Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance [1° ed.] 036714249X, 9780367142490

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CYBERNETICEXISTENTIALISM FREEDOM, SYSTEMS, AND BEING-FOR-OTHERS IN CONTEMPORARY ARTS AND PERFORMANCE Steve Dixon

Cybernetic-Existentialism

Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance offers a unique discourse and an original aesthetic theory. It argues that fusing perspectives from the philosophy of Existentialism with insights from the ‘universal science’ of cybernetics provides a new analytical lens and deconstructive methodology to critique art. In this study, Steve Dixon examines how a range of artists’ works reveal the ideas of Existentialist philosophers including Kierkegaard, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre on freedom, being and nothingness, eternal recurrence, the absurd, and being-for-others. Simultaneously, these artworks are shown to engage in complex explorations of concepts proposed by cyberneticians including Wiener, Shannon, and Bateson on information theory and ‘noise’, feedback loops, circularity, adaptive ecosystems, autopoiesis, and emergence. Dixon’s groundbreaking book demonstrates how fusing insights and knowledge from these two fields can throw new light on pressing issues within contemporary arts and culture, including authenticity, angst and alienation, homeostasis, radical politics, and the human as system. Steve Dixon is President of LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, one of Asia’s leading arts institutions. He is co-founder and Advisory Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Routledge), and author of the award-winning 800-page book Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art and Installation. He was co-founder and co-Director of the Digital Performance Archive and has published on subjects including theater, film, performance studies, digital art, science fiction, and robotics.

http://taylorandfrancis.com

Cybernetic-Existentialism Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance Steve Dixon

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Steve Dixon The right of Steve Dixon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-14249-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03089-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon LT Std by Thomson Digital

To my love, Prue and our remarkable children Sophie, Amelia, and Florence

http://taylorandfrancis.com

Contents

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: cybernetics and Existentialism in arts and popular culture

ix 1

PIERRE HUYGHE, ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, MARCUS HARVEY, GORDON PASK, NAM JUNE PAIK, PETER DOIG, MARTIN HONERT, DENNIS OPPENHEIM [Films:] On the Beach At Night Alone, Frozen. [Exhibitions:] Cybernetic Serendipity, Information, Open Systems, Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966), I Am A Problem, The Artist’s Voice

2. Visual art: the aesthetics of systems and being-towards-death34 HANS HAACKE, MARINA ABRAMOVIC´, CLAUDE SHANNON, MARTIN CREED, BILL VIOLA, ANISH KAPOOR, DAMIEN HIRST, MARC QUINN, CORNELIA PARKER, DOUGLAS GORDON, URICH LAU, HUANG YONG PING, AI WEIWEI, SUN YUAN AND PENG YU

3. Interactive art: communicating, controlling, and being-for-others68 WAFAA BILAL, AMALIA ULMAN, SOPHIE CALLE, JENNIFER RINGLEY (JENNICAM), LOUIS-PHILIPPE DEMERS, SANTIAGO SIERRA [Exhibition:] You, Other; I, Another

4. Participatory art: autopoiesis with strangers BILLY KLÜVER, KIT GALLOWAY AND SHERRIE RABINOWITZ, CLAIRE SHILLITO, GOB SQUAD, GILLIAN WEARING, FLORENCE DIXON, BLAST THEORY, SUSAN COLLINS, PAUL SERMON, THE CHAMELEONS GROUP

107

viii Contents

5. Theater art: staging cybernetics, dread, and the existential crisis

149

THE WOOSTER GROUP, ROBERT LEPAGE, JOSEF SVOBODA, MICHAEL KLIEN, SOCIETAS RAFFAELLO SANZIO, THE BUILDERS ASSOCIATION, LA FURA DELS BAUS AND ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA, HEINER GOEBBELS

6. Performance art: actualizing science fiction and invoking transcendence

178

STEVE MANN, ORLAN, GREY WALTER, EDWARD IHNATOWICZ, STELARC, DANI PLOEGER, HAYDEN FOWLER, LAURA KIKAUKA AND NORMAN WHITE, EDUARDO KAC AND ED BENNETT

7. Identity art: the adaptive system of the authentic self

203

JEFF KOONS, DANIEL J. MARTINEZ, JUDY CHICAGO, GILBERT AND GEORGE, JOHN BALDESSARI, MICHAEL LANDY, JEAN TINGUELY, APHIDS AND ALL THE QUEENS MEN, ADRIAN PIPER, JOSH GINSBURG, ENTANG WIHARSO, GAVIN TURK, BILDERWERFER, GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA

8. Uncanny art: existential absurdity within cybernetic environments229 SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES, RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER, URICH LAU, THOMAS HIRSCHHORN, 0100101110101101.ORG, ORON CATTS AND IONAT ZURR (TC&A), FRANCIS ALŸS, JEFFREY SHAW AND SINAN GOO, NATALIE JEREMIJENKO, JEREMY DELLER, SAMUEL BECKETT, JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN

9. Conclusion: the eternal return and being-in-new-systems

257

ILYA KHRZHANOVSKY, ANNE IMHOF, TEHCHING HSIEH, WESLEY GOATLEY [Conferences:] Artificial Tears: Singularity & Humanness—A Speculation, Global Art Forum: ‘I Am Not A Robot’. [Exhibition:] Human + : The Future of Our Species

Bibliography Index

280 304

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all my colleagues and friends at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, for their tremendous encouragement and support, and in particular, Chairman Peter Seah and the Board of Directors, Dr. Venka Purushothaman, Barbra Gan, Dominic Ang, Agnes Wan, Marcus Ngiow, Dr. Wolfgang Muench, Milenko Prvacki, Aubrey Mellor, Nur Hidayah, Professor Adam Knee, Professor Michael Earley, Bala Starr, Lee See Ee, Dr. Stephanie Burridge, Daphne Foo, Catherine Ong, and Chia Boon Hee. Special thanks to our inspiring Library Director, Malar Villi Nadeson, and Library Manager, Ashalatha Krishnan, who personally assisted in researching some of the literature reviews and securing important texts. Particular thanks and admiration to my brilliant assistant, Elamathi Vijaya Kumar, who has worked tirelessly in helping to bring the book to publication. Ela has been exceptional in researching, requesting, and securing scores of images, and numerous copyright permissions for the many quotations included in the book. I also offer sincere thanks to all the writers I have read and referenced, whose work has informed my understandings and helped inspire my own ideas and discourse; and to all the artists I have examined here—and I beg their forgiveness should there be any inaccuracies or misinterpretations. Great thanks to my colleagues and friends at Routledge, including Barry Clarke with whom I first discussed the idea and who encouraged me to take it forward, and to my fantastic editor, Laura Hussey, who has overseen the project with such positivity and enthusiasm. Many thanks also to everyone involved in the editing and production process including Claire Margerison, Dr. Sudhi Singh, and Daniel Fowler. Finally, eternal thanks to my wife Prue for her patience, encouragement, love, and inspiration; and for her expert eye in reading the various drafts and giving so many insightful suggestions, as well as her ever wise guidance on what to leave out. She has improved the book immeasurably. Parts of the book have been published previously in different forms in the following journal articles and chapters in edited books. They are reproduced with the kind permission of the publishers.

x Acknowledgments Dixon, S., 2018. Cybernetic-Existentialism in performance art. Leonardo, 52, 3. Dixon, S., 2018. Uncanny arts and the aesthetics of CyberneticExistentialism. J. Technoetic Arts 16(2), 191–214. Dixon, S., 2017. Cybernetic-Existentialism in interactive performance: strangers, being-for-others and autopoiesis. Int. J. Performance Arts Digital Media 13(1), 1–22. Dixon, S., 2016. Cybernetic-Existentialism. Int. J. Performance Arts Digital Media 12, 1, 11–30. Dixon, S., 2014, Performance art: actualizing science fiction. In: Rob Latham (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 263–276. Dixon, S., 2012. Researching digital performance: virtual practices. In: Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson (Eds.), Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 41–62. Dixon, S., 2010. The philosophy and psychology of the scenographic house in multimedia theatre. Int. J. Performance Arts Digital Media 6(1), 7–24. Dixon, S., 2007. Space, metamorphosis and extratemporality in the theatre of Robert Lepage. Contemporary Theatre Rev. 17(4), 499–515. Dixon, S., 2006. Uncanny interactions. Performance Res. 11(4), 67–75.

1 Introduction Cybernetics and Existentialism in arts and popular culture

Cybernetics had a decisive impact on art. … Given the emphasis of postWWII art on the concepts of process, system, environment, and audience participation, cybernetics was able to gain artistic currency as a theoretical model for articulating the systematic relationships and processes among feedback loops including the artist, artwork, audience, and environment. Edward Shanken, Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s (2002, p. 172)

After ALife Ahead For what one critic calls ‘the single most ambitious work of contemporary art created in 2017’ (Artsy editors, 2017), French artist Pierre Huyghe excavated the floor of a disused ice-rink in Münster, Germany, creating a gouged out, uneven terrain of clay paths and mounds, gravel, mud puddles, and imposing, geometric concrete slabs. He then inhabited it with live peacocks, bees, algae, and human cancer cells. After ALife Ahead (2017) presents a truly strange and uncanny mise-en-scène—described by Andrew Russeth as ‘one of the most formidable and mysterious artworks that I have ever seen, an alien environment that seems secretly to teem with life’ (Russeth, 2017). Above, geometric panels have been inserted in the roof, that open and close (letting in sun, wind, or rain) in response to a musical score, composed and computer-programmed in relation to the patterns on the shell of a venomous sea snail, which is situated in a large aquarium on a concrete ‘island’ in the center of the ice-rink. At the far side is an incubator containing the human cancer cells. These grow and multiply according to a number of factors, including the amount of CO2 they are fed by the breathing of the visitors to the installation (the busier the space, the faster they breed), who can view representations of the cellular mutations through an augmented reality app. Floating pyramids appear and proliferate, their number corresponding to the real-time splitting of the cancer cells, and they also merge together and mate, bearing offspring. In discussing the work, Huyghe sounds more cybernetician than artist: ‘I’m interested in letting, in a certain way, self-organizing systems try either

2 Introduction

Figure 1.1   Pierre Huyghe’s mysterious installation After ALife Ahead (2017) brings together complex cybernetic systems and core themes from the philosophy of Existentialism. (Photo: Bruce E. Phillips.)

to find or to not find a symbiosis … They grow, they evolve, they shift’ (quoted in Russeth, 2017). The After ALife Ahead system is conceived e­ xplicitly as a cybernetic mechanism that will adapt and change according to inputs, feedback loops, and human and environmental factors. The program is not fixed and is full of complexity: once set off, it is outside the artist’s control, and is described by Huyghe as an evolutionary algorithm employed as an archaic attempt to mimic life … Agents react and vary according to external factors. … It’s a way to shift the centrality of the human position—whether as a maker or receptor. Indiscernibility and unpredictability are among other operations that could shift that position. (quoted in McDermott, 2017) Huyghe’s references to unpredictability, and to shifting the centrality of the human position underline the Existentialist aspects of the work, emphasizing our vulnerable and contingent relationship to an inexplicable world and an uncertain future, and what Existentialists call being-for-others and being-towards-death. The installation is mysterious and uncanny, controlled by sophisticated cybernetic systems that are continually ‘changing, shifting, living, evolving’ (Huyghe quoted in McDermott, 2017) as they respond to,

Introduction  3 among other things, the life-breath of visitors and the being-towards-death journey of mutating human cancer cells. In a 2017 documentary following Huyghe’s award of the Nasher Prize Laureate for sculpture, critics variously dub him ‘a self-contained demonist’ who is ‘a master of the unexpected’ exploring ‘constantly shifting relationships’ with ‘a different conception of time’. Sheena Wagstaff, Chair of the Metropolitan Museum suggests that his preparedness to take real risks belies a mind so engaged with the intense realities of being ‘alive today that he sometimes undertakes projects that are a little shaky, are a little wobbly, and don’t necessarily turn out in the way he’d expected them to. That to my mind is the mark of a really great artist’ (Nasher, 2017). After ALife Ahead is a characteristic example of what I term CyberneticExistentialism in contemporary art and culture. It is a classic example of an artist conceiving a responsive and evolving cybernetic system in order to express deep existential concerns—in this case, around the fragility of both human life and our planet’s environment.

Figure 1.2  A chimera peacock is one of the elements of Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead (2017), which officially comprises: ice rink concrete floor; sand, clay, phreatic water; bacteria, algae, bee, chimera peacock; aquarium, black switchable glass, conus textile; incubator, human cancer cells; genetic algorithm; augmented reality; automated ceiling structure; rain; ammoniac; logic game. (Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; and Chantal Crousel, Paris. Photo: Ola Rindal.)

4 Introduction

A theoretical proposition I propose a theory, and a new analytical method, of CyberneticExistentialism. The ideas and philosophies of two fields are melded together to produce a new looking glass through which to peer, and a novel lens with which to critically analyze and deconstruct artworks. Two old paradigms are conjoined to provide a fresh perspective, and reanimated to shed new light on prevalent themes within art and socio-cultural practices. While some may consider cybernetics and Existentialist philosophy to be outdated or defunct, I contend that across contemporary visual and conceptual art, media and robotic arts, experimental theater and performance, artists are currently and continually encapsulating primary themes from these two distinct but interrelated disciplines. Ideas from both fields converge decisively and potently in classic works from the 1960s to the present day by some of the world’s leading artists. This book offers a close examination of a number of artworks to reveal how they encapsulate the ideas of Existentialist philosophers including ­ eidegger, ­Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin H Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre on freedom, nothingness, becoming, authenticity, self-determination, subject-­ object and master-slave relations, temporality, the absurd, being-for-others and being-towards-death. Simultaneously, these artworks are shown to engage in explorations of concepts proposed by cyberneticians including Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Grey Walter, Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela on information theory and noise, communication and control, feedback loops, homeostasis, circularity, negative entropy, adaptive ecosystems, autopoiesis, and emergence. I argue that while the names cybernetics and Existentialism are seldom spoken, and while the application of their ideas by artists may be largely unconscious, their philosophies, concerns, and themes have actually reemerged more prominently and explicitly than when popular interest in them was at its height in the 1950s and 1960s. I contend that far from being outmoded, cybernetics and Existentialism are not only alive and well, but of increasing relevance to arts practice, and to our appreciation and interpretation of contemporary work. Since these fields are generally considered outdated and forgotten, the task to argue their revival is challenging, particularly for a philosophy as extreme and uncompromising as Existentialism. As Michael Foley puts it: ‘Existentialism rejects team-player malleability, emphasizes finitude rather than potential … and embraces the difficult because it confers intensity. No wonder this philosophy has gone out of fashion’ (2001, p. 36). Nonetheless, a serious reappraisal is long overdue since its main protagonists are some of the last century’s most significant philosophers: ‘Heidegger is the most discussed thinker of the twentieth century’ (Polt, 2005, p. 1), Sartre ‘is arguably the best known philosopher of the twentieth century’ (Flynn, 2013), and

Introduction  5 Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex ‘is the most important feminist book ever written’ (Goldberg, 2010). The latter two are formidable and larger-than-life characters, whose promiscuous open relationship yet life-long devotion to one another is the most famous love story in philosophy. Since they lived their lives strictly according to its doctrines and, if ‘done correctly, all existentialism is applied existentialism’ (Bakewell, 2016, p. 217, emphasis in original), I will tell something of their extraordinarily bohemian stories and colorful adventures along the way. I will also narrate something of Heidegger, whom by comparison is distinctly monochrome, and menacing. Described as cold and having almost no character at all by Albert Camus (1991 [1942], p. 23), Heidegger is exceptionally difficult, both to read with his convoluted style, and to palate given his odious association with Nazism (discussed further in Chapter 3). It is now customary for academics to apologize even speaking his name, which I hereby do, yet as one of the philosophy’s most influential thinkers it is amiss to erase him from its history. Thankfully, it is rare to discern overtly political or fascist messages in his writing, despite some critics’ overzealous reading between the lines; and Heidegger represents more the exception than the rule, with most Existentialists as well as cyberneticians generally aligned

Figure 1.3  Life-long partners and France’s most feted Existentialists, Simone de Beauvoir (aged 52) and Jean-Paul Sartre (aged 55) at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 21 September 1960. STF/AFP/Getty Images.

6 Introduction with the politics of the far left or anarchism (Chapter 3). Indeed, during the famous May 1968 Paris student ‘uprisings’ demanding ‘Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!’ Sartre and Beauvoir were both there in person agitating on the streets, with Sartre literally on a soapbox preaching to workers outside a Renault factory. They were, and still remain iconic figures that embodied the rebellious and utopian spirit of ‘68, and had already been practicing free love, and demanding equality, freedom, and revolution for three decades.

Cybernetics as anti-disciplinarity Cybernetics emerged as a distinct field in the USA in the 1940s, building its momentum through a series of ten Macy conferences from 1946 to 1953. It is a philosophy and science of responsive systems—as opposed to purely mechanical ones—and is thus applicable to a wide range of areas, from engineering sciences and computing to psychology, anthropology, management studies, and interactive art. A system is cybernetic when it responds to information or inputs (in any form) and reacts to it using signal loops, feedback mechanisms and/or circular causal relationships. This may control and regulate phenomena; prompt outputs, new behaviors or changes within the system; or activate interactions between the system and its environment. While from its earliest days it was known for, and developed the potentials of high technologies including (then novel) digital electronic computer systems, it was not primarily centered or dependent on technology. Rather, as a type of trans-disciplinary systems science, it embraced and fused together vastly different scientific and humanities disciplines. The Macy conferences were chaired by Warren McCulloch, with other founding figures including Margaret Mead, who edited the proceedings and was ‘the most famous woman scientist of her age’ (Kline, 2015, p. 1); the originator of information theory Claude Shannon; and Norbert Wiener, who influenced Shannon’s theory and is considered cybernetics’ father figure who also named it—derived from the Greek for ‘steersman’, and the origin of today’s cyber prefix. In parallel in the UK, eccentric and pioneering practitioners including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask made breakthroughs with hobbyist-style inventions including the world’s first mobile autonomous robot (Walter’s Machina Speculatrix, 1949) and artificial brain. Ashby’s homeostat (1949) device caught the public imagination globally, described by Time magazine as ‘the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man’ in its January 1949 feature, ‘The Thinking Machine’. As in the US, the British side of the field gathered momentum through regular meetings—monthly cybernetic dinner discussions over beer and food at London’s Ratio Club from 1949 to 1958. A figure on the fringes rather than at the center was Alan Turing, who was fascinated by the ideas, regularly attended, and led three different talks there including on 7 December 1950, where he announced his famous ‘Turing Test’. His biographer Andrew W.

Introduction  7 Hodges relates his several meetings with Wiener and suggests that Turing might have become a more central figure had it not been for the marked personality differences between them—Turing was light of touch, witty, shy and modest, whereas Wiener was a brash and solemn self-publicist with little sense of humor (Hodges, 1992 [1983], p. 403). In the USA during World War II, cybernetics focused on conceiving a­ dvanced military hardware and later evolved as an interdisciplinary field focused on ideas of ‘communication and control’, homeostasis (self-­ stabilization), and the use of positive and negative feedback loops to develop hybrid and synthesizing systems. In its ‘second wave’ (aka second order), from around 1960, it particularly explored adaptive, self-organizing and autopoietic (self-making or self-regulating) systems across a range of areas from computing to management, and from biology and psychology to the arts. The focus in its third wave from around 1980 was emergence, artificial and collective intelligence, and artificial life forms. One of the originators of second-wave cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, grapples with the differing perspectives and definitions of cybernetics, emphasizing its fecundity and euphoric spirit, and how it means entirely different things to different people. He offers sample definitions provided by some of cybernetics’ ­leading lights: a form of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand. [Margaret Mead] … a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness and information. [Gregory Bateson] … the science of effective organization [Stafford Beer] … the science of defensible metaphors [Gordon Pask]. (Foerster, 1994) As Stafford Beer put it in 1959: Some people think that cybernetics is another word for automation; some that it concerns experiments with rats; some that it is a branch of mathematics; others that it wants to build a computer capable of running the country. My hope is that … people will understand both how these wonderfully different notions can be simultaneously current, and also why none of them is much to the point. (Beer, 1959, p. vi) Andrew Pickering’s book, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010) is ‘an attempt to rescue cybernetics from the margins and to launder it into mainstream discourse, to make it more widely available’ (Pickering, 2010, p.  390), and is among a number of works revisiting and bringing fresh perspectives to bear on its history and philosophy. He suggests that ­cybernetics is not so much an interdisciplinary field as an antidisciplinary one

8 Introduction ‘riding roughshod over disciplinary boundaries,’ and calls it ‘a general theory, applicable to all sorts of complex systems’ from the brain and the British economy to the evolution of the species (pp. 8–9). He presents a sustained argument on the centrality of both performativity and adaptive systems to British cybernetics, offering numerous examples, from Walter’s and Ashby’s inventions (above) to Stafford Beer’s applications of the metaphor team ­syntegrity to social, organizational and management models; Gordon Pask’s adaptive robot artworks and interactive theater creations; R.D. Laing’s developments of adaptive systems within psychiatry; and Gregory Bateson’s innovations concerning ‘the adaptive subject or self’ (p. 8).

Existentialism as adaptability An interest in ‘the adaptive self’, openness, self-creation, and self-­regulation (respectively, of systems, and of our self/identity) are among the many common concerns shared by both fields, as we will see. Existentialist philosophy highlights that while we are each alone, separate, and free, we are also ­contingent and relational. Thus, Jean-Paul Sartre urges that first-and-­ foremost we consider ourselves in relation to other people and in terms of our being-for-others, and Gabriel Marcel highlights the importance of our active participation and availability for others (disponibilité), with the combined aspect of human separation with communion (1995, p. 39) being a crucial concept. It is our interactions with the world and with other people that define us—in the same way that cybernetic systems differ from mechanical ones through their interactivity, adaptability, or responsiveness to other factors, inputs, and the environment. A close and interactive connection with the external environment, and malleability in relation to changes within it, are thus central concerns for both cybernetics and Existentialism. Both are meta-disciplines that share a total lack of recognition of boundaries and substrates, with a determination to cross, overcome and transcend them—one of cybernetics’ aims is to ‘overflow the boundaries of any physical object … [and] spread across multiple entities’ (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, 2003, p. 65). It effaces difference, seeing instead similarities and complementarities, including between humans and machines, as it draws ­together different disciplines, seeking to integrate them into new phenomena, organisms, organizations, systems, networks, and ecologies. In turn: Existentialism does not recognize the boundary between ethics and epistemology, nor between either and ontology (as for logic, it has no interest in it). … none of the Existentialist philosophers … [saw] a sharp distinction between perceiving one’s world, reacting emotionally towards it, and acting upon it. … Just as there is no sharp distinction between knowing and acting on one’s knowledge, so there is none between perceiving and feeling. (Barnes, 2003, p. xv)

Introduction  9 Existentialist ideas were first proposed in the 19th century by writers including Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and became consolidated as a distinct philosophy within the wider field of phenomenology in the mid twentieth century by thinkers including Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. It should be noted immediately that the term Existentialism was first coined by Marcel in 1945 and championed by him, Sartre and Beauvoir, while many other principal figures, including Heidegger and Albert Camus rejected the specific label, or at best wore it reluctantly. Nonetheless, almost all academic commentators agree their centrality within the philosophy, with Heidegger cast as ‘the reluctant father of existentialism’ (Crowell, 2017). When discussing Existentialism, I capitalize the E to denote the philosophical beliefs defined by these writers, as distinct from derivations of ‘existential’ that relate to the broader experience of living. Following the philosophy’s lead, I also refer to a collective humanity using the inclusive terms ‘we’, ‘our’ etc. While recognizing such generalization is problematic (‘we’ perspectives differ significantly depending on who one is) this is in order to discuss the philosophy using in its own terms and language, where all human beings are equal, and conceptualized universally and collectively—we.

Conflict, rejection, and individuality Existentialism emphasizes many fundamental conflicts in the nature of human Being (or Dasein) including an equally strong experience of ­Nothingness and anticipation of being-towards-death. Such recognitions of life’s simultaneous Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1994 [1943]), and the fact that we can never fully grasp our existence or events within it, means that we are confronted continually with choices about how to act in order to create meaning by the way we live. In Existentialism, facing and embracing Nothingness becomes one of the keys to freedom, and many of its philosophers do not feel ‘in this nothingness, a sensation of being lost. They praise it as a delirious sense of freedom, a new reality devoid of the theories, beliefs, traditions and clichés’ which inhibit, control, and hold people back (Hubben, 1997 [1952], p. 33). The philosophy urges rejection of social conditioning and externally imposed values so as to make individual freedom and responsibility paramount; and advocates that we continually create and re-create our own identities through authentic actions and relationships. It also emphasizes how in the face of Nothingness, perpetual choices and recognition of our absolute freedom, we experience understandable and insurmountable feelings of anxiety, separation, isolation, Angst, and nausea. For Existentialists, these are not only intense embodied feelings, but underline the human condition as synonymous with a primordial sense of dread, pathos, sadness, loss, loneliness, absurdity, boredom, homelessness, trepidation, anguish, and distress—as described variously, and emotionally, by its philosophers.

10 Introduction Existentialism emphasizes individuality and personal experience, and has been interpreted both as a protest against mid-20th century mass industrialization, and the prospect of the human being becoming marginalized as an anonymous cog in the machine, and as reaction to the alienation and angst of two world wars. The obliterations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom bombs in 1945 were shocking and horrific alerts to Existentialism’s remember-you-must-die message that we are all being-towards-death (discussed in Chapter 2), and once used now threatened the instant annihilation of all humans and the planet.1 In ‘The End of the War’ (1945), Existentialism’s ‘leader’ Sartre uses this to warn of the absolute essentiality of making the right and responsible choices, while Norbert Wiener, his counterpart ‘leader’ of cybernetics was so appalled he took immediate responsibility with a brave, life-changing choice to forever turn his back on the military research and funding that had helped make his name and reputation. I maintain that in the 21st century we are experiencing a different but parallel period of existential angst. It has arisen following new political and ecological fears, an amplified sense of psychological alienation and separation brought about in part by the migration of human communication into technological platforms, and a renewed longing for the individual to emerge out of the collective to assert itself. War in the 1940s reflected Existentialism’s message that life was full of anxiety and uncertainty in relation to historical and political events, and such contingency anxiety now intensifies around trepidations ranging from a global warming crisis and fundamentalism to the politics of separation, intolerance, and the extreme. Meanwhile, social science research indicates growing numbers of young people succumbing to depression, compulsive or neurotic behaviors, self-loathing, self-harm, and suicide. The despairing side of the philosophy has reanimated itself and become understandable, even logical again: ‘The existentialist frankly states that man is an anguish’ (Sartre, 1989 [1946]).

Existentialist tales and Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning The narratives and metaphors of Existentialism have been passed down through generations of thinkers like family legacy trinkets, but have undergone significant transformations along the way. Husserl begat the core concepts and Kierkegaard was the first to describe transformative leaps of faith, and to identify dread as a human given—a theme almost all its philosophers seize and wax lyrical upon, providing numerous nuanced names and descriptors. Nietzsche conceived of the ‘the Herd’, symbolizing a conforming proletarian mass characterized by anonymity and mediocrity that should be resisted, which Heidegger later reformulated as das Man (the they). His inaugural lecture in Freiburg ‘What is Metaphysics’ (1929) argues that absence is a precondition for presence, and that Western philosophy has ignored the importance of lack and ‘nothingness’. Heidegger ends with the words (following Gottfried von Leibnitz): ‘Why are there beings at all,

Introduction  11 and why not rather nothing?’ (Heidegger, 1993 [1929]), p. 112), which had a profound influence on Sartre, who adopted Nothingness as his mantra in a twinned and dialectical ontology with Being in the book that forms the cornerstone of the philosophy, Being and Nothingness (1943). He embodies its title in the potent visual analogy of a parasite living inside our bodies: nothingness ‘lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm’ (Sartre, 1994, p.  21). This in turn may derive from a parable Nietzsche tells in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891) where the titular character comes across a shepherd gagging and convulsing in life-threatening spasms as the head of a large, black snake emerges, wriggling angrily out of his mouth, while its body writhes inside him, consuming him. In the story, Zarathustra tries to pull the snake out of him, but cannot, and screams for the shepherd to bite the snake’s head off. He does so, and is symbolically freed from his inner fears, despairs, and demons to become ‘the higher man’. He is changed and radiant, and laughs like no one has ever laughed before (Nietzsche, 1954 [1885], p. 269). This powerful dramatic imagery is indicative of another notable commonality that binds cybernetics and Existentialism—creativity and aesthetics—with both inspiring significant artistic developments, and unique genres and forms. Existentialism has been called ‘as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one’ (Crowell, 2017), and novels by Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky, which predate the main philosophical movement, are generally included within the field termed ‘literary existentialism’ which was consolidated in the celebrated novels and plays of Camus, Sartre and others from the 1930s to 1950s. During his lifetime, Sartre was equally well known for his novels including Nausea (1938), which Iris Murdoch describes as a rare example of ‘a truly philosophical novel’ (Cox, 2016, p. 41, original emphasis) and plays such as The Flies (1943) and No Exit (1944) as for his philosophy. He declares that ‘There is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art’ (quoted in Cox, 2016, p. 1)—and biographers such as Gary Cox observe how ‘his life itself was a work of art too’ (2). Filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman, and many visual artists have been equated with Existentialism including Alberto Giacometti— a good friend of Beauvoir, whose advice ‘write anything!’ prompted her to pen The Second Sex (Bakewell, 2016, p. 208)—Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning (Crowell, p. 2017). Abstract expressionism may itself be reasonably considered proto-cybernetic, using a methodological system based on principles of feedback loops and circularity; and Pickering argues this case for de ­Kooning, whose works ‘conjure up an ontology of decentered ­becoming … [through a] temporally emergent process involving a constitutive back and forth between the artist and the paint on the canvas’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 397). A different type of negative feedback loop (the type cyberneticians are most interested in, as discussed in Chapter 3) took effect when de Kooning famously gifted Robert Rauschenberg a grease pencil, ink, charcoal,

12 Introduction

Figure 1.4  For his Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, Robert Rauschenberg performed a type of cybernetic negative feedback loop while invoking Existentialist questions around rebellion, authenticity, and the relationships between Being and Nothingness. Traces of ink and crayon on paper, with mat, and hand-lettered label in ink, in gold-leafed frame (64.1 × 55.2 × 1.3 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis (©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.)

and graphite sketch of a group of women, after the latter had turned up nervously and unannounced on his doorstep and described his concept: he would erase it. The already famous de Kooning obliged the young pretender but took time to select the work—it had to be a good one—and it took Rauschenberg two months and many erasers to rub out the image, and some faint marks and smudges remain in his Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953.

Introduction  13 The iconic work resonates with all the vibrations of Existentialism, conjuring ideas and posing questions around rebellion, authenticity, the absurd, the uncanny, identity as palimpsest, absence and presence, being-towards-death, and Nothingness’s relationship to Being, with Rauschenberg echoing the Existentialist view— ‘It’s not a negation’ he says ‘It’s a celebration’ (quoted in Cain, 2017). Michael Craig-Martin adds that Rauschenberg always asked essential questions: ‘How an artist functions, and what an artist’s role is, the parameters of art, the nature of art. What is the bottom line? What is the least thing you need? What can you get rid of and still have a piece of art? He initiated those things’ (Craig-Martin in Scott 2017). Rauschenberg’s ravenous interests in collaboration, while all the while defining his own inimitable originality, and pursuing a unification of art and life resonates like a bell with the ideologies and methods of both Existentialism and cybernetics. Federico Sabatini’s article ‘Louise Bourgeois: An Existentialist Act of SelfPerception’ describes the French-American artist’s ‘universal themes, which have long obsessed her personally: anxiety, alienation, rejection, love, the search for identity, sex, death and, above all, human relations, communication and the suffering they inevitably involve’ (Sabatini, 2007, p.  3). Existentialism had a direct influence on the development of the Theater of the Absurd and its playwrights such as Jean Genet (of whom Sartre wrote a eulogistic, psychoanalytic biography), Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, and Tom Stoppard. The absurdist playwrights echo Existentialism’s alienated worldview and its fierce politics of resistance, self-realization, and freedom, as theater academic Martin Esslin observes: The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties … [and] aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation. (Esslin, 1965, p. 23)

Authenticity and anti-heroism in film and television In the late twentieth century, the Existentialist tenet of authenticity was considered passé, even laughable—for Theodor Adorno, it was meaningless jargon (1973)—but it has made such a startling revival that the word is now seen and heard everywhere. Miraculously, authenticity has become the

14 Introduction new necessity. It is likely to have been the magic election ingredient in the unlikely transformation of Donald Trump into the most world’s most powerful human2; and Whisper creator Michael Heyward insists social media is now ‘all about authenticity’ (Heyward, 2016). Existentialism sees authentic action as a form of revolt and expression of individual freedom, and advocates that people ‘transcend their social and ethical predicaments … to attain authenticity by being faithful to scripts they have written for themselves’ (Golomb, 1995, p. 3). Existentialist authenticity is understood to be difficult and uncompromising, as Sartre makes clear: ‘Authenticity consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate’ (1965, p. 90). Such notions are now explored regularly and in surprising new ways in cultural texts and movies, from Richard Linklater’s award-winning Boyhood (2014), filmed with the same actors over ten years and drawing on their real lives, to art house pieces like Victoria (2015, Director: Sebastian Schipper), shot in one increasingly breathless long take as a tragic story of risks and consequences ricochet and unfold (like cybernetic feedback loops) around the real backstreets, clubs, and grimy apartments of Berlin. Acclaimed South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo mixes the search for authenticity in his character’s journeys with a trademark cinematographic style of single takes with an impassively fixed camera that occasionally zooms or pans clumsily to highlight its artificiality. The female protagonist in On the Beach At Night Alone (2017), Young-hee (played by Kim Min-hee) is a classic Existentialist heroine in the 1960s mode: brooding, impulsive, confrontational, alienated, and chain-smoking. She urges her friend, ‘Before you die, try everything!’ and tells her: ‘[I’m] resolving what it is I really want … what I want is to live in the way that suits me. To be strong, and whatever happens, to live my own way.’ Young-hee’s viewpoints on identity, freedom and authenticity are fiercely Existentialist, and in a drunken tirade she describes herself as a bomb who destroys everything, calls all men ‘idiots’, and confronts the assembled dinner party guests with their limitations, hypocrisies and inauthenticity: ‘everyone’s cowardly, satisfied with fake things’ she screams at them. On the Beach At Night Alone is a profound and melancholic exploration of the anti-heroine’s failed love affair with a married man (and echoes the real life off-screen relationship between Kim Min-hee and her director Hong Sang-Soo), and the consequences of human actions and choices. In the denouement, her lover extols a litany of tearful regrets while, despite her sadness, like a true Existentialist heroine she answers him by eschewing the whole idea of looking back, and scorns the very concept of regret. While some filmmakers explore the notion of what it is to be posthuman, others like Hong Sang-Soo return to older Existentialist perspectives and continue, in remarkable new ways, to ask crucial questions about what it is, and what it means, to be human.

