno, the Renaissance tradition of drawing. Other than the use of a pencil to calculate numbers or simply the hand-off of a punch card, however, the handiwork of the human grasp and touch is negligible here. The hand functions to relay the message of art in the creation of an object, the digital drawing. I identify these first digital images in art as instances of “closed loops” because, while generative and transforming according to an autopoetic logic, their creation manifests with closure uniformly on two-dimensional paper as an end-product after beginning as code. While the print design unfolds in a quasi-biological fashion, as though indexing the evolution of information, it lives not as a protean image in the mind of the artist or viewer as a memory of an event, but as an image-object that is the physical print. Noll created his first digital computer art in the summer of 1962, while working at the Bell Labs.29 Trained as an electrical engineer, Noll had been hired that year as a researcher at the Bell Labs focusing on the telephone, perception, and psychology. In particular, Noll researched “the perceptual effects of telephone signal quality and the investigation of new methods to determine the pitch of human speech.”30 Noll also began to experiment with the making of digital images. Using an IBM 7090 digital computer and Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm printer, Noll created a series of eight patterns, some of which would be shown in galleries under new titles 207

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Image 62 Georg Nees, “23-Ecke,” 1964, ink on paper.

as works of art.31 In 1962, Noll referred to them as “interesting and novel patterns;” three years later, and after an invitation from friend and Bell Labs colleague Julesz to show his work at the Howard Wise Gallery, engineer Noll recognized them as art.32 Without using any of the philosophical language that would inform the work of Nees and Nake, Noll arrived at artistic 208

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Image 63 A. Michael Noll, Gaussian Quadratic, 1965, ink on paper, courtesy of A. Michael Noll.

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Image 64 Frieder Nake, Polygon Drawing, 1965, ink on paper, courtesy of Frieder Nake.

creation from straightforward John Dewey-esque experience. For Nees and Nake, the process was, while equally action-oriented, a matter of theoretical lucubration. Rooted in a combination of philosophy and mathematics, the generative aesthetics of Bense and information theory of Moles were central to their tasks. Noll worked more like a scientist in a laboratory, deducing possibility and then producing factual evidence. “To produce a pattern,” Noll writes in the Bell Labs memorandum, “it is first necessary to formulate a means of determining the array of points. The array actually consists of pairs of x-axis and y-axis coordinates listed in the order in which they are to be plotted.”33 Problems of a litigious nature concerning authorship arose from the cleft between pattern making and art, as the 1962 memorandum Noll 210

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created would suggest origin and ownership by AT&T, the corporation under which Noll completed the research for making the pictures. However, once the work became officially “art,” and was shown within the context of the unusually forward-looking and investigational Howard Wise Gallery, Noll emerged as an artist-individual. No longer simply an electrical engineer-cum-bricoleur, Noll made disinterested abstract form considered “art” within the world of contemporary art. AT&T attempted to stop the exhibition, claiming ownership of Noll’s portfolio of drawings, which resulted, in turn, in Wise threatening a lawsuit and Noll’s stamping each drawing with the imprint of “copyright” alongside his initials. Created in 1962, the drawings were copyrighted in 1965, when shown at the Howard Wise Gallery. This brief but taxing interlude foreshadows not simply debates over appropriation and authorship within the digital world to come, but of fundamental definition. What constitutes a work of art on the Internet today, especially in light of its ability to destroy all senses of origin, originality, and authorship? When and how does something digital become a work of art? When is someone a legitimate digital artist? And, is gaming, for example, a legitimate genre of art? While Noll never attended art school, he considered his work to be truly “art” by the middle of the decade, claiming inspiration from Bridget Riley’s optical painting Current (1964). For Noll, though, the patterns and striations of Op Art, as in the paintings by Riley, were not indices of thinking and the imagination, but rather basic technical markings, which might be better—more efficiently—rendered via a computer. “Many ‘op art’ paintings are very regular and mathematical in design,” Noll claimed.34 “The computer is extremely adept at constructing purely mathematical pictures… the drudgery of drawing or painting complex designs such as those in moiré patterns can be easily done by the machine.”35 Painting from this perspective is tedious hard labor—and not a matter of processing the complexity of the world or wading through the grey ambiguities of life. Further nesting him within the convention of art, Noll based his drawing Computer Composition With Lines (1964) on Piet Mondrian’s Composition With Lines (1917). Such claims of allegiance are audacious and hubristic. Noll’s 1966 essay “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Lines’ (1917) and a Computer-Generated 211

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Picture” put art to the Turing Test, a hypothetical trial named after Alan Turing assessing the validity of computer intelligence when measured against human aptitude. Noll’s scholarly paper mentions the random and “subjective” testing of a group of individuals asked to compare a photographic reproduction of Mondrian’s painting to Noll’s similar configuration of computer-generated lines. All 100 subjects questioned “had education beyond grade school, ranging from high school to post-doctoral and all but two were employees of Bell Telephone Laboratories.”36 According to Noll, 59 percent of those surveyed preferred the computer picture to the Mondrian painting.37 Noll’s thinking expressed here is tantamount to another instance of the “dematerialization of the work of art,” which, though not centrally connected to complexism, emerges directly out of early computational science. There is a strain of dematerialization at work here insomuch as Noll received the Dutch avant-gardist’s work not as a three-dimensional object but simply as a pattern hypostatized in space. Noll’s study was indeed “subjective,” far from scientific, because it ignored the specific nature of Mondrian’s patterns—that they were embodied in paint. Rather than horizontal and vertical lines mise en abyme, they were the physical incarnation of black-and-white lines made from oil paint applied with a paintbrush onto a canvas that is a perfect square (108  cm x 108  cm) wrapped on a wooden stretcher that is fully physical in its objecthood, visually as well as in terms of olfactory presence. It smells ever so faintly of paint and cracks with time. With respect to history, the painting was revolutionary in 1917 in its radical abstraction of form. All of this goes unaccounted in the context of a Bell Labs engineer making art in 1965. Although Noll would have great success later fine-tuning the haptic interface between the human and computer, the profoundly haptic nature of the Mondrian painting goes missed here.38 If the failings of a technocratic sense of humanism are evident here by way of the digital as an emerging contemporary art practice, a response to an earlier failed technocratic humanism materialized in the German context. In Stuttgart, Nees and Nake made computer art more deeply rooted in the Continental philosophical tradition. At the same time, and more precisely, their work was born out of the rejection of the bureaucratic violence of World War II. Influenced by the writings of Max Bense and Abraham 212

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Image 65 Michael Noll’s comparison of his computer-generated drawing and Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Lines, 1917, ink on paper and reproduced image of Mondrian from original comparison by Noll, courtesy of A. Michael Noll.

Moles, Nees and Nake’s cool digital pictures embodied a rejection of the crowd-based manipulation of emotions. While digital machines were likewise central to the process of making a new kind of art, Bense and Moles looked to them with aesthetic intention, deploying the computer basically and forthrightly as a cold, rational tool. Albeit revolutionary in nature, for Nees and Nake digital machines reinforced the “generative” as an automatic process and bio-computational basis to understand complex systems. Nees and Nake commandeered the Zuse Graphomat Z64 to make digital art, a flatbed drawing machine invented by engineer Konrad Zuse for the creation of maps and land registration.39 Based on transistor technology, the Zuse Graphomat Z64 mediated the process of making art, deferring the artistic hand by way of a flowing loop of informational action: from the 213

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digital bits conveyed on punch tape or punch card to its mechanical translation by way of two gears moving independently along a Cartesian grid in x- and y-directions.40 Nees and Nake’s digital art practice gives intellectual depth to the bio-computational fusion at work here, insomuch as it was a practice directed by the generative as a technical process as well as a philosophical mode of intellectual nourishment. The philosophical tradition they looked to in the mechanical crafting of these images was itself markedly in the process of reinvention, similar to art and authorial action. The intentionally cold, anti-expressive theories of aesthetics proffered by Max Bense and Abraham Moles, two primary influences on the European digital art scene of the mid-1960s, came on the heels of world war and mass genocide. Bense and Moles’ demotion of abstraction based on emotional self-expression in favor of an impassive, programmable, informational, and generative sense of abstraction may be seen as an immediate postwar rejection of autocratic exploitation of the masses by way of emotional tinkering. Their writings would command artists in the rise of a broad-ranging conceptual art—linguistic and technological—which rejected the abstract painterly gesture in like terms. Bense was the leading figure of the Stuttgart School, a force in the creation and spread of information aesthetics and mainframe computational art in Europe.41 The Stuttgart School coalesced around the Studiengalerie, the art space at the University of Stuttgart that housed Nees’s debut exhibition in 1965. Launched by Bense, the gallery would introduce ninety-one exhibitions on the campus of the university, from its opening in 1958 to its closing in 1978.42 Trained in math, physics, geology, and philosophy at Bonn University, Bense came to Stuttgart in 1950 to teach the philosophy of technology, science theory, and mathematical logic.43 Bense brought a mixture of existentialism, Hegelian teleology, and quantum theory to bear in his aesthetic theory, a basic precept of which was “that all art is directed towards the intellect of the experiencer, not towards his feelings or emotions.”44 He became the master of “cybernetic poetry” rooted in “information aesthetics” which enlisted algorithms to reinterpret the writings of extant poets.45 Bense developed the generative idea of art translated through computation in these years, establishing a new mode of post-expressive art-making that provided a fount of creativity for Nees and Nake, then budding digital 214

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artists. Bense’s generative aesthetics described an art of rules, which was computational in analog or digital terms. Art from this perspective would not be subjective, rooted in the wafting shifts of emotional expression and response, but objective:  mathematically generated and measurable in its successes as a work of art. “The system of generative aesthetics,” Bense explains, “aims at a numerical and operational description of characteristics of aesthetic structures.”46 Upon request from the Swiss architect and typographic artist Max Bill, Bense taught information aesthetics to art students at the Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung (Ulm School of Design) from 1954 to 1958.47 Bense later wrote an essay about Max Bill for an exhibition of the artist’s work in 1966 at Hanover Gallery in London. The scale and print design of the tiny catalog encapsulates the ethos of Bense’s generative aesthetics. It is a pocket-sized pamphlet with color images of Bill’s work and Bense’s essay, which is printed in all lowercase letters. The scale of the booklet and the lowercase type-font point to a diminution of the ego and a decentering of the classical humanist will. From this perspective, the informational take on the world was intended to neutralize passions: in Bense’s thinking, the generative growth of form by way of computational rules happened automatically, with little affectivity. While Bill’s work was carefully crafted by hand in a conventional fashion, it was nonetheless generative and algorithmic in its limitations of strict geometrical form and reduced color palette. For Bense, Bill’s hardedge painting Four Colour Pairs around White Center (1961) functioned as simple direct signage, communicating form in the barest bits of information. Bill’s Moebius-strip sculpture Endless Ribbon (1935–53) worked topologically, its recursive and complex extruded geometry measurable in differential equations. Both were autonomous and anonymous in aesthetic quality. For Bense, these works embodied cybernetician Heinz von Foerster’s “order from (order plus disorder),” the idea that order arises autopoetically from noise.48 They were not generated directly from the hot touch of an emotional “I,” Bense supposed, but rather from an impassive set of rules generating order from chaos set in motion by an inexpressive human. Bringing Foerster’s cybernetic idea to Bill’s work, Bense argues (in all lower-case typography) that “creations by max bill [sic] give the impression of being higher degrees of order gained from given lower degrees of 215

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Image 66 Example of a complex sound communication channel, diagram from Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, 1958.

order plus disorder.” The second-order cybernetic take of Foerster shot through the generative aesthetics of Bense ensured a layering of mediation in the work of art. The proverbial author, if not dead, was indeed transformed and reintroduced anew—mutated, castrated, and shorn of forthright will. As digital technology within art has transfigured over time from obscure motif and manner to mainstay mode of communication, Bense’s ideas have endured. Their longevity is in part owed to his former doctoral student Georg Nees. In addition to creating generative works of art based on Bense’s thinking, Nees expanded Bense’s ideas in his dissertation Generative Computergraphik completed in 1968. Later in the new millennium, Nees connected the “growth and structural competition” of kinetic and digital art back to the biological concept of “morphology” in George Rickey’s essay ‘The Morphology of Movement: A Study of Kinetic Art’ published in Kepes’ Vision + Value Series. Bringing Bense and Rickey’s ideas full circle, Nees described “the heresy of morphography” in artistic, computational, and biological terms.49 Abraham Moles, a French colleague of Bense’s, established the field of information aesthetics with his 1958 book, Information Theory 216

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and Esthetic Perception. Trained as an electrical and acoustical engineer, Moles worked for the Laboratoire d’acoustique et de vibrations [Laboratory of Acoustics and Vibrations] of the Centre national de la rechereche scientifique [National Center for Scientific Research] (CNRS) in Marseille. He taught Sociology and Psychology at the Universities of Ulm, Strasbourg, San Diego, Mexico, Compiègne.50 The key to understanding contemporary art in the late twentieth century, Moles argues, was “information,” as it is determined in a twofold manner: by mechanical energies and communication materializing in the interconnection between “the individual and the rest of the world.”51 Similar to Bense’s manifold mediations of making, both semiotic and topological in nature, the first diagram in Moles’ seminal book portrays the evolution of sound conveyances across technologies through five “spatial channels.”52 It is a diagrammatic visual explanation of the layered technological mediation, largely analog in nature, of auditory aesthetic experience in all of its signaling complexity. It starts with a violinist’s live performance in a studio, which is tape-recorded, then pressed onto wax and vinyl record albums, then placed in a library, then played and transmitted across airwaves by way of antennas, and finally brought into the living room of a listener by way of a radio. “Considering the dizzying chain of transformations,” Moles exclaims, “it seems remarkable that what remains at the end has some similarity to the original signal.”53 Moles fortified the cybernetic take on art with ‘Cybernetics and the Work of Art’, an essay which was published in the New Tendency 3 exhibition catalog of 1965. As with the diagram of sound transmission across shifting signals and channels, the “cybernetic analysis constrains us to change our perspectives and our scale of values.”54 Giving shape to Galanter’s twenty-first-century complexism years before the fact, Moles elaborated on the manner in which rising digital technology sets in relief the complexity of relationally connected systems. The “true value” of binary technology and information “thus lies in the complexity of systems studied, which is the source of their novelty.”55 At the same time, he recognized the digital machine’s limits, identifying its bifurcated function as a simple tool, a “thinking machine” [machine à penser], and a means by which to better understand complex systems, or what he called “machines that make us think” [machines à faire penser].56 In this powerful distinction, Moles 217

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set in relief the potential trap of technocratic humanism into which Noll fell, which I described above. Following Moles’ complexist thinking, the digital machine can indeed function as a powerful tool for calculating data, while also setting in relief the probabilities and functions of living complex systems. They are now accessible tools that, like a mirror in Moebius-strip formation, provide profound understandings of living matter. The problem thus lies in mistaking one for the other, confounding simple “thinking machines” for “machines that make us think” both within and against the grain. The complexism at work in the greater telling of this story holds tight to Moles’ distinction. In our seemingly biological “symbiosis with machines,” to use Moles’ language, we are part of what he called a “silent revolution,” a gradual shift to the fleshy naturalization of digital technology. In this transformation, Moles argues for the possibility of a new positive art and new original forms a half century ago: “We have passed from the art of creative spontaneity to consumer art: it is the invention of new cultural productions, the nurturing of the social milieu through the intermediary of the mass media, that mechanical art inserted itself, as suited for mastering combinatorics or exploring the field of possibilities and defined by a basic originality.”57 Moles’ thinking offered a sense of prescience emboldened by circumspection, which in turn emerged in art form by way of the austere digital drawings generatively created by Noll, Nees, and Nake in the middle of the 1960s.

III. Experiments in Art and Technology [EAT]: The Open Loop of the Digital Image in Art The final two sections of this chapter further investigate the dialectical tension between technology and science introduced above:  as it manifested, on one hand, in the engineer and technology-focused art movement Experiments in Art and Technology [EAT] and, on the other, in the scientifically driven civic light projects of György Kepes and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Focusing on the lyricism at work in EAT, this section offers one half of a techno-scientific duality, the other half of which is interrogated in the final section. EAT was founded by the Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman in 218

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November 1966, just after the monumental engineer-artist collaboration 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, which took place at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York in October.58 The four were the leaders of a polyglot group, including 300 artists, engineers, and any other persons interested in the invention such a unification portended.59 Membership was open and fluid, growing to four thousand artists and engineers by 1969.60 The nexus of this unique not-for-profit organization was an office located at 9 East 16th Street in New York.61 Visionary engineer Klüver was driven by a will to unite art and technology, and explicitly not art and science. “The new interface I will define,” Klüver explains, “is one in which the artist makes active use of the inventiveness and skills of an engineer to achieve his purpose.”62 The group’s goal was to bridge a perceived divide: to bring together “groups unrealistically developing in isolation”—engineers and artists—in order to demystify technology for mass audiences.63 The engineer–artist union also sought to garner support for cultural expression from industrial initiatives while “generating original forethought, instead of compromise in aftermath,” as both sides of expertise might “avoid the waste of a cultural revolution”— the 1960s—better as a group of dedicated actors.64 If the binding cause of this group led by Klüver and Rauschenberg was technological and engineering in orientation, then the rallying cry bringing artists under the tutelage of Kepes in the next section was biological and scientific.65 It was not so much that technology within art was immune to the politics of war and the military industrial complex. It was simply that engineer Klüver was uneasy about the compatibility of art and science. Blind to the Whiteheadian dynamics at work in the foregoing complex systems discussions spread across years in Kepes’ Vision + Value Series, Klüver found the scientific concepts of “symmetry, invariance, uniqueness, time, and beauty” inadequate for understanding the rising new hybrids in art, such as his collaborative work with kinetic machine artist Jean Tinguely.66 Klüver was not attuned to the logic of complexism, which seems clearer perhaps now than then, at work in the art-and-science hybrids of his own moment. He found Kepes’ science-oriented art practices, discussed in the following and final section, to be stodgy and freighted by inertia, too ossified for a new art of technological “surprise, nonsense, humor, pleasure, and play.”67 The practices of EAT, while singly 219

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technological in claims, hewed close to the biocomputational thinking of complexism in hindsight. While the engineers and artists of EAT made few overt claims to science, philosophy, or information theory, we can nonetheless correctly identify a logic of generative aesthetics and information theory at work in their practice:  it was generative insomuch as technology created a set of hard productive rule-like parameters and informational in that their performances functioned as so many messages transmitted to audiences. The information theory informing the generative aesthetics at work in the first digital images in art becomes haptic and fully embodied in the collaborative acts of EAT. Members of EAT created light images in the form of performance using an array of technologies, including video projection, infrared lights, wireless FM transmitters and amplifiers, Doppler sonar, and telephone lines. From this perspective, the digital and electronic “images” of EAT must also be considered distributed. Yet, because the elements of their performances were so varied, the points of distribution were more changeful—spread out further in real time and phenomenological space—than with the distributed digital image of the preceding section. Let us nonetheless reconsider Moles’ information theory diagram tracing sound through layers of mediation, integrating the dynamic moving bodies of EAT.68 Instead of technological tools alone, let us substitute human bodies using technology as they relay information, triggering the movement of machines by way of wireless sensors. In this imagining, bodies transmit in conjunction with audio-visual technology, generating information theory as an image of wet, fleshy, corporeal interconnectedness. If Moles intended his “cybernetic organigram” to present a “position of the aesthetician in relation to the external world,” when reconsidered using the many artist-engineer performers of EAT along with their technologies we are confronted with a living, mutative organigram that translates the workings of a living and evanescent light image. Because of its role as “theater,” it is protean, changing with each generative iteration and performance.69 It is an open-loop image whereby the flows of information concretized as an event become images in the mind’s eye. Here we find the digital image virtualizing further, embedding in the brain as memory and knowledge, which in turn is reinterpreted across life experiences. 220