Introduction  15

Figure 1.5  Director Hong Sang-Soo’s movie On the Beach at Night Alone (2017) tells the story of Young-hee (played by Kim Min-hee), a contemporary Existentialist anti-heroine. (Courtesy of Jeonwonsa Film Co.)

The renewed interest in the Existentialist anti-hero/heroine, a non-­ conformist who breaks rules and attempts to live an authentic life in extremis, is equally apparent in many of the most successful American television series. Mr. Robot features not one, but two Cybernetic-Existentialist ­figures, with the main protagonist a morphine-addicted computer hacker with bleak internal monologues—‘I am fear. I am anxiety, terror, panic’ is how Episode 6 begins—and he is obsessed with making the right ‘zero or one’ ­choices. E ­ xtreme commitment and the same concern for authentic choices runs through The Americans, where the married Russian spies are told by their handler: ‘We all die alone … before that we make choices’. In 2018, the ­climax of the first episode of Ozark’s second season is a murder to which the protagonist Marty Byrde (played by Jason Bateman) remarks: ‘People make choices. Choices have consequences’. For Existentialists, choices of Either/ Or (the title of Kierkegaard’s greatest work, 1843) are confronted continually on an ongoing basis, each waking moment, and define who you will be. Each choice should be made as though ‘you were choosing on behalf of all ­humanity, taking the entire burden of responsibility for how the human race behaves. … It is exhilarating to exactly the same degree as it is frightening (Bakewell, 2016, p. 9–10). Arland Ussher emphasizes how ‘‘Choose and be damned’ … is Existentialism’s last word’ (Ussher, 1968, p. 16) but also points to how its philosophers were loath to tell us what specific choices to make or to define measures

16 Introduction by which to judge which choices are ‘more authentic’ than others: ‘This is the point most commonly made against Existential ethics … their omission to propose criteria’ (72). The standard Existentialist retort is that to do so would inhibit individual freedom, which is Existentialism’s ultimate and most sacred theme: it is up to each person to define their own values and make their own decisions. The Belfast serial killer Paul Spector (played by Jamie Dornan) in the British BBC/Irish RTE series The Fall (2013) is equally interested in choices, telling one of his victims ‘As Camus says, life is the sum of all your choices. Choose your next move carefully.’ He has a picture of Nietzsche in his sketchbook and a copy of Sartre’s Iron in the Soul on his bedside table; he invokes Heidegger by saying he has separated himself ‘from the herd’; and describes his murders as ‘existential’. But Walter White, Breaking Bad’s protagonist is arguably the most overt embodiment of the Existentialist outsider since Albert Camus’ The Outsider (1942), and he is also a visionary cybernetician, synthesizing drugs of miraculous purity and establishing a labyrinthine and self-regulating underground crime network. He may have turned ‘bad’ but crucially he is no longer in bad faith—Sartre’s term for inauthenticity and self-deception. Though a criminal facing an uncertain future and potentially violent fate, he has made choices in good faith that have intensified and changed his life forever. Regardless of how society may judge him, Walt has evolved into a paragon of existential virtue. He is done living in bad faith. He is completely honest about his motivations. In a world devoid of meaning, he has found meaning through cooking crystal meth. He knows he has done terrible things, and takes responsibility for them. (Man, 2013)

Let It Go But such anti-heroes and heroines are not confined to dark dramas of crime, drugs, and death. In 2013, the Walt Disney children’s film Frozen broke all records to become the most successful animated film of all time, with a central set-piece sequence, Let It Go that is pure Cybernetic-Existentialism. Filled with existential Angst, and having repressed her powers and authentic self for years, Elsa sings about being like the queen of a kingdom of isolation, who will now reject the past, cast off her controlling fears without a care for what others think, and go and reach the extreme limits of her potential. She makes her choice, and echoing the Existentialists’ total rejection of externally imposed codes and morals,3 she sings that from now on, for her there will be no rules and no regard for what is wrong or right. ‘I’m free!’ she declares, as she runs up a staircase that she simultaneously creates by emitting ice and snow from her body. As human being and nature make

Introduction  17 a magical cybernetic connection, she asserts that she is at one with the elements and that her power radiates through the earth and sky. The cybernetic circuit evolves rapidly, and reaches a climax as she conjures a magnificent palace of ice, while describing her soul as spiraling in fractals. She has taken a ‘leap of faith’ (Kierkegaard) to reach a point of existentialist self-creation (Beauvoir) whereby she is now ‘condemned to freedom’ (Sartre), pursuing transcendence from facticity (everydayness and her historical past), and seeking to live in an authentic mode of being (Heidegger) and to go beyond her limits (Nietzsche). At the same time, she has reached new heights of cybernetic ‘communication and control’ (Wiener) and become a cybernetic posthuman subject, which according to N. Katherine Hayles is: ‘an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’ (Hayles, 1999, p. 3). Frozen was not just another children’s film but a huge cultural phenomenon at the time, hitting a note that resounded loudly, and encapsulating a contemporary zeitgeist concerned with self-creation, freedom, authenticity, and making synthesizing connections that overflow normative boundaries— what I am defining as Cybernetic-Existentialism.

Synchronized ups and downs Cybernetics and Existentialism share many aspects and characteristics, and this book aims not only to apply these to critiques of artworks, but also to uncover and chart the complementarities of the two fields for the very first time. A primary example is their parallel histories: they share surprisingly close trajectories of dawns, highlights, twilights, and declines. Both emerged as distinct disciplines following key books in the 1940s—Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) and Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine (1948)—matured and grew to prominence in the 1950s, and achieved huge popularity in their heydays of the 1960s before their ardors began to diminish and their fames and flames quickly dimmed. Significantly, both attracted not only specialist and academic interest, but widespread public attention and popularity, with Wiener becoming a household name in the United States and beyond, and cybernetics being ‘seized upon … like a magic key’ to explain everything from what happened in World War II to what the scientific future held in store (Hodges, 1992, p. 403). Sartre was similarly a hugely famous (and infamous) public celebrity, whose funeral procession in 1980 was nationally televised and attended by 50,000 people. But while his calls to assert freedom by actively resisting rules and social conformity had captured the countercultural imagination of the late 1960s, it lost its fervor and relevance in the more politically c­ onservative times that followed. Meanwhile, cybernetics’ s­ cientific funding largely dried up in the United States at the height of the Cold War (when ironically the

18 Introduction Soviet Union was vastly increasing its cybernetics research spending) and Wiener’s ‘outspoken stand against military research … prompted the FBI to investigate his alleged “subversive activities” and “communist sympathies”.’ (Conway and Siegelman, 2005, p.  xiii) Cybernetics’ futuristic appeal as a visionary universal science uniting the physical and social sciences was overtaken by new ideas, emphases and vocabularies following the advent of the information age that cybernetics had laid the foundations for, when the rich discourse of cybernetics and information theory was flattened in the utopian information narrative. The basic analogy of cybernetics—that all organisms use information-feedback paths to adapt to their environment—is reduced to the adjective cyber. The scientific concept of information is reduced to digitized data. (Kline, 2015, p. 7) Both fields shared the fate of being replaced by new ideas and theories that drew directly from them. Cybernetics ‘diverged into a number of fields, such as information theory, artificial intelligence, artificial life and bio-informatics’ (Ilfeld, 2012, p. 57); and in the 1990s, posthuman theory remediated its ideas to re-cast them in another form, with the preeminent book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999) explicit about its parenthood.4 N. Katherine Hayles had spent six years in preparation researching its history and her field-defining book is first-and-foremost a biography of cybernetics, with the word appearing on almost every page. There are two basic routes to posthumanism: by augmenting humans with advanced technologies, rendering them cyborgs, or by augmenting machines to render them more human-like through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (AL) systems. But either way, she makes clear that posthumanism is quintessentially a cybernetic ontology: —one still in process, highly contested, and often speculative … edging toward a vision of what we might call the computational universe … [where] the essential function of both intelligent machines and humans is processing information. … the computational universe realizes the cybernetic dream of creating a world in which humans and intelligent machines can both feel at home. (Hayles, 1999, p. 239) While the name cybernetics faded away, its reality both in digital culture and contemporary theory did not, and ‘the socio-logic of cybernetics spread everywhere … [and] is today a taken-for-granted feature of the culture in which we live and die’ (Pfohl, 2016). Meanwhile, changes took place to take the spotlight away from Existentialism, directing the beam instead towards new discourses by writers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, with post-structuralism leaving Existentialism

Introduction  19 lingering awkwardly in the shadows, since the new ideas evolved directly out of it. Writers have dubbed the godfather of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida a ‘proto-existentialist’ (Reynolds, 2006, p. 166) and ‘Sartre’s double, a double of his double. A doubled double’ (Baugh, 2003, p. 43). While Derrida’s particular approach to textual analysis and deconstruction remains extraordinary and unique, it builds philosophically upon its phenomenological heritage (Baring, 2014), elaborates Nietzsche’s notions of the world as a constant flux where all beings and entities are unstable and in a state of becoming, and extends Sartre’s 1947 pronouncement in What is Literature? that ‘Reading is creation’ (2002 [1947], p. 43). Two other influential figures whose incendiary ideas are regularly applied to deconstruct artworks—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—also pay dues of inspiration to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Their discourses on becoming borrow from and extend those of Existentialist philosophers from Nietzsche to Sartre, and Edmund Husserl who in 1935 wrote: ‘This life, as personal life, is constant becoming through a constant intentionality of development. What becomes, in this life, is the person himself. His being is forever becoming (Husserl, 1970 [1935], p. 338). Deleuze wrote three monographs on figures associated with the movement: novelist Franz Kafka, painter Francis Bacon, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. As Bernard E. Harcourt puts it: ‘One cannot think Deleuze without Nietzsche’ (Harcourt, 2016), and I would argue the same of Sartre, with whom Deleuze and Foucault shared political activist experiences, including being evicted together from the Parisian Ministry of Justice while demonstrating and attempting to hold a press conference deploring the injustices, and calling for reforms in the French prison system in January 1972 (Cox, 2016, p. 274). Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) on the rhizome, lines of flight, boundary crossing, and nomadism also relate closely to cybernetic concepts and visions.

2016—Existentialism becomes best-selling again The philosophy is experiencing something of a revival, and several books have re-appraised it with a populist but intelligent eye, including Gary Cox’s The Existentialist’s Guide to Death, the Universe and Nothingness (2011) and Existentialism and Excess (2016), and Sarah Bakewell’s scintillating study At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails (2016), whose presence in the New York Times 2016 Top Ten book list is indicative not only of its stylish erudition but of the serious resurgence of interest. Not on that list, but with sales of three million is Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016), which artfully remediates and extends Existentialist principles for self-help and self-knowledge purposes. Bakewell argues that the recent revival reflects the fact that postmodern theories have ‘aged badly’ and people have woken up to more crucial issues, returning to ‘big questions about what it means to

20 Introduction live an authentic, fully human life’ (Bakewell, 2016, p. 28). She highlights the anti-conformist spirit that ignited the philosophy and the continuing potency of its message that one is entirely free to choose ‘who you will be’ (9). Sartre declares: ‘There is no traced-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path. But to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him’ (Sartre, 2009, p. 15). In the twenty-first century, his call is taken up again and again in myriad narratives and messages, including slogans for clothing brands where Kama recommends that you ‘Own Your Life’ while Nike urges: ‘Just Do It’. In 2016, a George Bernard Shaw quotation: ‘Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself’ became a popular poster in clothing shops in Sri Lanka, and quite separately in 2016, the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore Tharman Shanmugaratnam launched an ambitious ‘SkillsFuture’ lifelong learning initiative with a $500 subsidy for every citizen and an accompanying book with the same quotation writ large across its entire first page. In a rare interview in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, the legendary protest singer joined in the chorus— ‘Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself,’ Dylan growled. In literature, the 2008 Man Booker Prize winning novel was Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) whose protagonist is an Indian servant who murders his master in cold blood and steals his money, despite his master’s relative kindness to him, and the genuine possibility that his own family may be killed in revenge. It is a deliberate, existential act to, as he puts it, ‘break free of the coop’, and he compares the crime to a type of Buddhist enlightenment, marking his passage from ‘the Darkness’ to ‘the Light’. In the book’s final lines he reflects: I’ve made it! I’ve broken out of the coop! … Getting caught – it’s always a possibility. … [Yet] I’ll never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat. I’ll say it was worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant. (Adiga, 2008, p. 320–321) Chillingly, another with no regrets was Ian Brady, the UK’s longest serving prisoner. In June 2013, British newspapers reported he had broken a 47-year silence to speak out about the notorious ‘Moors murders’ of five children. Brady noted that he had been studying German and French philosophy and said the reason he and Myra Hindley ‘had tortured and killed children [was] as an “existential exercise” (Guardian, 2013).’ The most controversial and, for Norman Rosenthal, most important and cathartic work of the Sensation (1997) exhibition at London’s Royal Academy that truly launched the YBAs (Young British Artists), was Marcus Harvey’s recreation of the police photograph of Hindley that had been obsessively reproduced in the media. Vandalized twice on the opening day of the exhibition, the eerie and

Introduction  21 g­ iant 2.7 × 3.4 meter portrait Myra (1995) is painted using casts of children’s hands to apply the pigment; the UK’s best-selling newspaper The Sun commented: ‘Myra Hindley is to be hung in the Royal Academy. Sadly, it is only a painting of her’ (in Young, 2005, p. 34, double emphasis in original).

1968—Cybernetic Serendipity and the impacts of cybernetic arts As with Existentialism, cybernetics spawned its own innovative artworks and forms of expression, and influenced the seismic post-object, processoriented, and conceptual turns of the 1960s. Cybernetic art first developed in the 1950s with pioneers such as Nicholas Schöffer and Roy Ascott, and reached popular consciousness in the 1960s through the work of Nam June Paik, Tsai Wen-Ying, Gordon Pask, and Hans Haacke, and following the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London’s ICA gallery (1968, curator Jasia Reichardt). This brought together 325 artists and engineers to present a history of cybernetics and a series of interactive exhibits and robots (some are discussed in Chapter 6), computer sculptures, algorithmic artworks (by Charles Csuri and Kenneth Knowlton), quasi-autonomous art-making machines, and computers operating as interactive agents that collaborated and ‘performed’ with gallery visitors.

Figure 1.6   Franciszka Themerson’s poster design for the historic Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (I.C.A.) from 2 August to 20 October 1968. (© Tate, London 2019.)

22 Introduction British-Russian inventor Peter Zinovieff’s Music Computer (1968) improvised on the tunes that visitors whistled into it; and the computer for Margaret Masterman’s Computerized Haiku (1968) co-created haiku poems by incorporating some words selected by the participant with others it chose from within its thesaurus. Visitors used flashlights and mirrors to create a type of dance of sexual attraction between two ‘male’ and three ‘female’, sensor-activated hanging sculptures for British artist and cybernetician Gordon Pask’s large, glowing, kinetic machine The Colloquy of Mobiles (1968). The exhibition also toured to the US, and perhaps more vividly and publicly than any other event around the time, it heralded a turning point when artworks began to be reconceived in terms of processes and systems, rather than objects. It marked a crucial moment when cybernetics stepped into the arts limelight and the spell of interactivity began to grip the public imagination—the lay participant was now part-and-parcel of the loop and of the artwork itself. The press positively eulogized it, with one newspaper assuring it was ‘guaranteed to fascinate anyone from toddling age to the grave’, the Daily Mirror praising its revelations of the ‘unexpected joys in art and life’, and the London Evening Standard asking: ‘Where in London could you take a hippy, a computer programmer, and a ten-year-old schoolboy and guarantee that each would be perfectly happy for an hour without you having to lift a finger to entertain them?’ (Usselmann, 2003). In the same year, a number of important articles appeared. Roy Ascott’s ‘The Cybernetic Stance: My Process and Purpose’ (1968) is an enthusiastic rallying cry for systems approaches in art, where dynamic change and nonhierarchical, interactive flows become key, and process ultimately triumphs over product. His ideas, whether related to art or everyday life, are now as fresh and relevant over fifty years later, where the audience still expects: not a fixed attitude or viewpoint to the work, but a field of uncertainty and ambiguity in which they can, endlessly, take part. In every area the system, so regarded, is open-ended: nothing is fixed … and we can see how the vision of our time is ultimately cybernetic. (Ascott, 1968, p. 106)

Systems Esthetics, dematerializing objects, and cybernetic waves Ascott discusses a new ‘cybernetic spirit’ in art, an idea echoed in Jack ­Burnham’s influential ‘Systems Esthetics’ (1968) the same year (discussed further in Chapter 2). Reconsidering it decades later in Artforum where it was originally published, Caroline A. Jones suggests that while artists may avoid using the term: ‘Undeclared as such, systems thinking now suffuses the art world as we know it … [and] such different artists as Olafur Eliasson, Andrea Fraser, Damien Hirst, Seth Price, and Tino Sehgal’ (Jones, 2012). As her title suggests, Lucy R. Lippard’s book Six Years: The ­Dematerialization

Introduction  23 of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973) reflects on the changing status of the art object around that time following developments in minimalism, conceptual art, new process-based methods, and approaches informed by systems theory and information theory. Artists were looking to ‘restructure perception’, she suggests, and ‘information and systems replaced traditional formal concerns … Systems were laid over life’ (Lippard, 1997 [1973], p.  xv). She highlights the significance of John Baldessari’s statement: ‘I was beginning to suspect that information could be interesting in its own right …’; and Hans Haacke’s that: Information presented at the right time and in the right place can potentially be very powerful. It can affect the general social fabric … the working premise is to think in terms of systems: the production of systems, the interference with and the exposure of existing systems. … Systems can be physical, biological, or social. (Baldesari and Haacke quoted in Lippard, 1997 [1973], p. xiii) The first stage and ‘wave’ of cybernetics developed during the Macy Conferences and particularly focused on information (and its opposite, noise) as a preeminent concept. Information was identified as the lingua franca both of living organisms and machines, and ‘a shared language capable of crossing the boundaries between them’ (Hill 2014) that transcends frontiers of time, space and materiality. This was formulated into different iterations of information theory, later spawning associated real-world applications from compression systems (such as ZIP, JPEG, and MP3 files) to the mobile phone and complexity theory. As Marshall McLuhan put it in 1964, when cybernation ‘takes hold, it becomes obvious that information is the crucial commodity, and that solid products are merely incidental to informational movement’ (McLuhan, 1964, p. 298, emphasis in original). By 1970, the list of major artists included in MOMA New York’s exhibition Information (1970, curator Kynaston McShine) gives a sense of how many were caught up, associated with, or bitten by the information bug around that time: Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Art & Language, John Baldes­ ichard Long, sari, George Brecht, Victor Burgin, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, R Bruce McLean, Marta Minujín, Bruce Nauman, Hélio Oiticica, On Kawara, Dennis Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Ed Rusha, R ­ obert ­Smithson, and many more. But while ‘information theory was formative in Conceptual art’s self-understanding’ (Skrebowski, 2006), artists were often misinterpreting or reconfiguring the ideas to suit their instincts and ends ‘in a spirit of productive misreading’ (Corris, 2004, p. 197). Many artists did not wish, nor were able to, grapple with some of the mathematical and scientific complexities, but were nonetheless entranced with cybernetics principles that were, and still remain, accessible, egalitarian, and aesthetically appealing. Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory (1969), for example, took as its conceptual focus ‘the relation of

24 Introduction relations … [and] emerged from science’s shift away from essentialism and towards the recognition that relationships between objects, as well as the objects themselves, required study’ (Skrebowski, 2006, emphasis in original). Biologist von Bertalanffy used the model of living organisms to shift the scientific emphasis away from closed, self-contained systems and onto open and relational ones. Crucially, he also defined systems in simple terms that artists could, and still do, readily appreciate and embrace: systems involve interrelationships between elements or objects, and integrative functions that draw these together. It could be said this understanding of General Systems Theory continues to resonate powerfully not only with artists who consciously use systems approaches, but all artists who look to engage the viewer and draw them into a responsive, dialogic relationship with the work.

Cybernetic art revivals In the 21st century, there has been a re-evaluation of cybernetic arts and a revival of interest in key works and events of the past, such as Tate Modern’s Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 exhibition (2005, curator Donna de Salvo), which restaged late ‘60s and early ‘70s artworks that changed conceptions of ‘artistic agency, the object status of art, the role of the spectator … [and] systems theory as a conceptual resource for vanguard art practice’ (Skrebowski, 2006).5 When the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition went on tour in 1969, it was the inaugural show at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, and the museum presented a major symposium that re-gathered together some of its pioneer artists in September 2013. While naturally looking back, it was notable that the key focus was forward-looking, with discussion centering on ‘The Future of Creative Collaboration’, as the symposium’s subtitle explained. In 2015, its original gallery, London’s ICA curated a touring program to UK art galleries of displays, artifacts and photos entitled Cybernetic Serendipity: A Documentation; and in 2018, Studio International reprinted the original catalogue while events at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, and the University of Liverpool, UK celebrated its 50th anniversary.6 The exhibition’s artists are the subject of renewed research interest and publications. Bruce Lacey, the eccentric creator of the exhibition’s popular anthropomorphic robot, R.O.S.A. B.O.S.O.M (1965, Radio Operated Simulated Actress Battery Or Standby Operated Mains) was asked to revive her for a memorable performance at the 2010 Kinetica Art Fair in London; and at the age of 85, Lacey was the subject of a documentary by Turner-Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller, The Bruce Lacey Experience (2012, with Nick Abrahams). Cybernetic art-scientist Gordon Pask’s extraordinary legacy—including being the inspiration behind the BBC character Doctor Who—has been traced extensively from his morphogenesis evolutionary architecture research from 1989 to ‘96 with students at the Architectural Association in London (Frazer, 2001) to analysis of his own conversation theory, actors theory and Last Theorem

Introduction  25 (Green, 2004). María Fernández considers his status as cybernetic polymath: interactive installation pioneer, sociocultural machine maker, and exemplification of interdisciplinarity—‘His machines and theories were neither art nor science; they utilized and exceeded both’ (Fernández, 2008, p. 163). There has been new digital documentation and analyses of the Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering (1966) series of technological performances in New York, where notable scientists such as Billy Klüver collaborated with artists including John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Yvonne Rainer (Morris et al., 2006). These were also celebrated in the Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery (2016, curator Omar Kholeif), illustrating the impact of computers and the Internet on art and including cybernetic works by Roy Ascott, and Nam June Paik, who in 1974 coined the term that gave the exhibition its title. Paik’s 1966 manifesto ‘Cybernated Art’ celebrates ‘Cybernetics [as] the science of pure relations … the exploitation of boundary regions between and across various and existing disciplines’ and ends with an eternally upbeat mantra for interactive artists: ‘We are in open circuits’ (Paik, 2015 [1966], p.  64, emphasis in original). It is included, together with Ascott and Burnham’s 1968 articles, in Edward A. Shanken’s edited book Systems (2015), which begins by noting ‘the growing number of art exhibitions and academic publications on the topic … an ongoing fascination with its aesthetic … [and] its contemporary significance’ (Shanken, 2015, p. 13). The book is crammed with works by cyberneticians including Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson, and cybernetically inflected artists from composers Brian Eno and Iannis Xenakis to media artists Ken Rinaldo, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. Such art-related books, as well as those analyzing the field from a historical perspective such as Ronald R. Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment (2015) have contributed to a significant re-appraisal and celebration of cybernetics’ distinctive science, philosophy and aesthetics. Kline captures the excitement of the ‘Cybernetics Craze’ (Kline, 2015, p. 68), beginning with an account of the Macy conferences: During contentious meetings filled with brilliant arguments, rambling digressions, and disciplinary posturing, the cybernetics group shaped a language of feedback, control, and information that transformed the idiom of the biological and social sciences, sparked the invention of information technologies, and set the intellectual foundation for what came to be called the information age. (Kline, 2015, p. 1) Other important revivalist texts include Thomas Rid’s populist but a­ bsorbing Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics (2016) and Pickering’s erudite The Cybernetic Brain (2010), which highlights ‘the multiplicity of cybernetics, its protean quality’ and how ‘cybernetics is better seen as a

26 Introduction form of life, a way of going on in the world, even an attitude’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 8, 9).

2017—Existentialism returns to international art galleries Similar principles apply in Existentialism, which more than any other philosophy is seen as a way of life and being in the world, where concrete action and lived experience is all. The Existentialist ‘attitude’ is an extreme one, since (at least for Sartre) there is no God, meaning or purpose, and the only thing that can be meaningful and authentic in life is what you do. It would appear that a popular appetite for the philosophy’s extreme position has returned with gusto in the art world, as evidenced in three gallery exhibitions I visited in the last six months of 2017. I stress that these were not specialist or ‘fringe’ shows, nor had I sought them out specifically as research for this discourse (or at least, not consciously), rather they were among the most high-profile exhibitions taking place in the cities I happened to be visiting. In Beijing, Scottish painter Peter Doig’s first solo exhibition in China, Cabins and Canoes: The Unreasonable Silence of the World (2017, curator Francis Outred) is actually a duet, positioning his canvasses in between large wall-text quotations from the French-Algerian Existentialist novelist and philosopher Albert Camus. Doig’s glowing, mysterious landscapes and figure scenes seem frozen in time, and their dreamlike combination of haunting beauty and alienation are complemented and extended by Camus’s words. The titular quotation, writ large on the gallery wall between two paintings reads: ‘Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world’ (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942). Doig is one of the world’s most soughtafter living artists with canvasses fetching over $25 m, and the fact (one must assume his assent to this curation) that he directly relates his work to ­Existentialist ideas speaks volumes about the philosophy’s resurgence, and its pervasive power and influence. Camus has been little discussed since his heights of popularity from the 1940s to 1970s, but there is now a significantly renewed interest in his work. I AM A PROBLEM (2017–18, MMK Museum, Frankfurt) explores, as its entrance wall text puts it: existential matters of human existence such as the transformability of one’s own identity, the pursuit of perfection or the transience of organic matter … border crossers and doubles, quiet rebels, failed existences … [and] a journey through the ups and downs of human existence. Curated and designed by Ersan Mondtag, it juxtaposes bleak and disturbing works by artists including On Kawara, Robert Godber, Marlene Dumas, Thomas Ruf, and Bruce Nauman that excite classic notions of alienation,

Introduction  27

Figure 1.7  Gallery view details of the sepulchral and atmospheric I AM A PROBLEM (2017–18) exhibition at MMK Museum, Frankfurt, curated by Ersan Mondtag, including (top left) Arnulf Rainer’s Cadeveri (1980) series, and (bottom right) Martin Honert’s Foto (1993), a sculptural recreation of a childhood photograph, with his other family members missing. (Photos: Steve Dixon.)

being-towards-death and the existential crisis. Amongst the most striking is Douglas Gordon staring into a mirror and ‘surrender[ing] himself to the abysses of human nature’ (wall text) while grotesquely distorting his face with strips of transparent tape in the video The Making of a Monster (1996), and Arnulf Rainer’s Cadeveri (1980) series of paintings and drawings over the photographs of corpses. For Foto (1993), German artist Martin Honert recreates a childhood photo of himself surrounded by his family at the dining table as a life-size sculpture. But his relatives have been removed and he is left alone as a frightened, tiny figure dwarfed by an over sized table, staring coldly and frighteningly out, it seems, not towards the camera but into a terrible void. The exhibition is within an immersive mise-en-scène with all the gallery’s low-ceilinged walls encased in a mustard colored skin of plastic. An inflated, giant, black pneumatic tube by Plastique Fantastique, inspired by the story of a tapeworm that opera legend Maria Callas allegedly swallowed to control her weight and which ended up destroying her, snakes its way ominously through the center of the rooms and spaces.

28 Introduction

Gilbert and George finally come out … as Existentialists ‘More and more I think we are existentialists’, proclaimed artist duo Gilbert and George in 2015 (quoted in Furniss, 2015), and three monumentally sized examples of their work guard the entrance to The Artist’s Voice (2017–18) exhibition at the Parkview Museum in Singapore (they are discussed further in Chapter 7’s exploration of Identity). Curator Lóránd Hegyi echoes their sentiments, explaining that the exhibition explores: the capacity and competence of contemporary art to transfer essential messages and existential revelations about life, truth … [and] the singular, unique, unrepeatable, concrete and real complexity of every human being in each concrete, real, singular situation. (Hegyi, 2017, p. 5) Hegyi adapts his title from Gilbert and George’s expression the ‘speaking artist’, which they use to describe practitioners who take responsibility for making meaning and bold stances, and as Hegyi puts it, ‘making realities more conscious, more clear and more evident.’ His catalogue statement goes on to emphasize the non-conformism, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘radical independence’ of such artists, and he quotes Gilbert and George’s decidedly Existentialist view: ‘If you want to be a speaking artist, you have to be totally crazy, mad, extreme. Otherwise it doesn’t work. You have to be a complete outsider, totally alone. If you are part of something, nothing will happen’ (quoted in Gayford, 1997, p. 92). Artists in the show who fit this description include Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović (discussed in Chapter 2) and Italian artist Paolo Grassino, whose Zero (2017) installation features life-size sculptures of hooded figures. Long, thin tree branches protrude from their faces, and seem to be yearning and searching for authentic reconnection with the earth; the exhibition’s wall text quotes Grassino: ‘We must begin practicing for a return to nature. People in today’s society seem to have forgotten this, leading to the insanity of our times’. American conceptualist Dennis Oppenheim, who once turned and balanced a 25 foot high model of a Puritan church on its head for a sculpture entitled Device to Root Out Evil (1997), and sat in the hot sun for five hours with an open book on his chest for Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970) also features with sculptures of humans connecting with nature. In Lightning Bolt Men (2001), two suited life-size fiberglass figures lie side-by-side, impaled by giant zigzag shaped lightning bolts. They are illuminated brightly from inside, but the bolts appear to have transferred their energy and are dimmed out. Melding Existentialist themes of human crisis, isolation, and being-towards-death with cybernetic ideas of boundary-crossing circuit connections that transcend spaces and unite forms, the work is a striking example of contemporary art’s increasing fascination with what the Lightning Bolt Men wall description calls:

Introduction  29

Figure 1.8  Gallery view details of The Artist’s Voice (2017), clockwise from top left: Gilbert and George, Khilafah (2013); Dennis Oppenheim, Lightning Bolt Men (2001); Maurizio Nannucci, New Times for Other Ideas, New Ideas for Other Times (2017); Paulo Grassino, Zero (2017). (Photos: Steve Dixon.)

this moment between death and rebirth, light and darkness, stillness and action … one that disturbs, threatens and confuses. Neither condemning nor absolving the confusion often evoked in art, [Oppenheim] sought to persuade the spectator to consider the resolute instability of the universe.

Art forms and case studies The book is divided into chapters that examine and apply a Cybernetic-­ Existentialist reading to case studies across different artistic modes and forms: visual arts, interactive arts, theater arts and so on, and culminates

30 Introduction in two chapters focusing on specific conceptual themes: Identity, and The Uncanny. The book’s chapter structure groups together roughly cognate practices for ease and convenience, but this is not to suggest that such art categorizations are either rigid or meaningful, and from draft to draft, several featured artists have been like jumping beans, flitting from one chapter to another, uncertain of their ideal home. For example, a chapter on participatory art follows one on interactive art, and while critics have drawn some helpful distinctions between the two,7 firm lines remain difficult to draw—you interact when you participate, and you have to participate in order to interact. Just like boundaries between cybernetic substrates, artistic boundaries are peculiarly porous. Each chapter highlights and explicates different ideas from cybernetics and Existentialism, and relates them to case studies. Chapter 2 on Visual Art focuses on cybernetics’ core notion of systems (and in this case, non-technological ones) and the concept of being-towards-death in Existentialism, with artists including Marina Abramović, Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst, Douglas Gordon, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. Chapter 3’s examination of Interactive Art pits cybernetics’ communication and control paradigm in relation to Existentialist notions of the Other, being-for-others and disponibilité (openness and availability) with case studies including Sophie Calle, Wafaa Bilal, Jennifer Ringley (Jennicam), Louis-Philippe Demers, and Santiago Sierra. Participatory Art (Chapter 4) analyses the collectives Gob Squad and Blast Theory, and artists Susan Collins and Paul Sermon in relation to ideas of autopoiesis (self-creating or self-regulating cybernetic systems) and Existentialist notions of the look of the stranger. Theater directors Robert Lepage and Heiner Goebbels, and companies La Fura Dels Baus, Societas Raffaello Sanzi, the Wooster Group and the Builders Association are discussed in Chapter 5’s consideration of cybernetic forms of multimedia staging, the existential crisis, and Kierkegaard’s study of Dread. Chapter 6 looks at the ways that proponents of Performance Art have sought to express Existentialist ideas on transcendence, and to actualize the cybernetic fantasies of science fiction, with case studies of ORLAN, Edward Ihnatowicz, Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Norman White and Laura Kikauka. Chapter 7 focuses on the multifarious ways artists explore and critique personal Identity to reflect cybernetic ideas of adaptability and Existentialism’s concern for authenticity, and includes Adrian Piper, Gilbert and George, Michael Landy, Entang Wiharso, Gavin Turk and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Uncanny Art is considered in Chapter 8, with artists Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Natalie Jeremijenko, Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, and Samuel Beckett analyzed in relation to eerie cybernetic environments and Existentialist notions of the absurd and eternal recurrence. Chapter 9 concludes and consolidates the discourse with a detailed examination of the legacies of the two disciplines, and the reasons behind their rises, falls, and recent revivals. It goes on to present, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of their convergent concerns and complementarities,

Introduction  31

Figure 1.9  A scene from director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU (2019), an epic example of Cybernetic-Existentialism in art, which was over 10 years in the making, and is discussed in Chapter 9. (Photo: Olympia Orlova; © Phenomen IP, 2019.)

culminating in a summary table mapping out their remarkable similarities. It concludes by considering how, at the time of writing, some of the most high-profile recent artworks may be interpreted as examples of CyberneticExistentialism, from Anne Imhof’s Golden Lion-winning Faust (2017) at the Venice Biennale to one of the most ambitious artworks of all time, Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s controversial DAU (2019).

Autonomy and a new analytical methodology Considering contemporary arts in relation to the dual philosophies of Existentialism and cybernetics makes for fresh and illuminating analyses opening up unique, specific, and disclosing insights. Fusing the epistemologies of the two fields offers a novel and revealing methodology with which to deconstruct artworks. This research is important in re-examining some of the origins and theoretical frameworks that underlie prevailing themes within contemporary art and culture. Key among these is the idea of autonomy, which is commonly considered a, if not the, defining ingredient of artistic originality. Autonomy through self-sustainability is a fundamental facet of cybernetic systems (including the human body); is absolutely central to Existentialism’s advocacy of freedom and self-determination; and is equally reflected in a wider cultural context, for example through an increasing focus on issues of self and identity.

32 Introduction The same tripartite convergence is true of the paradigm of interactivity, which has seen seismic cultural transformations following the digital revolution and advent of new communicational modes including social media. This directly relates to and extends cybernetic models of feedback loops, circularity, networks, and information/communication theory, while simultaneously echoing core Existentialist concepts of receptive engagement, disponibilité (availability) and being-for-others. It should be noted that I include information theory and systems theory as core elements of cybernetics, which is where they originated, although others argue equally reasonably that they should be considered distinct disciplines, not least since they effectively outlived cybernetics.8 While much is written, often hyperbolically, about what is new in arts and culture, it is just as interesting to reflect on what came before and prompted it, and how the seemingly new commonly harks back to and reanimates the old. Looking back can teach us much, and historians and researchers know only too well that the past is rarely passé—on the contrary, it has much to tell us about the present and the future.

Notes 1 Writing about Existentialism in 1948, Guido de Ruggiero suggests that World War II helped to spur public engagement with Existentialism through both its parallel narratives of spiritual crisis and the ‘state of human disintegration’ and its powerful messages of how the individual can resist and triumph against impersonal, collective orthodoxies (nation, race, ‘fatherland’) (Ruggiero, 2004 [1948], p. 14). 2 See, for example, Raines 2018 and Chun 2017. Graham Harman has noted the synchronicity of Trump’s election with the Oxford English Dictionary making ‘post-truth’ their 2016 word of the year, which they define as relating to when ‘objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Harman, 2018, p. 3–4). 3 Sartre, however, did advocate a certain morality by suggesting that while acting to assert one’s own freedom, one should not inhibit, but rather promote the freedom of others. See for example ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ (2007 [1946]). 4 Ihab Hassan first coined the term and discussed the concept of posthumanism in a keynote speech at the 1976 International Symposium on Post-Modern Performance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA, which was subsequently published as ‘Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?’ (1977). Structured as a dramatic masque and casting the mythical figure of Prometheus as a symbol for the posthuman, he suggests that this master transgressor, trickster and bringer of fire embodies and performs our desire and suffering. He concludes that now we ‘are that performance; we perform and are performed every moment. We are the pain and play of the Human, which will not remain human. We are both, Earth and Sky, Water and Fire. We are the changing form of Desire. Everything changes, and nothing, not even Death, can tire’ (Hassan, 1977, p. 217). 5 The exhibition included works by Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Joan Jonas, Valie Export, Richard Long, Adrian Piper, Dan Graham, Andy Warhol, and Gerhard Richter.

Introduction  33 6 Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity was a colloquium at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, from 12–14 March 2018. The AISB 2018 Symposium: Cybernetic Serendipity Reimagined was held at ­University of Liverpool, UK, on 6 April 2018. 7 As Christina Albu notes, Frank Popper defines participation in art as a form that ‘actively engaged the audience “on both the contemplative (intellectual) and behavioral level” whereas interaction became associated mainly with two-way exchanges of information between spectators and technology-based artworks’ (Albu, 2016, p. 10). She goes on to note that art theorist Grant Kestner avoids drawing any such dichotomy, instead employing the broader term dialogic aesthetics. 8 In the US, when national research funding largely dried up for cybernetics, it was channeled instead to projects focused on information theory, systems theory and control theory. Meanwhile, the dream of a universal meta-science dimmed, and the discipline fragmented. Concurrently, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the language changed and what had been popularly termed the cybernetic age with its cybernetic society transformed gradually into an information age and information society (Kline, 2015, p. 227), However, the cyber- prefix lives on as a lasting legacy, notably in the figure of the cyborg and in the increasingly dwelledin cyberspace, the term first coined by William Gibson in his classic sci-fi novel Neuromancer (1984).

2 Visual art The aesthetics of systems and being-towards-death

Nothing can we call our own but death William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III, scene 2, line 152

The system of Dasein Cybernetics is the study of systems, with a general aim to understand, regulate, improve, develop, evolve, interconnect, or synthesize them. Existentialism is first-and-foremost the study of the human system: its fundamental ways of Being and its systems of interrelating with the world and with Others. Existentialists take a phenomenological approach to this and seek essences, undertaking ‘a rigorous science’ that involves ‘a direct and primitive contact with the world … a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing … [and the study] and definition of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for example’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1945], vii–viii). In much lighter vein, sci-fi novelist J. G. Ballard jokes that phenomenology is ‘the central nervous system’s brave gamble that it exists’ (1992, p. 271). Heidegger uses the term Dasein (first used by philosophers such as Hegel) to denote a person’s individual, embodied experience of being-in-the-world. It relates to one’s lived consciousness, feelings and actions, and has been summarized as ‘being there’ (its literal translation) or ‘existence’. But while individuated (it is ultimately you or I), it should not be oversimplified nor conceptually constrained by the materiality of our immediate world(s), and Heidegger uses the term as a replacement or abstraction of the concept of Self. I think of it as a mythologization, a type of ghostlike or idealized self, akin to the ‘everyman’ of medieval literature. Dasein encompasses an individual’s seeing, sensing, experiencing, and acting within the world and all its objects and people; the world and Dasein are inextricable and dynamically interdependent; Dasein is neither neutral nor indifferent; Dasein projects itself into the brute reality of the world, as an activist that can carve and refashion it. It is the ‘presence’, and human experience and reality of Being: ‘This entity which each of us is himself … we shall denote by the term Dasein’ (Heidegger, 1962 [1927], p. 27). Sartre

Visual art  35 provides a more dramatic take on it at the climax of his novel Nausea (1938) when Rouquetin has a shocking, quasi-hallucinogenic epiphany, a ‘horrible ecstasy’ of realization that ‘existence is being there’ [existence, c’êst etre là] (Sartre, 1965 [1938], p. 188, 183). Heidegger emphasizes and promotes an authentic Dasein, which he defines as engaged, self-aware and self-defining, and which ‘cares’ for the world and its people—interestingly, his concept of ‘care’ is not all altruism, and includes caring so intensely as to ‘hate’ negative phenomena. There are three interrelated dimensions of ‘The Care Structure’: Facticity—the historical age, place, socio-economic, and cultural circumstances we happen to be ‘thrown’ into at birth; Fallenness—how inauthentic we are by simply doing what we are told, and following the crowd; and Existentiality—its opposite: our authenticity in truly realizing our potentials (Dodson, 2014). An authentic Dasein confronts life’s paradoxes (such as being both a subject and an object, alone yet with Others), contingencies, and the problems of selfhood, and appreciates the implications of personal mortality. He contrasts this with an inauthentic Dasein: an unengaged, anonymous conformist that follows the crowd and considers death just as something that happens—so is not to be taken personally. But Dasein ends at the point of death; it frames and contextualizes Dasein and makes it matter: ‘the existentialist teaches that death is an end from which there is no resurrection’ (Cranston, 1962, p. 26). As American novelist Saul Bellow has written: ‘Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything’ (in Hitchens, 2012, p. 89). Anticipation of our own death, what Heidegger terms being-towards-death (2003 [1943]) has been a prevailing theme for the movement’s thinkers, employed as a revelatory memento mori to emphasize the need to act decisively and meaningfully, and to assert individuality and freedom. Cybernetic machines, organisms, and systems sometimes fail, and human systems always do, eventually terminally as they are predestined to (at least at the time of writing). Varied forms of cybernetic systems, particularly lowtech or no-tech ones, and different artistic expressions of human mortality are the primary focus of this chapter. Cybernetic systems in the visual arts are most often associated with technological practices, and it is here where cybernetic aspects may seem clearest—for example, in media arts when a participant becomes a meaningful node within a digital system they can interact with and affect with some concrete agency. However, cybernetic systems and paradigms are equally evident in many non-technological works, as we will discuss further.

Hans Haacke, hatching, and the art of systems theory When ideas from cybernetics began to proliferate in 1960s, systems theory was applied to emerging forms of digital media … but it also served to explain art not expressly associated with technology

36  Visual art today: conceptual art and its linguistic propositions, site-specific work and its environmental dimensions, performance art and its mattering of real time, minimalism even. (Lee, 2004, p. 68) Luke Skrebowski goes further to argue that systems theory may be thought of as ‘a productive methodological framework for considering postformalist art as a whole … and as an important genealogical precursor to the relational aesthetics of a more recent generation of artists’ (Skrebowski, 2006). Artist and curator Jack Burnham’s application of ideas from systems theory to art in ‘Systems Esthetics’ (1968) proved pivotal in transforming understandings of process-based arts methods, and directly influenced some of the creative developments emerging in technological and conceptual art. He argues that systems esthetics marks a ‘transition from an object-oriented to a systems oriented culture [where] change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done’ (Burnham, 1968). His book Beyond Modern Sculpture: the Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (1968) argued that the future of sculpture lay in simulating living systems—a position that critics such as Rosalind Krauss attacked fiercely at the time. German artist Hans Haacke cited Burnham’s ideas when creating Chickens Hatching (1969), an installation of eight rectangular incubators

Figure 2.1   Hans Haacke’s hermetically sealed plexiglass and water sculpture Condensation Cube (1965, with re-conceptions in 2006 and 2013) is a continually changing, eco-organic cybernetic system. (Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery.)

Visual art  37 filled with fertilized eggs, which hatched with encouragement from a cybernetic feedback system linking lamps and a thermostat during exhibition at the 1969 New Alchemy: Elements, Systems and Forces exhibition in Ontario, Canada (curated by Dennis Young). For Norbert: ‘All Systems Go’ (1970–71), Haacke attempted to train a caged mynah bird to repeat the phrase ‘All Systems Go!’ in a parodic homage to cybernetician Norbert Wiener’s ‘optimistic feedback-steered vision of human progress’, but the bird’s reluctance to do so resulted in its cancellation from Haacke’s planned Guggenheim Museum show on systems in 1971 (Skrebowski, 2006).1 One of his earliest works, Condensation Cube (1965, with re-conceptions in 2006 and 2013) is a hermetically sealed 76 cm square plexiglass cube containing a small amount of water, which evaporates and re-condenses at different rates depending on environmental conditions and the number, movements and associated body heat of gallery visitors. This prompts continuously metamorphosing patterns of vapor droplets and rivulets of water that trickle down its internal sides. Its visitor-responsive, eco-organic system thus operates in similar fashion to my opening case study, Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead (2017), staged more than half a century later. It is precisely in this way that this book seeks to reconsider, link and reconnect disciplines, philosophies, and aesthetic processes past and present that are more separated by discursive fashion or critical framing than actuality. After ALife Ahead reanimates and conceptually extends Condensation Cube for a new age and new audience, but adopts complementary ideas, processes and aesthetic concerns. Both echo Burnham’s ideas in ‘Systems Esthetics’ that ‘Art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment’ (Burnham, 1968); and one critic’s 1965 assessment of Haacke’s Condensation Cube could equally be said of Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead: This piece summarises Haacke’s interest in closed physical systems, biological growth and random movement … [he] redefines not only the work of art as a living system, but, most significantly, the role of the viewer or user of art. … As Haacke himself explained: ‘…The conditions are comparable to a living organism which reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings. The image of condensation cannot be precisely predicted. It is changing freely, bound only by statistical limits. I like this freedom. (MACBA, 2014)

Marina Abramović—Being-towards-death while Being-for-others Condensation Cube illustrates that technology is not intrinsic to making a system cybernetic, and Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) offers another interesting example. Abramović inhabits a room with a long table lain with

38  Visual art numerous objects, knives, and other weapons, and reacts entirely passively when gallery visitors adorn her with the feather and flowers, cut her with the knives, and point the real loaded gun at her (MAI, 2013). The piece thus creates a self-organizing and regulating heterarchic system—a term coined by cybernetician Warren McCulloch (1945) to describe neuronal networks that operate on equal, nonhierarchical systems of interaction. In Rhythm 0, a number of such systems are in play, and evolve with dynamic results. Moreover, these microsystems converge in ways that relate to and directly express Existentialist principles. Rhythm 0 incorporates: 1. An open interactive system, which confers absolute freedom on individuals to do what they wish. For Beauvoir, freedom ‘is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else’ (Beauvoir, 2000 [1947], p. 283). But this in turn opens up deep moral and ethical questions involving conundrums of authenticity (Kierkegaard, 1986 [1843]) and responsibility for one’s actions (Camus, 1991 [1942], Marcel, 1949) since, while we should be courageous in asserting our own freedom, we should not inhibit—and should rather promote and advance—the freedom of others (Sartre, 1994 [1943]). 2. A system of being-for-others. Sartre discusses at length the concept of being-for-others (2003 [1943]), a relatively self-explanatory term but with complex philosophical implications that we will explore in more detail in the next chapter. Abramović offers herself up entirely as an object in the service of others, in a humble act of total existential availability—Gabriel Marcel’s concept of disponibilité. 3. A master-slave system (Hegel, 1979 [1807], Beauvoir, 1997 [1949]) that manifests Existentialism’s concerns both to counter ‘slave morality’ (Nietzsche, 1996 [1887]) and to recognize that in our relations with other people, we act as both sadists and masochists (Sartre, 1994 [1943]), and ‘oscillate between them in an ongoing master-slave dialectic—the failure of one modality refers to and motivates the adoption of the other’ (Reynolds, 2006, p. 108). 4. A system of tools (the props), which were the focus of extended discourse in Existentialism including Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the blind man’s stick (2002 [1945]), also considered at length by cybernetician Gregory Bateson (1972), and Heidegger’s discussion of the ontology of the hammer. His famous parable considers three different states/forms in relation to whether the hammer is present-at-hand (just an object, not in use), ready-to-hand (in use, hammering), or unreadyto-hand (damaged/broken) (1962 [1927]). Such critiques have since been reanimated in the critical theories of Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, where things become A New Theory of Everything in a ‘bluntly realist philosophy’ (Harman, 2018, p. 10, emphasis in original) extending Heideggerian thought and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘return to

Visual art  39 the “things themselves”,’ (2002 [1945], p. viii). There are some clear accords between these theories and Cybernetic-Existentialism, with OOO’s emphasis on the ‘bonds and tensions between’ objects (157) also a central issue in cybernetics. The mysterious and lifelike power

Figure 2.2  Marina Abramović’s perilous 6-hour performance Rhythm 0 (1974) utilizes different cybernetic micro-systems to enable audience participants to practically apply Existentialist principles including freedom, the masterslave dialectic, and being-for-others. 6 hours. Studio Morra, Naples. (Courtesy of Marina Abramović Archives. Photo: Donatelli Sbarra.)

40  Visual art of objects is an oft-noted distinguishing factor of the field’s inventions like the homeostat (1949) ‘artificial brain’, and its creator Ross Ashby saw inanimate objects as vibrant black boxes: ‘What is being suggested now is not that black boxes behave somewhat like real objects but that the real objects are in fact all black boxes and that we have in fact been operating with black boxes all our lives’ (Ashby, 1956, p. 110). In Rhythm 0, tools and objects including real instruments of death are employed to elicit an actual anticipation of being-towards-death, and the pointing of the loaded gun at Abramović marks an extreme existential moment. ‘Intensity rather than serenity is the existentialist goal’ (Foley, 2010, p. 23), and acts of danger and murder pervade Existentialist literature, and are equated either with moments of recognition of nothingness and the absurd, as in Camus’s The Outsider (1942) or with authentic choice and action, as in the conclusion of Sartre’s novel Iron in the Soul (1949). Mathieu, the ineffectual schoolteacher protagonist, for the first time in his life has ‘recognition of his own freedom’ (Priest, 2000, p. 15) and makes a decisive choice to shoot a German infantryman: ‘For years he had tried, in vain, to act … He fired. He was cleansed. He was all powerful. He was free’ (Sartre, 1963 [1949], p. 217, 225). Biographers point to autobiographical elements here, since Sartre began his career as a schoolteacher, and although active in the French Resistance during World War II, he felt some guilt that he could have done far more: ‘In short, Sartre has Mathieu do what he himself had lacked the courage to do’ (Cox, 2016, p. 158). But while the heroes and antiheroes of Existentialist literature invariably pull the trigger, the gun wielders who faced Abramović did not, and the notion of responsibility and respecting others’ freedom prevailed. To apply Marcel’s notion of disponibilité to the gallery visitors, by maintaining their openness and availability to the Other, they ultimately resisted treating the passive Abramović as a mere object or a slave, and afforded her respect in the second, rather than third person: If I treat a ‘Thou’ as a ‘He’, I reduce the other to being only nature; an animated object which works in some ways and not in others. If, on the contrary, I treat the other as ‘Thou,’ I treat him and apprehend him qua freedom. I apprehend him qua freedom because he is also freedom and not only nature. (Marcel, 1949, p. 106–07)

Switching on and off: Claude Shannon and Martin Creed One of cybernetics’ pioneering figures, the American mathematician and cryptographer Claude Shannon, created several versions of a celebrated artwork The Ultimate Machine—The End of the Line (1952), a wooden box with an on-off toggle switch, and a mysterious hand that emerges from it,

Visual art  41 like the character ‘Thing’ in The Addams Family TV series and movie. As sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke recounts: Nothing could be simpler. It is merely a small wooden casket, the size and shape of a cigar box, with a single switch on one face. When you throw the switch, there is an angry, purposeful buzzing. The lid slowly rises, and from beneath it emerges a hand. The hand reaches down, turns the switch off and retreats into the box. With the finality of a closing coffin, the lid snaps shut, the buzzing ceases and peace reigns once more. The psychological effect, if you do not know what to expect, is devastating. There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing—absolutely nothing—except switch itself off. (Clarke, 1959, p. 159) Shannon’s Ultimate Machine performs a classic negative feedback loop and the purest and simplest of cybernetic tasks: responding to an input ‘on’ by turning it ‘off’. This zero-or-one binary constitutes, of course, the language and life force of computer systems, but as Clarke makes clear, the effect of the Ultimate Machine is ‘devastating’ since it offers a human mortality parable. The human binary positions of on or off, alive or dead, and time’s winged chariot hastening toward the latter, have been pervasive themes for artists for centuries. But we will focus here on contemporary visual and conceptual artists that have adopted Cybernetic-Existentialist approaches in their explorations of mortality.

Figure 2.3  Claude Shannon’s The Ultimate Machine—The End of the Line (1952) performs the simplest of cybernetic tasks—a hand inside a box emerges to respond to the input on with the output off—but to what sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke calls a ‘sinister’ and ‘devastating’ effect. (Photos: Steve Dixon.)

42  Visual art For example, Shannon’s paradigm is used to equal effect in British artist Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The lights going on and off (2000) where the matter-of-fact title tells it all: within an empty gallery, the lighting alternates between on and off in 5 second intervals. The fact that it won the

Figure 2.4  In Work No. 227: The lights going on and off (2000), Martin Creed’s alternating cycles of light and dark reflect Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontological concepts of Being and Nothingness (1943). (© Martin Creed. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019.)

Visual art  43 coveted Turner Prize is indicative of its conceptual panache and effrontery, but perhaps equally of its currency in capturing a millennium-turn zeitgeist suddenly re-considering the significance of Being and Nothingness. Like Shannon’s, Creed’s is a simple and proto-Dadaist work that opens up large, metaphysical ideas, while catalyzing Existentialist concepts of dread and opaque ‘moods’, which can ‘compress happiness and anxiety within one single gesture. … Are we afraid of the dark or just blinded by the light? I see a rainbow and I want to paint it black’ (Cattelan, 2004a). Creed says his minimalist aesthetic arises from an anxiety about his ethical responsibility in ‘making something extra for the world’ (quoted in Button, 2003, p. 172) that it does not need, as well as the classic Existentialist conundrum of being free but not knowing what to do or what choices to make: ‘I find that it’s difficult to choose, to decide that one thing’s more important than the other … So what I try and do is to choose without having to make decisions’ (Creed quoted in Buck, 2000, p. 111).

Watching the death of two mothers Consciously making difficult decisions or delegating choices to others or to chance is an important problem weighing on the minds of a number of artists. French conceptualist Sophie Calle (discussed further in Chapter 3) explains that one of her motivations in creating works where she secretly stalks strangers is that ‘Establishing rules and following them is restful’ since it reduces your number of decisions, including where to eat: ‘They take you to their restaurant. The choice is made for you’ (quoted in Jeffries, 2009). Of particular pertinence to this chapter is Calle’s assertion that ‘what attracts me is absence, missing, death’ (quoted in Wiseman, 2017); and her very personal work at the 2007 Venice Biennale on the theme of being-towardsdeath—a video of her mother’s last breaths on her deathbed. The 11-minute sequence shows her in a serene, profile close up. Intermittently, a male and then a female hand enter the frame, and hovers close to her mouth and nose to determine if she has expired. Its title, Impossible to Catch Death (2007) encapsulates Calle’s observation that during ‘the last minutes of her life, when I didn’t know if she was alive or dead … her last second, her last breath was impossible to catch’ (Tate, 2007). Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych (1992) similarly includes actual footage of his mother dying, as the right-hand panel of a 3-channel, altarpiece-style projection, dramatically counterpointed by a film of a woman giving birth on the left panel, and a clothed man suspended mysteriously under water (and metaphorically between life and death) in the center. The latter relates to an incident in childhood when he recalls: ‘I had no fear. I was witnessing this extraordinary beautiful world with light filtering down … it was like paradise. I didn’t even know I was drowning … For a moment there was absolute bliss’ (quoted in Walsh, 2003, p. 50). Viola has been praised by critics for the distinctly ‘existential character’ of his art (Mennekes, 1999,

44  Visual art

Figure 2.5  Bill Viola’s 29 minute 46 second meditation on birth, temporality, and death, Nantes Triptych (1992). Video and sound installation. (Photo: Kira Perov.)

p. 226), and his exploration of ‘the phenomenon of perception as a path to self-knowledge’ (Bernardini, 2012, p. 15), while his own words echo Heidegger’s in Being and Time by pronouncing time itself to be at the fundamental core of human ontology: ‘Time is the ultimate invisible world. It’s all around us. It literally is our life. … It is a fundamental mystery, defining who we are as human beings in the most profound way’ (quoted in Gayford, 2003, p. 24). Viola is critically lauded as a kind of alchemist of time who vividly reminds us of mortality in order ‘to realize a wholeness which, in our fallen condition, we have lost or forgotten’ (Jasper, 2004, p. 193) while confronting us ‘with an unstable seized temporality which aims to provoke an intense experience of our existence as a whole’ (Sánchez, 2014, p. 42). Giorgio Agamben suggests his videos ‘insert not the images in time, but time in the images’ (2011, p. 61), echoing Viola’s own philosophy that: Awareness of time brings you into a world of process, into moving images that embody the movement of human consciousness itself. … It is not the monitor, or the camera, or the tape, that is the basic material of video, but time itself. Once you begin to work with time as an elemental material, then you have entered the domain of conceptual space. (Viola, 1995, p. 173)

Visual art  45

The ekstasies of time With his magnum opus Being and Time, ‘Heidegger’s thesis was that being itself was time. This burst asunder the whole subjectivism of modern philosophy … the horizon of being was shown to be time’, wrote his student Hans-Georg Gadamer (Gadamer, 2013 [1975], p. 257). In turn, Heidegger borrowed some of his thought from his Jewish teacher Edmund Husserl, to whom he originally dedicated Being and Time, before removing the dedication in the Nazi era, and reinstating it following World War II; but his primary influence was Henri Bergson. Bergson’s meditations on temporality were intertwined with Existentialism’s primary concern, freedom, as the title of his first work, Time and Free Will (1889) makes clear. He revolutionized understandings and captivated modernist artists and writers by questioning the relevance of chronological time, and instead emphasizing the ceaseless and immeasurable flow of time: its duration (durée). Chronological time may be a convenient mechanism for measurement and organization, he says, but it is arbitrary, relative, and misleading since time is always-already continuous: an unbroken flux where past, present and future all work in fluid succession—they persist and dissolve together. Bergson further develops his ideas on duration in relation to existence as continual change and becoming which is unable to be ‘halted or isolated’ at any specific moment, and thus: the becoming is our being. We live, move, and have our being in time. Its subdivision into a series of static moments [in chronological time] is, therefore, false: according to Bergson, ‘It is quite possible to divide an object, but not an act.’ (Mosley, 1994, p. 54–55, emphasis in original) Heidegger expands Bergson’s ideas to conceive a triad of primordial temporal ekstasies—‘the past as facticity, the future as possibility and the present as immersion’ (Flynn, 1994, p. 201). Time thus becomes a unifying rather than dispersive principle, which forms and individuates us in terms of how we choose to respond to, and live within, time’s three dimensions. Existentialist philosophers generally agree not to metaphorically ‘live in the past’ (which would be inauthentic) and to focus either on the responsibilities and possibilities of the future (Heidegger and Kierkegaard) or the intensities of the present, and the possibilities of actualizing the possible right here and now (Sartre and Beauvoir). Maurice Merleau-Ponty concurs: ‘In’ my present, if I grasp it while it is still living and with all that it implies, there is an ekstase towards the future and towards the past which reveals the dimensions of time not as conflicting, but as inseparable: to be now is to be from always and forever (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1945], p. 491).

46  Visual art The idea has been celebrated by artists including Nam June Paik who placed two giant, multiscreen installations on adjacent walls at a right angle to one another for Electronic Superhighway, TV-Moon / Phasenvershiebung at the 1993 Venice Biennale. One presents Paik’s typically intense, video-overload, discotheque-style ‘aesthetic flood of stimuli’, the other plays slow and meditative footage of the phases of the moon. Their contrasts of speed emphasize that they ‘are only complementary aspects of the same … single flow of time—or as Paik says, “Moon is the oldest TV”. Light, time, and space as the fundamental dimensions of human existence are the actual theme of Paik’s work’ (Matzner, 1995, p. 53–55). Cyberneticians have equally embraced Bergson and undertaken serious studies of time, including Ross Ashby, who calls himself ‘a Time worshipper, seized with the extra fervor of the convert … The march of time is, in my scientific theorizing, the only thing that matters’ (Ashby, 1951–57, p. 36, 39), and Norbert Wiener. The first chapter of his field-defining Cybernetics (1948) is entitled ‘Newtonian and Bergsonian time’ and discusses the underlying paradox of the ‘arrow of time’ as both reversible and irreversible. He characterizes the classical notion of Newtonian time (linear clock time) as abstract and reversible (since clocks can work in subtraction when in countdown mode) but places cybernetics within the Bergsonian ‘new age’ notion of irreversible time, which Wiener equates with ideas of evolution and continual emergence. Cybernetic organisms including ultra-rapid computing machines, and the like … contain sense organs, effectors, and the equivalent of a nervous system to integrate the transfer of information from the one to the other. … the relation input-output is a consecutive one in time and involves a definite pastfuture order. … [but] rather than to the classical Newtonian mechanics … the modern automaton exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living organism; and hence there is no reason in Bergson’s considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same as that of the automaton of this type. (Wiener, 1961 [1948], p. 43–44)

Contemplating the void: Anish Kapoor’s Descension The 2015 installation of Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor’s Descension (2014–15) is a 16-foot-diameter hole in the floor in which a seemingly perpetual spiral of black water circles, froths, and spills into itself, like a giant, all-consuming plughole into the unknown. It shares with British artist Richard Wilson’s classic 20:50 (1987) oil installation an eerie, deathly blackness and the sense of an infinite, unknowable depth. But whereas Wilson’s black oil inspires awe through implacable stillness, Kapoor achieves

Visual art  47 it through a kinetic fury, presenting a dramatic spectacle of darkly violent aquatic splendor that compels the viewer’s gaze into a churning, disappearing vortex. In an Existentialist reading, it evokes our all-consuming anxiety in the face of nothingness: Anxiety is the recognition of a certain nothingness, a groundlessness in our existence. As Sartre will later describe it, anxiety leads us into a kind of vertigo where we literally have no ground beneath our feet. But anxiety thus serves to reveal that we are caught up in a structure of care about the world; that it is not a matter of indifference for us. (Moran, 2000, p. 241) Interestingly, Kapoor adopts Sartrean language in describing the piece as akin to the metaphor of Plato’s cave whereby, rather than looking toward the outside world (equivalent to Being), we instead contemplate the ghostly reflections on the back wall of the cave ‘the dark and empty back of being’, which in Sartre’s formulation is nothingness. Kapoor equates this with ‘the void, which paradoxically is full—of fear, of darkness. Whether you represent it with a mirror or with a dark form, it is always the ‘back,’ the point that attracts my interest and triggers my creativity’ (quoted in Jobson, 2015).

Figure 2.6  Anish Kapoor’s Descension (2014–15) offers an aquatic spiral into Sartre’s notion of nothingness and the existential void. Installation at the Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy in 2015. (Photo: Ela Bialkowska; © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019.)

48  Visual art Such themes are central to Kapoor’s work, and his earlier Descent into Limbo (1992) featured another circular void—an entirely dark and endless-seeming hole into the earth, within the floor of an off-white cuboid building. During its exhibition in Portugal in 2018, a man fell into the hole and was injured, having mistaken its black-painted walls for a black circle painted on the gallery floor. But conceptually, Descension reaches another dimension in evoking a sense of being-towards-the-end, offering up a vertiginous spiral into the existential void. Its gushing noises are harrowing and haunting, and the installation is a very real and dangerous force of nature that eerily offers up—and draws down—a foreboding sense of the uncanny. The artwork excites the phenomenological sense of unease, anxiety, and nothingness at the heart of Existentialist philosophy. It is intensified by the water’s extreme blackness (created using hair dye), which brings to mind Rosalind Krauss’s description of modernist sculpture being ‘experienced more and more as pure negativity … a kind of black hole in the space of consciousness’ (1979, p. 34). In 2014, Kapoor’s fascination with ‘absolute’ black extended to his purchase of the exclusive rights to be the only artist able to use the blackest pigment on earth, Vantablack, developed by the British company NanoSystems for stealth satellites, which reflects almost no light at all. The technology behind Kapoor’s Descension is powerful yet relatively simple. Nonetheless, its original construction for the 2015 Kochi-Muziris Biennale involved 50 workers digging a large hole for an entire week, and placing within it a rotary motor system. The catalog description is striking in using the paradigms and language of cybernetics, including boundary crossing, auto-generation, perpetual flux, and unknowable outcomes: Kapoor’s objects sit uneasily and have unstable boundaries between interior and exterior, between object and non-object … It builds on Kapoor’s concern with non-objects and auto-generated form. In the state of flux and motion, Descension confronts us with a perpetual force and a downward pull into an unknowable interior. (Tomazzo G., 2015) While by no means the ‘self-replicating machine’ that John von Neumann conceived as the exemplification of ‘second wave’ (aka ‘second order’ or ‘new’) cybernetics, Kapoor’s system is proto-cybernetic, its cycles appearing to be self-perpetuating and to have the potential to continue ad infinitum. The swirling vortex is always subtly changing and metamorphosing, its aquatic swirls and splashes never precisely the same from one revolution to the next. While cybernetic systems typically use or incorporate some form of feedback loop, Descension appears to be one, in and of itself—a selfconsuming and regenerative centrifugal feedback loop.

Visual art  49

Back to nature with Wiener and Heidegger Its form recalls one of Norbert Wiener’s numerous analogies—some say too numerous, and too vague—of humans as whirlpools. He describes how during our lifetimes, our cells and tissues change many times, and in our breathing, eating, and excreting we build and lose elements of our flesh and bone on a daily basis. We are thus regenerating continually, and are in a constant state of becoming (that central pillar of Existentialism): ‘We are whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves’ (Wiener, 1954 [1950], p. 96). Wiener was ‘the perpetual walker and irrepressible nature lover’ (Conway and Siegelman, 2005, p. 49), something he shared with Heidegger, who was brought up in the countryside, and wrote most of his famous works in a small cabin in the Black Forest. His intense relationship with it is captured in Adam Sharr’s book Heidegger’s Hut (2006), making it ‘the smallest residence ever to merit a monograph’ (Sadler, 2006, p. ix). One day while working in it, Heidegger conjured a memorable analogy of the mind/consciousness as a clearing in the forest. Soon after beginning his first full-time academic post, at MIT in 1919, Wiener went on a long walk, came across a fast-flowing river and stared long and hard at its wave patterns. His meditation became one of his important early publications, where he asked the question: ‘How can one bring to a mathematical regularity the study of the mass of ever shifting ripples and waves, for was not the highest destiny of mathematics the discovery of order among disorder?’ He muses on the continually changing waves, patches of foam, and sprays of droplets, and goes on to pose a phenomenological question: ‘What descriptive language could I use that would portray … the inextricable complexity [?]’ He concludes: ‘I grew ever more aware that it was within nature itself that I must seek the language and the problems of my mathematical investigations’ (Wiener, 1956, p. 33, emphasis in original). In 1940, soon after the death of his father, Weiner bought a small log cabin, around ten feet square with three small windows, and had it placed in the woods near his family house. He walked to it every day to ponder, muse and write, just like Heidegger in his little hut, amid the peace and tranquility of nature.