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The multipart nature of EAT’s intermedia performances would influence media art hybrids in the decades to come.70 I limit my discussion of the digital image as performative event here to two seminal EAT exhibitions: 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering at the Armory in New York in 1966, and the Pepsi Pavilion at the World’s Fair Exposition in Osaka, Japan in 1970. While EAT was involved in the creation of other significant artist-engineer collaborations, such as Soundings (1968) with Robert Rauschenberg and the exhibition Some More Beginnings:  An Exhibition of Submitted Works Involving Technical Materials and Processes at the Brooklyn Museum in 1968, I focus on these two occasions because of the centrality of interaction, the creation of a recursive ecology of events, and the way their workings are similar to complex living systems.71 Each event or exhibition plays out the complexist cybernetic version of dematerialization. The work of EAT was truly a collective affair. While there were ten events in the 9 Evenings, each with two or three primary artist-actors, the number of engineers and technicians involved in the creation of the overall set of events is well within the hundreds. 9 Evenings included the following ten sequences of performance:  Variations VII by John Cage and Cecil Coker; Kisses Sweeter than Wine by Öyvind Fahlstrom and Harold Hodges; Grass Field by Alex Hay and Herb Schneider; Vehicle by Lucinda Childs and Peter Hirsch; Solo by Deborah Hay and Larry Heilos; Physical Things by Steve Paxton and Dick Wolff; Carriage Discreteness by Yvonne Rainer and Per Biorn; Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg, Jim McGee, and Bill Kaminski; Bandoneon! (a combine) by David Tudor and Fred Waldhauer; and Two Holes of Water—3 by Robert Whitman and Robby Robinson.72 The performances were each extremely unique, ranging wildly in terms of experience and technological effects. In time they varied from forty to ninety minutes, unfolding over a two-week period in October 1966.73 Below are brief summaries, which in language do not do justice to the lived experience of engineer, artist-actor, and audience member alike. Cage and Coker’s Variations VII was the second to the last experimental music composition within an extant series initiated by Cage in 1958. The series ranged in character, from indeterminate music to full-body happening.74 In a two-night performance, October 15–16, Cage created a combination of the two, an experimental musical composition that was also an unscripted theatrical performance. In Variations VII, he sought to capture 221

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ambient noises—technologically and biologically generated—by way of twenty transistor radios and ten telephone lines located inside and outside the building in front of a live audience. Noises came from near and far, as the radios and telephone lines registered the brain waves of the collaborators on stage as well as noises from deep within the city. Two stages were set up at the center of the Armory, at the base of which were attached light and sound generators activated by the movements of the performers. Shadows from the lighting cast onto two screen-like canvases hung to the right of the central control area.75 Öyvind Fahlstrom and Harold Hodges’ Kisses Sweeter than Wine was held for two nights, October 21–22. It involved fifteen performers in a nine-part non-linear performance piece in which technological props ranged across themes, from everyday life to the Vietnam War.76 Certain characters performed as idiot savants, working through the contrapuntal possibilities of intuitive ratiocination communicated through autism. Section eight was called “Humanoids,” and involved screening excerpts from Wesley Barry’s science-fiction film The Creation of the Humanoids (1961) dubbed with the audio recordings of passersby responding to a Maoist demonstration in Central Park.77 In the same years, the French neo-avant-garde group the Situationists called such subversive use of print media or film détournement, a term literally meaning “rerouting” or “highjacking.” A  similar word-image strategy was popularized by Hollywood through Woody Allen’s 1966 directorial debut, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? While using an emergent populist mode of cultural critique, Fahlstrom and Hodges’ many-headed performance went against the grain of pop culture, both in its rebellious combination of kitsch science fiction film footage and in its title, appropriated from a popular love song of 1960. Alex Hay and Herb Schneider’s Grass Field, which took place October 13 and 22, involved three primary performers, Hay, Rauschenberg, and Steve Paxton, and numerous technical designers and assistants.78 It was algorithmic in that it had three primary rule-based parameters: 1) sounds would be coaxed from inaudible biological phenomena and amplified; 2)  all stage elements (clothing and other props) would be in the same color; and 3)  the performers would be given a single task.79 Influenced by John Cage’s silent musical composition, “4’33,” Hay 222

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alternated between movement and stillness, recording physical activities and brainwaves in order to set in relief the audio micrology of seeming silence.80 Vehicle by Lucinda Childs and Peter Hirsch, performed October 16 and 23, consisted of three primary movements, which altogether pushed non-static stage props to their limits. Lasting ten minutes, the first moment involved casting shadows on a screen by way of a rotating plastic cube and three light projectors. In the second moment, Childs stood between three swinging buckets containing bulbs set in motion by Alex Hay and William Davis. The third moment layered the visualization of the performers’ movements by projecting forty-five color slides of the buckets onto a central screen.81 Performed October 13 and 23, Deborah Hay and Larry Heilos’ Solo played out the living and non-living possibilities of “agency” in a choreography between sixteen dancers and several remote-controlled box-shaped carts.82 Eight cart drivers entered the hall of the Armory dressed in black tie and dress and sat down as though in chamber music formation in front of a conductor poised before a music stand. “Driving” the cars remotely by way of their movement, they walked around the dancers dressed in white, some of whom were balancing on moving carts. The movement of the carts was directed by radio waves generated by body movement and then relayed through antennas located just off stage to the left. Based on an experimental dance and music composition, the futuristic performance mixed mechanical and human movement, creating a disaggregated sense of cyborg life. In Steve Paxton and Dick Wolff ’s Physical Things, which took place October 13 and 19, performers and audience intermingled inside of a pneumatic environment installed within the shed of the Armory.83 While Paxton’s transparent structure dictated a certain cartography of movement, he allowed participants—performers outfitted with small radio receivers for picking up radio broadcasts interacting with audience members—to move freely within the plastic membrane. Participants walked on turf amid projected images of trees and vegetation, passed through intestine tunnels, were exposed to artist-actors’ body parts, and encountered “Sue Harnett and Elaine Sturtevant who had coated their faces and arms with Spectratherm, a Westinghouse product that showed the differences in temperature of the 223

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Images 67–69 Steve Paxton, Physical Things (1966). Performance presented as part of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, The 69th Regiment Armory, New York, NY, United States, October 13–19, 1966; Still from the factual footage shot in 16 mm film by Alfons Schilling; The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, 9 Evenings:  Theatre & Engineering fonds. Courtesy of Julie Martin (Experiment in Art & Technology) and the Daniel Langlois Foundation (Montreal).

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Images 67–69 (cont.)

blood vessels and skin.”84 Their passage through the experience culminated in confrontation with twins and the climbing of a 100-foot vertical tunnel, the Tower, which led up to the ceiling of the Armory.85 In Carriage Discreteness, performed October 15 and 21, Yvonne Rainer and Per Biorn, Rainer guided dancers and non-dancers through a series of quotidian tasks, requiring them to walk across stage with direction and carry props from one place to another. The project involved projectors and kinetic objects, the movements of which were programmed. The directed movement of technological components functioned as a counterpoint to the improvisational dance movements.86 Robert Rauschenberg, Jim McGee, and Bill Kaminski’s Open Score took place October 14 and 23 in a tennis court and involved tennis players (Mimi Kanarek and Frank Stella) with rackets outfitted with microphones. When they hit the ball, sound reverberated across the hall of the Armory. Each time a ball was hit, a light went off in the hall. After thirty-six hits, the Armory was pitch black with the exception of a screen that showed nearly 225

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Image 70 Steve Paxton, Physical Things (1966). Performance presented as part of 9 Evenings:  Theatre & Engineering, The 69th Regiment Armory, New  York, NY, United States, October 13–19, 1966. 500 of these “Invicta Eight Transistor” portable radios were made available to the public during the performance. The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, 9 Evenings:  Theatre & Engineering fonds. Photo:  Eric Legendre. Courtesy of the Daniel Langlois Foundation (Montreal).

500 people who had assembled on the stage where they were filmed by infrared cameras, which had been set upon the balcony.87 Performed October 14 and 18, David Tudor and Fred Waldhauer’s Bandoneon! (a combine) centered around Tudor’s performance using an electronically catalyzed instrument. Waldhauer attached the traditional accordion-like bandoneon to a circuit connected “to an array of technological components (frequency modulators, amplifiers, oscilloscopes).”88 Tudor, Waldhauer and Robert Kieronski sat in chamber-music arrangement on a slightly raised playing area, along with five individuals who drove remote-controlled carts during the performance of 14 October.89 Two Holes of Water—3 by Robert Whitman and Robby Robinson was performed October 18 and 19. Evoking the space of a drive-in movie theater 226

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Images 71–74 Robert Rauschenberg, Jim McGee, Bill Kaminski, Mimi Kanarek and Frank Stella, Open Score, tennis racket from performance of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, 1966; The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, 9 Evenings:  Theatre & Engineering fonds. Photo:  Eric Legendre. Courtesy of the Daniel Langlois Foundation (Montreal).

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Images 71–74 (cont.)

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and the layered time of fractured cinema, this piece was intended to show the differences in temporality between 16  mm film and then new video technologies. It involved simultaneous projection of real-time video from several automobiles that had been driven onto the floor of the Armory, and projection from cameras by artists situated in the balcony seats of the audience. EAT’s avant-garde intentions played out in terms of its shape-shifting contents as well as the location of the performances, which had been the site of the International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913. Iconically known as the Armory Show, the exhibition of 1913 introduced the abstract “isms”— Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism—of Europe to the United States, to much negative fanfare. In like manner, critics were not happy with 9 Evenings.90 While uniting technology and art might have been considered politically incorrect because of the Vietnam War, the formless nature of each performance most likely left critics and interpreters speechless—literally without the language to explain such art. The most vituperative analysis was not by a critic but fellow artist, Minimalist and Earth Work artist Robert Smithson. Smithson identified EAT’s protocol as an “aesthetics of disappointment,” calling it a “derangement” of art, the message of which was the “funeral of technology”: “Everything electrical and mechanical was buried under various esthetic mutations. The energy of technology was smothered and dimmed. Noise and static opened up the negative dimensions. The audience steeped in agitated stagnation, conditioned by simulated action, and generally turned on, were turned off.”91 Smithson interpreted the formlessness of 9 Evenings as a nihilism of sorts. The group’s raison d’être, technology, was simply overkill. On a perversely upbeat note, it all finished positively for Art. He located hope in the audience’s combined confusion and boredom, claiming in the end, “This at least was a victory for art.”92 Four years later, the members of EAT curated and conceptualized the Pepsi Pavilion at the World’s Fair Exposition in Osaka, Japan in 1970. The enormity of the vision and reality of what simply has come to be known as the Pavilion was similar to 9 Evenings in many ways. It was highly complex in concept and realization, and ultimately a counterforce to the expectations of Pepsi. Billy Klüver and Robert Breer chose Robert Whitman, Frosty Myers and David Tudor to work on the first incarnation of the 229

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overall workings of the space.93 The architecture of the actual dome was designed by Metabolist architect Kenzo Tange, and was based on an origami translation of a geodesic dome. The vault was 120 feet in diameter and constructed from white polyvinyl chloride panels attached to a steel structure.94 With sound designs by David Tudor, the building functioned something like a giant musical instrument. There were thirty-two inputs and thirty-seven speakers arranged in a “rhombic grid” located between the roof structure and the mirror shell on the top floor.95 On the exterior, Frosty Myers’ Light Frame gave ephemeral edges to the structure. Light Frame was a sculpture made out of four three-legged black poles projecting pencil-thin beams of xenon light, creating a tilted square that became particularly evident with nightfall. Both day and night, the roof of the structure was enshrouded in a water vapor cloud sculpture, designed by Fujiko Nakaya. “When fully operational,” Klüver recounts, “the fog system was capable of generating a six-foot thick 150-foot diameter area of fog.”96 On the ground plane, at the level of the terrace, there were seven of Robert Breer’s white bulbous “floats,” six-foot high sculptures that moved around in the artificial gloaming at less than two feet per minute, emitting sound. In its totality, the building appeared to be a living organism, respiring with foggy condensation and pulsating with thumping sound. After entering through a tunnel into a dark shell-shaped room lit by laser beams called the Clam Room, visitors were given clear plastic wand-like handsets at the entrance tunnel. There was an antenna coil inside of the handset, which catalyzed a chain of communication:  it responded to electromagnetic signals produced by loops in the floor, which were, in turn, “wired to a tape recorder and power amplifier in the control room.”97 Visitors heard varied effects on different floors:  horses’ hooves and shattering glass on the floor with tiles; ducks, frogs, cicadas, and lions on the floor with astroturf.98 The nodal point of the building was located upstairs: a mirrored dome, ninety feet in diameter and 210 degrees in spherical pitch, which had been envisioned to host performances by visiting artists throughout Expo ’70. The mirrored dome created optical effects that were holographic in nature. “Because of the size of our mirror,” Klüver explains, “a spectator looking at an image could walk around the image and see it from all sides.”99 On the opposing plane, the floor was a tactile extravaganza. A  kaleidoscopic patchwork of sorts, it consisted of 230

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ten different materials, which included astroturf, rough wood, slate, tile, and asphalt. Indeed multifaceted, the project was troubled from the beginning, with repeated overruns on the budget and confusion over ownership and property rights. The final death knell to EAT’s role in the creation, running, and performances of the Pavilion would be a combination of the two factors – money and proprietorship. After EAT had requested and garnered more funds several times from Pepsi for broken equipment, Pepsi finally declined to pay a maintenance bill of $405,000, instead of the proposed sum of $185,000.100 After EAT had refused to accept the lower amount for maintenance from Pepsi, EAT’s lawyer Robert Mulreany received a letter from W. Perry Keats, the counsel for Pepsi, which declared EAT’s “services in the Pavilion no longer required, effective immediately.”101 The building was left to decay without proper upkeep. At the same time, a considerable rift had opened over the question of whether EAT had created a work of art or simply a capitalist experience rooted in a well-known consumer product. The then president of Pepsi, Donald M. Kendall, ignored Klüver’s request

Image 75 EAT, Pepsi Pavilion shrouded in fog from Fujiko Nakaya’s fog machine, 1970.

231

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Image 76 Plan of EAT, Pepsi Pavilion, 1970.

by way of a letter to recognize the Pavilion as a work of art made by EAT in order to give property rights to the group.102 Upon months of silence from Kendall, Klüver told the artists of EAT to leave the Pavilion. After the departure of the members of EAT, Pepsi carried on the functions of the Pavilion with a new crew of Japanese engineers and tapes from local Japanese television shows. EAT’s complex abstractions of shape, material, and experience were made concrete and simplified into happy forms, with the the Pavilion’s thirty-seven loudspeakers playing the theme song from “It’s a Small World,” Pepsi’s leitmotif at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, in the mirrored dome.103 The attitude of EAT artists vis-à-vis Pepsi, the benefactor of the Pavilion, comes across prima facie as petulant and ungrateful. And similarly, the artists’ departure from the Pavilion and Expo ’70 in media res might mark the project as a failure. Yet, I would argue otherwise, connecting the funding and copyright problems to the predicaments that Moholy-Nagy faced in his 232

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attempt to launch a new Bauhaus in Chicago, and Kepes’ challenges to his art–science–technology institute at MIT, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, discussed in the final section. In the story of the haptic unconscious such strife is not simply par for the course, but in many ways, proof of foresight and provocative thinking. That Moholy-Nagy, EAT, and Kepes shared a hybrid vision of art—at base, an art–science–technology hybrid— was simply beyond the ken of critics of the time. In each instance, the world was left speechless because they simply did not yet have the vocabulary to explain. The projects of Moholy-Nagy, EAT, and Kepes were ahead of their time, incarnations of an art just now understandable to people in its mimicry and embodiment of the complex systems of a living organism.

IV. György Kepes’ Civic Light Art in the City: The Open and Closed Loop of the Digital Image in Art In the final section of this chapter, we end by returning to the beginning, in connecting György Kepes back to László Moholy-Nagy by way of a shared vision of civic light art in the city. In his later years at MIT, Kepes developed an idea of public art borne upon electricity, lights, and binary coding. Kepes turned his attention to the collaboration of the visual arts and sciences within the public sphere of the city in order to better tease out the possibilities of “expression and communication in the cityscape.”104 Such aesthetic interventions promised negligible injury upon the landscape, or so he envisioned. Civic light art boded enlightening public engagement: instances of large-scale art could be not simply educational in nature, but mind-expanding in terms of the definition of “art.” Looping back to his work with Kevin Lynch, art at the scale of the public plaza equally assured healthy brain activities in the creation of a solid and memorable cognitive map of one’s surroundings. By 1972, in the final volume of the Vision + Value Series, Kepes wrote of an art rooted in “ecological consciousness” within “a new environment” that brought to fruition Moholy-Nagy’s ideas of an architecture and art of light in the sky from forty years prior.105 This scientific light image would be ecological in nature because of its transitory, dematerialized qualities. In contrast to technology in the last section, the word “science” is here less performative and more a descriptive means to understand art and 233

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architecture as complex living systems.106 Kepes’ take on science in the context of the urban light image is biological, sociological, psychological, and a concern of urban planning. In 1934, Moholy-Nagy wrote of precisely such an image in a letter to the Czechoslovakian modern architect Frantisek Kalivoda. Written in German from Berlin some months before he left for London, the letter enumerates the ways in which an architecture and art of light might come to fruition. Moholy-Nagy believed electricity could extend aesthetic expression into a new epoch and new world of thinking, better connecting the fine arts to science and technology in the modern world. “Have you ever witnessed a large search-light with its vast cones of light flashing wildly across the sky and searching further and further afield into infinite space?” he queried Kalivoda in the first section of the ten-part letter.107 Giving shape to the digital image as a parade of light across the landscape, Moholy-Nagy continued with synesthetic poetic imaginings, “I envisaged similar results. But the flowing chords of my visions formed fully orchestrated symphonies of light that were not confined to the staccato rhythm of the flashlight signal code.”108 Moholy-Nagy described a fantasy of illumination in the firmament made real by modern “capital, industry, and working equipment.”109 He envisioned a world of form made possible using “all the resources of the physical sciences with its incomparable instruments,” in the creation of an infinite light form.110 Given the proper harnessing of “scientific” knowledge and machines by artists, there could be life-transforming “light displays in the open air” and “indoor light displays.”111 Moholy-Nagy argues for truly utilizing the third dimension in illuminated outdoor advertising displays, with light extending out into space, “achiev[ing] real spatial differentiation.” Artists might commandeer “gigantic searchlights and sky-writers” and create “projections onto clouds or other gaseous backgrounds through which one could walk, drive, fly.”112 He foreshadowed film projection as video art, arguing cinema and the color organ brought new insights to interior architectural space. When channeled through television, this colorized extension of organismic aesthesis might be democratized, brought to all with the new moving-image technology. The color piano also extended the possibility of spatial experience, similar to using “the color fresco” within architectural space.113 234

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Moholy-Nagy’s hybrid art–science–technology vision was the radix of Kepes’ interdisciplinary research practice. In the years after World War II, Kepes leavened Moholy-Nagy’s ideas of light art in the public sphere with a mixture of thinking on modern music, theoretical biology, pragmatic philosophy, and pop culture entertainment knowhow. The synesthetic theories of Russian Composer Alexander Scriabin, William James’ theory of the image as an accretive perceptual process, Hermann von Helmholtz and Kurt Goldstein’s organismic take on sensation and the environment, and Bob Beck’s guide to public light shows constituted a compound of textual resources shaping the haptic unconscious giving rise to Kepes’ civic art vision.114 These sources brought to bear a unique form of erudition, while Kepes’ collaboration with urbanist Kevin Lynch in the same years served as a practicum of sorts. In 1961, a year after Lynch’s Image of the City was published, Kepes issued “Notes on Expression and Communication in the Cityscape,” an essay which publicly revealed Kepes’ active and shared role in the formation of the idea of the city as an image ordered by symbols and signs. Kepes’ cellular metaphors of the urban landscape make more overt and palpable the wet biological sensibility of Lynch’s city image as “cognitive.” The cityscape and its image were organismic in nature for Kepes, a system of relational pulsions which gains greater organization through autopoetic growth and increasing density. He likened the city to a complex and growing organism: “A single-cell organism is immediately dependent on its environment, and has no means of controlling it. Only when cells grow into complex masses do they develop a fixed internal organization capable of protecting them from change or disturbance in the external environment. In this complex stage there is a division of labour, with the functioning of specific organs coordinated. In a complex social state, a similar structuring develops.”115 There are, no doubt, several different ways to receive Kepes’ cellular urban metaphors. In terms of political economy, an autopoetic urbanization comes to fruition logically as exurban sprawl: city growth according to laissez faire and unplanned decentralization. This possible reading of autopoetic urban ordering remains untouched by Kepes in his elaboration because, arguably, his goals were other—a matter of training artists to work cybernetically at the scale of public space in the city. 235

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Image 77 György Kepes, kinetic outdoor neon light mural for Radio Shack, Boston, 1950.