Blackness, authenticity, and the sublime The blackness of Descension’s water is so intense that it is redolent of the violent ‘liquid ebony’ whirlpool in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Descent Into the Maelström’ (1845). Kapoor’s title may or may not be a direct homage to Poe, but its effect is precisely akin to Poe’s ecstatic descriptions of the whirlpool that the narrator’s boat circles for an hour, gradually moving ‘nearer and nearer to its horrible inner edge’ and turning his hair from black to white. Kapoor’s creation is equally mesmeric, making one become ‘possessed with

50  Visual art

Figure 2.7   Anish Kapoor’s mesmerizing Descension recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Descent Into the Maelström’ (1845) where a whirlpool becomes ‘a pathway between Time and Eternity’. Image from Descension’s first iteration at the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India. (Photo: Dheeraj Thakur; © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019.)

the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make [… for] the mysteries I should see’ (Poe, 2005 [1845]). So, as with Existentialism’s viewpoint that contemplation of being-towards-the-end can confer a type of liberation

Visual art  51 and transcendence, Poe’s contemplation of the descent towards death—and ours when experiencing Kapoor’s installation—is simultaneously terrifying, thrilling, and uplifting. As Poe’s boat continually circles the ‘belt’ of the whirlpool, it seems to be ‘flying rather than floating’: Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which I gazed about me. … The gleaming and ghastly radiance … streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss. … The general burst of terrific grandeur was all that I beheld … a pathway between Time and Eternity. (Poe, 2005 [1845]) Poe here describes what Sartre would term an Existentialist transcendence and what Heidegger would describe as an authentic experience of temporality—not only while staring in the face of death, but also while encountering the sublime. It is a word that has been used by many critics in describing Kapoor’s vision of Poe’s black whirlpool. Jonathan Jones’s headline in the Guardian announces ‘a sublime spectacle from the magician of modern art’ and he argues that where artists like the YBAs (Young British Artists) had previously been radical while Kapoor had seemed conservative, now ‘Hirst is artistically bankrupt and Antony Gormley designs hotel rooms for the mega-rich. … But Kapoor is the real thing. … Kapoor is authentically creative’ (Jones, 2015). His use of the word ‘authentic’ underlines another fundamental pillar of Existentialism which, whether in life or art, requires courage and originality, and setting oneself away from the crowd where one becomes ‘lost in the Anyone’ (Heidegger, 1962 [1927],p. 435); and where The most vigorous clash between the will to authenticity and the inauthentic anyone is conducted under the shadow of death. … authentic Dasein is the author of its ‘own character.’ The ethos of the anyone is so pervasive that only death can ‘wrench’ one from its domination. … Beingtowards-death enables one to do this most effectively … we are forced to decide if we are to attain our authentic selves or lose them before the factual event of our dying. … anxiety ‘liberates’ one for authenticity. (Golomb, 1995, p. 108–09) Jones’s judgment on Kapoor’s authenticity versus Damien Hirst’s inauthenticity is interesting in relation to Existentialism’s views on the subject, which emphasize that it is a continual quest and struggle: ‘authentic selves do not exist; there are only certain individuals who carry out authentic acts and live authentic modes of life’ (Golomb, 1995,p. 54). Using this criterion, I would venture that in some of his early work, Hirst certainly did act authentically, as did many of his fellow YBAs. Moreover, many of the most groundbreaking and definitive YBA works (including Michael Landy’s Break Down (2001), discussed in Chapter 7) were examples of Cybernetic-Existentialism.

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Circularities of life and death: Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, and Cornelia Parker Hirst’s early sculptures and installations relate closely to Existentialist ideas, including his 14-meter-long shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde, the title of which directly echoes Sartre’s philosophy: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). While death and its anticipation is a core theme for most Existentialist writers, perspectives differ. For Heidegger, it marks a moment of ultimate significance since it confirms originality and individuality: ‘death individualizes … ; death is just one’s own’ (1962 [1927], p. 309, emphasis in original). But Sartre takes an opposite perspective, emphasizing Hirst’s notion of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living to contest that: a person does not die her own death because her own death is not an event she can experience … [since] death is the utter annihilation of the point of view that she is. In a very real sense, death only happens to other people. Only the death of other people is an event in my life, just as my death can only be an event in the lives of those who outlive me. (Cox, 2011, p. 166) Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1990) combines another, even darker meditation on being-towards-death, using a cybernetic system within a large glass

Figure 2.8  The brief cycle of birth, life, and death is actuated within an autonomous cybernetic system where flies hatch out of a bloody cow’s head only to meet their fate in an Insect-O-Cutor, in Damien Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1991). (Photo: Roger Wooldridge; © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019.)

Visual art  53 box divided into two sections. A bloody, severed cow’s head lies rotting on the floor and produces maggots, which metamorphose into flies that in turn fly into, and are killed by, an Insect-O-Cutor hanging above the cow’s head. While exploring mortal themes, Hirst works like a scientist or cybernetician to create ‘an aesthetic world that is thoroughly systematized and rationalized’ (Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2016) and the system itself is classically cybernetic in combining elements from, and crossing boundaries between, the organic and the machinic; and involving a dynamic cycle of evolutions and feedback loops. Though distinctly low-tech, it is nonetheless a perfect example of Cybernetic-Existentialist art. A Thousand Years is an evolving circuitry system and self-regulating organism whose theme and materials confront us not only with a vivid and visceral representation, but also an authentic performance of the brief, wholly absurd, and apparently meaningless cycle of life. This in turn elicits a type of aesthetic horror and angst in the inexorable face of death. The Existentialist view is that the ultimate effect of this is positive and awakening, and Hirst echoes this perspective in his discussion of the work: ‘You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigour’ (quoted in Sook, 2011). Many of the YBAs made similarly intense and performative proto-Existentialist reflections, including Marc Quinn’s life-size blood-sculpture of his head, Self (1991). Contained within a Perspex refrigeration unit, it is constructed with 10 pints of the artist’s blood and immersed in frozen silicone. Quinn has made a new iteration of what is, in essence, his living death-mask, every 5 years since the original 1991 version: ‘a cumulative index of passing time and an ongoing self-portrait of the artist’s ageing and changing self’ (Quinn, 2015); and he references a writer strongly associated with Existentialism when describing it as ‘a Beckett version of Rembrandt’ (quoted in Fullerton, 2014, p. 76). Elizabeth Fullerton notes how it ‘encapsulates life and death—a memento mori of real matter that could, theoretically, be cloned to make new life’ (p. 76). Equally, of course, the work’s power also rests on its evident fragility— when I saw its original 1991 exhibition it appeared to be filled with dents and defects, and falling apart—and the fact that a simple electrical short would destroy it, just as humans sometimes are, by unexpected and sudden short circuits of the heart, brain or other vital organ. This eerie blood bust was one of the most original and impactful being-towards-death expressions of the YBAs, and led to Quinn becoming the first of them to be signed by Jay Jopling, the director of the White Cube gallery in London. Its Existentialist statement was visceral and explicit, while its cybernetic impulses include the crossing of (epidermal) boundaries, synthesizing processes, and a display system that underwent a process of evolution. The first version was beset with problems due to air captured in the chamber, but a solution was developed by freezing the head in liquid silicone—a technique Quinn took further in his series of frozen flower sculptures (since 1998), which, he

54  Visual art says, were ‘made from the same molecules the living plant was made from, but it’s no longer alive. … beauty and death go together’ (in Fullerton, 2014, p. 76). These two elements combine with menace and magnificence in Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), for which Cornelia Parker hired the services of the British army to detonate explosives to blow up a garden shed filled with household objects, books and children’s toys. She collected the charred and twisted remains and hung them in various positions in mid-air, like some strange cosmic constellation, lit from its centre by a single light bulb, casting ghostly shadows over the surrounding walls. It seems to depict simultaneously: creation—as a symbolic visualization of the originary cosmic ‘big bang’; destruction and mortality—in the explosive being-towards-death of the shed and its contents; temporal durée—in its conceit of freezing a dramatic moment in time; and a pictorial imagining of cybernetic complexity theory. For Sumantro Ghose, ‘each immobile fragment once had its own story, once belonged to someone’s life. The fragility of Cold Dark Matter, the delicate shards of blackened wood suspended in space, the emptiness at its centre, confronts us with our own mortality’ (Ghose, 2004).

Time, anticipation, and videotape: Douglas Gordon and Urich Lau Scottish artist Douglas Gordon observes that the arrival of the videocassette and home VCR in the 1970s engendered a new human ‘replay culture’ where slow motion and freeze frames became ‘instruments of desire’ giving people a whole new take on things, and redefining the temporal perception of a generation (quoted in Hansen, 2004, p. 243). Gordon’s celebrated 24-Hour Psycho (1993) is an elevated two-sided screen installation, where Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) plays in slow motion at two frames per second (and thus lasts an entire day), creating an unnerving and hypnotic effect. A similar approach is employed, and a parallel effect elicited, in Singaporean artist Urich Lau’s two-channel, large dual screen Intersection: Video Diptych (2004), where a disturbingly violent 18-second sequence from Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine is slowed down to last 5 minutes. One of the screens plays in forward motion, the other in reverse, and their climactic moments coincide explosively, when a character being threatened with a gun is accidentally shot in the face. The latent menace of the movie footage is mirrored and magnified by the excruciatingly slow (×13) playback speed, which renders the dialog elongated and incomprehensible. Both Gordon’s and Lau’s installations repurpose found footage to excite a sense of the inexorable that transports the original film clips into an entirely new realm. As each still frame gradually replaces the last, the filmic mechanism is revealed, perception becomes disordered, and time seems,

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Figure 2.9  The intense psychological effects of slowing down found footage from violent movies operate in relation to the principles of ‘second-wave’ cybernetics and manifest Existentialism’s concept of anticipating beingtowards-death. Above: Douglas Gordon’s video installation 24-Hour Psycho (1993). (found footage from Psycho (1960) produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Distributed by Paramount Pictures © Universal City Studios. Photo: © studio lost but found/Bert Ross.) Below: Urich Lau’s video installation Intersection: Video Diptych (2004). (Courtesy of Urich Lau.)

56  Visual art simultaneously, omnipresent and absent. Both works accord closely with principles of Cybernetic-Existentialism: placing the viewer at the heart of a second wave cybernetic system (where the human subject is inside the system) that prompts visual, cognitive, and psychological disruption through a reversal and negation of Peter Mark Roget’s notion of persistence of vision (Anderson and Anderson, 1993)—which was the title of Lau’s 2013 solo exhibition in Singapore. Gordon’s and Lau’s works not only explore, but concretely manifest and convey central Existentialist concepts concerning the ontology of time, anticipation, and being-towards-death. Both artists work with an avowed intent to disturb their audience at a primordial level so as to affect concrete shifts in their perception of time and Dasein. Gordon describes his works as ‘trying to induce a perceptual shift from where you are to where you were or where you might be … as a human being you can coexist on various levels simultaneously’ (quoted in Camhi, 1999, p. 144). In New Philosophy for New Media (2004), Mark B. N. Hansen discusses 24-Hour Psycho in terms of how ‘Gordon’s experimentations with the temporal limits of visual art forces us to confront the origin of temporal consciousness (and hence consciousness per se)’ (Hansen, 2004, p. 249). He argues that since filmic images have become the privileged mode of contemporary perception, such works produce profound effects through ‘an eerie experience of protracted anticipation accompanied by a sobering insight into temporal relativity’ (243–44). As perception of time is disturbed and each still frame of the movie is slowly progressed and revealed, anticipation is key: the viewer quickly finds her attention intensely concentrated on anticipating this moment of change; moreover, as the viewer becomes more and more caught up in the halted progression of this narrative, this process of anticipation becomes ever more affectively charged, to the point of becoming practically unbearable. (Hansen, 2004, p. 244–45) It is the continual and concentrated nature of this ‘charging’, like a heated electrical element that triggers its cybernetic effect: connecting and activating a feedback loop between artwork and audience that goes beyond normative image-viewer relationships or traditional reception theories to affect complex shifts and concrete changes within the whole system. These changes occur within the viewer (or at least, interested viewers), are perceptual and existential in nature and are brought about by virtue of new temporal insights and an experience of intense anticipation. Existentialist philosophers discuss expectation and anticipation at length as keys to understanding and embracing the concept of being-towards-death, where contemplation of one’s own mortality is considered the ultimate existential wake up call. Firstly, such anticipation grounds one in the actual—‘in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a foothold in the

Visual art  57 actual’ (Heidegger, 1962 [1927], p. 306); and secondly, positively embracing our own finitude is seen as a spur for Dasein to seek to forge a meaningful existence. Of course, many artworks provide a catalyst or space for a similar type of meditation on death. But the seductive allure of this particular deconstruction and distillation of the technological elements of film projection in extremis, renders the (active and engaged) viewer a posthuman cybernetic subject facing her own mortality, and consequently awakened to her own freedom and possibilities. Heidegger: When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from one’s lostness … and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose … Anticipation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up … It guards itself against ‘becoming too old for victories’ (Nietzsche). (Heidegger, 1962 [1927], p. 308)

Obsessively Searching and Anticipating for Half a Decade For Five Year Drive-by (1995) Douglas Gordon sought to extend the slow motion anticipation from 24-hours to 5 years in a visionary concept first proposed at the 1995 Biennale de Lyon. This involves projecting John Ford’s Western movie The Searchers (1956) on a specially erected screen in a remote desert location in Utah where much of the movie was shot— ‘taking the landscape of the movie, back to the landscape of the movie’ (Gordon, 1997). It would be slowed down to such an extent that it lasted the same time—5 years—that its protagonist, Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne), had searched obsessively for his niece following her abduction by a Kammanche tribe. His proposal includes a step-by-step mathematical explanation, like some part-Fluxus, part-cybernetic blueprint (here significantly edited): 113 minutes of cinema time = 5 years in real time …  = 2629440 minutes in real time … 1 minute of cinema time = 2629440 ÷ 113 1 minute of cinema time = 23269.38 minutes in real time and further … 1 second of cinema time = 6.46 hours in real time (Gordon, 1997) Each day and night, less than 4 seconds of the film would therefore elapse, and in this drive-by cinema, the existential anticipation of the appearance of an entirely new image or camera angle would frequently last not just for days, but weeks. There is an intense and uncanny quality to this extreme

58  Visual art temporal manipulation and, as Heidegger puts in terms that suggest a type of cybernetic feedback loop: ‘by the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the actual, arising into the actual and returning to it’ (Heidegger, 1962 [1927], p. 306). Philip Monk notes how these still movie pictures appear reconfigured to reproduce painting genres such as landscape and portraiture, as well as rendering the desert screen as a type of advertising billboard since, as its title suggests, this is ‘drive by’ rather than drive-in cinema. His analysis hints at cybernetic paradigms (‘surpassing of technological thresholds’), Existentialist notions of absurdity, and the philosophy’s advocacy of the ‘authentic quest’—what Sartre calls the ‘grand’ or ‘original project’: To the problems of realization (it has been shown only in part), Gordon would further add the difficulty of audience participation … the viewer him - or herself must engage in a quest to see the work. … 5 Year Drive-By’s surpassing of technological thresholds matches the relentless, inhuman drive of the film’s protagonist. The absurdity of Gordon’s project is that in slowing the speed of the film to this extent, he ends up with a series of stills. (Monk, 2003, p. 80–81) Although the full 5-year durational project has never been realized, sections have been presented at gallery exhibitions, including a 3-minute sequence of The Searchers lasting 47 days; and Lehman recounts a special screening event in the desert, hundreds of miles away from Los Angeles, organized by the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001: I had a five-hour drive to contemplate the five-year screening about the five-year search. … [We] were greeted by a drive-in theater type movie screen with what appeared to be a static image of John Wayne … so charismatically arresting under any circumstances, here [he] seemed fetishized beyond belief … a body literally stopping the narrative dead in its tracks. … As we watched, the daylight gave way to twilight and finally utter darkness. Ethan advanced perhaps a frame during that dramatic shift in lighting. (Lehman, 2004, p. xi–xii)

Angels, babies, and old people: the art of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu In Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s 天使 (Angel, 2008), a hyperrealistic life-size figure of a white-haired, wrinkled old woman in a white gown lies face down on the ground, apparently dead. From her back sprout large, featherless chicken wings, wholly ineffective for flight. The image is simultaneously grotesque and beautiful, humorous and harrowing. Like

Visual art  59 many of their works, this ‘fallen angel’ hints at human existential tragedy, where Sartre’s complex ideas of transcendence (a major section in Being and Nothingness (2003 [1943]) come down to earth with a crash. It has a striking pathos and I have seen crowds of gallery visitors spend far longer in contemplation of it than is the norm with contemporary artworks. Like the philosophies of Existentialism, it is a meditation on shattered hopes and potentials, and the ontology of time and death which, in Sartre’s words, reveals that time is ‘the shimmer of nothingness on the surface of a strictly atemporal being’ (2003 [1943], p. 238). It conjoins imagery that derives from Biblical (angel), mythical (Icarus), and sociopolitical sources (this angel is

Figure 2.10  Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s eerie and poignant meditation on age, lost hopes, and transcendence, Angel (2008). The sculpture has been exhibited in different ways in galleries internationally, including as a solitary figure lying face down on the bare floor, and situated within a circular metal and netting installation. (Courtesy of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.)

60  Visual art a frail, emaciated old woman) to offer a memento mori both bleak and uplifting. The concern of lost hope and an uncertain future remains a telling theme within Chinese contemporary art, and as Ai Weiwei has put it: ‘These kinds of days are too short for some people, too long for others. There are too many failed expectations and too much lost hope. … What kind of future are we walking towards?’ (quoted in Merewether, 2009, p. 19). But while such meditations on death and the absurd place Sun and Peng’s work within the parameters of Existentialist philosophy, other aspects, and particularly the use of recursive systems and feedback loops, also anchor it within cybernetic understandings. In their controversial performance 连体 婴儿 (Body Link, 2000), the two artists are physically connected to the cadavers of two babies through an intravenous drip, with the dead children receiving blood into their systems (Fok, 2013). Peng reflects that when working with corpses and human remains ‘my work can have a healing effect’ and Sun that ‘I want death to be calm and peaceful, not frightening’

Figure 2.11  Sun Yuan (left) and Peng Yu (right) shortly after they decided to get married, giving blood to the cadavers of conjoined-twin babies in Body Link (2000) at the Bu hezuo fanghsi/Fuck Off exhibition in Shanghai. (Courtesy of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.)

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Figure 2.12  Sculpted from human bone ash, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s One or All (2004) proffers an arresting existential reminder to write our lives meaningfully. (Courtesy of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.)

(Sun and Peng, 2012). Less calming is their cybernetic 老人院 (Old People’s Home, 2007) on display as part of the London Saatchi gallery’s permanent collection for many years, where 13 dynamoelectric wheelchairs carrying life-size sculptures of geriatric political leaders (some asleep and drooling) travel apparently randomly around a room, continually bumping into each other. Where one technological vision of cybernetics is a symbiosis of human and machine, Sun and Peng’s 一个或所有 (One or All; 2004)—a sculpture of what appears to be a giant piece of white chalk that leans against the gallery wall—uses an analogue cybernetic paradigm in the form of a human-artwork symbiosis. It is made out of human bone ash. From an Existentialist viewpoint, the significance of transforming the real bones of numerous human cadavers into a towering stick of chalk is that it potentially writes: we are free to write our own stories, rules and fates, and our presence can endure even after death. In the face of a monumental and humbling sculptural statement of being-towards-death, the piece emphasizes Existentialism’s message of appreciating our finitude, and therefore writing our lives meaningfully in response. Peng sees the work as a respectful tribute to the lives of those people whose mortal remains it contains—as a piece filled with hope and memories, with a powerful presence offering resistance against forgetting those who have passed on. (Peng, 2012)

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Killer dogs For their cacophonous performance 犬勿近 (Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, 2003), Sun Yuan and Peng Yu arranged four pairs of gymnasium treadmills facing each other, just a few centimeters apart. A large sheet of clapboard separated the facing treadmills, down the middle of the space. A live pit bull terrier was placed on each of the eight treadmills and fitted with a special harness and chains that restricted the reach of their noses to very close to the central clapboard, which was then lifted. On suddenly seeing the dog opposite, each one lunges aggressively toward its counterpart and in an extraordinary spectacle of psychotic eyes, snarling teeth, spitting saliva, and deafening barking, these eight killer dogs attempt to attack and destroy the one opposite them. Although the power drives for the treadmills have been disabled, the dogs run at a ferocious pace on the same spot, circulating the treadmills at furious speeds as they strain, nose-to-nose, within millimeters of each other. Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other fuses hot, existential terror with cool, cybernetic systems thinking. There is a dynamic technological system

Figure 2.13  Fighting dogs, information theory, a cybernetic system of treadmills, and notions of being-towards-death (almost) collide in Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s cacophonous Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other (2003). (Courtesy of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.)

Visual art  63 (the running machines) that is part-open and part-closed (placed slightly apart with exact precision), inputs are introduced (the dogs), there are complications of noise (a cybernetic concept we will explore further in the next chapter; in this case, the noise is literal), there is a resulting output (art in the form of an audio-visual spectacle of terrifying aggression), and one of contemporary art’s most vivid ever feedback loops is established in hyperactive and hyper-real form due to the pit bulls’ fight to the death instincts. Their commitment is total and the negative feedback loops continual (the system’s reference value (see p. 75) is the maintenance of the centimeters between the dog’s noses), sending messages to one another in apparent perpetual motion, or at least up to the point of physical exhaustion or death. Gu Zhenqing has described the dogs as undergoing not a physical fight, but ‘a contest of the spirit’ (Zhenqing, 2003). The noise generated through the system is unlike anything ever heard in the history of art. The horrific intensity and violence of the sound of the dogs barking within an enclosed room, their gnashing teeth and running legs, combine eerily with the mechanical clanking of two sets (and rhythms) of chains—from the circulating treadmill mechanisms and from those affixing their body harnesses to the top beam of the running machines. The effect is ear piercing and unforgettable, offering a whole new perspective on the concept of ‘The Art of Noises,’ first mooted by Luigi Russolo and the Futurists in a 1913 manifesto (2005 [1913]). It is a traumatic performance of aesthetic aggression that is quintessentially cybernetic, combining precise measurements and scientific controls with unpredictable internal forces and external noise, which in turn renders it evolutionary and thus potentially out of control. It speaks to the unpredictability and fragility of life, and the way that it can turn in a single moment (as the clapboard is lifted) from calm to chaos, from peace to war, and from life to death. The messages it sends are multiple, and can be decoded by the receiver in relation to myriad existential meanings: from life being an absurd treadmill to the impotence of humans who continually run toward but are forever unable to reach what they seek, to a political critique and metaphor for China’s ‘state of political, psychological and cultural stasis that only barely holds chaos in check’ (Heartney, 2017). But above all, it presents a moment of being-towards-death with such explosive originality and visceral impact that it excites and awakens existential angst, fear and horror.

Political gnashing and smashing In 2017, more than a decade after the performance, a video of the piece aroused such controversy at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that it was removed from the Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World exhibition (2017, curated by Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari, and Hou Hanru) together with another low-tech, cybernetic-existentialist

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Figure 2.14  Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World (1993) is a 150 × 170 × 265 cm wood and metal structure with warming lamps, electric cable, insects (spiders, scorpions, crickets, cockroaches, black beetles, stick insects, centipedes), lizards, toads, and snakes. Exhibition view at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 1993. (Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; © Huang Yong Ping.)

being-towards-death piece by Huang Yong Ping, the exhibition’s titular work Theater of the World (1993). The removals followed what the museum called ‘explicit and repeated threats of violence’ from animal rights activists, and raised considerable public debate around issues both of art ethics and censorship (Neuendorf, 2018). The latter work comprises a custom-designed wooden, metal and gauze cage in the shape of a giant turtle, with integral drawers around its perimeter, through which live creatures are introduced periodically. Inside the sculpture, lizards, toads, snakes and insects (spiders, centipedes, scorpions, beetles, crickets, cockroaches and stick insects), perform irrevocable acts of death with recursive circularity as they stalk, battle with, and consume each another. It presents a scenario whereby an aesthetic system (the installation) encases the enactment of nature’s most fundamental system (life > death) with existential authenticity. When the show toured to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain in 2018, this display of nature’s most basic system was reinstated, although Sun and Peng’s Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other (which aroused the

Visual art  65 most controversy in New York) was not. The artists were invited instead to exhibit a different work, whose title is a critical theme for many Chinese artists, as well as being Existentialism’s most sacred precept. Freedom (2009) is a video based on an installation with a high-powered hose suspended in space and wriggling spasmodically and violently, like an angry black snake, and striking the walls and floor as it shoots out intermittent, high-pressure jets of water. In the same exhibition is Chinese artist Ai Weiwei‘s triptych photograph capturing three stages of him deliberately Dropping a Han Dynasty Vase (1995). In all three, his eyes remain defiantly on us in an un-shifting gaze of playful revolutionary intensity as the ‘priceless’ 2,000 years old artifact falls and smashes at his feet. In his authentic act of destruction of an authentically historic object, he violates tradition and antiquity in order to comment on the present. Aesthetically tracing this ancient vase’s being-towards-death symbolizes what Ai perceives as the need for China to smash and break free not only from its past but from the oppressions and human rights abuses of its present. As if in direct rebuke, without warning Chinese government authorities have twice physically demolished Ai’s studio with many of his artworks still inside—in 2018 in Beijing, and his Shanghai studio that he had named ‘Fake’ (whose homophonic Chinese translation is ‘Fuck’) in 2010. Charles Merewether suggests that in Dropping a Han Dynasty Vase, ‘Ai Weiwei raises a series of questions about cultural violence and history … [and] engages with the concept of a country that oscillates between ruin and production, patrimony and erasure—operating, that is, from within the logic of ruins in reverse.’ (2009, p. 28).

Like Dostoevsky, we all face the firing squad On 22 December 1849, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novels are considered among the greatest examples of literary Existentialism, experienced being-towards-death in the most vivid terms: facing a firing squad. Together with twenty others condemned for being part of a literary group reading banned, anti-Tsarist books, he stripped in the freezing prison yard. As they waited on the scaffold, each man was individually read his fate— ‘Sentenced to be shot!’ Twenty minutes passed, when an officer galloped in on a horse waving a handkerchief and announced that ‘in his infinite mercy’ Tsar Nicholas I had changed the men’s sentence to 4 years in a Siberian camp followed by 6 years military service. Some of the men suffered breakdowns or ‘became insane’ but Dostoevsky wrote to his brother comparing it to a rebirth: ‘I have the vitality of a cat … I shall be born again for the best’ (in Hubben, 1997 [1952], p. 53–54). Dostoevsky retained great humor, as well as a sense of fatalism, in both his novels and his life, which remained difficult after his years of punishment: he

66  Visual art suffered from epilepsy, and was an inveterate gambler and a bankrupt. ‘Always and in everything I go to the extreme limit’ he said (quoted in 68) and his characters also exist at the limits and on the edge: rebels and outsiders who experience life intensely—creating and destroying, loving and fighting, philosophizing on their fates and each others’ souls, and glimpsing heaven and hell. William Hubben’s eloquent study provides a reflection on Dostoevsky’s death mask that offers a perfect description of the classic Existentialist anti-hero: All the characters of his novels seemed engraved on his features: saintliness, criminal distortion, the marks of the believer and the skeptic, the volcanic zeal of the preacher, and the resignation of the martyr. Yet his death mask shows a face of ancestral distinction. Death had bestowed a clarity upon his features which suggested the rare spiritual victory of his via dolorosa [way of sorrows]. (Hubben, 1997 [1952], p. 56) Heidegger maintained that the more intensely we contemplate the reality of our impending death ‘as the possibility of the impossibility’ (1962 [1927], p. 307) the more death becomes a positive destination. It acts, he argues, as a catalyst to draw us away from being lost in the mediocrity of the everyday and the conformity of the crowd (the ‘they’) and to spur us on toward individual freedom, since death becomes ‘Dasein’s ownmost possibility’ (p. 307): We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself … in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the ‘they’, and is factical, certain of itself, and anxious. (p. 311, emphasis in original) Manifestations of the converging ideas of what I term Cybernetic-Existentialism are not only evident within, but also central to many contemporary artworks and performances. Indeed, it is a defining aspect of some of the most groundbreaking and critically acclaimed art by Abramović, Creed, Kapoor, Hirst, Quinn, Parker, Gordon, Sun and Peng. Different systems theories and cybernetic paradigms are integral to their works, which are, to return to Burnham’s ‘Systems Esthetics’: ‘in transition from an objectoriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates not from things, but from the way things are done’ (Burnham, 1968). These artists’ explorations of the notion of being-towards-death are novel and efficacious, exciting an anticipation of death in their audiences, which

Visual art  67 leads to the types of feelings of anxiety, nausea, and vertigo that Existentialists see as revelatory, and that wake us up: to the dizzying formlessness and groundlessness of our existence, an experience which provokes anxiety … the only possible meaning a life has is that given by living it, and therefore the challenge to live authentically is the highest human challenge. (Moran, 2000, p. 362)

Note 1 In the end, the Guggenheim cancelled the entire exhibition and fired its curator Edward Fry amid controversy over a work about local absentee landlords—an act of censorship that helped prompt Haacke to become even more political in his art subsequently (Lippard, 1997, p. xiii).

3 Interactive art Communicating, controlling, and being-for-others

To hit a plane with an AA gun, you need to aim at where the plane is going to be after your bullets have travelled to reach it. This is hard enough when the plane is merely far away and travelling very quickly. It’s near-impossible when that same plane is actively trying to get out of the way of your bullets. The answer is cybernetics. Tim Maly, ‘AA Guns and the Birth of Cybernetics’ (2009)

Norbert Wiener—Child Prodigy and Dark Hero of the Information Age One of the innovations that established Norbert Wiener’s reputation was an automated anti-aircraft (AA) gun he developed between 1941 and 1942 during World War II in collaboration with engineer Julian Bigelow. It uses sophisticated feedback loops that place human and machine in harmony. The human operator continually lines up the crosshair sights of the gun with the position of the enemy plane in the sky, and the gun’s predictive system maps and analyzes the changing positions (also tracked using microwave radar signals), takes into account the pilot’s previous avoidance zigzag patterns and other reference factors, extrapolates mathematical probabilities of where it might be several seconds later, then launches a missile there. Wiener was a math and algorithms prodigy, a true master of patterns, and was as equally fascinated by philosophy as science. On 7 October 1906, The New York World’s front page headline proclaimed ‘The Most Remarkable Boy in the World’ alongside a large photo-engraving of Wiener, then aged 11, standing like a cherub in a sailor suit on top of a plinth made of two giant books: Plato’s Dialogues and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The text eulogizes the youngest American in history to go to College and overflows onto the second page, demoting the launching of the great steamship the Mauretania to second billing. When the reporter arrived for the interview, Wiener had a copy of John Grier Hibben’s The Problems of Philosophy (1898) under his arm, and enthusiastically described philosophy as better than fairy tales, and a type of ‘fairyland’ to him. The article’s

Interactive art  69 physical description of Wiener concludes: ‘But his eyes tell the story. They are big and black and blazing. There is something almost uncanny in their gaze. To quote the boy’s own words, they seem already to have solved the riddle of the universe.’ This image of Wiener as some sort of a prophetic seer is apt, as the man whose biographers call the Dark Hero of the Information Age foresaw with uncanny insight a whole new scientific era that he ‘fathered’ and catalyzed (Conway and Siegelman, 2005, p. ix). But to my knowledge no one has yet solved the riddle of the universe, and his claim at so tender an age exposes one of the young prodigy’s fatal flaws: his colossal sense of self-importance.

Figure 3.1  Cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener in a classroom at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with his three-wheeled robot invention Palomilla (1949), better known as the moth-bedbug. It uses photocells to navigate in response to the intensities of external light sources, thus acting like a moth (discussed further in Chapter 6). The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images, 1949. (Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt.)

70  Interactive art Wiener went on to complete his BA in mathematics at Tufts aged 14, followed by a Harvard PhD by 17, the same year that he was clinically diagnosed with bipolar disorder (then called manic depression) that would affect his family and his work throughout his life, and make him consider and threaten suicide many times. In September 1931, he went to Trinity College Cambridge, UK, where he undertook postdoctoral studies, and argued and clashed with his formidable British supervisor, the philosopher and mathematician B ­ ertrand Russell, who wrote angrily to a friend: ‘[Wiener] thinks himself God Almighty—there is a perpetual contest between him and me as to which is to do the teaching’ (30). During the AA gun research Wiener wrote a historic 120-page report entitled ‘The Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series’ (1942), in which he calls his accomplishment ‘the minor task of a quite correct prediction’ and explains that patterns are a key element underlying the ‘fundamental unity of all fields of communication’ (in Maly, 2009). Six years before he coined the term, Wiener thus began his cybernetics quest to evolve entirely new systems by fusing different disciplines. The report opens by stating a purpose that is identical to my own: ‘an attempt to unite the theory and practice of two fields … from two entirely distinct traditions.’ For him: ‘These two fields are those of time series in statistics … quantitative data assigned to specific moments in time … and of communication engineering … the study of messages and their transmission’ (Wiener, 1964 [1942], p. 1–2). He goes on to introduce cybernetics’ most fundamental philosophical tenet, arguing that all communication forms—biological, mechanical, electrical, and cultural—are analogous and equitable in terms of their patterns and input-output functions. Depending on one’s viewpoint, this can be interpreted as a positive and progressive conception of universal harmony and oneness—and his collaborator Bigelow calls Wiener ‘a philosopher’ while in turn Wiener calls the former accountant Bigelow a ‘human computer’ ­(Conway and Siegelman, 2004, p. 115). But to see it another way, Wiener is also saying that everything is reducible to mathematics: The same mechanisms that regulate a steam engine and aim a­ rtillery can be used to manage politics, under this conception. The math has already been done, the only question that remains is what the constraints are on the population’s cultural motion … [the report] was immediately classified and came to be known as Wiener’s ­Yellow Peril.’ (Maly, 2009) Although the AA gun itself never saw the heat of battle, ‘his contributions helped to win the war’ as his new statistical approach to automated control systems was widely adopted in the allied war effort from the design of radar systems and servomechanisms to communication engineering techniques

Interactive art  71 (Conway and Siegelman, 2004, p. 124). Wiener’s Yellow Peril report was paradigm changing in three ways. Technologically, it demonstrated a transition from power engineering to a new applied field of communication engineering (integrating datasets, radar beams, radio waves, etc.); in mathematical terms, it ingeniously combined statistical methods of extrapolation (predicting the future from the patterns of the past) and interpolation (estimating where something is between two known points); and militarily it created a powerful and influential approach to weapons design that launched a whole new agenda for future cybernetic combinations of military hardware and software. Wiener’s pyrotechnic paper made plain to his wartime colleagues that a technological revolution, if not yet a full-blown scientific revolution, was close at hand … [opening] a new scientific terrain where the tools for controlling every form of modern technology from electronic gadgets to gun turrets, would reside forever after. … properly credited as the founding document of the new technical science of communication. (Conway and Siegelman, 2004, p. 116–18) Just a few years later, fellow cybernetician John von Neumann—another famous child prodigy who, like Wiener, was able to speak ancient Greek as a young boy—made his military mark indelibly as a chief scientist working on both the design and the launch strategy of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Wiener was a sharp contrast to the nationalistic, militarist-minded von Neumann, and was utterly appalled by the technological slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents. He immediately took up a strong leftist and pacifist stance, and entirely turned his back on military research, declaring: ‘to provide scientific information is not a necessarily innocent act, and may entail the gravest of consequences’ (quoted in Kline, 2015, p. 85). In 1946, he refused on moral grounds to allow his groundbreaking, classified AA paper to be shared with the Boeing Aircraft company to assist their own guided missile research; and in January 1947 published a full and angry renunciation of military research in ‘A Scientist Rebels’. Military intelligence agencies woke up quickly and took notice of this self-declared rebel, and within hours the FBI officially classified him as a category C suspect subversive who may threaten national security. But in truth they knew him already, and had been watching his activities for 7 years since 1940 when they had tenuously decided to label him a communist, and covertly kept track of his close friendship with a British communist, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane. As far as the FBI was concerned, with ‘A Scientist Rebels’, the boy-genius who had long since broken bad had now simply broken cover, and come out as the leftist ban-the-bomb pacifist he was. He was

72  Interactive art dangerous, and worse still, open about it, and they would monitor Wiener’s activities closely for many years to come.