Kepes’ later article on a similar topic, “The Visual Arts and Sciences: A  Proposal for Collaboration,” sheds light on his intentions of framing the city as an organismic creature. The goal was communication to an audience of artists working in conjunction with city planners the importance and possibility of making public light art projects. He intended to tease out a new kind of aesthetic practice:  art and architecture as an urban-scaled light image, a complex quasi-living organism ignited by electricity and digital bits. Here, two years before its inauguration in 1967, Kepes laid the groundwork for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies [CAVS] at MIT, proposing “the formation of a closely knit work community of eight to ten promising young artists and designers, each committed to some specific goals. The group, located in an academic institution with a strong scientific tradition,* would include painters, sculptors, film-makers, photographers, stage designers, illumination engineers, and graphic designers.”116 At the bottom 236

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Image 78 György Kepes, programmed light mural for KLM, 5th Ave. office, New York, 1959.

of the page, linking back to the asterisk, Kepes announced a proposal for the as yet unnamed CAVS. Invoking a collaboration between artists, architects, scientists, and engineers, Kepes argues: “It is assumed that close and continuous work contact with one another and with the academic community of architects, city planners, scientists, and engineers would lead to a climate more conducive to the development of new ideas than could be achieved by individuals working alone.”117 The mission of the program at CAVS was manifold. Expanding Moholy-Nagy’s ideas, Kepes encouraged artists-in-residence at the forthcoming CAVS to pursue the creative use of light, focus on environmental art, investigate “subjective icons as well as… the common visual symbols 237

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in the cityscape,” and scientifically explore urban communication within all levels of life in the city.118 Kepes successfully worked as a commercial designer, making light mosaics and murals for Radio Shack (1950) and KLM (1959) in the years leading up to CAVS. In many ways, these kinetic light walls function as templates for larger civic projects to come. If the project for Radio Shack serves as a blueprint for a pulsating work of abstract light art in the space of a museum or art gallery, then the KLM sign is a light-picture on the urban scale of the city itself. For the KLM light wall, Kepes created a set of cartographic moving lights that looked like the urban floor as seen from an airplane above. Kepes worked in conjunction with the Lawrence Adhesive & Chemical Corporation in the creation of the mobile fifty-oneby eighteen-foot mosaic.119 “Capturing the spirit of the air age,” the KLM mobile light mosaic “offers constant change, speed and mobility, so characteristic of flying,” Kepes argues. “It recreates the air traveler’s experiences when looking down on the metropolis at night.”120 Today it reads at both mega- and nano-scales: an aerial view of the electrified urban grid at night and brightly lit computer motherboard extruded in space and flickering in time. In the following decades, such signage grew to the scale of the city as Kepes developed a Tower of Light (1963) and the Baltimore Road Project (1970), a car-based urban entry scheme, both as part of urban redevelopment in Baltimore, an Orchestration of the Lightscape at Time Square (1970–72) in New  York, and Blue Sky on the Red Line (1985), a stained glass wall for the Harvard Square bus stop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Coming to fruition eleven years after his retirement from MIT, the glass mural in the bus stop was the only project that would actually materialize from this list. Kepes invited several artists to CAVS under similar pretenses to make civic art. He summoned Vassilakis Takis in 1967  “to adjust to and communicate with city planners, architects, social scientists, psychologists… who are working at reshaping the environment,” offering him a stipend of $10,000 for his collaborative work at CAVS.121 Under the auspices of CAVS, German Zero Group artist and future director of CAVS Otto Piene created Manned Helium Sculpture, a sculpture-cum-performance piece.122 It consisted of a round plastic pneumatic form—eight hundred feet in length and twenty-six inches in diameter and filled with four thousand cubic feet 238

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of helium—which was attached to a small woman, Susan Peters, who on January 5, 1969 publicly ascended for thirty minutes in the air while lit. With the expressed goal of developing the “urban pageantry of the Charles River,” the artist Thomas McNulty promised in 1971 to “utilize season changes and make the river a ‘necklace’ in the Boston scene, which changes color and reflection, but always adds to the environment.”123 This project was an extension of the Boston Harbor Project (1968–70), a series of site-specific proposals intended to “orient” city-dwellers, creating a cognitive image of Boston unfolding around the waterfront.124 Similar to Kepes’ Baltimore light tower, the American cybernetic sculptor Wen Ying Tsai later proposed to build a five-hundred-foot “Cybernetic Light Tower” in Boston.125 With most of the propositions of the artists not realized, one might argue that Kepes’ CAVS projects were utopian, more powerfully considered in their theoretical nature than for any ability to be accomplished. Other, perhaps more palpable successes materialized through the greater and more general production of discourse in the way of exhibitions, publications, and symposia. Kepes directed a vibrant public discussion on civic art, overseeing events in several American venues in the early 1970s. Kepes curated Explorations, an exhibition on interactive art–science–technology hybrids held in 1970 at the Hayden Gallery at MIT and the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC. For the catalog accompanying the show, Kepes wrote “Toward Civic Art,” an essay in which he called for balance and order in an “apparently uncontrollable new-scale world.”126 He infused the Arts & Crafts ideas of William Morris with a cybernetic awareness, arguing for “equilibrium” in the search for “self-regulation.”127 This was followed by “Art in the Civic Scale,” a symposium on May 19, 1971 with artists Claes Oldenburg, Louise Nevelson, Otto Piene, urbanist Kevin Lynch, and architects Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, José Luis Sert, Eduardo Terrazas, and Lawrence Halprin at the Kresge Auditorium on the campus of MIT. Kepes curated Dialogue for the Senses, the inaugural exhibition of the Tactile Gallery at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut in May 1972 and Multiple Interaction Team Exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in November 1972.128 This is where the story of the haptic unconscious concludes: 1972. Indeed a busy year for impresario Kepes, it was also the year in which the seventh and final volume of the Vision + Value Series was published. I finish with 239

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Kepes’ call for an ecologically conscious environmental art, in particular as embodied in the work of Pulsa, a Yale-based group of artists and architects who wrote “The City as Artwork,” the penultimate essay in Kepes’ last book of the series. Founded in 1967, the members of Pulsa—Michael Cain, Patrick Clancy, William Crosby, William Duesing, Paul Fuge, Peter Kindlmann, and David Rumsey—identified themselves as a “group of researchers in programmed environments.”129 All seven members lived and worked together, along with their wives and girlfriends, cohabitating commune-like in a large house called Harmony Ranch in Oxford, Connecticut.130 Pulsa’s interpretation of the city as software and hardware provides the basic notation of the digital image in art as an urban-scaled coalescence of distributed elements, the workings of which oscillate between open and closed loop: “The city is composed of soft information systems as well as hard architectural systems,” they argue in a collective voice.131 The built and immobile hardware of the city bases the urban light image within a closed circuit system; as communication within stolid, inert buildings tends to be closed. Urban software—the flow of information through hard infrastructure, from building to building—opens the loop. Pulsa’s temporary site-specific light- and sound-based installations drew out an inversion at work in the urban surrounds. The soft information currents and the hard built landscape bore the lifelike capabilities of mutation and flip-flop: “The information systems are becoming more architectural, while the architecture is less object-like and systemic. The city is now flexible, mutating object in the process of constant creation and destruction: future generations of cities may become something like artificial planets moving through space.”132 This concept of the city as a porous loop of flowing information came to life as many protean organismic light images in their work. Pulsa’s experimental lighting demonstration at the Public Garden in 1968, installed in expanded form as the Yale Golf Course’s light-sound installation in New Haven, Connecticut in 1969, was a subtle, environmentally sensitive civic art project that brought to life public and private space otherwise off limits because of the darkness of night. “Our hypothesis,” Pulsa explains about the Public Garden project, “was that the pond could be designed to become an attracting element at night.”133 They hoped that their “continually changing light and sound environment would involve people in experiencing the park,” while, “giving them new ways of seeing 240

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Image 79 Pulsa, Installation diagram for installation of Public Garden project in Boston, 1968, courtesy of David MacIver Rumsey and Michael Cain.

the park and new ways of hearing the sounds of the city.” Pulsa sought to make tangible the greater holism of the city in the minutiae of the Public Garden through making contrasts between hard static architectural structures and surfaces and the rattling noise of traffic and multi-vehicular flow. Creating an urban digital image with sound, they installed fifty-five xenon light strobes in the four-acre pond and fifty-five polyplanar speakers along the edges of the pond’s perimeter, programming the devices differently each night “with elements of analog and digital computers, a punch-paper tape reader, a signal synthesizer, and magnetic tape.”134 The movement of people along the sides of the pond, in addition to generative programming protocols, created changes in the digital and analog light image of the Public Garden pond project. For the project at the Yale Golf Course, they reinstalled the pond system, using an additional computer to expand their range of lighting and sound. The image was interactive and accretive in nature, distributed across space and time, revealing the digital image in art as an embodied and quasi-living entity. It marked the culmination of the haptic unconscious, a forgotten biologically based functionalism of the Bauhaus and late modernism’s aesthetic of living complex systems. 241

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Epilogue Political Paths—Past and Future

In conclusion, I  take up what is admittedly a large topic with which to end—the question of politics. I  do so not for closure but opening:  to open a path onto the well-grounded future development of any one of the loose-ended strands of inquiry left dangling at the end of this book. First, I look to the political past of the haptic unconscious, and then to its future.

I. Past Let us distinguish at least two overarching political paths within the biocentric functionalism of the 1920s, when this story begins: a left-leaning environmentalism that would later incarnate as a systems-oriented cybernetic functionalism; and a right-leaning biologism connected to theories of racial purity, Arianism, the Volk and its relations to the soil [Volksgemeinschaft, or “community of the people”], and the rise in the 1930s of National Socialism. Key here is the fact that, in this originating moment, the two positions shared a wellspring in early Goethean science-cum-German nationalism, ecology, and the proto-Green Movement. The first path emerged in the beginning of Art as Organism by way of the biologistic ideas of the Hungarian botanist Raoul Francé and expanded outward into the protean forms of the Gestalt, General Systems Theory, cybernetics, and generative aesthetics—all of which are necessary components of the haptic unconscious. The second path, largely absent from this study, links biology to race in eugenics-based theories of German exceptionalism. Based on bad science, this thinking led to a dead end while forever scarring humanity’s psyche through genocide in Europe. In the study of “Biocentric Bauhaus,” Oliver Botar outlines this intersection of binaries—mechanism and vitalism 242

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within biology, the left and right in politics—in order to understand “how it is that a single discourse such as Neo-Vitalism can contain within itself both materialist and idealist views, both mechanism and Vitalism,” and how within the Bauhaus these philosophies would give shape to the positioning of “the communist biocentric Hannes Meyer [and] the centre-right biocentric Mies van der Rohe.”1 Rather than expanding on the influences of late Bauhaus directors Meyer and van der Rohe, I  bring attention to two scientists whose ideas function more deeply and broadly as infrastructure to the biological themes of the haptic unconscious while also illustrating the duality above:  the aforementioned botanist Francé and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. As discussed in the first chapter, Francé’s thinking lies at the base of Moholy-Nagy’s ongoing invocation of biology. Francé’s soil and plant research bore the seeds of an ecological systems approach to design. From Francé, Moholy-Nagy garnered a biocentric pedagogy, building on Francé’s concept of “bios,” which translates roughly as “life,” the “living,” or the “ecological.”2 Moholy-Nagy calibrated Francé’s thinking for architecture, citing as basic functional types for design Francé’s “seven biotechnical constructional elements:  [the] crystal, sphere, cone, plate, strip, rod, and spiral (screw).”3 Francé’s plant-based biotechnical thinking about form and function marked in its own moment a rethinking of consciousness as a distributed ecological network according to the “mind of plants.” These ideas extended out through Moholy-Nagy’s teaching in the twentieth century and resound loudly in the present by way of scientific studies on the complexities and consciousness of plants.4 Unfortunately, they also abided next to and within Francé’s invidious politics. Abjuring “racial mixing” as “unnatural,” Francé acceded to the “temptation” of fascism and National Socialism during the 1930s.5 His thinking was part of a powerful union of rightist politics and biologism—a “certain type of ‘ecological’ argumentation, saturated with right-wing political content,” that “had attained a measure of respectability within the political culture of Germany.”6 Bertalanffy’s ideas appear in the second chapter of Art as Organism. His organismic take marked another path for biology, directing the field beyond the mechanism-vitalism arguments at the turn of the last 243

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century cited above by Botar. Bertalanffy’s ideas are the basis as well for many of the progressive extrapolations of the British biologists, embryologists, and geneticists of the interwar group, The Theoretical Biology Club. These British scientists, in turn, published essays in György Kepes’ Vision + Value series (1965–66). Between the late 1920s and the 1950s, while living in Austria and then Canada, Bertalanffy developed an organismic philosophy for biology that would give way to the broader organizational strategies of General Systems Theory by the middle of the twentieth century. Around that time, Kepes commissioned Bertalanffy to write an essay for the Vision + Values Series, titled “The Tree of Knowledge.”7 Prior to these discussions with scholars in the United States, Bertalanffy, like Francé, had opportunistically aligned himself with National Socialism in the 1930s and early 1940s. In those years, he recast his philosophy of biology in order to appease Nazi officials, discrediting his research through preposterous statements such as: “The organism appears no longer… as a republic of autonomous parts with the same rights, but rather like a hierarchical structure, dominated on each level by the Führer principle [Führerprinzip].”8 While German fascism ultimately disappeared, by mid-century organismic systems thinking gave way to control systems based on the central nervous system, or cybernetics. By no means immune to sinister politics, mid-century cybernetics in the West shaped self-correcting ballistics, psychological models based on the emergent computer, and a psychiatry of the “cybernetic brain.”9 As a science lending itself to defense mechanisms, psychiatric treatment, and new, distributed concepts of consciousness, cybernetics was a mixed, dicey, and provocative science. Andrew Pickering outlines its ambiguous standing between destructive and constructive modes of humanism, showing how it enlisted shock treatment and frontal-lobe lobotomies in the research of Grey Walter and Ross Ashby, while catalyzing visionary invention in the work of Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask. In the United States, the connection between cybernetic technologies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was not simply strong but compulsory. While working on radio waves and Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging) as a serviceman in World War II, the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, whose work also appears 244

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in the second chapter, invented cybernetics. His ideas were instrumental in the development of distributed systems for missiles, highway layouts, and information processing. Building on these ideas, the mid-century engineer Paul Baran, another figure looming largely in Art as Organism, modernized telecommunications with a distributed digital template while working for the RAND Corporation, a research arm of the American military. These violent and less sanguine bearings of biocentrism and biofunctionalism are evidence of the fragile lability of structures, systems, and organizational strategies, whether biologically based and emergent in sensibility or not. Might we query, “Are biocentrism and biofunctionalism inherently wicked and malevolent?” They are variously ideological, but bear no oneness: they are not essentially one way or another. Because of their deep sense of formalism—their constructural technological function—they can be deployed diversely, for evil or good: for political, bureaucratic, marketing, social, ontological, epistemological, or behavioral reasons. As I argue below, it is, however, the task of artists, architects, and designers to show these specific biases when deployed in specific situations.

II. Future I leave behind the past materialization of biocentrism as fascist and tease out its futurity as cybernetic by looking to the possibilities which might come from the alternative all-inclusive biological route made possible by Francé’s plant-based theory of mind and Moholy’s empathic art pedagogy. I refer to the greater systems-oriented cybernetic approach materializing as environmentalism, the meta-biological, and extended mind in the present. My implicit argument here is that systems theory and cybernetics would have become the basis for a philosophy of design functionalism had Moholy-Nagy not died prematurely at the age of 51. Never named as such, systems-oriented cybernetics is the diasporic Bauhaus functionalism of the postwar period that grew rhizomatically in the activities of Moholy-Nagy’s friend, design partner, and acolyte, György Kepes; further, it is the basis for theories of distributed consciousness, an ecology of mind, and the embodiment of virtual technologies and new media art in the present. 245

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As for the existence in the present of Moholy-Nagy’s heuristics of integration uniting art, science, and technology, the haptic unconscious flourishes generally today within primary and secondary education and the academy in the form of the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) movement, which is distinct from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). Affecting an even greater audience, the story of Art as Organism closes in the last chapter with a forecast about the ubiquity of the digital image in our current moment. The story of the haptic unconscious ends thus with scintillas of the future. It projects from the past into the present how the digital image is not something we look at but look through. The image in the age of digital technology is more mediator than medium. Thus, the final chapter signals not an end but a beginning: fixing an origin point for the digital image in art some forty years ago and, at the same time, hastening a transformation already at work, namely, of the artistic medium into a mesh-like sieve. The unpacking of its origination in three modes of expression in the last chapter—as a two-dimensional digital print, three- and four-dimensional live performance, and civic-scaled installation—serves to make a distinction: from inside of the rising all-over presence of the digital image, to the thing we explicitly call “art.” I sought in this chapter to tease out the specific and succinct quality of the digital image as art, as opposed to its presence as a mode of marketing or, to an even greater extent, symbolic infrastructure. The digital image marks a transition to extended perception, the medium as mediation, and ecologies of mediality, but is it art? And if so, when? Admittedly, one enters these waters at one’s own peril, especially in the age of the internet. And, it is altogether more perilous given the rather market-friendly turn of Moholy-Nagy’s pedagogy at the end of his life, where this tale began in the first chapter. If the intention of Moholy-Nagy’s haptic unconscious was to teach art students to gird capitalistic images and the like with a richer sense of aesthetic experience and the potentiality of justice, or a “biological bill of rights” as he put it, then an elision between art and non-art is already fixed from within the unfolding of the digital image in art. To systematize the query of the art-ness of the digital image at work here, let us look to two extremes:  the perspective of abundance and 246

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profusion on one hand, and of scarceness and rarity on the other. From the first, more liberal perspective, the digital image is now everywhere and all-encompassing. It is the stuff of the web. So, in turn, art is everywhere. Art becomes what Martin Heidegger called “the world picture” (Weltbild).10 Art is reified, made into an instrumental tool, which is in turn a technological image. Art is everything, so art is nothing. A  honed sense of the digital image specifically as a mode of art situates the discussion in fields of intention, spaces where artists willfully use the digital image as a mode of art—that is, contemporary art and, enveloped within that, the micro-fields of new media art, bioart, and the Nuit Blanche outdoor video, software, and kinetic light art exhibitions. Rather than distinguishing art from not-art, the foremost goal in outlining this trajectory—the biological underpinnings of the digital image in art—has been to buttress the deep, embodied structure of experiencing the virtual as a mode of aesthetic experience. The “virtual” encompasses manifold digital interfaces, both intentionally meant to be art and not:  from experiences of GIFs, memes, games, and curated exhibitions loaded on the Web; to projected video and software art in a museum gallery or on the side of a building; to the virtual worlds made sensual through Oculus Rift VR goggles. The ultimate point is not exactly a matter of gate-keeping or to distinguish what qualifies as art in the age of the digital, but, perhaps more bluntly, to describe the nature of the virtual itself. One does not escape into a better, cozier sense of the world in experiencing these various virtual interfaces. Rather, one plunges deeper into the living, affective, and ecological relations that constitute the layering of collective reality itself. The digital image as a work of art reminds us that the virtual is material, data is ideological, and technology is, while profoundly formal as discussed above, far from ever being neutral. Technology is partisan and partial. It is art—the digital image in and as art—that literally feels out and makes palpable these biases. It also tells of the temporality of a priori knowing within affectivity, or the haptic unconscious. The embodiment of virtual reality thus constitutes a wet, biological politics of the art world with repercussions beyond. In the art world, the story of the haptic unconscious situates new media and software art in the thick plenum of matter, a spectrum ranging from the soft concerns of affectivity and embodiment 247

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within academic critical theory to the hard social vectors of political economy in everyday life. Extending outside of art, looping back out into the world in emergent action, this story connects to a bigger politics of ecology, the environment, and radical and rapid climate change—or life in the time of the anthropocene.

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Glossary

Bauhaus biology – This phrase refers to the presence of biology within László Moholy-Nagy’s writings and pedagogy at the Bauhaus in Weimar (1923–28) and Chicago (1937–46). The Bauhaus was a German school of art, architecture, and industrial design, the organization of which was based on the factory. In coupling these two terms I underscore an alternative strain of design functionalism rooted in the philosophy of biology and workings of organisms. “Bauhaus biology” thus marks a unique proto-cyborgian interface between the machine and human. It is a general phrase encompassing biocentrism, biofunctionalism, and biotechnics. Berlin Bauhaus  – The last European location of the Bauhaus was in Berlin from October 1932 to April 1933. Director Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe rented an old telephone factory to rehouse the Bauhaus as a private educational institution. Mies closed the school in 1933, compelled by the Third Reich who deemed the school a hotbed of communist intellectualism. biocentrism  – Biocentrism [Biozentrik] is a strain of biologistic NeoRomanticism with origins in the philosophy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). It materialized in Germany as a form of education by way of natural forms and oneness with nature. Modern biocentric thinking lends itself to unity across fields—art, science, and technology. Biocentrism in Moholy-Nagy’s thinking is driven by themes of intuition, idealism, holism, and the unity of the mind and body. Biocentrism offered him a platform for the critique of the imbalances of life brought on by industrialization.

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biofunctionalism – 1) The function of living organisms, which is emergent in organization. 2) A design philosophy in which the creation of art, architecture, and industrial design mimics the function of living organisms. Shapes may or may not be organismic in form. biotechnics – Moholy-Nagy defined “biotechnics as a method of creative activity” [die Biotechnik als metode schöpferischer Tätigkeit]. It is based on the thinking of Hungarian-born botanist Raoul Francé. Francé defined biotechnics as “the art of applying the knowledge of the functions of living systems to technical problems, i.e. a biological engineering science.”1 It is rooted in his belief that the “mechanical elegance of living beings should inspire engineers to a new perspective on technology.” The concept is systems-oriented and ecological, a network-like concept of the interconnectedness and similarities between the organs of plants, animals, and humans. Chicago Bauhaus (New Bauhaus) – After closing in 1933, the Bauhaus reopened in 1937 in Chicago under the name New Bauhaus and Director László Moholy-Nagy. The curriculum continued to focus on hands-on interaction with materials and prototype design. New focuses included town planning, the social sciences, and commercial design. Under Moholy-Nagy’s leadership, it had three names: New Bauhaus (1937–38), School of Design (1939–44), and Institute of Design (1944–46). It merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949. cybernetic  – 1) The word “cybernetic” comes from the Greek kybernetes, meaning “governor” or “steersman.” It refers to autopoetic, or self-managing, machines tending toward equilibrium. Thermostats and toilet flushes are basic cybernetic systems. The living organism is a complex cybernetic system. MIT mathematician, Norbert Wiener coined the term in 1947. The cybernetic approach is based on extrapolations he made during World War II while working to improve anti-aircraft artillery. He based his ideas on the biological function of the nervous system, developing the cybernetic system from an imagined interface between a pilot, plane, and flight patterns in the process of avoiding or firing a missile. Wiener sought to invent a machine or algorithm that, in short, predicted the curvilinear path of a flight: a mechanism, or “prediction operator,” that accounted for specifically human function… the execution of a complicated pattern of computation.” 250

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Glossary

2) Cybernetics became popular within art and art criticism in the late 1960s. I use the term generally to define art and architecture dynamically situated within systems of relations between the living and nonliving, orgnasmic and technological. Dessau Bauhaus – The second location of the Bauhaus was in the German town of Dessau (1925–32), the home of the Junkers aircraft manufacturer. The town was socialist in orientation, and welcomed the left-leaning school of art from Weimar, Germany. The Dessau Bauhaus was housed in the benchmark pinwheel-planned building designed by Walter Gropius with assistance from Carl Fieger, Ernst Neufert and others. digital image  – An electrically generated two-dimensional image appearing on a screen, projected on a wall, or printed on paper that has been created by the computation of binary code, zeros and ones. Digital images within art mark another incarnation of mediation and deskilling in the dematerialization of art:  art created not by direct action on canvas but dispersed through a technological system of relations. A. Michael Noll, from New Jersey, and Georg Nees and Frieder Nake, from Stuttgart, created the first digital images in art between 1962 and 1965. distributed image – The distributed image is created by an artist, architect, or city-dweller mediating information through a network of technological relations. It is multidimensional and can be on paper created by technology, stored in the body as a memory of a performance, or part of a cognitive map, which orients people in urban contexts. The concept of “distribution” is based on electrical engineer Paul Baran’s 1964 diagram of the hot-potato switching system—the image on the cover of this book. It was used in the creation of digital telephonic communication and is the basis of the internet. My thinking on the distributed image is rooted in Baran’s diagram and contemporary discourses on extended mind and distributed cognition. emergence – Biofunctional ordering describing how a living form develops according to the diverse energies of self-organization. Parts relate to the whole, functional hierarchy is non-linear, and biological forms take shape according to asymmetrical paths. Larger shapes and patterns of regularity and order arise out of smaller elements that do not predict such 251

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organization. As Steven Johnson explains, an emergent complex system uses “local rules between interacting agents to create higher-level behaviour well suited to its environment.”2 epigenetic – The epigenetic refers to the environmental forces that affect the phenotypic expression of the genome. The environment ranges in scale from cellular to ecological. Embryologist Conrad Waddington coined the phrase “epigenetic landscape” to describe the development of stem cells from totipotent, cells with the greatest versatility, to adult multipotent, with specific organ-based functions. Here, the epigenetic describes the dictation of phenotypic expression within the environment of the cell. Biologist Scott F. Gilbert defines the epigenetic more generally as “an embryological concept that celebrates interaction, change, emergence and the reciprocal relationship between the whole and component parts.”3 It is one of four basic genomic forces, which includes the DNA-holding genome, epigenome, microbiome, and virome. extended mind – A phrase identifying the externalization of cognition and consciousness from the brain outward across the body through tools into the environment. Extended mind situates putative consciousness within a lateral set of systemic relations across and outside of the body. “Mind” and “ratiocination” unfold inside and outside the brain. General Systems Theory (GST) – GST is based on the biological workings of the human nervous system. Its basic precept is that the study of any given object must be holistic, undertaken in terms of its role within a greater system of interconnections. The organismic biologist and founding figure of GST, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, explains, “It is necessary to study not only parts and processes in isolation… but also to solve the decisive problems found in the organization and order unifying them, resulting from dynamic interaction of parts.”4 The biological concept of GST has been applied to organization across fields, including contemporary art, academia, the military, and corporate infrastructure. generative – 1) A biological term which refers to an organism’s ability to produce or reproduce. 2)  The term “generative” within art refers to aesthetic form created by software or any mechanical device acting autonomously. Such autonomous systems actuate without human causality or intervention. 252

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Gestalt  – A  German term which literally means “shape” or “form.” According to Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, the Gestalt refers to a perceptual whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It a holistic organizational concept within psychology and art meant to counter the noise of chaos. It is a system of “form perception” in a dynamic process of organization involving the active recognition of meaningful patterns and whole-relations in the stimulus array. Gestaltung – A German term which translates as “form,” “formation,” “becoming,” and “design.” It is a concept of form-in-motion, referring to the projection of forms into the world. Influential in the development of Moholy-Nagy’s fascination with kinetic art, it is a noun as well as noun-in-action, equally suggestive of the dynamism of the living organism and biology. haptic unconscious  – The phrase “haptic unconscious” names MoholyNagy’s biocentric aesthetics of the light image as it developed from photography, through kinetic art, the city, Op Art painting, the rise of the TV and computer screen, and multi-media art performance in the twentieth century. One experiences the haptic unconscious in a body extended across space and interconnected to and in the world. The unconscious of vision moves outside of the isolated sense into a net of sensations cast across time and space in order to show that there is more to the unassuming act of knowing. It is the palpable aesthetic experience of extended mind—knowing across fields of action—made possible by art–science–technology hybrids. holism – 1) The belief that the mind and body are united in acts of putative consciousness. 2) A practical approach to making art in which science and technology are elemental. Holism in art identifies this unity of fields. 3) Art lived as everyday life, integrated into quotidian acts involving biological needs, technological tools, and labor justice. Information Theory  – A  branch of mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science founded by Bell Labs researcher Claude E. Shannon. Closely related to cybernetics, it describes the flows of information within systems and feedback loops. Information is a measure of uncertainty or entropy; the greater the amount of information, the lower the uncertainty or entropy. Information theory made its way into postwar art in the form of geometric abstraction and computational art by way of the 253

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international art movement New Tendencies and writings of Max Bense and Abraham Moles. integration – Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes’ holistic concept within art and art pedagogy of amalgamating science and technology within creative acts. Integration materialized as a curricular concept in the New Bauhaus through the combination of studio art, art history, economics, and the social and natural sciences. light image  – The phrase “light image” is the literal translation of the German word Lichtbild meaning “photograph.” It is based on Moholy-Nagy’s broad concept of light within art—as it is a means of making photography, painting, sculpture, theater, and architecture. I play out the implicitly biological and evolutionary sense of photography giving way some years later to the digital screen image in art. The light image is also a memory image coalesced from distributed actions—people performing with machines and emergent wireless technology. The light image emerges full-bore in three articulations in the 1960s: as a two-dimensional digitally produced printed image; as an image of performance in which artists and engineers collaborated, using early electronic and wireless technology; and as a civic image in which artists installed urban-scaled works of art using lights, sounds, and analog and digital computation. The light image is a distributed image. London Bauhaus – The London Bauhaus refers to the two years, 1935 to 1937, in which Moholy-Nagy and Kepes lived in London, along with German Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and Russian-cum-English modern architect Berthold Lubetkin, founder of the architecture firm Tecton. In these two years, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes crossed paths with several scientists. Kepes later published essays by several of these figures in his anthologies, including the Vision + Value Series, 1965–66. monism – Monism is a philosophy of inorganic and organic oneness. In Art as Organism it describes the mind–body unity espoused by Moholy-Nagy and Kepes. Biotechnics is a monism, pivoting according to the oneness, lateral relations, and dynamism of all creatures. The return to monism and holism within this narrative marks a turn away from postmodern fragmentation. morphogenesis  – 1)  A  term within developmental biology which refers to the growth of an organism from beginning blastocyst to mature adult. 254

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Goethe developed the idea in the late eighteenth century. It was originally based on the empirical observation of living organisms (plants, in the case of Goethe). 2) Within art, the adjective morphogenetic describes composition and form that is dynamic and changing; it is in the process of becoming. Morphogenetic formalism exists within art that is alive with modification, affected by technological, scientific, and socio-political turns. Theoretical Biology  – A  movement founded at the beginning of the twentieth century by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. It is a holistic take on the field of biology which coalesced out of the need to go beyond the dualism of life as mechanized or vitalistic. The Theoretical Biology Club was a London-based group of biologists, embryologists, and geneticists influenced by von Bertalanffy who came together in the mid-1930s over shared research and political activism against the rise of fascism on the Continent. The group influenced Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, and included Ross G. Harrison, Joseph Needham, Paul Weiss, Joseph Woodger, Dorothy Wrinch, J. D. Bernal, John Haldane, and C. H. Waddington. Weimar Bauhaus  – The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany as a union of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Its founding director was Walter Gropius. After struggling with the conservative political leaders in the region, the Bauhaus closed its school in Weimar and relocated to Dessau in 1925. wetware – A term referencing the way in which cells exhibit the behavior of software. Dennis Bray defines wetware as living and biological: it is the “sum of all the information-rich molecular processes inside of a living cell.” The term is based on the conception of complex cellular functions as computational and, by connection, the mind extended outward into the world from a cyborg being who is biologically alive while technologized. I use the term in this book to relate to non-cognitive mapping and the distributed image of the city.

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Preface 1 Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001), 20. 2 Francisco J.  Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 8. 3 Gregory J.  Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1. 4 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique, no.  31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II (Autumn, 1995):  83–109. See also Massumi, Parables of the Virtual:  Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 5 Ibid, 85. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009); Edwin Hutchins, “Distributed Cognition,” unpublished paper, 18 May 2000, from the IESBS Distributed Cognition Conference. 11 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008); Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol. 6 (1986), 1–40. 12 Benjamin Libet, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2004); Chun Siong Soon, Anna Hanxi He, Stefan Bode, and John-Dylan Haynes, “Predicting Free Choices for Abstract Intentions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, www.pnas.org/ cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212218110 (accessed 7 July 2015); Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and John-Dylan Haynes, “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain,” Nature Neuroscience 11, no. 5 (May 2008): 543–545.

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Notes to Pages xvii–5 13 Massumi, 89. 14 Ibid., 89. 15 Lisa Feldman Barrett, “When a Gun Is Not a Gun,” New York Times (April 19, 2015), page  9 of the op ed section; Interview between Andrea Scarantino and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Why Emotions Are Situated Conceptualizations,” Emotion Researcher, http://emotionresearcher.com/lisa-feldman-barrett-why-emotion… (accessed 7 July 2015). 16 Barrett, “When a Gun Is Not a Gun,” 9. 17 Ibid., 9. 18 Jef Akst, “Human Skin Can ‘Smell’ Odors” (3 July 2014), http://www.thescientist-com/?articles.view/articleNo/40463/titl… (accessed 19 April 2015); Alex Stone, “Smell Turns Up in Unexpected Places,” The New  York Times (13 October, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com (accessed 19 April 2015); Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation are Changing Life on Earth (New  York:  Current/Penguin Press, 2015), 97.

Introduction 1 Thomas, Owen, “Facebook: Users Upload 300 Million Images a Day (So Please Let Us Buy Instagram,” http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-images-aday-instagram-acquisition-2012–7 (accessed 1 July 2015). 2 David Lamoureux, “Advertising:  How Many Marketing Messages Do We See in a Day?” http://www.fluiddrivemedia.com/advertising/marketing-messages/ (accessed 1 July 2015). 3 Ibid. 4 See Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866) and M. Elizabeth Barnes, “Ernst Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law (1866),” https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/ ernst-haeckels-biogenetic-law-1866 (accessed 09/7/2015). 5 See Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology, 10th ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, Inc. Publisher, 2013). 6 László Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Circus, Variety,” The Theater of the Bauhaus, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 52. On “biofunctionalism,” see Alain Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedgagogy in Chicago (1937–46),” Design Issues 7, no. 1: 10–12. 7 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, IL: Paul Theobald, 1947), 11. 8 Ibid., 25. 9 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),” trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University,

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10 11 12 13

14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

2008), 40–41. For Benjamin on “distraction,” see Frederic J.  Schwartz, Blind Spots:  Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 37–102. Benjamin, 40. László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (1925), trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 7. Benjamin, 37. Alex Stone, “Smell Turns Up in Unexpected Places,” http://www.nytimes. com/2014/10/14/science/smell-turns-up-in… (accessed 19 April 2015); Lawrence K. Altman, “Two Americans Win Nobel for Demystifying Sense of Smell,” http:// www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/science/04CND-NOBE.html (accessed 19 April 2015); Jef Akst, “Human Skin Can ‘Smell’ Odors,” The Scientist Magazine, 10 July 2014, http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/4046. Accessed 04/19/2015. Aloïs Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome:  Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985), 19–27. Translated from the original German text Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Vienna: 1901). Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl:  Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 78–79. Tobias Wilke, “Tacti(ca)lity Reclaimed: Benjamin’s Medium, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of the Senses,” Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010): 41. See also Ota Yoshitaka, “Consideration of Logique de la Sensation and Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation,” Aesthetics, no. 17 (2013): 13–24 and Giles Peaker, “Works That Have Lasted:  Walter Benjamin Reading Aloïs Riegl,” Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, ed. R. Woodfield (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001), 291–310. Iversen, 78–79. Benjamin, 40–41; Wilke, 42. Wilke, 40. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 23. See Schwartz, 46–47. Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Circus, Variety,” 52. Moholy-Nagy, quoted in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy:  Experiment in Totality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 44. Moholy-Nagy uses the grindstone metaphor once again in the posthumously published Vision in Motion (1947), stating, “The true artist is the grindstone of the senses; he sharpens eyes, mind, and feeling; he interprets ideas and concepts through his own media” (29). See Rosalind E.  Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1994). Schwartz, 42; Michael W.  Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y.  Levin, eds., “Editors’ Introduction,” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological

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26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008), 2; Michael Jennings, “Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-Garde,” in David, S.  Ferris, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29. Schwartz, 42–43. Jennings, 21. Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 11, 20, 30. Schwartz, 45. According to Schwartz, Benjamin copied Moholy-Nagy’s layout, done in the New Typography style, for his One-Way Street. Benjamin, “News about Flowers,” 272. Benjamin also cites Moholy-Nagy at length in “Little History of Photography” (1931). See also Oliver A.  I.  Botar, “László Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision and the Aestheticization of Scientific Photography in Weimar Germany,” Science in Context 17, no.  4 (December 2004): 525–56. Walter Benjamin, “News about Flowers,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008), 271–72. Moholy-Nagy, László, The New Vision (1938) (Mineola, NY: 1975), 62. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Second Version), 38. Anker, Peder, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 9–23.

1 Bauhaus Biology 1 Harrington, Anne, Reenchanted Science:  Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3–33. 2 Ibid., 3–33. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 Mertins, Detlef, “Bioconstructivisms,” Nox:  Machining Architecture, ed. Lars Spuybroek (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 366. 5 Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Circus, Variety,” 17. 6 Botar, Oliver A.I., Biocentrism and Modernism, eds., Oliver A.I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 15. 7 Ibid., 16. 8 Botar, Oliver A.I., Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism: Biocentrism, László Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision and Erno Kallai’s Bioromantik (Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 2002), 311.

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Notes to Pages 22–26 9 Floris Neusüss quoted in Botar, Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism, 308. 10 Mindrup, Matthew, Review of From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010) http://www.h-net. org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29410. Accessed July 11–12, 2013. A second edition of the English version which includes “Abstract of an Artist” as an afterword appeared in 1938, published for students of the New Bauhaus in Chicago. 11 Schwartz, 66–69. 12 Rabinbach, Anson, The Human Motor:  Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 202–05. 13 See Mary McLeod, “ ‘Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change,” Art Journal, vol.43 no.2 (summer 1983) 132–147. 14 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 11. László Moholy-Nagy, Von material zu architektur (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2001), 11. 15 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (1938), 14. 16 Bud, Robert, “Biotechnology in the Twentieth Century,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 21 no. 3 (August 1991) 425; Roth, René Romain, Raoul H. Francé and the Doctrine of Life (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2000), 67. 17 Mertins, Detlef, “Where Architecture Meets Biology: An Interview with Detlef Mertins,” University of Pennsylvania Scholarly Commons (1-1-2007) http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=arch_papers. Accessed 07/12/2013. 18 Bud, 425. 19 See Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2009)  and Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind:  Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Detlef Mertins cites the design work of Reiser+Umemoto, Lars Spuybroek, and Zaha Hadid as contemporary examples of bioconstructivism, a concept he developed based on Francé’s biotechnics. See “Where Architecture Meets Biology:  An Interview with Detlef Mertins.” 20 Roth, 109. See also Franz Pichler, “The Contribution of Raoul Francé: Biocentric Modeling,” Beyond Art, A Third Culture: A Comparative Study in Cultures, Art, and Science in 20th-Century Austria and Hungary, Peter Weibel, ed. (Austria, Vienna: Springer Austria Architecture, 2005), 371–73. 21 Bud, 425. 22 Annie Francé-Harrar quoted in Roth, 110. 23 Ibid. 24 See Raoul Heinrich Francé, Germs of Mind in Plants (Charleston, SC:  Nabu Press, 2010). 25 Ibid., 23.