Guns, three bodies, and a virtual human shield A remote-controlled gun, politics, surveillance, and cybernetics all converge in a durational performance originally called Shoot an Iraqi, but later changed to Domestic Tension (2007), since the FlatFile Galleries in Chicago where it was staged deemed the title too provocative. For 24-hours a day for one month, Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal lived within an installation room in the gallery, with a high-tech metal robot arm placed in the center of the space, which online participants could rotate and move to track him. This remote-controlled arm was a paintball gun that participants continually aimed and fired—primarily at Bilal, who wore protective goggles and moved around the space, ducking and dodging the shots—but also at pieces of furniture, although the bed where he slept was below the gun’s aim and reach. The associated website received 80 million hits during the month-long performance. It incorporated a live video stream without sound, with the camera mounted on the gun to provide the same subjective POV as a first person shooter game; and ‘gamers’ were what Bilal called his interactive audience from 136 countries who fired a total of 65,000 yellow paintballs at him. Clio Unger relates that Bilal had ‘previously struggled with posttraumatic stress disorder after his escape from Iraq during the First Gulf War [and] experienced a resurfacing of the disorder in the course of the project’ (Unger, 2015, p. 203). His brother Haji was killed in the war, and Bilal considers that his death was orchestrated by someone … pressing buttons from thousands of miles away, sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a computer completely oblivious to the terror and destruction they were causing to a whole family—a whole society—halfway across the world (Bilal and Lyndersen, 2008, p. 10). The piece recalls American artist Chris Burden’s infamous Shoot (1971), a quintessentially existential gallery performance where he had a friend shoot a real bullet into his arm. Wiener’s Cybernetics book is subtitled—or Communication and Control in the Animal and Machine—and the audience participants’ real agency to communicate with and control the system stretched to introducing entirely new elements and programming codes. At one point, hackers reprogrammed the gun so that with each remote mouse click it shot a barrage of multiple paintballs, converting the robot mechanism into an automatic machinegun. Other users responded by forming collectives to protect Bilal from the barrage, with a group calling themselves the ‘Virtual Human Shield’ working to a schedule to ensure one of

Interactive art  73

Figure 3.2  Details from Wafaa Bilal’s month-long, being-for-others performance Domestic Tension (2007), where his online audience fired a total of 65,000 yellow paintballs at him. (Courtesy of Driscoll Babcock Galleries; © Wafaa Bilal.)

them was always online, clicking continually whenever the gun was moving toward Bilal, to move it to the left and off-target. It thus became a classic cybernetic system with the nodes and consequent ‘noise’ expanding, evolving and becoming self-organizing through what Bilal termed a ‘form of direct democracy’ (quoted in Unger, 2015, p. 29). It is also what Apter terms ‘a complex purposeful system’ in his ‘Cybernetics and Art’ (1969) article, since the gun was able to be handled by several participants at once, and its aim and accuracy was always dependent on how many were operating, cooperating and pointing in the same direction. Domestic Tension is a proliferation of feedback loops upon feedback loops.

The Feedback Age Ours is the age of the feedback loop. The information age of the late twentieth century heralded mass digitization and electronic archiving, associated new paradigms of search and retrieval, and reconceived understandings of knowledge through, or even as, interactivity. With the public launch of the

74  Interactive art World Wide Web in 1991 and the onset of ubiquitous electronic person-toperson communication, firstly via email, games and chatrooms, and later through social media, the importance of the feedback loop grew to become the defining phenomenon of our time.1 The information age has given way to The Feedback Age. The hunger for electronic feedback swiftly went from ravenous to insatiable, progressing from being a desire and convenience in the 1990s to a requirement by the year 2000, and thereafter metamorphosed (for some) into an obsession and addiction. By early June 2018, with the iPhone less than 10 years old, even the CEO of Apple Tim Cook was lamenting, and not entirely disingenuously, a modern disease of smartphone addiction (Meyer, 2018). His voice echoed that of Wiener, the father of cybernetics in 1954, who in another era warned Americans that: There is a very real danger in this country in bowing down before the brass calf, the idol, which is the gadget. … We cannot worship the gadget and sacrifice the human being to it, but a situation is easily ­possible in which we may incur a disaster. … If we want to live with the machine, we must understand the machine. (Wiener, 2003 [1954], p. 71) While cybernetics did not invent the feedback loop, from the mid-twentieth century it played a significant role in evangelizing and popularizing it, and establishing it as a fundamental idea that would influence the direction of seismic developments, including digital computers and networking infrastructures. Cybernetics also originally defined much of the vocabulary and language of these systems, with terms such as input, output and feedback being used by the early cyberneticians, from whence they were adopted and enshrined within computer parlance and popular consciousness. The cybernetic loop is a default component of the contemporary existential condition; it defines our age and its fixation with sending out messages, signals and symbols, and waiting impatiently for feedback. The so-called posthuman is first-and-foremost a creature of the feedback loop, and even in the pre-Internet 1960s, Marshall McLuhan was discussing the loop in relation to how technologies bring about profound impacts on society, affect human life and identity, and trigger changes to the human brain itself. Like many in the 1960s, McLuhan was both intrigued and influenced by cybernetics, and presented a paper ‘Cybernation and Culture’ at a cybernetics symposium in Washington DC in 1964, declaring that: ‘The electronic age of cybernation is unifying and integrating’ and arguing ‘all human cultures as responsive cybernetic systems’ (McLuhan, 1966 [1964], p. 98–99). In 1965, he expanded on ‘the medium is the message’ idea to suggest that: ‘Everything under electric conditions is looped. You become folded over

Interactive art  75 into yourself. Your image of yourself changes completely’ (McLuhan, 1965). More recently, in her consideration of the status of art production in a world of fake news, white noise, and naked capitalism, Hito Steyerl observes that time appears to have lost its forward gear and ‘History seems to have morphed into a loop’ (Steyerl, 2017 p. 2).

Negative feedback and how Dani Ploeger became a human thermostat Feedback comes in varied forms, but in cybernetics the specific notion of negative feedback is a core principle, and involves the control and regulation of a system via responses to information it receives and changes detected in relation to reference values. It generally operates according to on-off messages (for example, Shannon’s Ultimate Machine (1952) hand-in-a-box shut-off circuit discussed in Chapter 2), and works equally in analog or digital systems. A classic example is the thermostat, where the desired t­emperature is preset as its reference value. The system’s thermometer monitors ambient temperature and responds directly and compensatively, i.e., negatively, to the error signal feedback it receives, to reverse or reduce the effects. When there is upward or downward variation from the reference value, it activates a heater or cooler, then shuts it off when the reference value is re-established; hence it is also known as balancing feedback. The Dutch artist Dani Ploeger in effect becomes a human thermostat in SUIT (2010), a performance where he jumps up and down wearing a transparent PVC boiler suit (he is naked underneath) rigged with sensors and a loudspeaker. His thermostatic reference value is 100% humidity level inside the suit, and a projection displays the progressively increasing percentage figures behind him as he jumps and sweats, while the bio-signals of his rising heartbeat are sonified and amplified via the suit’s integrated fetal-sensor device. When the 100% humidity point is reached, the system shuts down, and the performance finishes abruptly. Ploeger is explicit about the cybernetic nature of both his concept and system, relating SUIT to Hayles’ cybernetic posthuman body as a ‘material-informational entity’ and to Bateson’s argument that the relevance of the human being within cybernetics is not the physical individual but the ‘network of pathways and messages’ leading to and from them (Ploeger, 2011, p. 158). This negative feedback principle is at the center of the tug-of-war battles between Bilal’s online aggressors and his defenders in Domestic Tension. For the latter, the reference value is the gun pointing anywhere that is a safe distance from Bilal’s position, and they respond with negative feedback and move the gun off-course whenever there is a change to the reference value and Bilal is in the line of fire and in danger of being hit. Interestingly, in his analysis of the work, Unger cites cybernetician and neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch (Unger, 2015, p. 215), using the term heterarchy

76  Interactive art that he coined to describe the non-hierarchical mechanisms of neuronal networks. Unger explains that in similar fashion, Bilal’s work positions audience and performer on the same equal and horizontal levels, rather than within a hierarchy. In cybernetic terms, it can therefore potentially be reorganized, renegotiated, or combined into different formations, systems, or circuits. The principles of human-engineered self-regulating cybernetic systems stretch back over two millennia, to the third century BCE, when Philon of Byzantium invented a lamp that responded to low levels of oil in its burner by releasing more oil back into it from a separate reservoir above. The system used a pipe inside the burner which was shut off when oil covered it, but was exposed when the level dropped too low, prompting air to rise through the pipe and allowing oil to flow out through its capillary tubes (Mayr, 1970, p. 18). These are relatively simple systems, but more complex ones, including humans, have the ability to learn, and use ‘inductive inference’ in assessing multiple information signals and activating negative feedback in response: ‘if there are several kinds of disturbance and, consequently, several kinds of error signals, the system has to discover which of the activities in its behavioral repertoire is most likely to correct a particular error signal’ (Glaserfeld, 1979, p. 69). Cybernetician Humberto Maturana explains: ‘A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner; what occurred once will occur again. Its organization (both genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works’ (Maturana, 1970, p. 15–16). The human body’s cybernetic system uses multiple negative feedback processes in an inductive manner to resist viruses and combat illness, and to maintain homeostasis by regulating blood sugar, pH and hormone levels. For example, following meals, the pancreas detects any significant rise in glucose levels and compensates by producing more insulin, or when the body gets too hot, sweating is triggered as a cooling mechanism. Negative feedback processes are therefore one of a number of key examples that cyberneticians present when drawing analogies between humans and computers. Others include the observation that both are information systems that are determined by inputs and outputs, and are defined by control, intelligence and communication. As Wiener argues, elaborating on Warren McCulloch’s research into neural networks, the binary 0 or 1, true-or-false system that underpins the computer also parallels the human nervous system, where the individual fibers follow an ‘all or nothing’ pattern: they fire or do not fire; they do not fire halfway. … the nervous system is not only a computing system but a control machine. … Feedback mechanisms are not only well known to occur in the involuntary actions of the human body, but … they are necessary for its very life. (Wiener, 2003 [1954], p. 68–69)

Interactive art  77

Figure 3.3  Detail of the gallery installation for Wafaa Bilal’s performance Domestic Tension (2007), with the audience-controlled robotic arm paintball gun in the foreground and Bilal seated in the background, wearing protective goggles. (Courtesy of Driscoll Babcock Galleries; © Wafaa Bilal.)

Three types of body … and being-for-others In Domestic Tension, Bilal’s internal nervous system is subjected to the extremely visceral on-off firing patterns triggered by the external feedback mechanism he created. His interactive performance also starkly encapsulates and enacts many of Existentialism’s prevailing themes, from being-towardsdeath (where, as we have seen, contemplation of one’s own death is seen as a decisive spur toward realizing one’s personal responsibility and freedom), to its darker ‘moods’ of nausea, dread, and alienation. The piece also presents a potent representation of Sartre’s most famous line as a playwright: ‘Hell is other people’ (Sartre, 1944). Through the durational process he undertakes, Bilal’s body can be considered to have progressively and startlingly experienced all the three statuses of embodiment that Sartre defines in Being and Nothingness: as subject— the body-for-itself (as we experience it); as object—the body-for-others (as others see us, and we them); and as simultaneously subject and object— the body-for-itself-for-others. At the commencement of the project, Bilal

78  Interactive art is a feeling, experiencing subject: a body-for-itself, awake and energized, sparring playfully with the online opponents. As things progress, the body’s status as an object of the Other’s gaze and a body-for-others’ unremitting abuse becomes more and more pronounced. By the end, his body appears to be an exhausted, abject, and disconnected ‘thing’, yet Bilal still remains noble and defiant, and thus remains somewhere in the liminal space between subject and object: the body-for-itself-for-others. But Bilal’s default state here is what Existentialism terms Being-forothers, and his self-objectification also plays on anti-Islamic prejudice and xenophobia: ‘he made himself the image of this stereotype by literally inviting people to “shoot an Iraqi” … he made himself into and was read as “the foreigner”.’ (Unger, 2015, p.  215) Sartre discusses the look of the Other (another person) as something which renders us momentarily as ­self-conscious objects rather than subjects, and unable to control the ­Other’s judgment of us. He uses the example of a voyeur caught in the act of looking through a keyhole, who will suddenly experience self-­ consciousness and a feeling a shame: ‘pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object, but in general of being an object’ (Sartre, 1994, p. 288). S­ artre argues that this unexpected confrontation acts to deny solipsism (the view that the self or one’s mind may be the only thing that is certain to exist) by offering proof of the absolute reality of other people, since we would not experience such feelings of judgment and shame if other people did not exist and were not ‘subjects’ too: ‘being seen by the other is the truth of seeing the other’ (p. 257). For Sartre, the shock of the look of the Other thus ‘instigates a metamorphosis of our world’ (Reynolds, 2006, p. 95) that prompts not only the realization of our being-as-object but also a revelation of our being-for-others, which he affords a special ontological category in its own right. The Other can pose simultaneously a threat or a route to liberation. The Other marks a potentially ‘opposed freedom’ and conflict of consciousness between two subjects: an antagonistic enemy that may limit one’s freedom— ‘From the moment I exist, I establish a de facto limit to the freedom of the Other’ writes Sartre in 1948 (quoted in Boulé, 2009, p. 12). But the Other may also be an ally to support and enable freedom, and by the 1960s, S­ artre repeatedly emphasizes the notion of reciprocity with the Other as being crucial to the personal realization of freedom, since both Self and Other are forms of praxis which recognize one another and help realize the other (Boulé, 2009). Sartre devotes 200 pages of his Being and Nothingness to a section entitled Being-For-Others, and declares dramatically and memorably: ‘I am for others, the Other is revealed to me as the subject for whom I am an object’ (Sartre, 2003 [1943], p. 375, emphasis in original). For many people this remains a less well-known and surprising aspect of a philosophy more famous for its emphasis on independence and (potentially selfish) individualism. But for both cyberneticians and Existentialists, the concrete approaches to Being

Interactive art  79 are defined by relationships with others—with wider networks and systems in cybernetics, and with other human beings in Existentialism. Through these intense connections, and through our choices in actions and relationships, ‘the human being approaches the mystery of being and becomes filled with the assurance that one’s life is lived in the company of an eternal presence’ (Macdonald, 2000, p. 85).

Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber: availability and universal reciprocity Sartre’s discourse on Being-for-Others was partly influenced by the writings of the Christian Existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, whose ideas on the one fusing with the many through love, compassion, ‘creative fidelity’ and what he terms disponibilité (availability) distinguish his thought and contributions to the philosophical movement. In the face of the world’s emptiness and absence, our sincere and open interactions with the presence of others allows us to become truly present, and presented to ourselves; and this insight has bearing on our understandings of numerous interactive artworks as well as wider technological culture. Disponibilité involves being present by revealing oneself to Others, ­privileging them and putting oneself at their disposal, remaining available, ‘open and exposed’, and (as in cybernetics) responsive and adaptable to all external and environmental factors (Marcel, 1951, p. 145). Marcel was an atheist who converted to Catholicism in 1929 at the age of 39, and during and following the First World War, he worked devotedly for four years for the French Red Cross. In particular, he specialized in contacting and supporting families of men missing in action, which opened him to what he called ‘a boundless compassion for the distress to which each day testified anew’ (Marcel, 1984, p.  20). He identifies participation, communal being, relationships, and love as the key to affective living and as a route to transcendence, and his abiding devotion to his wife Jacqueline informed his praxis. ­Existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers follows Marcel’s example of defining his highest purpose as his absolute dedication to his spouse, while Kierkegaard defines marriage as ‘the most important exploration which man can undertake’ (quoted in Hubben, 1952, p. 36). To the shock of some, following Sartre’s death, Beauvoir pronounced that her greatest work was not her writing, but her relationship with him. The Jewish Existentialist philosopher Martin Buber’s book I and Thou (1923) predates both Sartre and Marcel’s discourses.2 He describes two types of human relationship: a reciprocal I-Thou where the Other is afforded due respect and an open dialogue, and an objectifying I-It, where the Other is considered a detached and separate object of control. The book influenced Existentialist thought as well as Bakhtin’s ideas on dialog and language, proposing that ‘All real living is meeting’ (Buber, 1958, p. 11) and that ‘one achieves true self by relating with others’ (Kiner, 1968,

80  Interactive art p.  3). The Singapore exhibition You, Other; I, Another (2018, curator Dr. Susie Lingham) draws its inspiration and theme from Buber’s work and provides another example of the resurgence of Existentialist ideas and influence on recent curatorial practice. The exhibition’s artists Regina De Rozario, Mithun Jayaram, Mumtaz Maricar, Siew Kee Liong, Leroy Sofyan, ­Vincent Twardzik Ching, Victor Emmanuel, Susie Wong, and Yeo Chee Kiong explore the philosophy’s perspectives overtly, interrogating ideas that are central to Buber, Marcel, and Sartre: subject-object relationships, the Other, and being-for-others. Indeed, the exhibition’s preview text reads like it could have been written by any one of them, while the associated ideas of oscillation and ‘currents of reciprocity’ resonate with cybernetic modes: Relation is reciprocity. My You acts on me as I act on it. […] Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity. (Martin Buber, I and Thou)3 … Otherness is an oscillation; is in oscillation. The binary-dynamic of finding the self in the other has always been tipped at moments, and shifts to finding the other in the self—recognising difference within oneself is ongoing, and unnerving, for every ‘I’. … In what way do we feel ‘other’, and how do we feel for and with ‘the other’ who differs from our self-sensed otherness? (The Private Museum 2018, emphasis in original).

Reversing the selfie … look behind you! In 2010, Wafaa Bilal had a 10-megapixel digital camera surgically implanted into the back of his head, in another extreme experiment in the service and cause of being-for-others. For 3rdi (2010–11), the camera relayed one live image per minute onto a website for an entire year, including his travels between Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the USA. The camera has always been a witness, but here the witnessing functions differently: only partially constructed by the artist, arbitrarily framed, and frequently pointed toward the darkness (of the pillows at night below his head), and the awful Nothingness that lies coiled like Nietzsche’s snake and Sartre’s worm at the heart of Being. The relayed images transmit beings, nothingness, and fractured narratives for the viewer to discern and interpret. Bilal says the project arose ‘from a need to objectively capture my past as it slips behind me’ and notes that it creates a form of storytelling which uses a ‘narrative triangle … for the telling and retelling of stories, whether they belong to us or we make them ours’ (Bilal, 2012). For Existentialism, the notion of what may ‘belong’ to us is pivotal to core ideas around freedom, choice, and action—what we ‘make’ ours decisively and independently, as opposed to what we accept passively, or share in unquestioning conformity with the crowd.

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Figure 3.4  Wafaa Bilal’s surgically implanted rear-view camera for 3rdi (2010–11). (Courtesy Driscoll Babcock Galleries and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art; © Wafaa Bilal.)

3rdi’s cybernetic system involves a particular mode of Internet feedback looping that crosses boundaries of form, and media modes (durational live ‘performance’, photography, web interactivity) and links together (to adopt Bilal’s ‘narrative triangle’ idea) an artist; random, uncontrolled images; and free audience interpretation and feedback. These different triggers, viewpoints, modes, and loops are integrated within a unified system. From an Existentialist viewpoint, he could be seen to become what in Buber’s terms is ‘The highest human being … who makes himself a “Nothing”, a mere openness to the world’ (Ussher, 1968, p. 17). Moreover, Bilal’s life and art are (appropriately) fused, and intensely so, just as Sartre maintains that: ‘my life

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Figure 3.5  Four of the one-frame-per-minute live images uploaded to a website from the camera in the back of Wafaa Bilal’s head during his yearlong performance 3rdi (2010–11). (Courtesy Driscoll Babcock Galleries and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art; © Wafaa Bilal.)

and my philosophy are one and the same’ (quoted in Cohen-Sohal, 1987, p.  20); and he operates authentically through decisive action that opens himself to others. For an entire year, he stands by his actions and is unable to conceal or lie about them since they are made public—or at least fragments of them are, from a rear view perspective. But as Jacob Golomb notes: ‘an act either is or is not authentic. One cannot stipulate degrees and progressive levels of its so-called realization’ (1995, p. 54). It is also pertinent to reflect on 3rdi in terms of wider cultural impulses, and as a type of reverse Selfie: a retrogressive viewpoint of the back of the artist’s life; and Bilal calls it ‘anti-photography’, since the traditions of the artist’s conscious intervention by hand and eye are removed. The ubiquitous Selfie is an ultimate Cybernetic-Existentialist phenomenon, where the feedback loop connects the same sender and receiver with their own signal, and where ideas of freedom and self-creation take on a grotesque form, as the most negative tendencies of Existentialism (solipsism, narcissism) engender a type of ultimate bad faith—the term Sartre adopts to denote inauthenticity. The Selfie personifies alienation and the absurd, and is a phenomenon explored by a number of artists such as Amalia Ulman, who posts provocative

Interactive art  83 self-portraits in her underwear on Instagram, triggering an avalanche of comments that she responds to in return. These feedback loops are an essential part of her social media performances, which employ, as she puts it, ‘an undertone of possession, seduction, anxiety and insecurity’ (quoted in Jones (Rhett), 2015). The easy click-and-upload instantaneity of the Selfie in contemporary culture prompts a casual self-love and self-delusion where, to use Sartre’s formulation, the camera’s ‘compression of time … separates me from myself’ (1994 [1943], p.  238]; and in parallel with ideas of self-­separation causes a sort of triple disjunction in relation to Sartre’s three notions of the body. He suggests that the first and second of these—the (subject) body-for-itself and the (object) body-for-others—are forever separated and incommunicable. Yet it seems that the Selfie and associated social media incarnations may be an (ultimately vain and delusional) attempt to square the circle, to make subject and object synonymous and indistinguishable. The contemporary instinct is not only to admire or worship the self, but also to construct the body as an overly simplistic construction of Sartre’s third notion of embodiment—the body-for-itself-for-others—celebrating its status as simultaneously subject and object, yet ignoring the fundamental

Figure 3.6  Detail of Sophie Calle’s gallery exhibition La Filature/The Shadow (1981) based on her project The Detective (1981) where she renders herself both a willingly stalked subject and the object of a stranger’s gaze. (Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin; © Sophie Calle/ADAGP, Paris, 2019.)

84  Interactive art or ‘pre-reflective’ recognition that these two ‘bodies’ are always-already disconnected (Reynolds, 2006, p. 78).

Sophie Calle and Simone de Beauvoir: watching the detectives In The Detective (1981), French artist Sophie Calle arranged for her mother to hire a private detective agency called ‘Duluc’ to ‘follow me, to report my daily activities, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence. The investigation was conducted on April 16, 1981’ (Calle and Auster, 1999). She thus (secretively) renders herself an object for a stranger’s gaze and becomes a being-for-Others, but under her own terms, just as Beauvoir’s affirms that: ‘To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object’ (1997 [1949], p. 400). She also actively puts into place a proto-cybernetic investigative system of real-time surveillance, propagating responsive feedback loops of photographic art and textual documentation. In a subsequent exhibition documenting this ‘evidence of my existence’, the detective’s dispassionate, factual report and photographs are contrasted with Calle’s personal and emotive reflections—including her feelings on revisiting the site of her first kiss—on precisely the same activities and journeys undertaken. The exhibition’s title The Shadow (1981) reflects the fact that Calle’s face is never fully visible in the photos and her identity always remains at least partly concealed. On first studying the detective’s report, she ‘felt as if she had become a stranger, as if she had been turned into an imaginary being’ (Auster, 1992, p.  63); Calle fictionalizes herself, subordinates herself to the gaze of Others, and makes herself an Other. The relation between the self and the Other is central for Existentialism. Others objectify and validate us, and we them. Others act both to split our consciousness of ourselves (as simultaneously subject and object) and to affirm our intimate connection with, and dependence on the world. Thus, there is both a holism and schizophrenia to the Existentialist worldview. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes how ‘The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself’ (1997 [1949], p. 16) with ideas of a duality of the Self and the Other being a pervasive theme of ancient myths and primitive societies: ‘Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought’ (p. 17). She relates how such notions of alterity affect human cultures and behaviors, from small-town suspicions of strangers to class divisions and racist hostilities. Rather than the fellowship and solidarity of a Mitsein (being-with-others), oppositions occur and following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed—he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object (p. 17).

Interactive art  85 She famously argues that in precisely the same way, patriarchal traditions have compelled women to assume the status of the Other through a dominant and domineering perspective that: humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being … she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other (p. 16). She discusses this in terms of a master slave relationship wherein the feminine has been ‘fashioned’, and she attacks the logic whereby men cast women in the role of the Other. But she is as fiercely critical of female compliance and lack of resistance: ‘Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? … Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?’ (p. 18) She turns to examining the circumstances limiting women’s liberty and ways to overcome them, seeing freedom as her fundamental concern: ‘I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty’ (p. 23). Beauvoir’s classic work shook the world, and changed the ­attitudes of men as well as women, with Camus noting how simply ridiculous it made men look; Bakewell calls it ‘the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement.’ (Bakewell, 2016, p. 210) Calle’s particular take on Beauvoirean freedom, the Sartrean look, Otherness, and the master slave relationship in The Detective was a reversal of numerous previous acts of following and surveillance where she had herself been the observer and detective: For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them [Filatures parisiennes, 1978–79]. At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him [Suite vénitienne, 1980]. (Calle, 1983)

Following, finding, and returning the look Such spontaneous, life-changing choices, ‘grand projects’ and authentic acts are the stuff of Existentialist legend, and are key to Calle’s unique appeal and place within the art world: she takes ‘a kind of gamble with civility, with ethics, with boundaries, with good citizenship, and with the question

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Figure 3.7  Two photographs from the book Suite Vénitienne / Please Follow Me (1983), documenting Sophie Calle’s actions subsequent to her making the decision to follow a stranger to Venice. (Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin; © Sophie Calle/ADAGP, Paris, 2019.)

of what we can endure in life, and death’ (Heti, 2017). Similarly impulsive existential acts by Calle include undertaking military training in her youth with a radical Palestinian group ‘not because of any fundamental belief in the group’s values but simply to see what the experience would be like’ (Rinder, 2005, p.  13), and spending time employed as a stripper to overcome her fear of ‘being psychologically destroyed by the look of others … [instead] I looked at them with a look of contempt … and they were paralysed’ (quoted in Jeffries, 2009). She thus subverts the notion of Otherness by directly confronting and returning the look of the voyeur, and inverting subject-object relations. Sartre was fascinated by such defiant acts of returning the judging look of the Other, and on related interpersonal power struggles, not least in sexual relationships. His biography on Jean Genet centers on a key moment when the young Genet was walked in on in the act of stealing from his adopted parents, with his hands in a drawer, and was told he was a thief. Like Sartre’s story of the voyeur, his perception changed suddenly from subject to object, and became another name thought to be shameful—thief. But Genet decided to stare back, adopt the label defiantly, and to become forever defined as such: frozen in the gaze of the Other … his alienation gave him his escape. From then on he owned his outsider identity as a thief, vagrant,

Interactive art  87 homosexual and prostitute. He took control of his oppression by inverting it. … This is why Sartre calls him a saint: where a saint transfigures suffering into sanctity, Genet transfigures oppression into freedom. (Bakewell, 2016, p. 219) In Venice, Calle attempts to trace her subject, Henri B.’s whereabouts by visiting a police station, telephoning hundreds of hotels, locating him and then stalking and photographing him. While her methodology is occasionally arbitrary (once following a flower delivery boy just in case it led her to him), for the most part it is rigorous, scientific, and cybernetic: establishing a network of surveillance nodes, interactive strategies and information feedback loops. She elicits the covert assistance of numerous strangers, including getting them to make phone calls for her and persuading a woman living opposite Henri B. to allow Calle access to her room to photograph his comings and goings. The work is documented in the book Suite Vénitienne/ Please Follow Me (1983), filled with beautiful, evocative black and white photographs, many with Henri B. in an overcoat striding away from us along Venice’s winding streets, or strolling amid elegant, back-lit arches: an

Figure 3.8  Henri B. and his friend in Venice—strangers whom Sophie Calle secretly followed, and photographed in 1980. From Suite Vénitienne/Please Follow Me (1983). (Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin; © Sophie Calle/ ADAGP, Paris, 2019.)

88  Interactive art enigmatic study of ‘the measure of the distance in between’ them (Rinder, 2005, p. 13) and a type of obsessional, unrequited, visual love letter. Calle’s documentation includes her textual reflections on feeling in love with Henri B, yet knowing that her emotion also relates to his elusiveness; and the presence of another woman arm-in-arm with him in some photos adds drama and poignancy to her words. Hannah Pezzack calls it ‘one of conceptual art’s greatest feats … [that] explores the unexplainable ­fascination with a figure lost in a city crowd’ and suggests that nowadays we replicate Calle’s actions. using our own personal stalking techniques online. Social media awards the kind of anonymity and detective tactics that Calle could only dream of. … In flicking through the holiday snaps of a distant mutual Facebook friend are we replicating the quest for closeness with strangers that Calle dedicated her life to?’ (Pezzack, 2018). The first-wave cybernetic principle of ‘communication and control’— which was applied to military ‘command and control’ applications during World War II such as Wiener’s work on his automated AA gun—is interesting to consider in relation to Calle’s work. Like a General peering at the enemy’s movements through binoculars, she seeks to have a real knowledge, including moment-by-moment observation, and command of everything her subject does; yet as a secret observer she cannot assert any control. She is a type of free-spirited wanderer and flâneur (or flâneuse) in Baudelaire’s terms—whom she describes as a key influence on her—but one whose routes are precisely determined by another, who in effect unknowingly controls her. Her initial choices to follow people are decisive and existential, but thereafter she delegates her choices to the Other, entirely following the stranger’s leads; she explores and enjoys opposites: ‘control and freedom, choice and compulsion, intimacy and distance’ (Jeffries, 2009). In cybernetic parlance she is both command-er and control-led, while in Existentialist terms she renders herself simultaneously master and slave, subject and object. Calle’s cat and mouse tailing and detection sets up a recursive, interactive cybernetic system where two strangers converge, crisscross, and circle one another, as though in some fateful yet absurd film noir thriller.

Jennicam Jennifer Ringley, a self-confessed computer geek, used a camera to render herself a Being-for-others in the relatively early days of 24/7 online ­webcams. In the process she broke all ‘box office’ records to become the first superstar created by and on the Internet. Her Jennicam (1996–2003) was one of the web’s first viral phenomena, reported in 1997 by Reuters to

Interactive art  89 have over 20 million viewers a day, who simply watched her life unfold; or an empty room when she was not around. Although part of this popularity has been put down to rare but occasional glimpses of naked flesh or sexual activity, Ringley is clear that she initially rigged the webcam when she moved to college so that her mother could see her. She says that she subsequently broadcast her home life (or slowly changing still frames of it) for almost eight years ‘not because I want to be watched, but because I simply don’t mind being watched.’ This web blog statement is one of many with a distinctly Existentialist ring: ­another reads ‘People are always waiting for real life to start’. Jennicam was a type of cybernetic organism that expanded to connect, ­affect and interact with the external environment including through a veritable media ‘frenzy’ and numerous copycat sites. The feedback loops were red hot with interaction, as fan sites and chatrooms dedicated to R ­ ingley proliferated, and she received—and sometimes answered—­ hundreds of emails every day. As we watched her, we were also existentially confronting ourselves, exploring our positions as subjects or objects of what she called ‘a sort of window into a virtual human zoo’. As we watched, we were hit—time and time again—by the monumental absurdity and aching banality of existence. It was utterly compelling. This was first-and-foremost a life ‘most ordinary’—eating, sleeping, watching TV—although there were highs and lows, and some surprise occurrences. But most fundamentally, we experienced the surprising profundity of the mundane, the hypnotic compulsion of the absurd, and the existential shock of a soap opera of Nothingness. It encapsulated Sartre’s insight at the end of his novel Nausea (1965) that Being is mere contingency, and has no meaning, it just is: ‘The essential thing is contingency. I mean that by definition, existence is not necessity. To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, let’s itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it’ (Sartre, 1965, p. 188). Dermot Moran calls contingency ‘Sartre’s first and greatest philosophical illumination … the concept that the world exists but does not have to be there’. Sartre’s atheism from the age of 12 years led him to the conclusion that with the removal of a deity, ‘there is no rationale, no overall plan, no intrinsic meaning in events. There is no necessity governing the fact of existence. Being just is. … [and] without a divine plan the world is literally meaningless, absurd’ (Moran, 2000, p. 356). What one encountered when logging in was as often Ringley’s absence as her presence, and Being and Nothingness provides such a perfect description of Jennicam that it could have been its subtitle. Sartre’s foregrounding of nothingness includes significant reflections on the nature of absence, and he provides various examples of negation, most famously a story of going to meet his friend Pierre in a café. When he walks in and realizes Pierre is not there, the space becomes entirely defined by his absence, rather than by the presence of the other people who are there. As new customers arrive and Sartre ­realizes they too are not Pierre, he nihilates and negates them, seeing

90  Interactive art them only in terms of what they are not, so that they ‘quickly decompose’. Everyone melts into the ground … Thus the original nihilation of all the figures which appear and are swallowed up in a total neutrality of the ground is the necessary condition for the appearance of the principal figure … Pierre. … I am witness to the successive disappearance of all the objects which I look at. (Sartre, 2003 [1943], p. 34) Although ostensibly the people, objects, and sounds denote that ‘the café is a fullness of being’, absence becomes entirely pervasive throughout it, as though ‘it is Pierre raising himself as nothingness on the ground of the nihilation of the café. So that what is offered to intuition is a flickering of nothingness … Pierre absent haunts this café’ (p. 33). This idea becomes one of the foundational pillars of Sartre’s philosophy since: we could not apprehend absence and perceive that which is not in the café were we not free, were consciousness not radically separate from the real of things (Being and Nothingness p27). These then, are the foundation for Sartre’s later insistence on our radical freedom. All his various examples of negation (i.e. questioning, destruction and absence) involve a rupture, or a break, from what is given, or from that which is, to posit that which is not given. He concludes from this that particular instances of negation are made possible by non-being (or Nothingness) and not the other way around. Nothingness is part of the ontology of the human-world relation, although it is human beings who are the beings by which Nothingness comes to things. (Reynolds, 2006, p. 65) Sartre articulates nothingness in terms of an interruption within being, and this also lies at the heart of Jennicam, where even when Ringley was there (in the house) she did not always appear to be there (within the camera’s view), or when her camera or Internet connection was down, there was, to use Gertrude Stein’s famous words, ‘no there there’. Sartre’s notion of experiencing ‘a flickering of nothingness’ is also particularly apposite, given the low, one per minute webcam frame rates in the early years, when each new image had a surprise ‘what-will-happen-next?’ element, with ‘nothing’ being a common reply. The metaphor of searching for Pierre and experiencing a sense of deepening, pervasive absence can nowadays be fittingly considered a metaphor for the endless online searching that has become a defining hallmark of contemporary culture. Whether navigating search engines or scrolling through social media screens to find your Pierre, large parts of human life now consist of fast finger flicks that continually open up ‘a flickering of nothingness.’

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The Blind Robot The fingers of a robot flicker slowly, and delicately explore your face in the one-person experience The Blind Robot (2012), a truly extraordinary communication and control system by French-Canadian artist Louis-Philippe Demers. You sit opposite a robot torso construction with two long, gangly

Figure 3.9  The Blind Robot (2012) gets physical with its creator, Louis-Philippe Demers (above) and a gallery visitor (below). (Courtesy of the artist and Ars Electronica. Photo: Florian Voggeneder.)

92  Interactive art arms, and hands with translucent fingers, with the same capacity for movements and degrees of articulation as its human counterpart. You are rendered a being-for-others as the hands of this Blind Robot (it has no head) proceed to touch you, exploring all of your face delicately, and in great detail, as a blind person might to understand or recognize someone’s appearance. The engagement and action that takes place is simple, yet highly unusual: one is not used to having one’s face touched and slowly explored in detail by a stranger, whether human or artificial. My own experience, in common with many others as evident from video documentation, is that it begins quite tensely and awkwardly, but soon gives way to a feeling of real connection, empathy, and intimacy: video footage shows many participants wide-eyed with wonder. The touch is inexplicably gentle and sensitive. As you trust the machine opposite and begin to ‘let go’ and open yourself to the Other, it becomes an emotional experience. More than that, it ignites a liberating, almost spiritual feeling. This seems the perfect posthuman art vehicle to enable participants to allow themselves to be, in Sartre’s terms, a being-for-others and in Marcel’s terms, disponible. As your face and body responds to the cybernetic touch—and many participants reciprocate by touching and caressing the robot’s hands—this feels to be the most honest, delicate, and authentic of feedback loops. This type of intimate, physical giving is normally reserved only for lovers.

Intimacy and trickery—the sighted leading the blind Except that the real toucher is not actually the delicate, vulnerable-looking robot in front of you. The commander and controller is the artist Demers himself, who sits hidden behind a one-way mirror watching you and is manually remote controlling the robot’s hands and fingers. This knowledge suddenly feels like some terrible betrayal. The séance is a fraud; the engagement is a sham. The realization that the origin of the touching is human rather than posthuman suddenly renders this tender and beautiful interaction a type of cynical molestation. But the revelation should come as no surprise—the touching is too soft, sensitive, and human for it not to be human. In a sense, both the participant and Demers are being-for-others in the work, and the set-up is carefully designed to ensure the ‘human touch’. In the technical rider for venues, Demers describes the construction of the false room to hide the operator, and the crucial positioning of the one-way glass to enable him to be directly facing, and in front of the participant (in the precise position just behind where the missing robot’s head would be): ‘the operator needs a direct line of sight to the robot (to achieve 3D perception)—a camera does not work … This is not to be divulged to the public at any point’ (Demers, 2016). The seemingly ‘magical’ cybernetic organism that is The Blind Robot is thus much more analogue and mechanical—and of course much more human—than it first appears. Demers drew inspiration from the famous

Interactive art  93 chess-playing automaton designed by Wolfgang de Kempelen in 1769. In an elaborate trick for paying audiences, the wooden automaton dressed in Turkish garb sat in front of a chessboard on top of a cabinet, the doors of which were dramatically opened to reveal it filled with wires, moving gears and whirring clockwork mechanisms. The doors were then closed, whereupon a hidden sliding mechanism brought a prone, expert chess-player (small or a dwarf) into a void gap within the cabinet. An audience member was invited to play chess with the Turk, and using a mirror system and levers to operate the automaton’s hand, the hidden expert would play and invariably beat the challengers, who reportedly included Benjamin Franklin and, in 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte. Wiener was fascinated, if not obsessed, by such machines and their histories, and at the age of 9 years believed that with the correct incantations, he could turn a doll into a baby (Conway and Siegelman, 2005, p. 14). He attempted to create what he called ‘quasi-living automata’ and in Cybernetics (1948) he discusses the history of the automaton at length, casting it like a simulacrum that reflects both the ideology and the living technique of the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre and sinister concept of the Golem, that figure of clay into which the Rabbi of Prague breathed life … In the time of Newton, the automaton becomes the clockwork music box, with the little effigies ­pirouetting stiffly on top. In the nineteenth century, the automaton is a glorified heat engine, burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen of human muscles. Finally, the present automaton opens doors by means of photocells, or points guns to a place at which a radar beam picks up an airplane, or computes the solution of a differential equation. (Wiener, 1961 [1948], p. 39–40) In his artist statements, Demers discusses how ‘the social context of blindness deepens the gap in perception but enhances the emotional resonance’, and describes one of his stated aims as being to transform current conceptions of the robot arm as a high precision tool into a ‘fragile, imprecise and emotionally loaded agent. … The Blind Robot has the complex task of touching people softly, something achieved by hardly any contemporary robots’ (Demers, 2015). He goes on to discuss a range of issues that connect with both Existentialism and cybernetics—from human psychologies and posthuman ontologies to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: The Blind Robot is a direct reference to the works of Merleau-Ponty and his example of the body extension of the blind man’s cane. … the cane does more than sense the world; it also reveals the blind man as blind. It is this very aspect that the Blind Robot exploits: to create an empathic situation and a positive pre-disposition to the engagement. … just by

94  Interactive art the fact that I state that this is a blind robot, you will accept that this machine can touch you in very intimate places … your brain is not sure what to think of it. … it becomes a Turing test of agency and perceived artificial life. (Demers, 2015) The Blind Robot is a Turing test, a blind date with the uncanny, and a classic ­Cybernetic-Existentialist work. Cybernetician Gregory Bateson later improvised around Merleau-Ponty’s classic cane conundrum to argue that such boundaries are porous or illusory. To ask if a blind man’s stick or a scientist’s microscope are ‘parts of the men who use them … is not communicationally meaningful’ since they are clearly crucial ‘pathways of communication’ for them and e­ stablish a network, ‘but no boundary line—e.g., halfway up the stick—can be relevant in a description of the topology of this net’ (Bateson, 1972, p. 251). It remains fascinating to me that so many philosophical ideas and allegories are shared directly across both cybernetics and Existentialism, and how evident and significant they become when one interrogates contemporary artworks. The same concepts around the blind man’s stick were considered by both Bateson and Merleau-Ponty (and now artist Louis-Philippe ­Demers), with the same broad conclusions reached. Bateson is a figure whose thoughts and achievements also relate to our other field of discussion, with his particular ideas on cybernetic feedback loops according with the concept of being-for-others: ‘Bateson holds that we live in a world that is only made of relationships. And without context, our words and actions have no meaning’ (Boeckel, 2011). Similarly, Wiener’s early paper on ‘Relativism’ (1914) argues that both science and philosophy operate entirely relationally, through comparing different concepts with one another. There are no absolutes and even the technical laboratory scientist can only ever work through measurements and formulae that are ‘mere approximations’, and will never have a completely ‘accurate knowledge of the degree of approximateness of his approximations’ (Wiener, 1914, p. 567). Bateson and Wiener maintain that every person and every thing is entirely relative to other people and things, that: no experience is self-sufficient, that no knowledge is absolutely certain … no concept can mean what it does entirely independently of everything else … Relativism is a philosophy of doubt, but it is of a liberating, not an enslaving, doubt. (p. 567, 577) Such ideas cast a clear picture in relation to Demers’ trickery and ‘sleight of hand’ that holds true for both cybernetic and Existentialist perspectives: the only thing that truly matters in The Blind Robot is the relationship between robot and participant—and that interaction is filled to the brim with existential weight and meaning, and cybernetic hyper-connection. It is an

Interactive art  95 unforgettable experience igniting a sense of human joy as well as pathos, and perfectly encapsulates our uncertainties as we embark on our uncanny transition into the realm of the posthuman.

Santiago Sierra: permanently marking others There are of course darkly negative as well as positive aspects to the two fields of this study, and Spanish artist Santiago Sierra emphasizes what some may consider the worst aspects of cybernetic ‘command and control’ systems while simultaneously exposing the status of poor and disadvantaged people as being-for-others out of existential necessity rather than choice. His work is unapologetically exploitative and offers unsettling political critiques of the injustices and socio-economic inequalities of the modern world. In different countries, he hires people from the lower echelons of society who are homeless, immigrants, unemployed, political prisoners, and so on, to participate in exhibitions, videos, and site-specific interventions. These typically involve performing meaningless or degrading tasks, such as sitting concealed in cardboard boxes, holding heavy weights for as long as possible, or trying to clean people’s shoes in the street without their consent. Others involve payment for being marked by tattoos. Six men in Havana stand shoulder to shoulder facing a wall, their heads bowed, while a ­tattooist draws a continuous horizontal line across each of their backs in 8 Foot Line Tattooed on 6 Remunerated People (1996). The same happens to four seated, heroin-addicted prostitutes in Spain who are paid the price of a heroin fix, in 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000). Sierra’s command and control systems are controversial and his feedback loops certainly connect strongly with audiences, prompting extreme reactions. His particular take on interactive art is palpably existential too, providing lasting impacts on his paid participants and leaving permanent imprints. His actions go to the heart of notions of freedom and the complex issues and ethics at play in making choices—not only for the participants but also for Sierra in choosing to make artworks which some deem abusive. Each participant makes an important, and in the tattoo works, permanent choice. But their contexts and circumstances—what Sartre calls facticity, and which he argues can be largely overcome—affects that decision significantly and indeed helps make the choice for them. As Elizabeth Manchester puts it, Sierra’s works expose the tension between ‘the choice of the participants to undertake the tasks for a wage, and their lack of choice owing to their economic situation and neglected medical conditions. The actions he instigates are metaphors—or poetic equivalents—for all the poorly paid jobs backing the structure of the global market economy’ (Manchester, 2006). Claire Bishop invokes authenticity in her discussion of the increasing number of artists such as Sierra who hire non-professional performers to follow their instructions ‘as an artistic practice engaging with the ethics

96  Interactive art and aesthetics of contemporary labour’ (Bishop, 2012, p.  220). She suggests that in such work the artist ‘outsources authenticity’ to the performers who, unlike them, can operate without ‘the disruptive filter of celebrity’ to provide: a guarantee of authenticity, through their proximity to everyday social reality … [and] metonymically signify an irrefutable socio-political issue (homelessness, race, immigration, disability, etc.) … the artist both relinquishes and reclaims power … [to] give rise to a highly directed form of authenticity: … Authenticity is invoked, but then questioned and reformulated, by the indexical presence of a particular social group, who are both individuated and metonymic, live and mediated, determined and autonomous. (p. 237, emphasis in original)

Anarchy in the North and South Poles Bishop makes telling points about common public reactions and the sense of moral outrage such work elicits, suggesting it has a logic of ‘fetishistic disavowal’ that perversely accepts the normalization of social and economic

Figure 3.10  Having undertaken a dangerous journey to the South Pole, a worker raises, and later plants an anarchist flag, in Santiago Sierra’s Black Flag (Part 2). The South Pole, Latitude 90°South in December 2015. (Courtesy Studio Santiago Sierra © DACS/Artimage 2019).

Interactive art  97 exploitation, while finding the same entirely unacceptable for artists: ‘I know that society is all-exploiting, but all the same, I want artists to be an exception to this rule’ (p. 238). This is precisely the type of socio-political and existential debate that Sierra seeks strategically to provoke and ignite. His recent provocations include sending paid workers to place a black flag at the North Pole in April 2015, and 8 months later, another at the South Pole. His use of the universal symbol of the Anarchist movement protests and challenges the veracity of nation states, colonialism, and territorial appropriations. ‘Borders disgust me,’ says Sierra, and his ready identification with the anarchist libertarian cause as ‘a way of life without concessions’ (quoted in Jeffries, 2018) equates closely with Beauvoir and Sartre’s politics of freedom and resistance, expressed through an absolute commitment to and ‘a confidence in the freedom to come, a confidence which is never disappointed. … At each moment freedom is confirmed through all creation’ (Beauvoir, 2000 [1947], p. 285). The links between anarchism, Existentialism and cybernetics are surprisingly strong and extensive. Following many years as a Communist, Albert Camus turned to espouse anarchism and supported its causes actively in the 1950s, and his book The Rebel (1951) concludes with meditations on the politics and ethics of anarcho-syndicalism. The rebels he discusses span from Epicurus and the Marquis de Sade to Georg Hegel, André Breton, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. He emphasizes that their rebellions are not just personal or political, but metaphysical in seeking beauty, dignity, and solidarity in the face of an absurd world: ‘Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation,’ he says, adding jubilantly ‘I rebel, therefore, we exist’ (Camus, 1956 [1951], p. 23, 28).

Political intensities and extremities The extremities and intensities of both Existentialism and cybernetics were partly responsible for their impressive developments and popularities, rising out of the ashes of the horrors of two World Wars, but also led to their demises. They demanded too much of individuals and societies (Existentialism), and systems and sciences (cybernetics). Both were ideological and political movements, seeking to bring about revolutionary changes in mindsets, myths and methodologies, whether approaching the mysteries of Being and offering new routes to an embodied form of transcendence, or conceiving visions for a universal meta-science that extends the capabilities of human beings and places them at the center of new forms of intelligent networks and autopoietic environments. Both speak of power and control (self-control in Existentialism’s case)—loaded words that are generally seen as problematic, and indicative of polarized political positions, whether to the totalitarian right or the ‘power to the people’ left. Sartre spoke of his philosophy grabbing people by the throat and of treating his pen as a

98  Interactive art sword (1971 [1964], p.  157), Nietzsche subtitled a book ‘Philosophizing with a Hammer’, and Heidegger famously philosophized about one, before lending tacit support to the most infamous hammer-wielder of all time, Adolf Hitler. The intensity and socio-politically radical nature of Existentialism resulted in its central philosophers being highly controversial, and occupying extreme and polar positions on the political spectrum. Nietzsche has even been accused of being on both, with some commentators seeing his brave, unapologetic Űbermensch (Overman) as evidence of far right thinking, whereas Deleuze’s study Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) helps recast and popularize him as a leftist thinker. Cybernetics’ father figure, Norbert Wiener was ‘on the extreme left of … American opinion’ (Hodges, 1992 [1983]), while the ‘second leading figure in [US] cybernetics’ Warren McCulloch was on the far right, had links to the CIA, and was militantly anti-communist—a factor leading to some tension between them culminating in an inevitable break up around the end of 1952, which some scholars cite as the beginning of the end for cybernetics (Kline, 2015, p. 87). The notion of ‘control’ was foregrounded in the subtitle of Wiener’s definitive Cybernetics book, arousing suspicions by some of conservative and authoritarian values, and Theodore Roszak’s The Making of the Counter Culture (1969) casts cybernetics as part of the technocratic society the counterculture was opposing. But many cyberneticians were countercultural free spirits themselves, as discussed further in Chapter 9, and as Pickering argues, the discipline is much more aligned with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘nomad sciences that upset established orders’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 31–32). Gabriel Marcel’s and Simone Weil’s absolute social altruism and devotions to Others place them at the social, if not covertly socialist, far left, where alongside stands Beauvoir, whose role in championing the women’s movement makes her the most truly revolutionary and politically efficacious of all the Existentialists. With The Second Sex, ‘when women changed their lives after reading it, they did so in existentialist ways, seeking freedom and a heightened individuality and “authenticity”,’ (Bakewell, 2016, p. 21). Sartre preached perpetual revolt and was a neo-Marxist activist involved in causes ranging from the Paris student uprising of May 1968 to the Palestine liberation movement, and (with Beauvoir) met and talked radical politics with leading figures including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and the Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev. During World War II, Sartre co-created a French resistance movement Socialism and Freedom with Merleau-Ponty (though it was largely ineffective); co-founded the Reassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire in 1948 with David Rousset in an attempt to create a socialist and democratic French political party; and in 1973, he co-founded the leftist newspaper Libération. Camus was a French Communist Party member from 1935 to 1951 before turning to anarchism,

Interactive art  99 and took up the plight of Muslims in the Kabylie region, promoting changes by the Algerian government. He was an important resistance writer and ­activist in France during World War II as editor of the underground newspaper Combat.

When Heidegger met Sartre By contrast, the work and reputation of Heidegger will be muddied and mired forever by his seduction by, and association with Aldolf Hitler’s National Socialism. Although Heidegger later privately described joining the Nazi party in 1933 as vanity and ‘the biggest stupidity of my life’ (Rothman, 2014), despite being pressed many times until his death in 1976, he always stubbornly refused to publicly denounce his action, perhaps holding firm to Existentialist principles of never looking back, and taking absolute responsibility for one’s choices. A year before joining the party, he had published a theory of errancy, ‘On The Essence of Truth’ (1932), revealing his view that making mistakes is intrinsic to Dasein, ‘from the most ordinary wasting of time, making a mistake, and miscalculating, to going astray and venturing too far in one’s essential attitudes and decisions. … leading him astray, errancy dominates man through and through’ (Heidegger, 1961 [1932]). Heidegger’s personal and political errancy has spawned a whole field of study analyzing perceived levels and relativities of his naivety, guilt, and fascist tendencies, and their absence or presence in his philosophy, a summary of which is included in this footnote.4 Whatever one’s take, as Joshua Rothman concludes, it is ‘impossible to set aside Heidegger’s sins—and they cannot help but reduce the ardency with which his readers relate to him. … Even if his philosophy isn’t contaminated by Nazism, our relationship with him is’ (Rothman, 2014). Heidegger was Sartre’s most profound philosophical influence, and although he was largely unimpressed by Being and Nothingness (which in many ways was an answering response to his own Being and Time), ­Heidegger enjoyed the section describing skiing, and in 1945 invited Sartre to come and visit him in his hut in Todtnauberg and go skiing together. This never transpired, but the two finally met for the first and last time in 1953 when Heidegger again invited him to be his guest—this time at his home in Freiburg rather than his country hut—following Sartre’s invited lecture at the city’s University. Sartre’s talk was overlong and went badly, with the students becoming restless and losing interest, and he was not in the best of moods when he made the trip to Heidegger’s house in the suburbs. They spoke in German, and Heidegger immediately complained about a play by Existentialist Gabriel Marcel that had made fun of him as an incomprehensible hut-dweller. Despite the fact that Sartre and Marcel were in the midst of an angry feud, which included them turning up to one another’s theater premieres only to dramatically walk out shouting and complaining

100  Interactive art loudly in disgust, Sartre courteously apologized on Marcel’s behalf. He then turned the conversation to the subject of political convictions, which annoyed Heidegger, and the dialog grew increasingly brittle and awkward, and eventually dried up. Politics divides like little else, and there was no meeting of minds between these two big beasts of Existentialism in their one-and-only encounter. Sartre went to get his train, where he found his carriage filled with roses as a thank you gesture from the University. As the train pulled out of the station, he flung them all angrily out of the window (Bakewell, 2016, p. 205–207).

Existentialism and anarchism At the same time, Existentialism’s political alignments with anarchism are strong but rarely discussed—and here I refer not to the nihilistic and violent kind, but to the idealist models of responsible, collective societies without governments put forth by anarcho-syndicalists and political philosophers such as the first self-styled anarchist, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who in the nineteenth century declared somewhat paradoxically that ‘Anarchy is Order’ (Marshall, 2010, p.  x). ‘The central ideals of anarchism—freedom, equality, and mutual aid’ (Encyclopedia Britannica) are fundamental to Existentialism, with both ideologies sharing an absolute commitment to personal freedom, and to challenging conventions, rules and orthodoxies that may inhibit freedom or subordinate the individual. Cybernetics, too, sought to break out and free itself from the conventions of ‘old’ science; it was an antimovement, as Pickering argues, ‘antidisciplinary’ and ‘anticontrol’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 31). I consider there to be two mirrored faces to Existentialism. One is philosophical, concerned with analyzing the human condition and understanding the essential nature and ontology of Being, specifically through its relationship to Faith (Kierkegaard), Will (Nietzsche), Time (Heidegger), Nothingness (Sartre), Freedom (Beauvoir), Absurdity (Camus), and Others (Marcel). The second is political, prescriptive, and didactic, sounding an alarm and making a direct call for people to act authentically, assert freedom, reject imposed rules and values, and to self-determine their own identities and fates. Histories of anarchism have made clear the significant and explicit influence of Existentialism (e.g., Marshall, 2010, p. 579), while writers such as L. Susan Brown argue that anarchism must learn The Politics of Individualism (1993) from Beauvoir and Sartre so as to fully appreciate a ‘fluid conceptualization of human nature’ (Brown, 2002, p. 153). Other works focusing on the analogies between the fields include Spencer Sunshine’s Nietzsche and the Anarchists (2005), which emphasizes how the Űbermensch is conceived as neither master nor slave, and traces Nietzsche’s extensive influence on anarchist thinkers; and Existentialist philosopher Martin Buber directly aligns himself with anarchism in Paths in Utopia (1952). Although Sartre sought

Interactive art  101 to further the causes of Maoism and Marxism for much of his life—in a turbulent relationship that also saw him criticizing communism and never joining a communist party—in later years he championed anarchism, met with jailed members of the Baader-Mainhof Group and ‘publicly associated himself with the French anarchist group Action Directe’ (Moran, 2000, p. 353). Sartre reflects that: ‘If one rereads all my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist’ (quoted in Escobar, 2017). Interestingly, after graduating and finishing his National Service, Sartre’s first job in 1931 was as a schoolteacher in Le Havre in Northwest France where, at the age of 25, students and staff gave him the nickname ‘the anarchist’. The reasons were clear: he flouted convention by being the only teacher living in the sleazy, red light area of town; he allowed his students to smoke in class; sang bawdy songs to them; and preached freedom, free-thinking, and taking responsibility for one’s actions. The Le Havre years proved pivotal to his philosophical development, where he mused on notions of nothingness and contingency, and conceived arguably his greatest literary work, Nausea (1938), set in 1932 in a fictional town called Bouville, but which is clearly Le Havre. At that time his lover Beauvoir was at the opposite end of France in Marseilles, also working as a school teacher, and during solitary walks Sartre’s ‘anxious realization that reality is inexorable and overwhelming, yet elusive, unnecessary, contingent and superfluous, became the nausea, the terrifying and loathsome ontological revelation that lies at the heart of the novel’ (Cox, 2016, p. 39–40). In Existentialism, Marxism, and Anarchism (1949), the English anarchist Herbert Read persuasively equates anarchism to the works of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre. Read also wrote an impassioned Introduction for Albert Camus’ The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (1954), a work conjoining anarchist and Existentialist ideas; and the French anarchist Michel Onfray reaffirms these dual credentials in The Libertarian Order: The Philosophical Life of Albert Camus (2012). Camus himself eulogizes what he terms a joyous Absurd Freedom maintaining that ‘I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy’ (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 51). He aligned himself with anarcho-syndicalist causes in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary in the 1950s, and wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La Révolution ­Prolétarienne, and Solidaridad Obrera.

Cybernetics and anarchism Not to be outdone, and once again cementing the correspondences between the two fields, cybernetics has also had close associations with anarchism. Tortoise robot inventor (Chapter 6) and one of the leading British

102  Interactive art cyberneticians, Grey Walter was ‘something of an anarchist’ (Duda, 2013, p. 55), and published a paper in the Anarchy journal in 1963, which prompted a response in the same journal by John McEwan entitled ‘Anarchism and the Cybernetics of Self-Organizing Systems’ (1963). In 1966, the journal’s editor, Colin Ward published ‘Anarchism as a Theory of Organization’ (1966), which discusses how cybernetics’ ideas on self-organizing systems are revolutionary, and relate precisely to anarchism’s views of how societies should self-determine and evolve naturally. Ward’s book Anarchy in Action (1973) explains that: Anarchy is a function, not of a society’s simplicity and lack of social organisation, but of its complexity and multiplicity of social organizations. Cybernetics, the science of control and communication, throws valuable light on the anarchist conception of complex self-organizing systems. (Ward, 1973, p. 50) Thomas Swann emphasizes cybernetics’ ‘engrained concerns for democracy and emancipation’ (Swann, 2015, p. 34) in an examination of the potentials and problems of using cybernetic models and social media platforms for anarchist activism and radical left organization. He calls for an anarchist cybernetics … an approach to understanding organisation and the role of communication therein that draws on the fundamental concepts of cybernetics: viable systems; autonomy; self-organisation; and functional hierarchy. (Swann, 2015, p. 3, my emphasis) John Duda draws parallels between anarchism and the work of Grey ­Walter, Gordon Pask and Gregory Bateson to ‘highlight a few key moments in which the new scientific concepts of systems, circular causality, and selforganisation found their way into anti-authoritarian theory’ (Duda, 2013, p. 52). He notes the friendship Bateson developed with the anarchist writer Paul Goodman, and their extensive correspondence, including their discussions about de-centralization, and Goodman’s contention that a complicated system works most efficiently if its parts readjust themselves decentrally, with a minimum of central intervention or control … a society that distributes power widely is superficially conflictual but fundamentally stable. (Goodman, 1969, cited in Duda, 2013, p. 59). Eden Medina’s award-winning Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011) is an engrossing historical study of Chile and its ‘twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism’ under President Salvador Allende, including attempts to

Interactive art  103 ‘socialize’ the economy through Project Cybersyn (1971–73). This was conceived and led by the leftist British cybernetician and author of Cybernetics and Management (1959), Stafford Beer: the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems … shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies … are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history. (Medina, 2011, sleeve note) The future communication, economic, and industrial infrastructure of Chile was conceived to become cybernetic. Beer originated a computer program capable of analyzing, on a daily, real-time basis, the vast data being accumulated, and built simulation systems and an operations room equipped with flashing light early warning systems. The system was conceived to be synergetic in linking and catalyzing the country’s industries while devolving real power to the people in the factories. But while Project Cybersyn progressed and grappled with various teething problems, external hostilities intensified to put serious pressure on, and finally put pay to, President Salvador Allende’s vision for a Chilean socialist-cybernetic utopia. Other countries’ governments mounted an economic siege, blocking financial credit and supplies of imports including hardware and software. In early September 1973, Allende instructed the Cybersyn team to move its control room to the presidential palace for safety, but before it had time to do so, General Pinochet’s coup took place on September 11. Allende’s dream was dead, and following a farewell speech on live radio, he withdrew to the ‘Independence salon’ of the La Moneda Palace, and took his own life. Beer later reflected: ironic, looking back, is the fact that every advance Allende made, every success in the eyes of the mass of the people (which brought with it more electoral support) made it less likely that the Chilean experiment would be allowed to continue—because it became more threatening to Western ideology. (Beer, 1981, p. 307) Beer equated cybernetics with politics and always emphasized that the sorts of organizational meta-systems he conceived were not dictatorial and totalitarian, but rather libertarian; for him, cybernetics was a tool of freedom, and he referred to it using his own term: ‘The Liberty Machine’. Beer was

104  Interactive art in England and escaped the 1973 coup and possible harm, but his main ­Chilean collaborator on the project, Fernando Flores was captured and jailed. Upon his release, he moved to the US and, in an interesting twist to this book’s narrative of complementarities and entanglements, completed a PhD on the philosophy of Heidegger. R. D. Laing is a fascinating figure with a unique place in this discourse, since he may be considered a cybernetician, Existentialist, and anarchosyndicalist. He founded alternative types of psychiatric institutions, including Kingsley Hall from 1965 to 1970, run as a commune with the therapists and patients living together and on an equal footing, learning from one another. He co-founded the Institute of Phenomenological Studies in 1967 which sponsored the establishment of the Anti-University of London in 1968, which had no exams or defined curriculum, and where teachers alongside Laing included artist Yoko Ono, writer Aldous Huxley, musician Cornelius Cardew, and cannabis-rights activist Steve Abrams, who gave joint-rolling lessons (Pickering, 2010, p. 208). Laing invited Gregory Bateson and anarchist Paul Goodman to speak at a conference on freedom he organized at the Round House in London in 1967, Dialectics of Liberation. Other high profile speakers included poet Allen Ginsberg and The Living Theater’s Julian Beck, Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael, LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, and German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. David Cooper describes it as a unique expression of the politics of modern dissent, in which existential psychiatrists, Marxist intellectuals, anarchists and political leaders met … The aim of the congress was to create a genuine revolutionary consciousness by fusing ideology and action on the levels of the individual and of mass society. (quoted in The Round House, 2018) I contend that while cybernetics and Existentialism waned and largely disappeared from view soon after this 1967 conference on liberation, their ideas and their joint advocacy for ‘revolutionary consciousness … on the level of the individual and of mass society’ remain just as equally significant themes today as they were then.

Notes 1 The World Wide Web became publicly accessible in 1991, although Tim BernersLee invented it in 1989 and it was used for research purposes at CERN in ­Switzerland in 1990. 2 Although Buber himself rejected the label ‘existentialist’, he is widely considered one, see for example Edward David Kiner’s The Existentialism of Martin Buber and Implications for Education (1968), and Malcolm M. Diamond’s Martin ­Buber: Jewish Existentialist (1960).

Interactive art  105 3 Their quotation is from page 67 of the edition translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone, 1996) 4 See for example: Victor Farías’ ‘Heidegger and Nazism’ (1987), Hugo Ott’s ­‘Heidegger: A Political Life’ (1989), Emmanuel Faye’s ‘Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy’ (2009) and Hans D. Sluga Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (1993). Sluga suggests that the debate has never been settled, has been marred by ‘doubtful assumptions about the necessary unity of thought and person’ and has produced at best ambivalent results (Sluga 1993, p. 5). Sluga is more forgiving than many, arguing that Heidegger’s Nazism was more professionally opportunistic and self-serving than ideological. He joined the Nazi party in the Spring of 1933, and during his public Rectorial inauguration at Freiburg University spoke of the current political situation and the important role philosophy could play in it, including spiritual leadership. His former student and lover, the formidable Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt dismissed his actions as a foolish ‘escapade’ (Rothman, 2014), but also characterized his politics as ‘irresponsible, nihilist, and romantic’ (Moran, 2000, p. 301). It would seem that prior to this, Heidegger had shown little interest in political engagement and appeared to have been ‘swept away by the general wave of enthusiasm’ which ‘came as a surprise to some of his closest friends and associates’ (Sluga, 1993, p. 7, 135). Sluga notes that it was necessary for Heidegger to assert his allegiance in order to secure the Rector (President) position at Freiburg University, and he gave that up one year later in 1934 possibly due to faculty members’ adverse political opinions and their pressure on him to go (Rothman, 2014). Sluga points to the avowedly ‘apolitical and anarchic’ attitude of Being and Time, his preoccupation with the crisis and ‘lostness’ of human life rather than super-races, and an uncompromising letter he wrote to Karl Löwith: ‘I do what I must and what I consider to be necessary and do it as well as I can—I do not adapt my philosophical work to the cultural needs of an unspecified Today … I work out of my own “I am”.’ (in Sluga, 1993, p. 136) Others have noted how ‘Heidegger’s Dasein has been drawn upon as a theoretical resource by liberal and left-liberal political theorists’ (Millerman, 2018) and his ‘description of Dasein is remarkably true to recent liberal conceptions of the self … a richly detailed portrait of human being within a social context’ (Salem-Wiseman, 2003, p.  534). Sluga suggests that Heidegger’s initial engagement was characterized by expediency that soon ‘become part of the process of his withdrawal from politics’ as he witnessed a tragic and violent history unfolding, and this led to his later, less activist and more spiritual redefinition of Dasein as ‘a call for stillness, holding on, and letting be.’ (Sluga, 1993, p. 152, 153) However, others including Existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers characterize Heidegger’s thinking as ‘in essence unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative’ (quoted in Moran, 2000, p. 192), while Camus reflects that as both philosopher and person, ‘Heidegger considers the human condition coldly’ and equates existence with anxiety and humiliation. (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 23–24) Heidegger has always been tarnished by his Nazi links, but his reputation sustained serious additional damage following new revelations in 2014, when the ­Director of the Martin Heidegger Institute, Peter Trawny discovered and published some of his voluminous, personal ‘black notebook’ writings of the 1940s, some pages of which are explicitly anti-Semitic. Heidegger characterizes Jews as

106  Interactive art ‘calculating’ and closed, and talks of a global Jewish conspiracy (Rothman, 2014). Such unconscionable views have understandably led to an increasing academic heat of opposition to his philosophy. It is a strange and disturbing fact that some of the most groundbreaking artists and philosophers were proto-fascists, from the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to Heidegger and Richard Wagner. Interestingly, Nietzsche was a close friend and admirer of Wagner for many years, and was reportedly obsessed and in love with his wife Cosima, but became repulsed by Richard Wagner’s increasing anti-Semitism and lust for self-deification, and angrily severed ties with him.