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Notes to Pages 26–34 26 Haeckel, Ernst Monism As Connecting Religion and Science (Whitefish, MO: Kessinger Publishing, 2012), 3. 27 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (1938), 61. 28 Botar, “László Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision and the Aestheticization of Scientific Photography in Weimar Germany,” 530. 29 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (1938), 122. 30 Ibid., 122. 31 Mertins, “Where Architecture Meets Biology:  An Interview with Detlef Mertins,” unpaginated. 32 Moholy-Nagy mentions Fröbel, along with Pestalozzi, in The New Vision (1938), 17. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form played an intermittent but nonetheless important role in the evolution of modern architecture in the twentieth century, influencing the work of Anne Tyng, Buckminster Fuller. See Mertins, “Bioconstructivisms,”364–65. 33 Mertins, “Bioconstructivisms,” 366. 34 Botar, “László Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision and the Aestheticization of Scientific Photography in Weimar Germany,” 533–34, 540–41. 35 Ibid., 532. See also Pepper Stetler, “ ‘The New Visual Literature’:  László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film,” Grey Room, no.32 (summer 2008), 88–113. 36 Botar, Oliver A.I., Technical Detours:  The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered (New York: City University of New York/The Salgo Trust for Education, 2006), 173–75. 37 Moholy-Nagy, László and Alfred Kemeny, “Dynamic-Constructive EnergySystem,” from the Alain Findeli file in the New Bauhaus archive at the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2007.15 8/10. 38 Botar, Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered, 173. 39 Ibid. 40 Kostelanetz, Richard, “Moholy-Nagy:  The Risk and Necessity of Artistic Adventurism,” Moholy-Nagy: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 6. 41 Harrington, Reenchanted Science, xv–xxiv. 42 Ibid., 140. 43 Goldstein, Kurt, The Organism:  A  Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 77. 44 Harrington, 150–53. 45 Ibid., 147–48. 46 Harrington, 140. This is the title of the chapter. 47 Quoted in Harrington, 150. 48 Goldstein, 85.

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Notes to Pages 35–43 49 Singerman, Howard, Art Subjects:  Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 76. 50 Smith, Barry, ed., Foundations of Gestalt Theory (Munich: Verlag, 1988), 14. 51 On “Gestalt versus Chaos,” see Harrington, 108–14; D.  Brett King and Michael Wertheimer, Max Wertheimer & Gestalt Theory (London: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 155. 52 Mertins, “Bioconstructivisms,” 369. 53 Singerman, 76. 54 Ibid., 76. 55 Ibid., 77. 56 Postmodern theory tended to reduce the Gestalt to a stationary opacity and a major player in modernism’s “hegemony of vision.” See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 57 Lupton, Ellen, The ABC’s of Bauhaus, The Bauhaus and Design Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 22. 58 Harrington, 119. 59 Ibid., 115. 60 King and Wertheimer, 99–100. 61 Ibid., 100. 62 Harrington, 115. 63 Behrens, Roy R.  “Art, Design and Gestalt Theory,” Leonardo, vol. 31 no.  4 (1998), 299. 64 Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 12. 65 Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Circus, Variety,” foldable insert. 66 Ibid., 62. 67 Ibid., foldable insert. 68 It is notable also that, in the late 1950s, Cage also taught typography at the New School. 69 Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Circus, Variety,” 48. 70 Ibid., 60. 71 Carnap, Rudolf, The Logical Structure of the World (1928), trans. Rolf A. George (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), xvi. 72 Neurath, Otto, “Sociology and Physicalism,” trans. Morton Magnus and Ralph Raico, Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1978), 282–321. 73 Galison, Peter, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 16 no. 4 (summer 1990), 713. 74 Ibid., 710. 75 Ibid., 737. 76 Ibid., 710.

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Notes to Pages 44–57 77 Botar, Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered, 139. 78 Vossoughian, Nader, Otto Neurath:  The Language of the Global Polis (Rotterdam, NL: NAi Publishers, 2008), 61. 79 Ibid., 61. 80 Neurath, 287. 81 Ibid., 286. 82 Ibid., 290. 83 Ibid., 287. 84 See William H. Jordy, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies, and Breuer,” in The Intellectual Migration:  Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University), 485–543. 85 Galison, 747. 86 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, 144. 87 Ibid., 145. 88 Jordy, 485. 89 Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937–46),” 5. 90 Ibid. 91 See Frederic Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 92 Engelbrecht, Lloyd C., The Association of the Arts and Industries: Background and Origins of the Bauhaus Movement in Chicago (Chicago:  University of Chicago Dissertation, 1973), 4–85. 93 Ibid., 86. 94 Ibid., 89. 95 Ibid., 100. 96 Ibid., 101. 97 Ibid., 105. 98 Ibid., 102. 99 See the German curricular wheel from 1919/1922 in Hans M.  Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 52. See the New Bauhaus curricular wheel from 1937 in information pamphlet (1937) in the Institute of Design archive, University of Illinois at Chicago, IC Collection 2006.014; See also Alain Findeli, Le Bauhaus in Chicago: l’oeuvre pédagogique de László Moholy-Nagy (Sillery, Quebec: Septentrion, 1995), 47. 100 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 165. A similar image appears in the catalog for the School of Design, 1941–42. 101 Ibid., 163. 102 Findeli, Le Bauhaus in Chicago: l’oeuvre pédagogique de László Moholy-Nagy, 56–7. 103 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 24.

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Notes to Pages 60–63 104 Moholy-Nagy, László, Design Workshops (1944), 36:11 min film (The Moholy-Nagy Foundation, 2008). See also http://www.moholy-nagy.org/ category-s/36.htm. Accessed 07/22/2013. 105 Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937–1946),” 14. The two men met with good cheer in New York November 1938. 106 Ibid. 107 Dewey, John, Art as Experience (1934) (New York: Penguin Group, 2005) 258. 108 Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937–1946),” 14. 109 Finch, Elizabeth, Languages of Vision: György Kepes and the “New Landscape” of Art and Science (Ann Arbor, MI:  UMI Dissertation Publication, 2005), 3. 110 Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 222. 111 Findeli, Le Bauhaus in Chicago: l’oeuvre pédagogique de László Moholy-Nagy, 33. 112 Ibid., 67. 113 Ibid. 114 Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937–1946),” 6. “Design Education and Industry: The Laborious Beginnings of the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1944,” 109. 115 Findeli, 116 Finch, 150. 117 Allen, James Sloan, The Romance of Commerce and Culture:  Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 65. 118 School of Design Pamphlet, Institute for Design archive, University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 3 Folder 70. 119 Anonymous, “Outline of the Camouflage Course at the School of Design in Chicago 1941–1942,” unpaginated, Institute of Design archive, Box 3 Folder 64. See also John L. Scott, L. Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes, “Materials for the Camoufleur,” Civilian Defense (September 1942) 13–6. 120 Moholy-Nagy, László, “Courses in Rehabilitation and Occupational Therapy,” unpaginated, Institute of Design archive, University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 3 Folder 64. 121 Ibid. 122 Allen, 65. 123 Ibid., 65. 124 Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937–1946),” 6; Allen, 66–67. 125 Findeli, Alain, “Design Education and Industry: The Laborious Beginnings of the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1944,” Journal of Design History 4, no. 2

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Notes to Pages 63–68

126 127 128 129

(1991), 97–113; See also Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1997). Ibid., 107. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 103.

2 György Kepes and the Light Image as Bio-Image 1 See Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Modern Theories of Development:  An Introduction to Theoretical Biology (New  York:  Harper Torchbooks, 1962 [1933]) and Donna Jeanne Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos (Berkeley, CA:  North Atlantic Books, 2004 [1976]). Brian K.  Hall claims that embryologist Conrad Waddington was awarded a “studentship in philosophy” for an essay on the “Vitalist-Mechanist Controversy.” It is presumed that Waddington met Kepes in London during the 1930s as his writings appeared in Kepes’ later publications. See Hall, “Waddington’s Legacy in Development and Evolution,” American Zoology, No. 32 (1992) 113. Waddington’s unpublished award-winning paper is in the archives at the University of Edinburgh. See http://www.archives.lib. ed.ac.uk/catalogue/cs/viewcat.pl?id=GB-237-Coll-41-2-1-3&view=basic . Accessed 06/14/14. 2 Clayton, Philip, “Why Emergence Matters,” Beyond Mechanism:  Putting Life Back Into Biology, eds. Scarfe, Brian G. Henning, and Dorion Sagan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013) 76, 79. 3 On the Theoretical Biology Club, see Haraway, 4, 102, 131–34. On leftist activist scientists in 1930s Britain, see:  Soraya de Chadarevian, Designs for Life:  Molecular Biology after World War II (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2002) 22–30; Gary Werskey, The Visible College: The Collective Biography of British Scientific Socialists of the 1930s (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978); William McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State:  The Social Relations of Science Movement in Great Britain, 1931–1937 (Columbus, OH:  Ohio State University Press, 1984); and Mary Jo Nye, Blackett:  Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) 13–41. 4 Haraway, 4. 5 Aprahamian, Francis and Brenda Swann, eds., J. D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics (New York: Verso, 1999) 168–69.

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Notes to Pages 69–77 6 See György Kepes, ed., Vision + Value Series, including The Education of Vision. Structure in Art and Science. The Nature and Art of Motion. Module, Symmetry, Proportion, Rhythm. Sign, Image, Symbol. The Man-Made Object (New York: George Braziller, 1965–66). A seventh volume was published later: György Kepes, ed., Arts of Environment (New York: George Braziller, 1972). This chapter focuses on eight of the nine primary anthologies by Kepes and Language of Vision (1944), his manifesto on light art and scientific images on par with Moholy’s The New Vision. I  will discuss the seventh volume of the Vision + Values Series in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 5 . 7 Five years after the exhibition, Kepes published a catalog of essays and images with the same title, New Landscape in Art & Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Col, 1956). 8 Gilbert, Scott F., Preface, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields:  Metaphors That Shape Embryos, by Donna Jeanne Haraway (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004 [1976]), xi. 9 Elizabeth Finch argues against the idea that Kepes was a product of the German Bauhaus and greatly influenced by Moholy-Nagy in his life work. While not a mainstay of my argument in the development of the haptic unconscious as a concept, the story I tell here is implicitly about the diaspora of the German Bauhaus into the United States during the mid-twentieth century. See Elizabeth Finch, Language of Vision:  György Kepes and the New Landscape of Art and Science (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Publishing, 2005). 10 Finch 112–30; Arning 32–43; Roach 89, 95. See also J.  D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1967)  and Soraya de Chadarevian, Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 11 See Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1964). 12 See Marco Piccolino and Marco Bresadola, Shocking Frogs: Galvani Volta and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience (Oxford, UK: Oxford Press, 2013) and Marcello Pera and Jonathan Mandelbaum, The Ambiguous Frog:  The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 13 Martin, Reinhold, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 54. 14 Arning, 29. 15 Finch, 143. 145–46. 16 Ibid., 131. 17 Arning, 29. 18 Finch, 112. See also Leigh Anne Roach, A Popular Art: Sources, Structure, and Impact of György Kepes’s Language of Vision (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Publishing,

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Notes to Pages 77–88

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

2010)  78–85, 96–100 and Bill Arning, Vision + Value, 1965–72 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Publishing, 2008), 32–72. Finch, 175. See also http://historiccamera.com/cgi-bin/librarium2/pm.cgi? action=app_display&app=datasheet&app_id=2527& Finch, 192–207. Ibid., 198, 204, 207. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 175–76. Martin, 64. http://cavs.mit.edu/about/id.53.html. Accessed 03/16/2014. Stetler, Pepper, “The New Visual Literature”:  László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film,” Grey Room 32 (Summer 2008), 89. Ibid., 89. Ibid. J. L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, and N. Gabo, eds., Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971 [1937]) and Arning, 35. Bernal, J. D., “Art and the Scientist,” Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971 [1937]), 123. Ibid., 123. Moholy-Nagy, László, “Light Painting,” Circle:  International Survey of Constructive Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971 [1937]), 245. Braham, William H. and Jonathan A. Hale, Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), 63. The aerial land surveys for housing developents of the “Praesens” and “U Group” of Warsaw, Poland within Siegfried Giedion’s “The Work of C.I.A.M.” are the other science-like images (276–77). Honzik, Karel, “A Note On Biotechnics,” Circle:  International Survey of Constructive Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971 [1937]), 259. Ibid., 262. Ibid. See Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, eds. Warnke von Marfred and Claudia Brink (Berlin:  Akademie Verlag, 2000); Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970); and Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). Johnson, 9. Ibid. Ibid., 151–53. Vossoughian, Nader, “The Language of the World Museum: Otto Neurath, Paul Otlet, Le Corbusier,” Transnational Associations 1–2 (2003), 83.

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Notes to Pages 91–104 45 Otlet quoted in Vossoughian, 85. 46 Malraux, André, Museum Without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1967), 12. 47 See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1959]). 48 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Science_Library. Accessed 03/03/2014. 49 Finch, 113. 50 Ibid., 114. 51 Burtin, Will, “Design and Communication,” Education of Vision, ed. György Kepes, Vision + Value Series (New York: George Braziller Company, 1966), 78. 52 Ibid. 53 Remington, R. Roger and Robert S. P. Fripp, Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin (Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries), 67. 54 Ibid., 67–70. 55 Burtin, 78–95. 56 Ibid., 80. 57 Ibid. 58 Remington and Fripp, 87. 59 Burtin, 89. 60 Ibid. 61 Remington and Fripp, 104. 62 Ritterbush, Philip C., The Art of Organic Forms (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1968), 33. 63 Ritterbush, Philip C., “The Public Side of Science,” Change, Vol. 9 No. 9 (September, 1977), 27. 64 Morris, Charles W., “Course and Program Descriptions, 1938–1944: Intellectual Integration,” Institute of Design Archive, University of Illinois at Chicago, Box no. 3 Folder no. 64, dated 4/2/38. 65 Finch, 123. 66 Morris, “Course and Program Descriptions, 1938–1944: Intellectual Integration.” 67 Scott, John L.  in collaboration with L.  Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes, “Materials for the Camoufleur,” Civilian Defense (September 1942), 13–16. 68 School of Design Course Advertisement, Institute of Design Archive, University of Illinois at Chicago, Box no. 3, Folder no. 76. 69 Schuldenfrei, Robin, “Assimilating Unease:  Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/ Postar Bauhaus in Chicago,” in Atomic Dwelling:  Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture (London: Routledge, 2012), 87–126. 70 Scott with Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes, 14. 71 Finch, 149. 72 For the influence of Dewey on Moholy-Nagy and the New Bauhaus, see chapter 1. For the relationship between Dewey and the Unity of Science movement stateside, see Ivan Ferreira da Cunha, “John Dewey and the Logical Empiricist

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Notes to Pages 104–109

73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90

91

92

93

Unity of Science,” Cognitio, Sao Paulo, Vol. 13 No. 2 (January-December 2012), 219–30. Kepes, György, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobold, 1944), 201. Ibid., 201. My emphasis. See Charles W.  Morris, “Science, Art, and Technology,” The Kenyon Review, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Autumn 1939), 409–23 and Roland Posner, “Charles Morris and the Behaviour Foundations of Semiotics,” Classics of Semiotics, eds. Martin Krampen, et. al. (New York: Plenum, 1987), 23–57. Hayakawa, S. I., “The Revision of Vision,” Language of Vision, by György Kepes (Chicago: Paul Theobold, 1944), 9. Piaget, Jean, Strucutralism (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1971 [1968]). Ibid., 42, 49, and 54. Kepes, Language of Vision, 13. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 52. My emphasis. Finch, 101. Martin, The Organizational Complex, 67–68. See also Reinhold Martin, “Naturalization, in Circles: Architecture, Science, Architecture,” in On Growth and Form:  Organic Architecture & Beyond, eds. Philip Beesley and Sarah Bonnemaison (Halifax, NS: Tuns Press, 2008), 100–113. Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science, 36–37; 210–211. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Ibid., 103. Ibid. See David Robbins, Jacquelynn Baas, and Lawrence Alloway, eds., The Independent Group:  Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) and Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Great Britain, 1945–1949 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1996). Whyte, Lancelot Law, ed., “Editorial Preface to the 1968 Edition,” Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art (Bloomington, IN: Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1971 [1951]), vii, ix. Enriquez, Juan and Steve Gullans, Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Seleciton and Nonrandom Mutation are Changing Life on Earth (New  York:  Current, 2015). See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) the full text of which is available at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin.html, accessed 03/08/2014. On Lamarckism and Neo-Lamarckism see Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr. The Spirit of System:  Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge,

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Notes to Pages 109–114

94

95

96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103

104 105 106

107 108 109

MA:  Harvard University Press, 1995); Frederick Wollaston Hutton, Darwinism and Lamarckism, Old and New: Four Lectures (New York: Nabu Press, 2011); Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation:  Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene:  30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006). Whyte, Lancelot Law, “Introduction,” Aspects of Form:  A  Symposium on Form in Nature and Art (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1971 [1951]), 2. See Philip Morrison, “The Modularity of Knowing,” 1–19 and C.  H. Waddington, “The Modular Principle and Biological Form,” 20–37 in Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm, in Vision + Value Series, ed. György Kepes (New York: George Braziller, 1966). Waddington, C.H., The Strategy of the Genes (New  York:  Macmillan, 1957), 1–58. Ibid., 30. Ibid. Ibid., 32. See also Sanford Kwinter, “Landscapes of Change: Boccioni’s ‘Stati d’animo’ as General Theory of Models,” Assemblage, No. 19 (December 1992) 50–65; and Sara Franceschelli, “Morphogenesis, Structural Stability, and Epigenetic Landscape,” Morphogenesis:  Origins of Patterns and Shapes, eds. P. Bourgine and A. Lesne (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011), 283–93. Waddington, 32. Ibid. Ibid. In February of 2014, the National Museum of Wales acquired a large collection of paintings by John Piper. Museum curators, however, have no knowledge of the whereabouts of Piper’s renderings of the “epigenetic landscape” for Waddington. This is information gained from an email enquiry to the museum, followed by a response on 05/27/14 from Melissa Munro, Senior Curator:  Derek Williams Collection. See also the museum website:  http:// www.museumwales.ac.uk/news/?article_id=833. Accessed 05/31/14. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes, 27. Ibid. Nochlin, Linda, “Introduction:  The Darwin Effect,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (Spring, 2003) http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring03/218-th e-darwin-effect-introduction. Accessed 05/30/14. Needham, Joseph, Order and Life (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1936) 110–11. Ibid., 112. Hayles, 61; quoting Piaget, Structuralism, 5.