4 Participatory art Autopoiesis with strangers

Man is free: but his freedom is only real and concrete in the measure to which it is engaged—only if it tends towards a goal and works to realize some change in the world. It is by his project in the world that man fully realizes himself … Man is only free if he gives himself a concrete goal and works to realize it: but a goal can only be a real goal if freely chosen. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948 [1947], p. 11)

Behind Relational Aesthetics Cybernetic-Existentialist inclinations are alive and well in participatory art and performance, including works that have been categorized as ‘relational’ arts following Nicholas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics (1998). Bourriaud makes little explicit reference to either cybernetics or Existentialism, but behind his discourse lie ideas central to both, with relational art taking ‘as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interaction and its social context’ ([1998] 2002, p. 14). Cybernetic notions of communications systems and feedback loops combine with Existentialist paradigms in the artistic movement Bourriaud describes as ‘an arena of exchange’. Like the positions taken on life and Being by the philosophy’s major thinkers, here: ‘Art is a state of encounter … the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action’ (p. 13). Bourriaud uses Existentialist concepts and language in many of his book’s most cited sections, and reawakens the spirit of Sartre when evoking ideas around self/Other and subject/object relations, the look, and being-for-others: our ‘form’ is merely a relational property, linking us with those who reify us by the way they see us … When an individual thinks he is casting an objective eye upon himself, he is, in the final analysis, contemplating nothing other than the result of perpetual transactions with the subjectivity of others. … The artistic practice thus resides in the invention of relations between consciousness. … As part of a ‘relationist’

108  Participatory art theory of art, inter-subjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art, which is its ‘environment,’ its ‘field’ (Bourdieu), but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice. (p. 22) Sartre’s relational phenomenology thus underlies, informs and supports Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics. However, the rigor and originality of the movement’s underlying theories, as well as some of its key artworks, have been questioned, notably by Claire Bishop, whose critique might also be remediated to hint at how Cybernetic-Existentialist impulses have been underlying participatory arts for decades: ‘This idea of considering the work of art as a potential trigger for participation is hardly new—think of Happenings, Fluxus instructions, 1970s performance art, and Joseph Beuys’s declaration that “everyone is an artist”,’ (Bishop, 2004, p. 61).

Autopoietic principles of unity and circularity Existentialism highlights our ability to continually re-invent and re-create ourselves, while cybernetics creates systems and environments that are flexible, adaptive, or autopoietic (self-creating or self-regulating): ‘An autopoietic system recursively re-produces the elements and conditions of its organization to maintain its identity’ (Fernández, 1998, p. 484). Coined in 1978, autopoiesis grafts an –auto prefix onto the Greek word for production (poiesis) to denote an auto-production that relies upon both a unity and circularity. A classic example is the human nervous system, which triggers and prompts the spontaneous production of actions (such as reaching out your hands for protection during a fall) or products (such as nucleic acids or adrenalin) to correct and regulate the system or organism: ‘It is the circularity of its organization that makes a living system a unit of interactions, and it is this circularity that it must maintain in order to remain a living system and to retain its identity through different interactions’ (Maturana and Varela, 1980 [1972], p. 9). Such principles are central to many participatory performances, such as Allan Kaprow’s Happenings from the early 1960s, which employed circular causality and evolving proto-cybernetic environments while playing out the Existentialists’ call to privilege freedom and action above anything else. In pioneering pre-Internet networked experiments such as Telex Q & A (1971), Billy Klüver and collaborators linked telex machines around the world and posed existential questions about the future (specifically a decade later, 1981) to distant participants who then telexed back their answers: Will people seek greater or less contact? To what degree will sex roles be interchangeable? Will world culture become more or less homogenous?

Participatory art  109 Will pot replace alcohol? Will people be generous? What will people think about in 1981? What would be the aspiration of man? … Klüver notes the cultural diversity of the responses circulating through the interactive system: ‘The Indians were very theoretical … the Japanese were extremely positive’ (in Obrist, 1998). In 1977, Douglas Davis and collaborators presented The Last Nine Minutes, a live satellite telecast from Caracas, Venezuela to twenty-five countries, where he spoke to camera about ideas of time, space and separation. The telecast included performances by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, and a performance lecture by Joseph Beuys conceptualizing art as an inclusive and liberating social praxis: ‘A notion of art relating to everyone and to [the] very problem of the social organism … such a notion of art would no longer refer exclusively to the specialists within the modern art world but extend to the whole work of humanity’ (Beuys quoted in Zimbardo, 2008, p. 130). In the same year, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinovitz’s Satellite Arts Project: A Space with No Geographical Boundaries (1977) created the first composite image space to combine live dancers from remote locations. It was followed by their groundbreaking, NASA-funded Hole in Space (1980), which utilized the most complex technological systems of the time to cybernetically—and seemingly magically—connect people in real time and allow them intimate and (technologically) embodied encounters with strangers thousands of miles away. Satellite systems linked large video screens in New York and Los Angeles, enabling passers-by to see, hear and talk to one another. Strangers struck up relationships and made a date to return to see each other the next day, while family members and friends in the two cities arranged times to meet and re-establish contact across what the artists called this ‘public communication sculpture’. In 1984, Nam June Paik published an article/manifesto ‘Art and Satellite’ ruminating on the rich potentials of satellite technologies to conjoin artists from remote locations: ‘what was being discovered was not new THINGS but merely new RELATIONSHIPS between things already existing’ he said, therefore what was now needed was ‘not new things but new thinks’ (Paik, 2001 [1984], p. 41–42).

Autopoietic systems: open or closed? There is a degree of disagreement over how open or closed cybernetic, and autopoietic systems are, typified by the perspectives of the co-authors of the first primary texts on autopoiesis, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The former takes the view that since survival and autonomy is the primary focus of an autopoietic system, by nature it is a ‘closed dynamic system in which all phenomena are subordinated to its autopoiesis’

110  Participatory art (Maturana, 1970, p. 38, my emphasis). But his protégé Varela would later diverge from this view to argue the open natures of many such systems, and recombinant poetics artist Bill Seaman has also lent his voice to the cause, calling for ‘Open Order Cybernetics’ (Guagusch and Seaman, 2004, p. 18).1 Both cybernetics and Existentialism share concerns around ‘relative natures’, relational actions, subject-object positions, and the dialectics of openness and closure. Maturana’s valid point about autopoiesis favoring a ‘closed dynamic system’ concerns the operation of its different parts to ensure the strength, longevity and integrity of the organism. Von Foerster reinforces this point when contrasting first and second order cybernetics, with the latter emphasizing autopoietic ideas of the autonomous self: first-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of observed systems, while second-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of observing systems. … When taking the latter position one develops notions like ‘closure’, ‘self-organization’, ‘self-reference’, ‘self’, ‘auto-poiesis’, ‘autonomy’, ‘responsibility’, etc., etc. (Foerster, 2003, p. 303) Existentialism emphasizes a need for an equivalent ‘self-closure’ in order to achieve autonomy, through an assertion of personal freedom and rejection of externally imposed rules, views, and values. But such closure is balanced against the openness of forging a meaningful existence through engagement with the world and interactions with others. The same balancing act takes place in cybernetic systems such as the human body, which must be open enough to its environment to navigate safely and draw sustenance from outside itself (and may be prized open further to receive blood transfusions or restorative surgery), but closed enough for self-preservation and to protect itself from external dangers, for example through its immune systems and reflexes. In their reflections on ‘art as a collective immune system’, Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito have drawn interesting analogies between the six biological stages of an immune response and six types of artistic intervention: ‘perversion, arrest, revelation, execution, recognition and perseverance’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p. 12). They propose a highly open immune system where ‘good art presents not attenuated memes but raw antibodies; it seeks not to protect from but to expose to’ (p. 13). This concept can be applied readily to participatory artworks such as Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies Mysterien Theater series, where participants are exposed to, and engage in extreme existential rituals including animal slaughters and staged crucifixions, literalizing Blais and Ippolito’s six types of artistic intervention. Nitsch describes his Orgies in terms of being-for-others, with him performing ‘the apparent negative, unsavoury, perverse, obscene, the passion and the hysteria of the act of sacrifice so that

Participatory art  111 YOU are spared the sullying, shaming descent into the extreme’ (quoted in Lucie-Smith, 1989 [1969], p.  166). In the 1970s and 1980s, Augusto Boal enacted a different concept of being-for-others through new forms of activist political performance that led to his being jailed, tortured, and exiled by the Brazilian authorities in 1971. Through his Invisible Theater and later Forum Theater forms, strangers come together to become what he calls spectactors, where the viewer is transformed from passive witness to an active agent engaging spontaneously and existentially in complex and sometimes dangerous real-world situations so as to transform their political understandings and appreciate the values of freedom: ‘The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!’ (Boal, 1985 [1974], p. 156).

Homeostasis … and a flame-lit confession with a ‘prostitute’ Homeostasis (or steady state) was ‘central to the development of cybernetics’ (Hammond, 2003, p.  109) and a concept first elaborated by Walter Cannon in 1929 to describe the tendency for organisms both to seek to maintain a stable equilibrium through auto-regulating internal processes (as a closed system), but also to adjust or evolve to accommodate changing external conditions for optimal survival (as an open system). This was adopted as a core element of Bertalanffy’s General System Theory (1968), ‘paving the way to a new conception of the organism, a new orientation of biological thought’ (Bertalanffy quoted in Hammond, 2003, p. 109). Elaborating on ideas of biological growth, which necessitates a continuous self-regulating process of building up (anabolism) and breaking down (catabolism), assimilation and decomposition, he developed a theory of dynamic morphology. His proposal was radical and influential (but also criticized by some as overly philosophical and metaphysical) since it was intended not only to apply to living organisms but to all systems, and he developed mathematical models for describing and unifying these. Bertalanffy appealed to Heraclitus’s conception of reality as a ceaseless stream of events: ‘We ourselves are not the same from one moment to the next.’ While the organism is apparently persistent, it is really the manifestation of a perpetual flow, an open system in a dynamic steady state. … Bertalanffy defined the living organism as ‘a hierarchy of open systems maintaining itself in steady state due to inherent system conditions.’ (Hammond, 2003, p. 116, original emphasis) Anthony Howell (1999) suggests that homeostasis is core to many participatory performance artworks, and offers as a case study Claire Shillito’s Hi I’m Claire (1997–78). Participants visit a hotel room alone, where Shillito is

112  Participatory art dressed like a high-class prostitute. She removes their shoes and asks them to get into bed with her. She then performs an intimate action, leans over their body, takes a matchbox from under the bed, lifts the sheet, lights a match under it and asks them to confess something intimate or embarrassing. They do so until the match goes out, and then she shows them into the bathroom, where they find the previous participant, who now leaves, and the cycle continues: ‘the construction of the piece reveals itself to be a trail which loops back on itself’ (Howell, 1999, p. 64). The participant is coaxed into an existential experience in what at first appears to be a closed and private, one-to-one system that becomes increasingly spatially closed and constricted as the two go under the sheet together, lit only by the flame, and secrets are shared. But the spell is broken with the revelation that it is in fact an open system with another stranger present, Sartre’s omnipresent voyeur, who has witnessed everything … and changed everything. We may turn away or hide beneath the sheets, but the environment never goes away: as both cybernetics and Existentialism make clear, all organisms and all systems are always-already within and a part of their environment, and operate in constant relation to it. Howell argues that the piece encapsulates an ‘essential homeostasis’ (p. 66) and that: all organisms enjoy an intimate relationship with their niche in the environment, and that the environment conditions their homeostasis. … In art, therefore, homeostasis … is achieved by creating a situation where each element or action is under as much tension as any other, and … each part is essential to the whole. An artwork ‘holds itself together’. … the notion of homeostasis has replaced the notion of beauty, or we could say that the ideal homeostasis of a piece constitutes its beauty. (Howell, 1999, p. 56)

Equilibrium and the Diary of a Seducer Cybernetic homeostasis has parallels with Existentialism’s concept of Equilibrium, which seeks to ensure the sacred notion of human freedom does not become entropic or messianic, and is tempered by a sense of personal responsibility and ethics. Nietzsche’s will to power in the open system of the world may have dangerous consequences for others without being cooled by the stabilizing notion of equilibrium. Almost all the movement’s philosophers address the issue, first articulated in detail by Kierkegaard. In the first Either part of his book Either/Or (1843), he discusses three modes or phases of existence. The first, aesthetic mode is characterized by selfishness and pleasure seeking, and in its worst aspects are encapsulated in a section in the form of a long ‘Diary of a Seducer’ recounted by a fictional character, Johannes. He tells of how he grooms and manipulates a young

Participatory art  113 woman, Cordelia, into falling in love with him, then falling out of love with him, simply for his cynical, voyeuristic sense of pleasure and power in breaking her heart. He is the unacceptable, nihilist face of existential freedom: I own nothing. I desire to own nothing, I love nothing, I have nothing to lose … Show her to me, show me a possibility which seems an impossibility; show her to me among the shades of the underworld, I shall fetch her up; let her hate me, despise me, be indifferent to me, love another, I am not afraid. (Kierkegaard, 1971 [1843], p. 323) The second Or part concerns the ethical mode of existence, characterized by responsibility and respect for oneself and others; and the equilibrium concept is articulated in a major 180-page section entitled ‘Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality’. Kierkegaard explains that while most people exist within the hollowness and inessentiality of the aesthetic mode, it is possible to combine this with the higher minded ethical mode—’the ethical individual lives in such a way that he is continually transferring himself from one stage to another’ (263)—and the further one moves toward the ethical mode, the more noble and fulfilling life becomes. His third and final mode is the spiritual, involving coming closer to God through a leap of faith, and a number of philosophers—Kierkegaard, Marcel, Nicholas Berdyaev, and Karl Jaspers—combined Existentialist beliefs with religious devotion, and sought to exist first-and-foremost in the spiritual mode. But others including Beauvoir and Sartre lived firmly in the first, aesthetic realm, and retained a fierce atheism, despite the fact that as a child Beauvoir felt she had a strong calling to become a nun. The parallels between Kierkegaard’s character Johannes, and Sartre and Beauvoir are uncomfortably close, although they were not deliberately cruel to their lovers, and Sartre was kind and generous to many, paying rent for their apartments for many months after their affair had ended. Indeed, Sartre was generous to a fault, regularly picking up café and bar bills for large groups of friends, and famously over-tipping waiters. But he was a serial seducer, forever acting like an adolescent in that respect, and was generally less interested in actual sex than in the thrill of the conquest and his ability to assert power over women—seducing minds and wills rather than bodies. He touched but rarely had intercourse with the many women he slept with, and his descriptions of sex in his novels are revealing: invariably concerning disappointment, squeamishness at the act, or revulsion at the visceral, viscous body and its gloopy fluids. Sartre appears to have been a sex addict who actually disliked sex (Bakewell, 2016, p. 321). Beauvoir was also an enthusiastic seducer, of both men and women, including her female students, some of whom she would encourage to sleep

114  Participatory art with Sartre. One was Olga Kozakiewicz, then aged 19, with whom both were obsessed and madly in love for 2 years from 1935, the first and only time jealous rivalry appears to have seriously threatened their intensely loving, open relationship that would last half a century from 1929 until Sartre’s death in 1980. Both had a penchant for young women, and while in his 50s, Sartre had an affair with a 19-year old student Arlette Elkhaïm, whom he adopted as his daughter at the age of 60 in 1965, and made her his sole heir and executor (Cox, 2016, p. 229). In June 1943, following an affair with one of her students, Natalie Sorokine (the model for her wild, promiscuous character Nadine in The Mandarins (1954)), Beauvoir was dismissed from her teaching post for ‘behaviour leading to the corruption of a minor’ although she was eventually cleared of the charge. She never returned to teaching again (Appignanesi, 2005, p. 74–75). Sartre and Beauvoir’s actions appear predatory and entirely outside Kierkegaard’s, and most people’s, ethical realm; Hubben argues that ‘Sartre’s freedom is nothing but moral anarchy’ (Hubben, 1980 [1952], p.  33). Although he spoke for decades about writing a major work on ethics to complement and complete his Being and Nothingness discourse, it never came to fruition, and Olga Kozakiewicz and several others romantically involved with the philosopher couple later stated they had been psychological scarred by their experience. One of Sartre’s lovers, Evelyne Rey committed suicide with an overdose in 1966, but it is unclear how much if at all he was to blame. Sartre’s hedonistic image is compounded by his addictions to and excessive use of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs—notably Corydrane, a combination of amphetamine and painkiller that he sometimes consumed like candy. Possibly the major homeostasis and equilibrium in Sartre’s life was to compensate the speed pills by also taking large quantities of sleeping tablets at the end of the day to counteract the amphetamines and what he called ‘the speed of my soul’ (Sartre, 1971 [1964], p. 154) to enable him to occasionally get some sleep.

You and Andy Warhol Never Had It So Good: the work of Gob Squad UK/German art collective Gob Squad revel in the excesses of drug consumption and sexual freedom in the lives of the American artist Andy Warhol and his entourage, in an exuberant participative multimedia theater work, Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) (2007). Before the audience takes their seats, the Gob Squad performers take them onstage for a backstage tour of the set. There are three rooms, where three of Andy Warhol’s films from the 1960s will be recreated: Stage Right, a bedroom (Sleep, 1963); in the center, a kitchen (Kitchen, 1965); and Stage Left, a bare space with a chair (Screen Tests, 1964–66). Each room has a video camera linked to one of three large screens at the front of the stage, and later the performers will

Participatory art  115 go into the audience to coax volunteers to take part and have their 15 minutes of fame, becoming the live stars of each movie. The performance itself begins with a projected 1960s-style black and white film leader-tape, with a descending number countdown, which gives way to a black and white live-video feed of the scene taking place in the hidden Kitchen stage set behind. One of the performers, Simon, steps forward to address the camera in Close-Up: ‘Hello. Thank you for coming and welcome to Gob Squad’s Factory. It’s 1965 and it’s New York. This film—that we’re in—is the essence of its time’. By the end of performance, Simon and the other three performers are replaced onstage entirely by audience members, who wear headphones and receive whispered instructions and their lines of dialogue to deliver on stage, from the actors who now sit in the audience: ‘Hi, my name’s Simon, and I’m playing Simon, in the film Kitchen by Andy Warhol’ says one audience participant. The show ends with another coming forward to camera to repeat the words: ‘We are the beginning, we are the essence of our time’. Phenomenology is a search for essences, and essence lies at the heart of Sartre’s most quoted dictum: ‘existence precedes essence’ (1994 [1943],

Figure 4.1  The three-screen mise-en-scène for Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) (2007), relaying live video of audience members located behind the screens. They recreate Andy Warhol’s movies Sleep (1963) (left screen) and Screen Tests (1964-66) (right screen), while the Gob Squad performers, who are later replaced by audience members, re-imagine his film Kitchen (1965) (center). (Courtesy of Gob Squad. Photo: © David Baltzer/bildbuehne.de)

116  Participatory art p. 25). His philosophy dramatically converts Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ into ‘I am, therefore I act’ by insisting that existence and Being just is, and precedes everything, since we are simply, as Heidegger puts it, ‘thrown’ into the world. We have no self, predestination, soul or universal essence, but are rather blank canvases who must determine our own identity and destination—and thereby define our unique essence—through our authentic lived experience. Hegel stresses the need to treat and take ‘each moment to be an abiding essentiality’ (1979, p. 317) and Heidegger relates authenticity to the assertion of individuality, discussing ‘ownness’, ‘ownership’ and ‘mineness’, and our potential to become ‘whole’. The Existentialist’s vision of authenticity went far beyond its everyday meanings: For them, the notion of authenticity expresses, among other things, revolt against the traditional concept of truth and the ideal of sincerity derived from it. … This is, in fact, the heart of the Existentialist revolution: the eclipse of ‘truth’ by ‘truthfulness’, the transition from objective sincerity to personal authenticity. … authenticity requires an incessant movement of becoming, self-transcendence and self-creation. (Golomb, 1995, p. 8–9) In the 1960s, Warhol and his associates at the Factory (and others within the revolutionary counterculture of the time) can be considered to have taken that route with existential gusto, rejecting societal norms and experimenting in extremis across new terrains of art, sexuality, drugs and socio-politics in the search for authenticity, and the construction of their particular essences. Gob Squad go through similar motions in what they themselves describe as: ‘A quest for the original, the authentic, the here and now, the real me, the real you’ (Gob Squad, 2014). They do so with intoxicatingly wild enthusiasm, deadpan wit, and tender parody, making messianic speeches, snorting lines of instant coffee, and gyrating lewdly on the kitchen table: ‘In the Factory, people were self-expressionist … defining new boundaries, breaking the rules’ shouts one of them. At the same time, the mise-en-scène and the performance structure operate according to the principles of a responsive and interactive cybernetic organism. The live events are mainly hidden behind large media screens, but relayed through three closed circuit cameras, and random audience members are recruited to join, adapt and refresh the system as they re-enact Warhol’s anthropological-style films. The New York Times critic describes it as ‘a live magic act of sorts, and one of the most enjoyable such feats I’ve ever seen at the theater. … [It] excites in us a startled appreciation of the beauty in the present moment, which is among the most gratifying things good theater can do’ (Isherwood, 2012).

Participatory art  117

Figure 4.2  In Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) (2007) the performers not only shout about, but also demonstrate enthusiastically how in Andy Warhol’s Factory, ‘people were self-expressionist … defining new boundaries, breaking the rules’. (Courtesy of Gob Squad. Photo: © David Baltzer/bildbuehne.de)

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Critiquing Gob Squad’s Cybernetic-Existentialism Academic critiques have presented discourses on the show that readily align with a Cybernetic-Existentialist perspective. Patrick Primavesi’s analysis evokes (though perhaps unconsciously) cybernetic ideas of interactivity, testing boundaries, circularity, and send-and-receive circuits while simultaneously conjuring Existentialist paradigms: thresholds of presence, ‘isolation in exposure’, and Sartre’s discourse on the voyeur. Primavesi discusses the audience participants’ possibility of taking a step behind the screen into the film … [to] join the actors as ghosts in the machine, the phantasmatic sphere of the in-between—on the threshold between sender and receiver … liveness is demonstrated as fake, participation as a process of isolation in exposure … there is no way out of the circle of representation towards a pure, unmediated presence. Gob Squad’s attempt to expose actors and audiences test those boundaries and challenge our roles as voyeurs, witnesses and participants. (Primavesi, 2009, p. 97, 98, 105, emphasis in original) Gob Squad take their audience into ghostly territories of Nothingness; reveal the inauthentic and ‘fake’; demonstrate that ‘an image … is nothing but a relation’ (Elpidrou, 2011, p. 18); and evoke Marcel’s ‘separation with communion’ (1995, p. 39) in what Primavesi terms ‘isolation in exposure’. Both Marcel and Sartre discuss our simultaneous feelings of isolation yet yearnings for intimate relationships; and how ‘intersubjectivity assumes a communion … a unity. It designates a subjectivity that is made up of all subjectivities and it thus assumes all subjectivities in relation to the others—at once separated in the same way and united in the other’ (Sartre, 2002, p. 291). Primavesi’s reference to ‘our roles as voyeurs, witnesses and participants’ equates with Sartre’s parable of the voyeur (Chapter 3) which offers a type of revelation of the patent ‘truth’ of the subject-hood of the Other—the stranger exists with the power to judge us, make us apprehend ourselves, potentially challenge our freedom, and render us objects (Sartre, 1994 [1943], p. 257). There is a close parallel here with cybernetics when the move to its so-called ‘second order’ (second wave) placed human subjects inside the system ‘as voyeurs, witnesses and participants’. For Sartre, the objectifying look provided philosophical proof both of the Other and of oneself, and was the foundation stone of his attempt ‘to provide phenomenological evidence of other people and to deny solipsism’ (Reynolds, 2006, p. 97). In putting the observer within, rather than outside, the system, there was a danger of a type of solipsism, and one of its instigators John von Neumann sounded both Existentialist and messianic when he noted that ‘the world as we know it is our invention’ (quoted in Shanken, 2015, p. 14). But second wave pioneer Heinz Von Foerster used Sartrean thinking to counter this and, ‘rebelling against

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Figure 4.3  The funhouse-style interior for Gob Squad’s exploration of voyeurism and existential isolation: What Are You Looking At? (1998). (Photo: © Courtesy of Gob Squad.)

the closed information loops of primitive cybernetics, literally turns reality inside out, moving from “reflexivity to self-organization”, from the “hyphen to the splice’’,’ (Kroker, 2012, p. 96). Von Foerster’s essay collection Observing Systems (1981) explores what Hayles calls his thinking about reflexivity as a circular dynamic that can be used to solve the problem of solipsism. How does he know people exist, he

120  Participatory art asks. ‘If I assume that I am the sole reality, it turns out that I am in the imagination of somebody else, who in turn assumes that he is the sole reality.’ In a circle of intersecting solipsisms, I use my imagination to conceive of someone else and then of the imagination of that person, in which I find myself reflected. Thus I am reassured not only of the other person’s existence but of my own as well. (Hayles, 1999, p. 133) A concern to solve the problem of solipsism is yet another example of a theme shared by cybernetics and Existentialism, and while Von Foerster’s answer was to place the observer into the system itself and thus render the subject an ‘object’ within it, the Existentialists adopted an equivalent strategy by re-casting themselves as objects and as the Other.

‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ In Gob Squad’s 6-hour durational performance What Are You Looking At? (1998), voyeurism, isolation, being-for-others, and ‘separation with communion’ are vividly played out with the actors working inside a box constructed of two-way mirror walls, seeing only their own reflections, and not the audience members who stand and walk around the perimeter, watching them through the glass. Every half hour, a lighting change briefly cancels the internal mirror effect and brings performers and audience faceto-face for moments of ‘communion’; and at the performance’s conclusion another lighting change reverses the entire paradigm by reflecting the audience on the external walls so that they are ‘confronted by their own voyeurism’ (Tecklenburg, 2012, p. 19). The construction is a dynamic system that incorporates a performer-audience telephone link, with the first participant to answer the performers’ call being brought inside the box. It is notable that Nina Tecklenburg’s analysis employs explicit Existentialist vocabulary: The effect was astounding: What the performers had attempted to show through their stylized self-presentation of authenticity and everydayness was achieved much more convincingly by spectators. Particularly in the artificial context of the box, individual spectators seemed all the more ‘authentic’ in relation to the ‘artificial’ Gob Squad performers. … The fourth walls that Gob Squad still breaks through are always already doubled. … this is Gob Squad’s pleasurable politics and existential poetry. … [In] Gob Squad’s affirmative guerrilla theatre … alienation and melancholy can also stand beside spectacle, empathy, and enthusiastic engagement. (Tecklenburg, 2012, p. 18, 19, 32)

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Listening to the revelations of strangers A number of British women artists have created works in this vein, meeting and interacting with strangers and adopting a proto-cybernetic feedback process to place the Other in the spotlight as subject, in order to reveal something of their existential essence. For Confess all on video. Don’t worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian … (1994), Gillian Wearing took out advertisements asking strangers to confess on video, which they did revealingly, donning shop-bought masks to conceal their identity. Her work Signs that say what you want them to say not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–93) plays on themes of authenticity and non-conformism, and Wearing explains how she would ‘stand on a street corner, anywhere … I stopped people and just said ‘I’m an artist, and I’m doing a project where I ask people to write something on a piece of paper’,’ (Salvo and Wearing, 1999, p. 9). The resulting photographs are iconic artworks of the 1990s, including a uniformed British policemen holding his capitalized ‘HELP’ sign, a red haired woman textually reflecting ‘MY GRIP ON LIFE IS RATHER LOOSE’, a suited man stating ‘I’M DESPERATE’, a smiling young woman saying ‘I HATE THIS WORLD’ and a bespectacled man observing ‘EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED IN LIFE THE POINT IS TO KNOW IT AND TO UNDERSTAND IT’. Wearing reveals that she did not print out the images for an entire year, since the true motivation behind her most famous work was process rather than product: ‘the most important aspect was approaching strangers on the street and the interaction between us’ (Ferguson et al., 1999, p. 9). So it was too for British artist Florence Dixon, who stood on the street in various UK locations, wherever she happened to be (but primarily Leeds) for at least one hour every day for four months holding a hand-written cardboard sign reading Does anyone want to talk about anything? (October 2009 to February 2010). They did, and at length, many sharing their entire life stories or opening up to reveal intimate confessions, and some returning the next day(s) to talk again. In part an anthropological and socio-political project, she notes the demographic of the thousands of strangers who approached her to talk: over 80% male, and most from the disadvantaged side of society, including many homeless or jobless people, and some with mental health or drug issues. She also describes it as being conceived as a direct reaction against Facebook at a time when social media had first become popular and ‘people started looking down and away from, rather than up and towards the real world. We may be digitally connected now, but I think we’re actually more disconnected, distant, and separated than ever’ (Dixon, 2014). Following her contra-media aesthetic, she eschewed any photographic and audio recorded documentation, instead completing hand-written, objectively articulated journal entries at the end of each day, and presenting an exhibition of all the pages of her text, pinned at a 45 degree angle, around all four walls of the gallery space.

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Figure 4.4   One of the images resulting from Gillian Wearing’s search for the existential essences of strangers in Signs that say what you want them to say not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–93). (© Gillian Wearing, courtesy of Maureen Paley, London, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.)

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Figure 4.5  ‘I think we’re actually more disconnected, distant, and separated than ever’—Florence Dixon eschews what she feels is Facebook’s superficial connectivity in favor of spending at least an hour a day inviting face-toface interactions with strangers on the street, in Does Anyone Want to Talk About Anything? (2009–10). Camden Town, London, 17 November 2009.

Does anyone want to talk about anything?’s proto-cybernetic process concerns Dixon’s use of spontaneous feedback loops and a self-regulating rule system which includes being there every day without fail, continuing the conversation beyond the minimum one hour daily period until the person has finished and wants to leave (sometimes after several hours), writing about the encounters the same day in a factual, descriptive manner, never judging anyone, and just listening, empathizing, prompting and eliciting. She notes that she suspends moral judgment in order to learn about their experiences, keep the conversation going, and establish a platform for what she calls ‘real democracy, without hysteria’; some verbatim examples illustrate her method: I was a football hooligan and Neo-Nazi. —Right, tell me about it. I’m a coke dealer and got stabbed two days ago. — Shit, what happened? (Dixon, 2014) At the same time, the work’s Existentialist credentials are clear, igniting close and intense encounters with strangers, delving deeply into the lived experiences of Others, searching for essences, and intimately exploring the principle of being-for-others using Marcel’s notions of participation, openness to the Other and absolute disponibilité as a social, political and existential ethic.

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Blast Theory: seeking epiphany with a stranger ‘With the appearance of the Other’s look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object … [and] A me-as-object is revealed to me as an unknowable being, as the flight into an Other’, writes Sartre (2003 [1943], p. 375). At that moment, our absolute, ‘pure contingency’ and ‘the relativity of my senses’ in relation to other people is revealed, together with ‘the absolute flow of my world toward the Other’ (376). Thus, genuine communion with people, including strangers, is afforded the greatest importance. Blast Theory’s Matt Adams speaks like a diehard Existentialist when he describes how his arts collective trio (with Ju Row Far and Nick Tandavanitj) is ‘looking for ways in which you can have moments of epiphany with a stranger. It is rare that you have an interesting engagement with strangers, but when it happens, it is a thrilling moment!’ (in Chatzichristodoulou, 2009, p.  113). Blast Theory’s approach to intimate audience interactions shares much in common with Gob Squad, who have equally discussed their work in terms of meaningful encounters with strangers: ‘Faith makes it possible to take a stranger by the hand, see a hero in a passerby and ultimately in doing so, make a utopia possible, if only for a split second’ (Gob Squad, 2010, p. 112). For decades, Blast Theory have been among the most original practitioners of artistic Cybernetic-Existentialism, crafting intensely existential encounters with strangers through the employment of a range of technological cybernetic systems, utilizing game-based structures and locative media, and often developing customized applications. As a participant in Uncle Roy All Around You (2004), you are divested of all possessions—bags, phones, money—everything in your pockets. You are then put out alone on the streets with only a palm computer through which you are contacted by the cryptic Uncle Roy as well as other online audience participants who attempt to help (and sometimes hinder) your journey through the city streets to find the said Uncle before the time is up and it’s ‘Game Over’. As I have discussed in Digital Performance (2007), my personal experience of this cybernetic ‘computer game’ was highly existential, including fearing being mugged, and nearly, really being hit by a car when hurrying across a street in the race against time (Dixon, 2007, p. 663–669). If you ‘win’ the game, the piece climaxes with the appearance of a chauffeur-driven stretched limousine containing a rather sinister man who beckons you inside. From the intense virtuality of the computer game you have been playing solo for an hour, this deus ex machina presents an unnerving and uncanny sense of what Sartre calls the revelatory ‘shock of the encounter with the Other’ (2003 [1943], p. 371). As you drive off together, he gives you the look and asks you all about strangers—whether you would trust one and whether you would help one—and he persuades you to make a commitment to support a real stranger for a year. You do this by correspondence, firstly by sending a postcard through the mail, and thereafter online and, if you wish, by meeting face-to-face.

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Figure 4.6  The surprise arrival of a chauffeur-driven stranger in a stretch limousine is the deus ex machina climax to Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy All Around You (2004). (© Courtesy of Blast Theory.)