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Notes to Pages 114–121 110 Waddington, Conrad, Behind Appearances: A Study of the Relations Between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968 [Edinburgh, 1967]). 111 Waddington, C. H., ‘New Visions of the World,’ Leonardo, Vol. 1 No. 1 (January 1968), 72. My emphasis. 112 Ibid., 72. 113 Galison, Peter, “The Americanization of Unity,” Daedalus, Vol. 127 No. 1, Science in Culture (Winter 1998) 47. 114 Holton, Gerard, “On the Vienna Circle in Exile,” in W. DePauli-Schimanovich, E.  Köhler, and F.  Stadler, eds. The Foundational Debate:  Complexity and Constructivity in Mathematics and Physics (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 47. 115 Galison, 46. Philipp Frank’s organized an “Inter-Scientific Discussion Group” in 1944. 116 Ibid., 66. 117 Ibid., 67. 118 Wiener, Norbert, “Pure Patterns in a Natural World,” The New Landscape of Art and Science,” György Kepes, ed. (Chicago:  Paul Theobold and Co., 1956), 274. 119 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, “The Tree of Knowledge,” Sign, Image, and Symbol within the Vision + Value Series, György Kepes, ed. (New  York:  George Braziller, 1966), 274–78. 120 Ibid., 276–77. 121 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961 [1948]), 133–43. 122 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, Modern Theories of Development:  An Introduction to Theoretical Biology (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962 [1933]) 177–187. See also Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory:  Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1968). 123 The British scientist J. H. Woodger translated Bertalanffy’s Modern Theories of Development from German into English in 1933. 124 Haraway, 33. 125 Bertalanffy, Ludwig, Modern Theories of Development:  An Introduction to Theoretical Biology (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962 [1933]), 21. 126 Ibid., 24. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid., 25. 129 Ibid. 130 Second-order systems theory and neo-cybernetics bring the viewer-percipient into play, arguing that this figure is enveloped within the cybernetic loop rather than an actor looking in from an Archimedean viewpoint. See Bruce C.  Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen, eds., Emergence and Embodiment:  New

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Notes to Pages 121–126

131 132 133 134 135 136

137

138

139 140 141

Essays on Second-Order Systems Thought (Raleigh, NC:  Duke University Press, 2009). Wiener, Cybernetics, 11. James Clerk Maxwell, “On Governors,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, no. 100 (1868). Ibid., 6. Wiener goes into great detail describing the pilot zigzagging and stunting in the attempt to avoid being shot down while flying in the air. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Interview between Paul Baran and David Hochfelder, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 24 October 1999, http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Paul_Baran. Accessed 03/06/2014. Baran, Paul, “On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks” (Santa Monica, CA:  RAND Corporation, 1964), iii. Interview between Paul Baran and David Hochfelder, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 24 October 1999, http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Paul_Baran. Accessed 03/06/2014. Baran, v. Baran, 1–3. Interview between Paul Baran and David Hochfelder, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 24 October, 1999, http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Paul_Baran. Accessed 03/06/2014.

3 The Distributed Image of the City 1 See Reginald G.  Golledge, ed., Wayfinding Behaviour:  Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes (Baltimore, MD:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 2 Kepes, György, “Urban Form Notes,” MIT Archive. 11/9/1954. https://libraries. mit.edu/archives/exhibits/kepes-lynch/index.html Accessed 06/20/14. 3 The term “wetware” invests the computer-related terms “hardware” and “software” with biological life. See the popular science book on cellular complexity framed in terms of computation by Dennis Bray, Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) and the science fiction novel by Rudy Rucker, Wetware (New York: Avon Books, 1988). 4 Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). vi. 5 Ibid., vi. 6 Ibid., 3. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 6.

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Notes to Pages 127–139 9 Ibid., 46. 10 Ibid., 12. 11 Raynsford, Anthony, “Civic Art in an Age of Cultural Relativism:  The Aesthetic Origins of Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City,” Journal of Urban Design, vol. 16 no. 1, pp. 43–65. While Unwin is not in the bibliography of The Image of the City, urbanists such as Herbert Gans, and Catherine Bauer Wurster are included in a list of “People Contacted” for The Perceptual Form of the City that was in the grant proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation in fall 1954. MIT Archive. Fall ’54. https://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/kepes-lynch/index.html Accessed 06/20/14. 12 Wohl, R.  Richard and Anselm L.  Strauss, “Symbolic Representation and the Urban Milieu,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 63, no.  5 (Mar., 1958), 523, 526. Wohl and Strauss were sociologists and this article is in Lynch’s bibliography for The Image of the City. 13 Silver, Nathan, “The Movement Movement,” Progressive Architecture, vol. 47 (Dec., 1966), 178. 14 Rickey, George, “The Morphology of Movement:  A  Study of Kinetic Art,” in György Kepes, ed., The Nature and Art of Motion, Vision + Value Series (New York: Braziller, 1965), 81. 15 Silver, 182. 16 Halprin, Lawrence, Freeways (New  York:  Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1966). See also Alison Bick Hirsch, City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (Minneapolis, MN:  University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 17 Halprin, Lawrence, “Motation,” Progressive Architecture, vol. 46 (July 1965), 128. 18 Ibid., 128. 19 Ibid. 20 Richter, Hans, “My Experience with Movement in Painting and in Film,” in György Kepes, ed., The Nature and Art of Motion, Vision + Value Series (New York: Braziller, 1965), 145. 21 Halprin, “Motation,” 129. 22 Ibid., 130. 23 Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). 24 Ibid., 556–59. 25 Moholy-Nagy, László, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), 11. 26 Ibid., 153. 27 Moholy-Nagy, Foreword. The emphasis in the text was made by Moholy-Nagy. 28 Kepes, György, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944), 13. 29 Ibid., 52. 30 Ibid., 170.

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Notes to Pages 139–143 31 Ibid., 196. 32 Ibid. 33 Kepes, “Form and Motion,” lecture given at the Institute of Design, 23 October, 1947. From the archives of Alain Findeli at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 2007.15. File 9 of 10. 34 Waddington’s identification of the “organizer” in mammals and birds was based the discovery in the late 1920s by Spemann and Mangold of the “organizer” within the amphibian embryo. See also http://embryo.asu.edu/ search?text=organizer. Accessed 05/30/2014. 35 Kepes, “Form and Motion,” 3. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Banerjee, Tridib and Michael Southworth, eds., City Sense and City Design:  Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1995) 10. 39 Ibid., 11. 40 Ibid., 14. 41 Ibid., 18. 42 Ibid., 19. 43 MIT Kevin Lynch-György Kepes Archives, December 4, 1953, “Research Proposal,” http://libraries.mit.edu/_archives/exhibits/kepes-lynch/. Accessed 07/16/14. 44 MIT Kevin Lynch-György Kepes Archives. April 1951, “A Study of the Visual Forms of Cities,” http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/15/14. 45 MIT Kevin Lynch-György Kepes Archives. http://libraries.mit.edu/150books /2011/04/16/1960/. Accessed 07/15/14. 46 Rockefeller Archive Center. http://www.rockarch.org/publications/resrep/rowan.php. Accessed 07/17/14. 47 See the website for the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. http://dusp.mit.edu/department/about. Accessed 07/16/14. See also MIT Kepes-Lynch archive site http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/16/14. 48 MIT Kepes-Lynch archive site http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/16/14. 49 Raynsford, 45. 50 See on-line photography archive https://www.flickr.com/photos/mit-libraries /3341810877/in/set-72157614966285159. Accessed 07/21/14. 51 Kepes, György, Field Notes, 03/24/55. https://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/kepes-lynch/index.html. Accessed 07/16/14. 52 Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 143–150 53 Kepes, György, “Urban Form Seminar:  Interviews with John Cage, composer, James T.  Farrell, writer, and Andreas Feininger, photographer,” György Kepes, 12/10/54. MIT Kepes-Lynch archive http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/16/14. 54 Ibid. pg. 1, 12/10/54. MIT Kepes-Lynch archive http://dome.mit.edu/handle/ 1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/16/14. 55 Ibid pg. 3, 12/10/54. MIT Kepes-Lynch archive http://dome.mit.edu/handle/ 1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/16/14. 56 Ibid. pg. 5, 12/10/54. MIT Kepes-Lynch archive http://dome.mit.edu/handle/ 1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/16/14. 57 Lynch, Kevin, “Morning with Cab Despatcher, July 18, 1956.” MIT Kepes-Lynch archive http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/16/14. 58 Lynch, Kevin, “The Sensuous Impact of Highway Driving,” 08/01/56. MIT Kepes-Lynch archive http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656. Accessed 07/16/14. 59 Lynch, Kevin, “Summary of Accomplishments:  Research Project on the Perceptual Form of the City,” 1959. MIT Kepes-Lynch archive http://dome.mit. edu/handle/1721.3/35642. Accessed 07/16/14. 60 Lukashok, Alvin K. and Kevin Lynch, “Some Childhood Memories of the City,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 22, no. 3 (1956), 142. 61 Ibid., 143. 62 Lynch, Kevin and Malcolm Rivkin, “A Walk Around the Block,” Landscape:  Magazine of Human Geography, vol. 8, no.  3 (Spring 1959), 24–33. 63 Sarkis, Hashim, “Disoriented:  Kevin Lynch between Behaviour Psychology, Boston, and Planning,” unpublished paper. isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic709752.files/WEEK%204/HSarkis… Accessed 07/16/14. 64 Raynsford, 44. 65 Ibid., 48. 66 Ibid., 43. 67 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, General Systems Theory:  Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 31. 68 See Lynch’s unpublished notes referenced above “The Sensuous Impact of Highway Driving” from 1956. 69 Letter from Donald Appleyard to Kevin Lynch. MIT Kevin Lynch Papers. Box 4b, File: Highway General Statements. 70 Letter from Donald Appleyard to Kevin Lynch. MIT Kevin Lynch Papers. Box 4b, File: Highway General Statements. 71 Waldrop, M. Mitchell, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking, 2001), 182.

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Notes to Pages 150–154 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84 85

86 87 88 89 90

Ibid., 183. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 96. Ibid. Letter from J. C. R. Licklider to Kevin Lynch. 09/13/54. Available through Licklider Correspondence Archive at MIT. http://dome.mit.edu/ handle/1721.3/35615?show=full. Accessed 07/17/14. For a definition of the Fourier transform, see http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1002/fouriertransform-for-dummies and http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform. Accessed 07/17/14. Letter from J. C. R. Licklider to Kevin Lynch. 09/13/54. Available through Licklider Correspondence Archive at MIT. http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/35615?show= full. Accessed 07/17/14. Letter from J. C. R. Licklider to Kevin Lynch. 09/13/54. Available through Licklider Correspondence Archive at MIT. http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/ 35615?show=full. Accessed 07/17/14. Licklider, J. C. R., “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1 (March 1960)  4–11. http://groups.csail. mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html. Accessed 07/17/14. Licklider, J. C. R., “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1 (March 1960)  4–11. http://groups.csail. mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html. Accessed 07/17/14. On fig-tree pollination see http://www.figweb.org/Interaction/How_do_fig_ wasps_pollinate/index.htm and http://sp11symbiosis.providence.wikispaces. net/Fig+Wasp+Symbiosis. Accessed 07/18/14. Smith, David Woodruff, “Consciousness and Actuality in Whiteheadian Ontology,” in The Dawn of Cognitive Science: Early European Contributors, ed. Liliana Albertazzi (Boston:  Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 269–97. Smith, 271. Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, eds., David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978 [1929]), 18. See also Smith, 270 ad Donald W.  Sherburne, ed., A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Smith, 271. Ibid., 274. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 23. Smith, 278; Whitehead, Process and Reality, 219. Ibid., 275; Ibid., Process and Reality, 210.

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Notes to Pages 154–159 91 Langer, Susanne K., Feeling and Form:  A  Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 32–34. 92 Langer, Susanne K., “On Artistic Sensibility,” in The Visual Arts Today, ed., György Kepes (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1960), 246–48. 93 Dryden, Donald, “Whitehead’s Influence on Susanne Langer’s Conception of Living Form,” Process Studies, vol. 26, no. 1–2 (1997), 62. 94 Langer, Susanne K., Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1969 [1942]), 90. 95 Ibid., 90. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 44 quoted in Richard M.  Liddy, “Susanne K.  Langer’s Philosophy of Mind,” Transactions of the Charles S.  Peirce Society, vol. 33, no.1 (winter 1997), 150. 98 Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 44 quoted in Liddy, 150. 99 Liddy, 149. 100 Dryden, 67. 101 Clayton, Philip, “Why Emergence Matters,” Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back Into Biology, eds. Scarfe, Brian G. Henning, and Dorion Sagan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 76, 79. 102 Liddy, 155. 103 Lynch, The Image of the City, 13. 104 Ibid. 105 Boulding, Kenneth E., The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 3. 106 Boulding, The Image, 148. 107 Ibid., 5. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., 33. 110 Ibid., 19. 111 Ibid., 5. 112 The first use of the term “cognitive mapping” was by Edward C. Tolman in his “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” Psychological Review, no. 55 (1948), 189–208. 113 Boulding, Kenneth E., Foreword, Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behaviour, eds., Roger M. Downs and David Stea (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973), vii, ix. 114 Appleyard, Donald, “Notes on Urban Perception and Knowledge,” Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behaviour, eds., Roger M. Downs and David Stea (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973), 113, 114.

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Notes to Pages 159–167 115 Lynch, Kevin, “Some References to Orientation,” Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behaviour, eds., Roger M.  Downs and David Stea (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973), 300. 116 Ibid., 301. 117 Jameson, Fredric, “Cognitive Mapping,” Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 347–60. See also Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1991)  and Robert T. Tally, Jr., “Jameson’s Project of Cognitive Mapping: A Critical Engagement,” Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, ed., Rolland G. Paulston (New York: Garland, 1996), 399–416. 118 Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 51. 119 Ibid., 51. 120 Ibid. 121 Bray, x. 122 Ibid.

4 Wet Perception 1 The phrase Op Art appears with uppercase letters as it designates a proper noun, which is the name of the art movement. By contrast, “optical art” appears here in lowercase because it references the more general, inclusive “perceptual art” of the 1960s, including both Op and New Tendencies. 2 Rosen, Margit, “The Art of Programming: The New Tendencies and the Arrival of the Computer as a Means of Artistic Research,” A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival:  New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2011), 27–42. 3 Kleinman, Kent, and Leslie Van Duzer, Introduction, Rudolf Arnheim; Revealing Vision, Kent Kleiman and Leslie Van Duzer, eds. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997) 2–3. See also Eric Rentschler, “Rudolf Arnheim’s Early Passage between Social and Aesthetic Film Criticism,” Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins (New York: Routledge Press, 2011), 52–53. 4 Rentschler, 53. 5 Borgzinner, Jon, “Op Art:  Pictures that Attack the Eye,” Time, vol. 84, no.  7 (October 23, 1964), 78–82. 6 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Anna Dezeuze, “ ‘Neo-Dada,’ ‘Junk Aesthetic,’ and Spectator Participation” in David Hopkins and Anna Katharina Schaffner, Neo-Avant-Garde (Amsterdam, NL:  Editions Rodopi BV, 2006)  49–73; and Hubert van den Berg, “On the Historiographic Distinction between the

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Notes to Pages 167–177

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Historical and Neo-Avant-Garde” in Dietrich Scheunemann, Avant-Garde/ Neo-Avant-Garde (Amsterdam, NL: Editions Rodopi BV, 2005), 63–76. See Rosalind Krauss, “Afterthoughts on Op,” Art International, vol. 9, no.  5 (June 1965),  75–76 and Pamela M.  Lee, “Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem,” October, vol. 98 (Autumn 2001), 26–46. Anonymous, “The Movement-Movement,” Time, vol. 87, no. 4 (Jan. 28, 1966), 74–77. Lee, 50. Seitz, William, The Responsive Eye (New  York:  Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 8–9. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Seitz, William, “The New Perceptual Art,” Vogue, vol. 13, no.  6 (Feb.15, 1965) 78–80, 142–143. Riley, Bridget, “Perception is the Medium,” Art News, vol. 64, no.  6 (October 1965), 32. Riley, 33. Seitz, “The New Perceptual Art,” 143. Ibid. Both moving-image documents are available at Youtube.com via the following links. Mike Wallace’s Eye on New  York:  http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XSVQqJo0Pmk; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHoCHD3CM FM&list=PLe4g2onp-hy4Bot1UJHrXqMBUPLsbi32U&index=4; http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=onj5Quj2cu8&index=5&list=PLe4g2onp-hy4Bot1UJH rXqMBUPLsbi32U. Brian De Palma’s documentary on the exhibition is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC_TVbfwH0I. Arnheim, Rudolf, “Gestalt and Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 2, no. 8 (Autumn, 1943), 71. Riley was not informed about the creation of the fabric. See Lee, 26–46 and Jack Burnham, “The Art of Bridget Riley,” Tri-Quarterly, no. 6 (1966), 60. Lee, 28; Burnham, 60. Burnham, 60. Lee, 28; Burnham, 60. Burnham, 60. Canaday, John, “Art that Pulses, Quivers, and Fascinates,” The New York Times, February 21, 1965. Section B, p. 57. Kozloff, Max, “Commotion of the Retina,” The Nation (March 22, 1965), 316. Hess, Thomas, “You Can Hang It in the Hall,” Art News (April 1965), 41. Krauss, Rosalind, “Afterthoughts on Op,” Art International, vol. 9, no. 5 (June 1965), 75.

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Notes to Pages 177–183 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

38 39

40

41

42

43 44

45 46

Krauss, 76. Lee, 28. Ibid., 28. Hansen, Mark B.  N., Embodying Technesis:  Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Bann, Stephen, “Unity and Diversity in Kinetic Art,” in Kinetic Art: Four Essays by Stephen Bann, Reg Gadney, Frank Popper, and Philip Steadman (St. Albans, England: Motion Books, 1966), 48–67. Borgzinner, 82. Alloway, Lawrence, “Notes on Op Art,” in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: Dutton Press, 1966), 86–87. Rosen, 36; Fritz, Darko, “Notions of the Program in 1960s Art:  Concrete, Computer-generated Art, and Conceptual Art,” Editions HYX David-Oliver Lartigaud, ed. (Orléans, France:  Architecture-Art Contemporain-Cultures Numériques, 2011),  26–39; George Rickey, “The New Tendency (Nouvelle Tendance—Recherche Continuelle),” Art Journal, vol. 23, no.  4 (Summer 1964)  272–79; Jacopo Galimberti, “The N Group and the Operaisti:  Art and Class Struggle in the Italian Economic Boom,” Grey Room, vol. 49 (Fall 2012), 80–101; and Darko Fritz, “Vladimir Bonacic:  Computer-Generated Works Made within Zagreb’s New Tendencies Network (1961–1973),” Leonardo, vol. 41, no. 2 (2008), 175–83. Rosen, 28. Medosch, Armin, Automation, Cybernation, and the Art of New Tendencies (1961–1973), doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths University, London (2012), 61–2. Available http://research.gold.ac.uk/6924/. Accessed 11/26/2014. Medosch, 86–93; 131–35; 159–62; 228–30. See also Julio Le Parc: Kinetic Works, http://issuu.com/daroslatinamerica/docs/julioleparc_exhcat_rio/67. Accessed 1/26/2014. Today Mestrovic is currently emeritus senior research fellow at the Zagreb Institute of Economics. See http://www.kriticnamasa.com/autor_en.php?id=20. Accessed 11/26/2014. Mestrovic, Matko, Untitled, A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival:  New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 116. Ibid., 116. Morellet participated in The Responsive Eye as well. See Francois Molnar and Francois Morellet, “For a Progressive Art,” A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 138. Ibid. Ibid., 139.

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Notes to Pages 183–191 47 Ibid., 142. 48 See Julio Le Parc:  Kinetic Works, 57–58; http://issuu.com/daroslatinamerica/ docs/julioleparc_exhcat_rio/67. Accessed 11/26/2014; Margit Rosen, ed., A Little-Known Story about a Movemen.t, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival:  New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) 184; and Yves Aupetitallot, GRAV, Groupe de recherche d’art visuel, 1960–1968: Stratégies de Participation: Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Joël Stein Yvaral (Grenoble, France: Le Magasin, 1998), 121–22. 49 See Julio Le Parc:  Kinetic Works, 57–58; http://issuu.com/daroslatinamerica/ docs/julioleparc_exhcat_rio/67. Accessed 11/26/2014. 50 Aupetitallot, 113. 51 Argan, Giulio Argan, “Art as Research,” Rosen, ed., A Little-Known Story about a Movemen.t, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival:  New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 194. 52 Argan, Guilio Carlo, “The Reasons for the Group,” Herschel B.  Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1975), 497. 53 Argan, “The Reasons for the Group,” 498. 54 Argan, “Art as Research,” 194. 55 Seitz, William, Art in the Age of Aquarius (Washington, DC:  Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 90. 56 Popper, Frank, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, trans. Stephen Bann (New York: Studio Vista, 1968). 57 Burnham, Jack, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 49–109. 58 Ibid., 254. 59 Ibid., 258. 60 Waddington, C.H., The Strategy of the Genes (New York: Macmillan, 1957) 1–58. 61 Medosch, 117; Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers (New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1951). 62 Lewin, 170. 63 See http://www.spaceandmotion.com/physics-electromagnetic-waves-field-theory. htm. Accessed 11/28/2014. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. James Clerk Maxwell, “On Governors,” February 20, 1868; http://www.maths. ed.ac.uk/~aar/papers/maxwell1.pdf. Accessed 11/28/2014. 66 Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 256–57. 67 Arnheim, Rudolf, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1954), 48.

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Notes to Pages 191–195 68 The terms interoception, exteroception, and proprioception bring this story full circle. They are words important to artists and scientists alike in the telling of the haptic unconscious, as Moholy-Nagy used them in his elaboration of the aesthetic sensorium at work in The New Vision (1928) and they are instrumental in Gibson’s development of ecological psychology. See László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (1938) (Mineola, NY: 1975), 62; See J. J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950); Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966); and Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 69 Arnheim, Rudolf, Entropy and Art:  An Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), fn. 2, pg. 5. Arnheim’s emphasis. 70 Ibid., 12. 71 Ibid., 13. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 33. 74 Ibid., 28. 75 See Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Modern Theories of Development: An Introduction to Theoretical Biology (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962 [1933]) and Donna Jeanne Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004 [1976]). 76 Eco, Umberto, “Arte Programmata,” Rosen, ed., A Little-Known Story about a Movemen.t, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival:  New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 98. 77 Eco, Umberto, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 1–23. 78 Ibid., 8. 79 Eco, Umberto, “The Open Work in the Visual Arts,” The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 103. 80 Houston, Joe, Op Out of Ohio (New York: D. Wigmore Fine Arts, Inc., 2010), 5. 81 Gibson, James, J., Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson, Edward Reed and Rebecca Jones, eds. (Hillsdale, NJ:  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1982), 18. 82 Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World, 7. 83 Jenkins, Harold S., “Gibson’s ‘Affordances’:  Evolution of a Pivotal Concept,” Journal of Scientific Psychology (December 2008), 34–5. 84 Jenkins, 34. 85 Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 130. 86 Ibid., 131. 87 Ibid., 133.

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Notes to Pages 195–201 88 Bickhard, Mark H. and D. Michael Richie, On the Nature of Representation: A Case Study of James Gibson’s Theory of Perception (New  York:  Praeger Publishers, 1983), 8. 89 Ibid., 8–9. 90 Ibid., 9. 91 Ibid. 92 Gibson, Reasons for Realism, 16. 93 Goldstein, E. Bruce, “The Ecology of J. J. Gibson’s Perception,” Leonardo, vol. 14, no.3 (1981) 191; Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World, 8–9. 94 Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 5. 95 Ibid., 2. 96 Ibid., 49. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., 220.

5 The Digital Image in Art 1 Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/view/Ent ry/77523?redirectedFrom=generative#eid, Accessed 12/30/2014. 2 For a biological definition of the “generative,” see Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin, Form and Transformation:  Generative and Relational Principles in Biology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a computational definition of the “generative,” see Jonathan L. Zittrain, “The Generative Internet,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 119, no. 7 (May, 2006), 1974–2040. 3 Bense, Max, “The Projects of Generative Aesthetics,” Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas, ed. Jasia Reichardt (Greenwich, CT:  New  York Graphic Society Ltd., 1971), 57–60; Georg Nees, Generativ Computergraphik (Berlin: Kaleidoskopien, 2006). 4 Von Hermann, Hans-Christian, “Künstliche Kunst—eine strukturalistische Tätigkeit,” in Generativ Computergraphik (Berlin: Kaleidoskopien, 2006) v–viii. Frieder Nake used the phrase “künstliche Kunst” as the title of his essay “Künstliche Kunst—zur Produktion von Computer-Grafiken,” which was published in H. Ronge (ed.): Kunst und Kybernetik, Cologne: Du Mont Schauburg, 1968. 5 Roberts, John, The Intangibilities of Form:  Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (New York: Verso, 2007). 6 Clauser, Henry R., “Towards a Dynamic, Generative Computer Art,” Leonardo, vol. 21, no. 2 (1988), 117. 7 Gertner, Jon, The Idea Factory:  Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 115–35. 8 Clarke, Bruce and Mark B.  N. Hansen, “Introduction:  Neocybernetic Emergence,” in Emergence and Embodiment:  New Essays on Second-Order

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Notes to Pages 201–203

9 10

11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18

19 20

21

Systems Theory, Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 1. Pias, Claus, ed., Cybernetics-Kybernetik:  The Macy Conferences, 1946–1953, Vols. 1–2 (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2003). Von Foerster, Heinz, “From Stimulus to Symbol:  The Economy of Biological Computation,” in Vision + Value:  Sign, Image, Symbol (New  York:  George Braziller, 1965), 42–61. Ibid., 53. Ibid. Bense, Max, “Max Bill,” (London:  Hanover Gallery, 1966)  14–15. See also Heinz von Foerster, “On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments,” in Understanding Understanding:  Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New  York:  Spring, 2003),  1–20; Francisco J.  Varela, “Introduction:  The Ages of Heinz von Foerster,” in Observing Systems, Heinz von Foerster (Seaside, CA:  Intersystems, 1984),  xiii–xviii; Jan Müggenburg, “Modeling Self-Organization: How Scientists at the Biological Computer Laboratory Came to Grips with an Elusive Concept,” conference proceedings Third ICESHAS, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (2008), 473–84; and Francis Heylighen, “The Science of Self-Organization and Adaptivity,” Knowledge Management, Organizational Intelligence and Learning, and Complexity, ed. L. D. Kiel (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers, 2001), unpaginated. Gertner, 129. The article was written in 1967 and published a year later. See Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International, vol. 12, no. 2 (Feruary, 1968), 31–6. Dezeuze, Anna, “Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Hélio Parangolés,” Art Journal, vol. 63, no. 2 (Summer, 2004), 58–71. Chandler, John, “Art in the Electric Age,” Art International, vol. 13, no.  2 (1969), 19–25. Popper, Frank, interviewed by Joseph Nechvatal, “Origins of Virtualism:  An Interview with Frank Popper,” http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/popper/ intervewww1.html; Accessed 4/5/12. See also Joseph Nechvatal, “Frank Popper and Virtualised Art,” http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/popper/FrankPopper. html; Accessed 11/29/11 and Frank Popper, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (New York: New York Graphic Society/Studio Vista, 1968). See also Frank Popper, Art—Action and Participation (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1975). Burnham, Jack, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1974) 15–38. “Systems Esthetics” was originally published in 1968 and “Real Time Systems” in 1969 in ArtForum. Burnham, 15.

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Notes to Pages 204–212 22 Galanter, Philip, “Complexism and the Role of Evolutionary Art,” in The Art of Artificial Evolution: A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music, eds. Juan Romero and Penousal Machado (New York: Springer Books, 2007), 311–32. 23 Jameson, Fredric, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text (Spring–Summer, 1984), 178–209. 24 This is explicitly a discussion of the first use of the digital image as a work of art, not simply the first digital image. While it first appeared as an intended work of art in 1962, the actual first digital image was made in 1957. National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] computer expert Russell Kirsch scanned the world’s first digital image, which was a photo of his infant son using the country’s first programmable computer. See http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/image_052407.cfm. Accessed 12/31/14. 25 See Anonymous, “Georg Nees:  Generative Computergrafik,” http://dada. compart-bremen.de/node/3280; Accessed 10/27/11. 26 Interview with A.  Michael Noll, 05/16/12. See also A.  Michael Noll, “First-Hand:  Howard Wise Gallery Show of Digital Art and Patterns (1965): A 50th Anniversary Memoir,” http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/First-Hand: Howard_Wise_Gallery_Show_of_Digital_Art_and_Patterns_(1965):_A_50th_ Anniversary_Memoir; Accessed 12/31/14. A  few months later, Noll showed his drawings at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in Las Vegas, along with the work of Vaughan Mason. 27 See Anonymous, “Computer-Grafik,” http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/exhibition/164; Accessed 12/20/14. 28 Rosen, Margit, A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival:  New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 242–60. 29 Interview with A. Michael Noll, 05/16/12. 30 Noll, “First-Hand:  Howard Wise Gallery Show of Digital Art and Patterns (1965):  A  50th Anniversary Memoir,” http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index. php/First-Hand:Howard_Wise_Gallery_Show_of_Digital_Art_and_Patterns_ (1965):_A_50th_Anniversary_Memoir; Accessed 12/31/14. 31 Noll, A.  Michael, Technical Memorandum of Bell Laboratories Archives, #62-1234-14, August 28, 1962, 1–4, and an unpaginated appendix. 32 Ibid., 1. 33 Ibid., 2. 34 Noll, A. Michael, “Computers and the Visual Arts,” Design Quarterly, no. 66/67 Design and the Computer (1966), 68. 35 Ibid. 36 Noll, A.  Michael, “Human or Machine:  A  Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Lines’ (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture,” The Psychological Record, vol. 16 (1966), 6.

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Notes to Pages 212–219 37 According to Frieder Nake, this survey is potentially apocryphal. Interview with Frieder Nake, University of Texas at Dallas, 10/1/14. 38 Interview with A. Michael Noll, 05/18/12. 39 See Anonymous, “Zuse Graphomat Z 64,” http://dada.compart-bremen.de/ item/device/5; Accessed 12/31/14. 40 See Anonymous, “Zuse Graphomat Z 64,” http://dada.compart-bremen.de/ item/device/5; Accessed 12/31/14. 41 Klütsch, Christoph, “Information Aesthetics and the Stuttgart School,” in Mainframe Experimentalism:  Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn, eds. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 65–89. 42 Ibid., 65. 43 Ibid., 66. 44 Schaper, Eva, “The Aesthetics of Hartmann and Bense,” The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 10, no. 2 (Dec. 1956), 301. 45 Legrand, Jacques, “Max Bense et le groupe de Stuttgart,” Critique: revue générale des publications française et étrangères, vol. 218 (1965), 618–28. 46 Bense, “The Projects of Generative Aesthetics,” 57. 47 Klütsch, 66. 48 Bense, “Max Bill,” 14–15. 49 Nees, Georg, “Growth, Structural Coupling and Competition in Kinetic Art,” Leonardo, vol. 33, no. 1 (2001), 41–7. 50 See http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/352; Accessed 12/31/14. 51 Moles, Abraham, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, trans. Joel E. Cohen (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966), 1. 52 Ibid., 10–11. 53 Ibid., 11. 54 Moles, Abraham, “Cybernetics and the Work of Art,” in A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival:  New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2011), 219. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 217. 57 Ibid., 222. 58 Vasulka, Woody, Experiments in Art an Technology. A  Brief History and Summary of Major Projects 1966—1998 (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Experiments In Art And Technology, 1998) http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Writings/EAT.pdf; Accessed 1/1/15. 59 Ibid. 60 Klüver, Billy, “Experiments in Art and Technology,” Museum of Modern Art Members Newsletter, no. 3 (Jan–Feb, 1969), 6.

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Notes to Pages 219–222 61 Vasulka, http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Writings/EAT.pdf; Accessed 1/1/15. 62 Klüver, Billy, “The Great Northeastern Power Failure” (1966), http://www.w2vr. com/archives/Kluver/Northeastern.html; Accessed 1/2/15. 63 Vasulka, http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Writings/EAT.pdf; Accessed 1/1/15. 64 Ibid. 65 Goodyear, Anne Collins, “György Kepes, Billy Klüver, and American Art of the 1960s: Defining Attitudes toward Science and Technology,” Science in Context, vol. 17, no. 4 (Dec. 2004), 621. 66 Alan Kaprow and Billy Klüver, Art 1963: A New Vocabulary, exhibition catalog quoted in Goodyear, 623. 67 Ibid. 68 See Robin Oppenheimer, The Strange Dance: 9 Evenings:  Theatre & Engineering As Creative Collaboration (Vancouver, BC:  Robin Oppenheimer/ Simon Fraser University, 2011)  http://summit.sfu.ca/item/11626; Accessed 1/1/15. 69 Moles, “Cybernetics and the Work of Art,” 221. 70 See http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=294 ; Accessed 1/1/15. The archives of EAT bears artifacts and information from 1966 to 2005. 71 For information on Some More Beginnings, see the catalog from the exhibition, Some More Beginnings:  An Exhibition of Submitted Works Involving Technical Materials and Processes Organized by Staff and Members of Experiments in Art and Technology (New  York:  EAT, 1968)  and the link at the Brooklyn Museum website, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/1095/Some_More_Beginnings%3A_Experiments_in_ Art_and_Technology_E.A.T. Accessed 1/1/15. See also Anonymous, “Robert Rauschenberg: Soundings,” Museum of Modern Art Members Newsletter, no. 1 (Oct., 1968), 6. 72 Oppenheimer, 119. 73 See http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=294 ; Accessed 1/1/15. 74 Anonymous, “John Cage:  Variations VII (Performance),” http://www. fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=611; Accessed 1/1/15. The performers in the piece included David Tudor, David Behrman, Antony Gnasso, Lowell Cross, and John Cage, with lighting design by Jennifer Tipton and Beverly Emmons. 75 Ibid. 76 Anonymous, “Öyvind Fahlström, Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” http://www. fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1792; Accessed 1/1/15. The performers included Robert Breer, Letty Lou Eisenhauer, John Giorno, Bruce Glushakow, Tom Gormley, Jim Hardy, Cassandra Hughs, Ed Iverson,

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Notes to Pages 222–229

77

78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86

87

88

89 90

Kosugi, Larry Leitch, Les Levine, Robert Rauschenberg, Marjorie Strider, Bob Schuler, and Ulla Wiggen. Anonymous, “Öyvind Fahlström, Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” http:// www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1792; Accessed 1/1/15. Anonymous, “Alex Hay:  Grass Field (Performance), http://www.fondationlanglois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=662; Accessed 1/1/15. Ibid. Ibid. Anonymous, “Lucinda Childs:  Vehicle (Performance), http://www.fondationlanglois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1734; Accessed 1/1/15. Anonymous, “Deborah Hay:  Solo (Performance),” http://www.fondationlanglois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1773; Accessed 1/1/15. The dancers included Lucinda Childs, William Davis, Suzanne de Maria, Lette Eisenhauer, Walter Gelb, Alex Hay Deborah Hay, Margaret Hecht, Ed Iverson, Julie Judd, Olga Klüver, Vernon Lobb, Steve Paxton, Joe Schlichter, and Carol Summers. Nine other performers—James Tenney, Franny Breer, Jim Hardy, Michael Kirby, Larry Leitch, Fujiko Nakaya, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Schuler, and Marjorie Strider—operated the carts from afar. Anonymous, “Steve Paxton: Physical Things (Peformance), http://www. fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1752; Accessed 1/1/15. Ibid. Ibid. Anonymous, “Yvonne Rainer:  Carriage Discreteness (Performance),” http:// www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=626 ; Accessed 1/1/15. The piece involved the following 15 performers in addition to Rainer:  Carl Andre, Becky Arnold, Rosemarie Castoro, William Davis, Letty Lou Eisenhauer, June Ekman, Ed Iverson, Kathy Iverson, Julie Judd, Michael Kirby, Alfred Kurchin Benjamin Lloyd, Meredith Monk, Steve Paxton, and Carol Summers. Anonymous, “Robert Rauschenberg:  Open Score (Performance),” http:// www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=642 ; Accessed 1/1/15. Anonymous, “David Tudor: Bandoneon! (a combine) (Performance),” http:// www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=583 ; Accessed 1/1/15. Ibid. The carts were not used during the later performance on 18 October. Lacerte, Sylvie, “9 Evenings and Experiments in Art and Technology: E.A.T. and the 1960s,” http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1717; Accessed 1/2/15.

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Notes to Pages 229–234 91 Smithson, Robert, “An Esthetics of Disappointment On the Occasion of the Art and Technology Show at the Armory,” The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York, New York University Press, 1979) 334–35. 92 Ibid., 335. 93 Klüver, Billy, “Pepsi Pavilion” (1970), http://www.w2vr.com/archives/Kluver/10_ Pavilion.html; Accessed 1/2/15. 94 Garmire, Elsa, “An Overview,” in Experiments in Art and Technology: Pavilion, eds. Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose (New York: Dutton, 1972), 173. 95 Klüver, Billy, “Pepsi Pavilion,” http://www.w2vr.com/archives/Kluver/10_Pavilion. html; Accessed 1/2/15. 96 Klüver, Billy, “Pepsi Pavilion” (1970), http://www.w2vr.com/archives/Kluver/ 10_Pavilion.html; Accessed 1/2/15. 97 Garmire, 184. 98 Klüver, “Pepsi Pavilion,” http://www.w2vr.com/archives/Kluver/10_Pavilion. html; Accessed 1/2/15. 99 Ibid. 100 Tomkins, Calvin, “Outside Art,” in Experiments in Art and Technology: Pavilion, eds. Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose (New  York:  Dutton, 1972), 162–63. See also Jack Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed,” (1980) http://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Burnham_Jack_1980_Art_ and_Technology_The_Panacea_That_Failed.pdf; Accessed 1/2/15. 101 Tomkins, 162. 102 Dyson, Frances, “And Then It Was Now:  Art and Technology,” http://www. fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2157#n1 ; Accessed 1/2/15. 103 Tomkins, 163. 104 Kepes, György, “The Visual Arts and Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration,” Daedalus, vol. 94, no.  1 (Winter, 1965)  117–134; György Kepes, “Notes on Expression and Communication in the Cityscape,” Daedalus, vol. 90, no.  1 (Winter, 1961), 147–65. 105 Kepes, György, “Art and Ecological Consciousness” and “Toward a New Environment,” in Vision + Value: Arts of the Environment, ed. György Kepes (New York: Braziller, 1972), 1–31. 106 The living complex system was an explicit concern for Kepes in the final tome of the series. See Jay W. Forrester, “Planning under the Dynamic Influences of Complex Social Systems,” in Vision + Value: Arts of the Environment, ed. György Kepes (New York: Braziller, 1972), 152–66. 107 Moholy-Nagy, László, “Letter to Fra. Kalivoda” (1934), in Moholy-Nagy, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 37.

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Notes to Pages 234–241 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

127 128 129 130

131 132 133

134

Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. György Kepes Archives, Stanford University Libraries, M 1796, box 8.2; folder 2. Kepes, “Notes on Expression and Communication in the Cityscape,” 149. Kepes, “The Visual Arts and Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration,” 122. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 123–24. György Kepes Archives, Stanford University Libraries, M 1796, box 9.1; folder 17. Ibid. György Kepes Archives, Stanford University Libraries, M 1796, box 13.2; folder 6. Ibid. Ibid. Finch, Elizabeth, “A Brief History of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT,” http://act.mit.edu/cavs/history/; Accessed 1/3/15. György Kepes Archives, Stanford University Libraries, M 1796, box 13.2; folder 6. Kepes, György, “Toward Civic Art,” Leonardo, vol. 4, no. 1 (Winter, 1971) 69. Originally published for the catalog of “Explorations,” held the Hayden Gallery at MIT and the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institute, May 1970. Ibid., 70. György Kepes Archives, Stanford University Libraries, M 1796, box 13.2; folder 6. Pulsa biography in in Vision + Value:  Arts of the Environment, ed. György Kepes (New York: Braziller, 1972), 243. Shirey, David L, “Pulsa: Sound, Light, and Seven Young Artists,” The New York Times (Dec. 24, 1970)  10, http://mkandh.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/pulsa-art-collaborative/; Accessed 1/3/15. Pulsa, “The City as Artwork,” in Vision + Value: Arts of the Environment, ed. György Kepes (New York: Braziller, 1972), 208. Ibid., 208. “Summary Report on Experimental Lighting Demonstration:  Public Garden,” October 9-October 27, https://archive.org/details/PulsaBostonEnvironment 1968SummaryReportOnExperimentalLighting; Accessed 1/3/15. Pulsa, 208.

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Notes to Pages 243–252

Epilogue 1 Unpublished manuscript by Oliver Botar, “Bauhaus Biofunctionalism,” forthcoming in Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (2016), co-edited by Charissa N.  Terranova and Meredith Tromble and discussion with Botar 09/03/2015. 2 See Raoul Francé, Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt [Bios: The Laws of the World] (1926). https://archive.org/details/biosdiegesetzede02fran. Accessed 09/08/2015. 3 Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (1938), 122. 4 See Stefano Mancuso and Allesandra Viola, Brilliant Green:  The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, trans. Joan Benham (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015). 5 Unpublished manuscript by Oliver Botar, “Bauhaus Biofunctionalism,” Botar quoting Fritz Sterm, “National Socialism as Temptation,” Dreams and Delusions:  The Drama of German History, New  York, 1987, 147–91; Staudenmaier, Peter, “Fascist Ecology: The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and Historical Antecedents,” in Ecofascism:  Lessons from the German Experience (Oakland, CA:  AK Press, 1995),  5–31/unpaginated on-line version. http:// www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html . Accessed 09/08/2015. 6 Staudenmaier, unpaginated. http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/ sp001630/peter.html. Accessed 09/09/2015. 7 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, “The Tree of Knowledge,” Sign, Image, and Symbol within the Vision + Value Series, György Kepes, ed. (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 274–78. 8 Pouvreau, David, The Dialectical Tragedy of the Concept of Wholeness: Ludwig von Beralanffy’s Biography Revisited (Litchfield Park, AZ:  ISCE Publishing, 2009), 65. 9 Pickering, Andrew, The Cybernetic Brain:  Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 10 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115–54.

Glossary 1 See Franz Pichler, “The Contribution of Raoul Francé:  Biocentric Modeling,” Beyond Art, A Third Culture: A Comparative Study in Cultures, Art, and Science in 20th-Century Austria and Hungary, Peter Weibel, ed. (Austria, Vienna: Springer Austria Architecture, 2005), 371–73. 2 Johnson, Steven, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001), 20.

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Notes to Page 252 3 Gilbert, Scott F., Preface, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields:  Metaphors That Shape Embryos, by Donna Jeanne Haraway (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004 [1976]), xi. 4 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, General Systems Theory:  Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 31.

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Index affective turn xii–xix

Agam, Yaacov 178, 203 Alberts, Josef 48, 172, 176, 184 Aldrich, Larry 175–176 Alloway, Lawrence 179 Anker, Peder 16 Anonima 166, 175, 180, 194 Anuszkiewicz, Richard 175–176 Appleyard, Donald 17, 83, 130–131, 144, 149, 159 Argan, G. C. 12, 17, 165, 184–187 Arnheim, Rudolf xix, 11–12, 17, 36, 47, 69, 83, 108, 165–166, 173–174, 187–198, 200, 206 Arp, Jean 69, 83, 192 Art Institute of Chicago [AIC] 50–53 Ashton, Dore 179 Association of Arts and Industries [AAI] 50–53 Aufbau [up-building] 16, 33, 42, 44, 103, 117 Bann, Stephen 130, 178 Baran, Paul 74, 122–128, 164, 197, 245, 251 Barrett, Lisa Feldman xvii Bass, Saul 69, 83 Bauhaus 95, 102, 164, 176, 182, 184, 241, 242–243, 245 Bayer, Herbert 48, 65 Bell Labs, 192, 200, 207–212, 218, 253 Bellamy, Dick 172 Benjamin, Walter 4–15, 20, 44, 98, 165 Bense, Max 192, 198, 201–202, 206–217, 254

Bergson, Henri xv, 26, 180 Bernal, J. D. 68, 80–81, 96, 99, 255 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von 12, 69, 118–122, 148, 193, 203, 243–244, 252, 255 Bill, Max 83, 215 biocentrism [Biozentrik] 16, 242–245, 249–250, 253 bioconstructivism 35 biofunctionalism xii, xiii, xvi, xix, 19–66 biogenetic law 2 biology 19–66, 67, 69–70, 73–75, 80, 82–83, 95, 97, 99, 105–106, 108, 114, 119, 152, 157, 159, 173, 187, 193, 201, 205, 242–244 Biorn, Per 221, 225 bios 19, 28, 38, 47, 73–74, 99 biotechnics 16, 19–21, 24–26, 81, 169, 249, 250, 254 Black Mountain College 40, 48 Blossfeldt, Karl 13–14 Borgzinner, Jon 166, 178–179 Botar, Oliver A. I. 22, 29, 242, 244 Boulding, Kenneth E. 17, 128, 152, 156–162 Breuer, Marcel 48, 69, 80, 83 Bronowski, J. 69, 83, 96 Brooklyn College 61, 73, 77, 78, 202 Buckminster Fuller, Richard 61, 83 Burnham, Jack xviii–xix, 11–12, 36, 47, 79, 165, 187–190, 203–204 Burtin, Will 69, 83, 97–102 Bury, Pol 132, 134

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Art as Organism Cacioppo, George 134 Cage, John 40, 42, 61, 69, 83, 134, 143, 221–222 Cain, Michael 240–241 Canaday, John 176 Carnap, Rudolf 43–44, 47, 117 Cartesian dualism xiii, 2, 50, 100, 214 Center for Advanced Visual Studies [CAVS] xviii, 18, 78, 236–239 Chandler, John 202–203 Childs, Lucinda 221, 223 Clancy, Patrick 240 Clarke, Arthur C. 95 Clauser, Henry R. 200 cognitive mapping 15, 17, 124, 158–162 Coker, Cecil 221 complexism 204–206, 212, 217–220 connectionism xiii, xviii Corrazzo, Alexander 56 Crosby, William 240 Crowther, J. G. 75–76, 96, 99 Cunningham, Benjamin 172 cybernetics xii, 75, 110, 116–119, 150, 188, 192, 196, 201–204, 217, 223, 244–245 Darwin, Charles 108–109, 112, 193 Davis, Gene 174 Deconstruction xiii–xiv, 3 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] 150, 244 Deleuze, Gilles, xv De Palma, Brian 172–175 Dessau 21, 33, 43–44, 46, 52, 56, 251 Deusing, William 240 Deutscher Werkbund 49 Dewey, John 50, 60, 104, 138, 141, 210 digital image in art xii, xviii, 1–4, 7, 11, 15, 17–18, 36, 47, 54, 67, 70–71, 87–88, 116, 122, 124, 150, 161–163, 165, 180, 198–241, 251 distributed image xviii, 116, 124–162,

197, 251, 254 distribution 17, 18, 74, 102, 116–117, 123–124, 161, 199, 220, 251 Dubos, Réné 95 Dushkin, David 61 Eckart, Carl 47, 61 Eco, Umberto 165, 193–195, 203 Eggeling, Viking 134, 138 Ehrenfels, Christian von 35, 253 embryology 68, 105 entropy 157–158, 191–193, 203, 253 epigenesis 17, 21, 28, 34, 67, 70, 82, 102, 108–116, 205, 252 Equipo 57, 166, 178, 180, 182 evolution xi, 128, 137, 139, 161 Experiments in Art and Technology [EAT] xix, 199, 218–233 extended mind xvi, 25, 168, 245, 251–252, 253 Facebook 1 Fahlstrom, Öyvind 221, 222 Fairweather, Francis 57 Farrell, James T. 143–144 Feininger, Andreas 143–144 Fiedler, Conrad 36 film 4–8, 13, 29, 59, 65, 79, 84, 166 Flake, Thomas 56 Fluxus 40 Foerster, Heinz von 69, 83, 201–202, 206, 215–216 Francé, Raoul 11, 16, 22, 24–30, 34, 81–82, 242–245 Francé-Harrar, Annie 25 Frank, Lawrence K. 69 Freud, Sigmund 12, 43 Fröbel, Frederick 28 Fuge, Paul 240 Gabo, Naum 69, 80, 82, 83, 86 Galanter, Philip 204–206, 217

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Index Galison, Peter 43 Galvani, Luigi 74 Gans, Herbert J. 127 General Systems Theory [GST] xiii, 148, 157, 159, 252, 253 generative art 47, 198, 207 George, William H. 96 Gerard, Ralph 47 Gerstner, Karl 83, 132 Gesamtkunstwerk 21 Gesamtwerk 21 Gestalt xiv, xviii, 5, 8, 10–12, 15–20, 28, 33–41, 47, 69, 102, 104–109, 115–123, 139, 148–149, 153, 155, 159, 163–168, 173–197, 205, 242, 253 Gestaltung 35–38, 253 Gibson, J. J. 17, 69, 83, 164–165, 180, 188–190, 194–197 Giedion, Siegfried 63, 65, 69, 137 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 16, 19–22, 174, 242, 249, 254–255 Goldstein, Kurt 11, 16, 33–35, 44, 62, 235 Gombrich, Ernst 11, 108 Great Chain of Being xv, 168 Gropius, Walter xviii, 20, 40, 46, 48, 52–53, 62, 65, 74, 79, 83, 127, 251, 254, 255 Grosz, George 20 Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel [GRAV] 11, 166, 180, 183–185, 203 Gruppo N 166, 169, 172, 178, 180, 184 Gruppo T 166, 178, 180, 184, 193 Haacke, Hans 204 Haeckel, Ernst 2, 11, 26, 27 Haldane, John 68, 255 Halprin, Lawrence 130, 133–136, 239 Hamilton, Richard 107–108 Hansen, Mark B. N. 178 haptic unconscious 1–19, 21, 30, 33, 36, 38, 42–43, 46–49, 54, 61, 66, 67,

69–71, 74–75, 77, 79, 97, 99, 100, 106, 114–115, 121, 124–126, 132, 137, 141, 146, 153–154, 163–165, 168, 177, 180, 196–198, 202, 205–206, 233, 235, 239, 241–243, 246–247, 253 Haraway, Donna 114 Harrington, Anne 20, 33, 37 Harrison, Ross G. 68 Haussmann, Raoul 24 Hay, Alex 221 Hay, Deborah 221 Hayakawa, S. I. 104 Hays, K. Michael xviii Heidgger, Martin 247 Heilos, Larry 221 Hepworth, Barbara 80 Hess, Thomas 177, 179 Hilbersheimer, Ludwig xviii, 48, 127 Hirsch, Peter 221 Hitler, Adolf 33–34 Hodges, Harold 221 holism xvi, 15, 16, 19–23, 33–37, 42–43, 47, 49, 63, 68, 69, 75, 102, 153, 155, 205, 241, 253, 254 Honzik, Karel 80–82, 89, 90, 105 Hultén, Pontus 202 Ianelli, Alfonso 50–51 information theory xvi, 192, 201–205, 210, 220, 253 Institute of Design 16, 48, 49, 60, 63, 65, 66, 77, 158, 250 integration 67, 102–105, 116–117, 123, 139–140, 150, 181, 246, 254 Jacobs, Jane 127 Jameson, Frederic 160–162 Johnson, Martin 96 Kållai, Ernõ 24 Kaminski, Bill 221, 225, 227

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Art as Organism Kanarek, Mimi 226–229 Keck, George Fred 61 Kemény, Alfred 30 Kepes, György xviii–xix, 11, 12, 16–18, 36, 47, 61–62, 67–123, 123–162, 205, 206, 216, 218–219, 233–241 Kiesler, Frederick 20 Kindlemann, Peter 240 kinetic art xix, 2, 20, 21, 130–136, 169, 178, 180, 187, 189, 190, 193–194, 197, 203, 216 Klüver, Billy 218–219, 229–232 Koffka, Kurt 16, 38, 104, 194 Köhler, Wolfgang 16, 34, 38, 104, 165, 194 Kozloff, Max 177 Krauss, Rosalind 12, 177 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 24, 108–109 Langer, Susanne K. 17, 83, 128, 152, 154–156, 161 Lebenslehre 14, 22 Le Corbusier 23, 80, 83, 87–88, 91–93, 127 Lee, Pamela M. 177 Leger, Fernand 69, 83 Le Parc, Julio 183–185, 194 Lewin, Kurt 17, 165, 189 Liberman, Alexander 174 Libet, Benjamin xv Licklider, J. C. R. 17, 128, 150–152 light image [Lichtbild] xix, 2–5, 7–8, 10, 13, 15–19, 67–123, 146, 164, 199, 220, 233–234, 236, 240–241, 253, 254 Lissitzky, Lazar Markovich 24, 28, 29, 44 Logical Positivism 42–46, 117 London Bauhaus 16, 68, 254 Lorenz, Konrad Z. 108 Ludwig, Wolfgang 169, 171 Lukashok, Alvin K. 145 Lye, Len 132

Lyell, Charles 112 Lynch, Kevin, xviii, xix, 124–162 Mack, Heinz 132 Malina, Frank 203 Malraux, André 91–92 Margenau, Henry 95 Marx, Karl 43, 96, 182, 183, 262 Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] xviii, xix, 17, 18, 61, 70, 75, 77–79, 106–107, 114, 117, 124, 141–142, 146, 150–151, 203, 218, 233, 236, 238–239, 250 Massumi, Brian xv, xvii Mavignier, Almir 174, 175, 178, 182 Maxwell, James Clerk 106, 121, 190 McGee, Jim 221, 225 McKim, Mead, and White 142 McNulty, Thomas 239 Mertins, Detlef 28, 34–35 Mestrovic, Matko 182–184 Meyer, Hannes xviii, 24, 46, 74, 243 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 20, 24, 48, 243 modern art xii, xiii, xiv, xix, 68, 73, 80, 138, 188 modernism xii, xiii, xiv, 3, 5, 12, 35, 127, 132, 165, 167, 188, 204–205, 241 Moholy-Nagy, László xi–xii, xvi–xviii, xix, 1–69, 73–82, 96, 98, 102, 104, 115, 137–139, 153, 165, 168, 180, 184, 186, 203–206, 232–235, 237, 243, 245–246, 249, 250, 253, 254, 255 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl 48 Moles, Abraham 192, 201, 206, 210, 213–214, 216–218, 220, 254 Molnar, Francois 83, 183, 211–213 Mondrian, Piet 80, 192 monism xi, 15, 22, 26, 28, 33, 155, 254 Morellet, Francois 183

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Index organism xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, 1–18, 19, 21, 21, 33–34, 36, 44, 68, 70, 75, 105, 109, 114, 118, 120–122, 128, 131, 139, 140, 148, 153, 155, 161, 162, 174, 181, 192, 194–195, 201, 230, 233–236, 240, 242, 244, 249, 250, 252 Oster, Gerald 172 Otlet, Paul 87–88, 91

morphogenesis 70, 102, 205, 254 morphology xiv, 17, 69, 106, 114, 132, 216 Morris, Charles 43, 47, 61, 83, 102–104, 106, 116–117 Morris, William 49, 239 Movement Movement, The 130–135, 137, 141, 143, 169, 188, 190 Museum of Modern Art, New York [MoMA] 167, 169, 170, 173, 179, 202 Myer, John R. 17, 130, 144 Myers, Frosty 229–230 Nakaya, Fujiko 231 Nake, Frieder 18, 199–201, 206–208, 210, 212–214, 218, 251 National Socialism 33, 181, 242–244 naturphilosophie 173, 193 Needham, Joseph 68, 96, 99, 108, 114, 119, 255 Nees, Georg 18, 199–201, 206–208, 210, 212–214, 216, 218, 251 Neo-Lamarckianism 24, 108 Neue Sachlichkeit 43, 47, 74 Neurath, Otto 43–46, 87–88, 91, 117 New Bauhaus 16, 47–48, 51, 54–57, 60–61, 66, 75, 77, 81, 102–103, 117, 250, 254 New Tendencies xix, 11, 17, 18, 36, 163–197, 200–201, 204, 254 Nicholson, Ben 80, 82, 86 Niedringhaus, Charles 57 Noll, A. Michael 18, 116, 170, 200–201, 206–213, 218, 251 Nuit Blanche 116, 199, 247 NUL 166, 180 Occam’s razor 25 Op Art xix, 2, 18, 36, 47, 163–197, 203, 204, 211, 253 Oppenheim, Dennis 204

Paepcke, Walter 63, 65 Pantin, C. F. A. 69, 83 Parsons, Talcott 117 Paxton, Steve 221–226 Peters, Susan 239 phi/effect 38–39 photography 1, 2, 4–8, 10, 13, 19, 21, 28, 29, 54, 61, 74, 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 87, 91, 106, 143, 206, 253 Piaget, Jean 105–106 Piper, John 110–113 Pop Art-and-Science 67–123 Popper, Frank 130, 187, 203 postmodernism xii, xiv, 3, 35, 160, 165, 167, 204–205 Post-Structuralism 3 process-thinking [Gedankengestaltung] 11 Pulsa 18, 83, 240–241 Rainer, Yvonne 221 RAND Corporation 122, 128, 245 Rand, Paul 83 Rapson, Ralph 61 Rauschenberg, Robert 40, 114, 218, 219, 221–222, 225–227 Reichart, Jasia 202 Responsive Eye 18, 166, 168–179 Richardson, Henry Hobson 142 Richter, Hans 20, 83, 134–135, 138 Rickey, George 83, 132, 165, 172, 187, 203, 216

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Art as Organism Riegl, Alois 8–9, 98 Riley, Bridget 170, 175–178, 211 Ritterbush, Philip C. 99–100 Rivkin, Malcolm 146 Robinson, Robby 221 Rockefeller Foundation 17, 63, 142, 145 Romanticism 4, 16, 19, 20, 22, 48, 74, 95, 99, 138, 173, 182, 249 Rose, Barbara 179 Rumsey, David 240 Ruskin, John 49

Tange, Kenzo 230 Tatlin, Vladimir 30, 32 Taylorism 140 theoretical biology 67, 69, 73, 75, 95, 114, 118–120, 153, 193, 235 Theoretical Biology Club 16, 68, 80, 119, 244, 255 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth 28, 107, 193 Tots and Quots 68, 80, 81 Tudor, David 40, 221, 226, 229, 230

Sagan, Carl 95 Schneider, Herb 221 Schöffer, Nicholas 203 School of Design xvii, 48–49, 61–63, 66, 103, 215, 250 Schwitters, Kurt 29 Sebök, István 29–31 Seitz, William 18, 165, 169–177, 182, 187 Shannon, Claude E. 192, 200, 202, 253 Silver, Nathan 130 Smith, Henry Holmes 61 Smithson, Robert 169, 229 Snow, C. P. 93, 95 Soto, Jesus-Rafael 178, 190, 203 Spemann, Hans 140 Spinoza, Baruch xv Stahle, Norma K. 48, 52 Stanczak, Julian 175 STEAM 246 Stella, Frank 226–228 STEM 246 Subotnik, Morton 134 symbiosis 152, 218

Unity of Science 15–16, 33, 42–47, 52, 61, 88, 103–104, 106, 116–117 University of North Texas 61, 77 Unwin, Raymond 127

Tachisme 164, 181, 183 tachistoscope 36–37 taktisch 8–9, 80, 106, 170

Varela, Francisco xiii, 201 Vasarely, Victor de 175–176, 178, 203 Vision + Value 17, 67–123 Vogue 167 Volta, Allesandro 74 Waddington, Conrad Hal viii, xix, 68–69, 83, 96, 99, 108–115, 119–120, 122, 131, 139–140, 153, 189, 252 Waldhauer, Fred 218, 221, 226 Wallace, Mike 172–173, 188 Warburg, Aby 87–88, 92 Weimar Republic 3 Weiss, Paul 68–69, 83, 255 Wertheimer, Max 16, 34, 38–39, 165, 180, 194 wetware 126, 149, 158–162, 255 Whitehead, Alfred North 17, 116, 128, 131, 139, 143, 145, 152–155, 161, 181, 219 Whitman, Robert 216, 218, 221, 229 Whyte, L. L., 69, 83, 96, 99, 108–109

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Index Wiener, Norbert 69, 83, 117–119, 121, 150, 196, 202, 244, 250 Wolff, Dick 221 Wolff, Robert J. 62, 221, 223 Woodger, Joseph 68, 119, 255

Wright, Frank Lloyd 23, 50, 141 Wrinch, Dorothy 68, 255 Zero Group 132, 166, 180, 182, 238 Zuse, Konrad 213

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