Self and Other This is an unusually forceful commitment to being-for-others to emerge from an artwork, which brings to mind Marcel’s ideas on openness and availability and Beauvoir’s belief that ‘One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion’ (Beauvoir, 1977). In Totality and Infinity (1961), Emmanuel Levinas took the relationship of Self with Other to new heights, and ‘turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of it’ (Bakewell, 2016, p.  197). Most extreme of all was the ethical Existentialist philosopher Simone Weil, who decided that since many people could not afford to sleep in beds nor to eat, neither would she, so she slept on the floor and almost entirely starved herself for several years before dying of heart failure in 1943 at the age of 34. Weil strongly influenced Albert Camus’s ideas, including his discourses on attaining dignity and purpose in the face of an absurd world in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951); and Susan Sontag has reflected eloquently on Weil’s simultaneously ‘noble and ridiculous’ willingness to sacrifice herself for her ‘truths’, calling her one of the most

126  Participatory art uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit. … such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka … Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction. (Sontag, 1963). As those writers’ works attest in vivid and direct ways, encounters with, fear of, and empathy toward Others constitute a distinguishing feature, and sometimes obsessive theme in Existentialist texts, both literary and philosophical. The cybernetic system of Uncle Roy All Around You that began as an afternoon art-game journeying through city streets with a palm computer and online interactants becomes truly autopoietic in its evolution into a new, self-regulating system of real-world feedback loops and recursive encounters with an actual stranger for the period of a year. As Nan June Paik put it: ‘Cybernetics [is] the science of pure relations, or relationship itself … cybernetics is the exploitation of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences’ (2015 [1966], p. 64); and as Matt Adams puts it, the group’s ‘artistic enterprise … is about accepting the full complexity and confusion of our existence, and trying to represent these enormously ineffable issues … [that] always hover outside of our understanding’ (quoted in Chatzichristodoulou, 2009, p. 115).

Freedom … above everything else Some years earlier in Kidnap (1998), Blast Theory had famously asked their online audience once again to trust a stranger, and to allow themselves to give up their actual freedom and be held in captivity. They thus played, in a very real sense, with the foundation stone of Existentialism—human freedom: ‘Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else’ (Beauvoir, 2000 [1947], p. 283). Many people willingly volunteered online to undertake the Kidnap ordeal, but no one was contacted or told they had been chosen. But one day, without warning, two of them were snatched, bags were placed over their heads, and they were taken to a safe house where they remained prisoners for two days. A webcam relayed the events online, including the kidnappers feeding the blindfolded victims, taking them to the toilet and waiting outside, and washing their hands; ‘an extremely intimate interaction’ (Chatzichristodoulou, 2009, p. 112). Like in Uncle Roy, the participants commit themselves to an intense form of Existentialist being-for-others, and an extreme cybernetic ‘command and control’ system, which has drawn sharp criticism from commentators such as Marc Tuters who suggests that it represents ‘an unwelcome substitution of military logic over the “real” world’ (in Benford and Giannachi, 2011, p. 7).

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Figure 4.7  Strangers are snatched from the street and held in captivity in Blast Theory’s Kidnap (1998). © Courtesy of Blast Theory

The victims revealed later that that they were truly upset by the emotional intensity of the experience, and not knowing what might happen and what the limits were. In these terms, both the participants’ existential experience and the ‘second order’ cybernetic system of which they were a centrifugal part went way beyond the normal expectations of an artwork, and this is a telling indicator of the powerful impulses underlying artistic manifestations of Cybernetic-Existentialism. Roy Ascott argues that cybernetic artists’ primary focus is the trigger effects they induce and the behavior they provoke ‘in the spectator and in society at large … the art of our time tends toward the development of a cybernetic vision, in which feedback, dialogue and involvement in some creative interplay at deep levels of experience are paramount’ (Ascott, 1968, p. 107). Matt Adams stresses that Our projects are not hollow intellectual and aesthetic experiments, they are pieces of work that look to engage with, and ask particular questions about, the culture in which we live. If you take Kidnap as an example, the question we set ourselves was: why do so many of us give up control so readily to others and what is the pleasure in that?’ (Chatzichristodoulou, 2009, p. 110). Both cybernetics and Existentialism provide their own answers to the question: human control is yielded willingly as part of an evangelical faith in the self-organizing, evolving organism in cybernetics; and master-slave (Hegel,

128  Participatory art Nietzsche, Beauvoir) and sado-masochist (Sartre) dialectics have been widely discussed within Existentialism in terms of direct responses to issues of power, subjectivity, and our simultaneously pleasurable and problematic, and desirous and fearful relationship with the Other.

Sartre as prisoner, and as actor ‘burning with faith’ Sartre emphasizes that our freedom still remains even when in the most unbearable situations such as imprisonment or torture, since we still have clear and free choices, such as whether to absolve or confront our tormentors, and whether to accept and submit to, or willfully resist our pain. Sartre’s philosophy was strongly influenced by his experiences during World War II in occupied France, including his time incarcerated as a Prisoner-of-War in Stalag 12D in Trier, close to France’s border with Luxembourg from 1940 to 1941. There he pored over Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) in detail and intensely (he had read it first in 1938) and began to formulate his own magnus opus Being and Nothingness (1943) in response. There are delightful ironies to this, with the proto-Marxist, fiercely atheist Sartre greedily devouring a book by a Nazi sympathizer that he had persuaded a Catholic priest to illegally smuggle in for him. The Catholic Church would later ban all of Sartre’s works in 1948, placing them on their Index of Prohibited Books. Bakewell suggests Sartre found Being and Time ‘the perfect inspiration for a nation in defeat’ (2016, p. 141) and that Heidegger had been writing it from the same perspective following Germany’s humiliating WW1 defeat in 1918; she also notes that it seems extraordinary that the German censors in 1943 should let Sartre’s huge tome through, since freedom is its overarching theme. Similarly, his play The Flies (1943), based on the legend of Orestes returning to free the city of Argos from a usurper King, was untouched by censors despite being a thinly disguised allegory of the German occupation and the French resistance, with its message that freedom, personal and political, must prevail: ‘I am my liberty!’ the hero declares. In the run-up to Christmas 1940 while in the prisoner-of-war camp, Sartre wrote and produced a similarly allegorical play on the theme of resistance and freedom, Bariona (1940). It combines the Biblical story of the nativity and Herod’s attempts to kill newborn babies with an apocryphal one about a chieftain in Roman-occupied Palestine who organizes sexual abstinence across his village to create ‘a religion of nothingness’ that will leave the Romans only ‘empty, ruined towns’. It is the only occasion Sartre acted in one of his play, as one of the three kings, Balthasar, who delivers an inspiring speech on the everlasting joy of freedom, and was ‘apparently “so sincere, ardent and burning with faith” that it converted an atheist doctor to Christianity’ (Thody, 1971, p. 60–61). Sartre’s war experiences, and his subsequent involvement in the Resistance, including forming a group with Merleau-Ponty called ‘Socialism

Participatory art  129 and Freedom’, led to him being awarded the French Légion d’Honneur in 1948, an award also bestowed on Beauvoir in 1982. In typical fashion, both refused it politely, citing their needs to remain absolutely independent. Strangely, Sartre’s very first publication at the age of 18, L’Ange du Morbide (1923) tells the satirical story of a perverse, neurotic teacher who attempts to seduce a girl who has tuberculosis, and who later in life wins the Légion d’Honneur, which Sartre describes disdainfully as ‘an undisputed badge of middle-class respectability’ (quoted in Thody, 1971, p. 30). The war years were entirely exhilarating for Sartre, and brought his and Beauvoir’s political consciousness and philosophical ideas to a new maturity, together with a new understanding of the importance of ‘responsibility and solidarity—the two foundation stones of Existentialist ethics’ (Appignanesi, 2005, p.  71). In the cramped physical conditions of Stalag 12D, where there was always an arm or leg in contact with him when he slept, it also had the positive effect of bringing Sartre closer to his fellow men. His earliest years had been difficult and unhappy—‘I hate my childhood, and everything that survives from it’ (Sartre, 1971 [1964], p. 156). Following the death of his father when he was a baby, his penniless mother moved back with her parents, and his schoolteacher grandfather Charles was doting but overbearing. Seeing him as a prodigy, he virtually confined Sartre to the house, where he was home-schooled and deprived the company of other children. When he did go to school aged 10 he was bullied (and responded by learning boxing), and later blamed Charles both for ‘sacrificing his adored grandson’s well-being to his own vanity and fear of death’ and for neglecting to deal with the leucoma that was affecting his right eye when he was seven and for the rest of his life left him ‘squinting and one eyed’ (Thody, 1971, p. 10, 13). ‘The war really divided my life in two’ said Sartre and he ‘would rarely be as relaxed and happy again as he had been as a prisoner of war’ (Bakewell, 2016, p. 142, 163), where he directly formulated his distinctive appreciation and idiosyncratic take on freedom: We were never more free than under the Nazi Occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to speak. … And because of all this we were free: precisely because the Nazi poison was seeping into our thoughts. Every true thought was a victory. … The choice that each of us made of his life and his being was a genuine choice because it was made in the presence of death … Everyone of us who knew the truth about the Resistance asked himself anxiously ‘If they torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?’ Thus the basic question of freedom was set before us; and we were brought to the point of the deepest knowledge a man can have of himself. The secret of a man is not his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex; it is the limit of his own freedom; his capacity for standing up to torture and death. (Sartre, 1949, p. 11)

130  Participatory art It is also interesting to reflect on the ways in which the processes that Blast Theory devised, and in particular the strict rules and absolute sense of order that they imposed on the Kidnap captives, equate directly with ideas within cybernetics and systems theory. In The Cybernetics Moment (2016), Ronald R. Kline relates how the investigation of ‘the nature of pattern and order’ was a key innovation of one of its most radical pioneers, Gregory Bateson, who illustrated ‘how radically cybernetics and information theory could be transformed when applied to subjects as diverse as New Guinea headhunters, schizophrenic patients, alcoholism and religion’ (Kline, 2015, p. 148).

Negative entropy, homeostasis, and Day of the Figurines In the 1950s, Gregory Bateson argued that Norbert Wiener’s idea of equating information with negative entropy ‘marks the greatest single shift in human thinking since the days of Plato and Aristotle, because it unites the natural and social sciences and finally resolves the problem of teleology and the body-mind dichotomy’ (in Kline, 2015, p. 148). Within cybernetic understandings, Kidnap enacts a type of negative entropy by firstly staging entropy, in the form of an act of apparently destructive randomness and disorder (the kidnapping), but then reversing this to impose a highly formal system based on transparent communication (via the webcam), strict rules of engagement, pattern, and orderliness. This correlates with the quest for negative entropy-inducing mechanisms that Bateson, Wiener, and Margaret Mead saw as a crucial cybernetic concern, whereby the natural tendencies of nature and the universe toward an entropy marked by a chaotic randomness and instability (for example, the unpredictable behavior of molecules when they become heated) is instead transformed into a coherent and orderly pattern of behavior through the process of negative entropy. Amidst the existential Angst and chaos of a kidnapping, a self-corrective cybernetic model is applied to establish a stable and ordered ecosystem. This works toward another of Bateson’s concerns, for somatic homeostasis where ‘self-correcting or buffering mechanisms operate to hold constant’ different elements or structures (Bateson, 1972, p. 357). Within interdisciplinary cybernetics, these can range from ‘natural selection’ and the chemical composition of materials to the politics and economics of human societies. Somatic adjustment and homeostasis can be achieved through mechanisms or ecosystems that simultaneously exercise (and discriminate between) flexibility at the individual, local or micro level and variability at the macro level (357–8). The former operates in an additive manner, the latter in a multiplicative one, and thus: Its mathematics will resemble that of information theory or negative entropy … [with] a difference between the economic system of the individual, whose budgetary problems are additive (or subtractive)

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Figure 4.8 Detailed views of the online participants’ figurine characters and their miniature, cutout town set for Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines (2006). (© Courtesy of Blast Theory.)

and those of society at large, where the overall distribution or flow of wealth is governed by complex (and perhaps imperfect) homeostatic systems. (p. 358) This type of cybernetically inflected worldview that juggles and distinguishes between the individual and the governing meta-system above it is created time and time again in the work of Blast Theory. In Day of the Figurines (2006, with the Mixed Reality Laboratory), it is literalized in a kind of online massively multiplayer soap-opera board game. A participatory interactive narrative is developed and played out through a combination of players’ SMS text messages and a physical representation of the story enacted using tiny and exquisite plastic figurines which are moved around a model town: each of up to 1,000 players are represented by their own figurine, modeled by the artists according to the biographies and physical characteristics the players invent for them. Over the course of 24 days—each correlating to one hour of a single day in the course of the town’s narrative—an absurd and increasingly apocalyptic series of events unfolds. Existential questions, freedom, and self-determination are all explicit in Blast Theory’s website description: It invites players to establish their own codes of behaviour and morality within a parallel world … defining themselves through their

132  Participatory art interactions … Day of the Figurines invites players to think about and discuss their reason for being there. At the same time, the game exists within an autonomous and ever-changing world of circular causality and feedback loops where, for example, ‘players’ health deteriorates through interactions with the environment’ which ‘uses emergent behaviour and social dynamics as a means of structuring a live event’ (Blast Theory, 2012). Day of the Figurines thus dramatizes an interactive world in miniature that catapults the player/character into the heart of a quintessential existential crisis. Crucially, the drama being played out involves, like life, a series of cybernetic feedback loops where certain acts are decisively made by the characters, but other acts simply and unavoidably befall them. ‘Man is not a thing, but a drama’ wrote the Spanish Existentialist philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (quoted in MacDonald, 2000, p. 108), who agreed with Sartre’s vision that we are entirely ‘free’ to choose our particular paths, but less so with his confidence that we can always counter and overcome facticity—our histories, circumstances and environment. Rather for Ortega, our being is intimately subject to events happening around us and to us: Man is what has happened to him, what he has done … a relentless trajectory of experiences that he carries on his back as the vagabond his bundle of all he possesses. Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits on what he is capable of being. … [There is] only one limit: the past. The experiments already made with life narrow man’s future. … Man lives in view of the past. Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is … history. (Ortega, 2000, p. 136, emphasis in original) The players have some meaningful participatory agency in peopling the figurine world with its dramatis personae and directly affecting the narrative, thus rendering the system self-regulating and autopoietic. However, the players’ actual ‘affordances’ are relatively limited. A term coined by James J. Gibson to denote the range of latent possibilities open to interactors to directly affect their environment, the ‘Theory of Affordances’ (1977) was further developed in relation to human-computer interaction design by Donald Norman (1988). Like much of Blast Theory’s interactive work, Day of the Figurines offers the user some significant affordances yet the major plotlines remain predestined, and emphasize Ortega’s notion that who we are is dependent not only on what we do, but on what happens to us. All this takes place within a miniature model of a classically adaptive cybernetic society, which is autopoietic in its continual evolution in relation

Participatory art  133 to user-interaction and the particularities of the tripartite affordances of ‘environment, organism and activity’ (Dourish quoted in Benford and Giannachi, 2011, p. 122) that the artists have conceived and enabled. While this particular world projects a narrative of intensifying danger, chaos and entropy, culminating in the sudden appearance of Arabic-speaking soldiers on the streets, the superstructure nonetheless equates with the type of flexible society advocated by Bateson: A single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmes) characteristics. (Bateson, 1972, p. 502, emphasis in original).

Stranger and stranger In Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger (1942) (L’Étranger, also translated as The Outsider), the French protagonist decides to shoot an aggressive Arab stranger on a beach five times—his main explanation is the effect of the hot sun. Meursault defined a new type of anti-hero, who makes no pretense about empathy toward others; whose relationship to himself is alienated; and to the world is so simultaneously distanced yet raw and subjective that it becomes absurd and unreal. In Existentialist literature—just as in cybernetics—different agents and elements are set up to encounter one another, connections and miss-connections are made between them, and important things may happen as a result. But they remain unpredictable, and may be surprising, random or, in cybernetic parlance, entropic. From their first meeting when Camus introduced himself to Sartre at the premiere of the latter’s play The Flies on 2 June 1943, they became the best of friends, and wrote about one another’s work with huge admiration. But their relationship finally turned to entropy and enmity following Camus’ rejection of state communist models in The Rebel (1951) in favor of anarchist ones of continual rebellion, which many leftists such as Sartre at the time interpreted as overtly anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary. Camus defended himself eloquently against an angry review by a critic published in Sartre’s journal, but an emotional and heavy-handed counter-punch article from the ex-boxer Sartre proved the knockout blow to the relationship. The story is often mythologised as a drama in which Sartre, a ‘dreaming boy’ chasing an impossible fantasy, meets his comeuppance in the form of a clear-sighted moral hero who also happens to be cooler and wiser and better looking: Camus. (Bakewell, 2016, p. 258) Like Sartre, Camus’s father also died when he was a baby—killed during World War I—and he was brought up in squalid conditions in Algiers

134  Participatory art without running water or electricity by his violent grandmother, and his mother Catherine, a cleaner who was deaf and mute following a stroke. He loved her dearly, although she was ‘largely incapable of showing him any visible sign of affection’ (Maher, 2014, p. 77), a situation dramatically reversed in the famous opening to Camus’ The Outsider. Even mother and child can remain strangers to one another, and Camus reflects in The Rebel that we are ‘overwhelmed by the strangeness of things … this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men, and human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe’ (1956 [1951], p. 23). He explores the incomprehensibility, absurdity, and triviality of both life and death, where mortality is just a brute and absurd fact, as in The Outsider’s banal opening statement—‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don’t know’; and he asks his boss for time off to attend the funeral saying ‘it’s not my fault’ (Camus, 2000 [1942], p. 9). At his murder trial, Mersault is denounced for his failure to show emotion at the funeral, and is sentenced to death. In the Afterward, Camus reflects: In our society any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death … the hero in the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game … he is an outsider … he refuses to lie … Mersault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings … The Outsider [is] the story of a man who, without any heroic intentions, agrees to die for the truth. (p. 118–119). Beauvoir describes Camus as emotional and funny, a ‘simple, cheerful soul’ (Beauvoir, 1965 [1960], p. 539), and his own death was sudden and untimely at the age of 46, in 1960. He generally feared and avoided cars but on 4 January 1960, his publisher Michael Gallimard was persistent and persuaded him to get into his so that they could talk as Gallimard drove Camus to his destination. The car hit two trees and both were killed, with Camus’ body flung out of the rear window. Nearby the body, Police also found the unfinished manuscript to his autobiographical novel, The First Man, and in Camus’ back pocket, the mortuary found an unused train ticket for his destination. Among the pages of the manuscript is a section describing how, on hearing of someone’s death, the grandmother responds with flippant cruelty: ‘Well … he’ll fart no more’ (Camus, 2001 [1960], p. 128). Despite their quarrel, Sartre was devastated and wrote a moving obituary praising the brilliance and originality of his work and calling him: ‘the little Algerian tough guy, very much a hooligan, very funny. … He was probably the last good friend I had’ (1978 [1976], p. 64). Cox reflects that: ‘His smouldering good looks, his footballing prowess, his violent and untimely death, his genius as a novelist, have all contributed to the modern-day cult

Participatory art  135 of Camus: to making him the most attractive and popular of the existentialists’ (Cox, 2016, p. 171–2).

Strangers meeting strangers Strangers encounter strangers in British artist Susan Collins’ In Conversation (1997) as passersby in a street in Brighton, UK come across a projection on the sidewalk of an animated, speaking mouth, uncannily separated from anybody or context. Amplified by loudspeakers, the mouth captures pedestrians’ attention and draws them into intimate encounters. The mouth’s voice is Victoria, an androgynous-sounding piece of Macintosh’s contemporaneous text-to-speech software. ‘Behind’ her, around 10,000 online participants a day watch a webcam of the live scene on the street and type furiously, vying to be the next in line to converse with the stranger(s) on the street. Their text inputs are collaged, but homogenized as one by Victoria’s voice; and Collins has compared the installation to a trompe l’oeil collage of virtual, illusionistic space and physical space. She notes how: The ‘voice’ performing these messages could be quite persuasive, if not manipulative. A man on his way home, while the piece was installed in Amsterdam, found himself captivated … repeatedly trying to leave,

Figure 4.9  The web camera view of fascinated passers-by, talking to the mouth projected on the street that combines thousands of online voices, in Susan Collins’ In Conversation (1997). (Courtesy of Susan Collins.)

136  Participatory art only to be called back, compelled by this computerized disembodied voice. The online visitor … made up of more than one person in more than one location eventually asks him for a kiss, following which the man is seen bending over to kiss the projection of the mouth on the pavement. (Collins, 2004, p. 50) Other passersby agree to sing and dance, while their online interactants use their text dialogues to prompt Victoria to vocalize a type of percussive, rhythmic ‘music’. In Conversation is a classic example of an autonomous cybernetic system that not only incorporates a series of inputs, outputs and feedback loops, but also aims for a symbiosis of human and machine. The speaking mouth—an advanced example of a public-site interactive media artwork in its time—is a startling, strange and ghostly apparition. It is apparently ‘real’, with photo-realistic lips synched to a voice that interacts with strangers directly, and responds to them specifically in real time. But clearly it is also not real, and is thereby rendered uncanny in both its form and its interactive modality. As Andrew Pickering notes: ‘Cybernetic devices … explicitly aimed to be sensitive and responsive to changes in the world around them, and this endowed them with a disconcerting, quasi-magical, disturbingly lifelike quality’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 7). In relation to Existentialism, not only does the mouth confront the passerby with an extraordinary encounter with a stranger and ‘Other’, but it also plays on the philosophy’s fascinations with voyeurism, and oscillating dialectics—of presence and absence, subject and object, master and slave. Or, as Thomas Ligotti writes: We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation … We keep company with ghosts. (Ligotti, 2011, p. 274)

Noisy conversations As noted previously, one of cybernetics’ earliest innovations in the 1940s was the development of information theory, a discourse exploring how signals are encoded, sent, received, and decoded, whereupon a feedback loop enables new or adapted signals to be returned to the sender, and the cycle continues. To take a simple example, the spoken message from the sender (information source) into a telephone (transmitter) is encoded into wave signals and sent through cables, and then decoded at the receiving end. The receiver may then instigate feedback by speaking in reply, which transmits another message back through the system, and the effect is recursive. Two of the theory’s pioneers, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver note that within cybernetic understandings of information theory, it is irrelevant

Participatory art  137 ‘what kinds of symbols are being considered – whether written letters or words, or musical notes or spoken words, or symphonic music, or pictures’ (Shannon and Weaver, 1949, p.  8). Interestingly, In Conversation’s cybernetic system combines and remediates a number of the symbols they describe, transposing the ‘written letters’ of online interactants into ‘spoken words’, and then animating and lip-synching those with the moving ‘picture’ of the mouth. In their 1949 book The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon and Weaver explore ‘three levels of communication problems’ that remain as relevant today for interactive artists: technical (accuracy of the symbols’ transmission); semantic (whether the desired meaning is conveyed following transmission); and the effectiveness of the ‘received meaning [to] affect conduct in the desired way’ (p. 4). As we have seen, there is one final element in the system chain that is crucial to information theory—noise. This may originate from within the system or outside it and can affect the signal as it moves through the system. It may interrupt or disrupt the message, thus rendering its decoding and interpretation problematic, or else adding a new element that embellishes or otherwise complicates it: ‘These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example), or static (in radio), or distortions in the shape or shading of a picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy or facsimile). All these changes in the signal may be called noise’ (Weaver, 1949, p. 12). In Collins’ piece, noise is integral and is actually one of its most interesting and novel elements, as the mouth’s sentences are sometimes strange or incomprehensible mixtures of words and phrases, where the text messages

INFORMATION SOURCE TRANSMITTER

SIGNAL MESSAGE

RECEIVER

RECEIVED SIGNAL

DESTINATION

MESSAGE

NOISE SOURCE

Figure 4.10  The concept, and complication of Noise, whether in ‘words, or musical notes or spoken words, or symphonic music, or pictures’ as theorized in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s ‘Model of Information Theory’ (Shannon and Weaver, 1949, p.  8). This diagram is reproduced from Claude Shannon’s earlier sole-authored article: ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ (1948) in The Bell System Technical Journal. (Courtesy of Nokia Bell Labs.)

138  Participatory art of different users have been fragmented and combined. While the system is designed to deliver one voice that appears to be individual and coherent, Collins notes that ‘slippages and imperfections became integral to the work, as sometimes words stumbled out on top of each other to form an unintentional collective sentence, usually irrevocably altering the original intended meaning’ (Collins, 2004, p. 50).

Glitch Art and the aesthetics of noise The aesthetics of noise, in one form or other, have long fascinated artists, from Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises (2005) [1913] to John Cage’s 4’33’’ (1952)—a concert performance of apparent silence that is specifically designed for the audience to became hyper-aware of ambient noise and the sounds (breathing, coughing, movements etc.) they themselves make. For Etan J. Ilfeld it is a ‘subversive deconstruction of Shannon’s information/noise binary … [and] a rebuke of Shannon and Weiner’s signal-based information, which had championed signal over noise’ since the concert hall’s ambient and audience noise ‘became the actualized message/signal’ in 4’33” (Ilfeld, 2012, p. 58). Signal-related audio-visual noise played a central role in content within many video artworks from the 1960s, and net.art works since 1990s, while in the 21st century, it turned into an aesthetic genre unto itself in Glitch Art, where static white noise, electronic dysfunctions, error messages, breakups, and digital defects and are not just embraced but elevated as the ultimate creative act (Betancourt, 2017). Extending avant-garde traditions of Cubism, Futurism and Dada, Glitch Art’s aesthetics of error, accident and failure reveals ‘new knowledge’ (Speiser, 2017), and Dutch curator and theorist Rosa Menkman’s ‘Glitch Studies Manifesto’ (2011) discusses its destructive and degenerative impulses in relation to ideas pertinent to both cybernetics and Existentialism: using formal processes that are reformative and regenerative, pioneering, non-conformist, and ultimately concerned with freedom. She announces that while communication platforms and media forms may progress, the search for an entirely noiseless channel will remain forever futile—there will always be imperfections and these should be glorified: In the beginning there was only noise … join the avant-garde of the unknown. … Use the glitch as an exoskeleton for progress. Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and cracks … Rejoice the critical trans-media aesthetics of glitch artifacts. … Flow cannot be understood without interruption or function without glitching. (Menkman, 2011, emphasis in original) ‘Transgression, radical action, broken sound and intense intimacy’ is explored in the UK’s Tempting Failure Biennial of Performance Art and Noise

Participatory art  139 (since 2012), with its 2017 event ‘Fractured Bodies’ (curator Hellen Burrough) bringing together an impressive array of 70 artists, and a Hermann Nitsch retrospective. Mark Nunes’ edited collection Error: Glitch, Noise and Jam in New Media Cultures (2011) explores ‘a cybernetic understanding of noise’ and celebrates it as a transgressive form of ‘errant communication within a culture increasingly dominated by a logic of maximum performance’ (Nunes, 2011, p. 4, emphasis in original). German artist Matthias Gommel’s Delayed (2002) plays with this errancy as strangers encounter one another within a gallery space, where they don headphones, talk into microphones, and listen to one another at a distance. But a three second time delay in the closed circuit relay system disrupts the signal to scramble and alienate the communication. As Tanya Zimbardo observes, Delayed ‘revisits notions of feedback’ and the time delay techniques of early media art in order to demonstrate how, ‘According to cybernetic theory, distortions and delays are fundamental to aspects of electronic communication; it is in these delays that perception and awareness are heightened’ (Zimbardo, 2008a, p. 174). Noise, and Heinz von Foerster’s notion of order-from-noise became a central aspect of second order cybernetics, particularly in the work of Foerster, Bateson, and Pask, with a primary task being ‘to overcome entropy by using “noise” as positive feedback’ (Darby, 1982, p. 220).2 Meanwhile, management theory has taken an applied interest, with Maurice Yolles’ Organizations as Complex Systems: Social Cybernetics and Knowledge in Theory and Practice (2006) arguing that companies are cybernetic systems where noise within them, or affecting them from the outside, is often ‘the central focus of the problem’. He argues that ‘Managing the complex is about managing “noise” or perhaps we should say it is about “dealing with” “accepting” “making room for” and “learning from” “noise”,’ (Yolles, 2006, p. 23).

Is there love in the telematic embrace? Over 25 years ago, one of cybernetic arts’ great practitioners, advocates and educators, Roy Ascott posed a profound question in an article title: ‘Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?’ (1990). He reflects on art systems that telematically connect two separate physical locations, but in turn also opens up Existentialist notions of ‘the look’, disponibilité and beingfor-others—at a distance. One of Ascott’s students (who have included musicians Brian Eno and Pete Townsend), British media artist Paul Sermon answered the question two years later with an emphatic ‘Yes’, creating the classic telematic installation of the time, Telematic Dreaming (1992). Two beds in different spaces are linked via cameras and a video conferencing system and, using blue-screen techniques, the image of the gallery visitor on the opposite bed is projected onto your bed. Apparently ‘together’

140  Participatory art

Figure 4.11 Two remote participants (left, Susan Kozel and right, Andrea Zapp) ‘telematically embrace’ on a bed in Paul Sermon’s interactive installation Telematic Dreaming (1992). (Courtesy of Paul Sermon.)

through the cybernetic circuit that has been established, you see (but cannot hear) one another, you share the same space, you begin to engage and interact, and inevitably you begin to ‘virtually’ touch one another, whereupon: a feeling of astounding nearness arises … many visitors seize the opportunity for uninhibited mischief and make virtual seductive advances, indulge in intimacies or even come to blows … the restraints that reality imposes on us are lifted and the actual consequences of our actions removed. (Grau, 2003, p. 275) Telematic Dreaming is a classic networked system of inputs, outputs and feedback loops; but it also operates powerfully in terms of exploring Existentialist concepts. The license that the virtuality of the other person affords in lifting what Grau calls ‘the restraints that reality imposes’ offers an interesting take on ideas of freedom as a transcendence from everydayness and facticity, and the concept of acting spontaneously and authentically. While the installation is grounded in a sense of fun and play, it also provides an experience of the body’s apparent separation and splitting across two spaces, and a transcendence of the physical, which in turn acts as a powerful reminder of our phenomenological body and its simultaneous subject-hood

Participatory art  141 and object-hood. As Susan Kozel notes: ‘Telepresence has been called an outof-body experience, yet what intrigues me is the return to the body which is implied by any voyage beyond it’ (Kozel, 1994). As the body becomes an Other, an object and a double (on the other bed), the experience provides ‘double consciousness’ of the body as a vacillation between separation and oneness. This idea is a cornerstone of the philosophy, with this sense of separation resulting in intense feelings of what Kierkegaard called dread, Heidegger dubbed Angst, Sartre termed anguish, and Camus conceptualized as recognition of the absurd. In Sermon’s installation, the bodies of Others are rendered virtual, poetic and metaphorical bodies to us (and we to them), lying vulnerably on a bed. They are symbols of the always already ghostly and ephemeral status of the human being, which is always lost and ‘never at home’ [Nicht-zuhause-sein] (Heidegger, 1962, p.  233–4), ever searching for communion with others, and for existential connection. My argument here is that such artworks and experiences provide profound illuminations on the human existential condition while underlining our increasingly cybernetic and posthuman ontology in the face of networked technologies.

Uncanny journeys In 2006 and 2007, my theater company The Chameleons Group and I (as director) collaborated with Sermon, Mathias Fuchs and Andrea Zapp to present Unheimlich (Uncanny), which utilizes an advanced networked system combining video conferencing and blue-screen techniques. Audience members in the United States are invited to step into an entirely blue stage area, and on doing so (sometimes alone, sometimes in couples or groups) they are greeted by two female actors (Anna Fenemore and Niki Woods) playing charming but mischievous, child-like sisters. These two are in an empty theater studio in London, UK, and their video image and voices are transmitted via a high-speed Internet connection to be conjoined with the US participants in real time, and in high resolution, within a combined live screen image that is projected on large monitors placed all around the space. All the bodies thus share the same screen space and everyone in the two remote locations talk together, ‘virtually’ shake hands and sometimes kiss, improvise together and, to use Roy Ascott’s concept, ‘telematically embrace’. Cameras observing each space are aligned so that when the images from the two sites are video-mixed, the scale of the figures from both sites are identical, and eye lines between them appear accurate. 2D and 3D virtual backgrounds are keyed in and changed dynamically by Zapp and Fuchs, creating mise-en-scènes using photographic locations such as forests, beaches, train carriages and rooms, as well as surreal 3D navigable fictional spaces (including heaven and hell) created by Fuchs using game engines. The backgrounds prompt different interactions and fragmented narratives, and

142  Participatory art

Figure 4.12  The Unheimlich sisters take an audience member (Toni Sant) on an improvised journey from a railway station to a beach and a forest fire. It concludes in Hell, where he says he is so hot that he needs to take off his trousers. (Courtesy of the artists.)

are used by the actors as routes to lead the audience members on surreal journeys. Participants typically come on ‘stage’ for a few minutes to interact, then exit and watch others do the same, and return again later. There is a continual negotiation of space and the relative positioning of the bodies in the US and UK, with a complicating cybernetic loop added though the reversal of the right and left perspectives when watching oneself on video. This begets a delicate and sometimes bumbling ‘dance’ as the mediatized bodies within this self-organizing system spontaneously compose themselves—no longer 3,000 miles apart, it seems, but within precise millimeters of one another— inside the many screen frames all around the space, which they all watch, and which now embodies and conjoins them.

Separation with communion Via the Internet, these uncanny interactions span thousands of miles and several time zones. Yet the feeling of co-presence and of occupying the same

Participatory art  143

Figure 4.13  In Unheimlich, two sister characters (played by Anna Fenemore and Niki Woods) are situated in a blue-screen space in London, UK and are visually and audibly conjoined with remote audience participants at the 2006 SIGGRAPH Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, USA (top 2 images) and at the 2005 Performance Studies International Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, USA (bottom images). (Courtesy of the artists.)

space is highly defined. The sense of virtual touch is something that delights audiences and leads to moments of real contact and intimacy as the mischievous sister characters improvise with participants and take them on magical journeys. The piece explores how the presence of a telepresent body in front of us elicits our desire and will for an intimate encounter—and how in our cybernetic world the allure of distance now trumps the banality of proximity. Most people would never dare to mount a real stage to improvise with flesh-and-blood performers, but here the sisters’ virtuality encourages and enables it. Unheimlich utilizes an interactive system to explore how telepresence acts to foreground the Existentialist idea that our Being is first and foremost a relational property, ‘where we contemplate ourselves as nothing other than the result of perpetual transactions with the subjectivity of others’ (Bourriaud, 2002). Stephen Wilson has noted how Paul Sermon’s works provide ‘an escape from the body, but the opportunity to observe oneself from a new

144  Participatory art perspective’, (Wilson, 2002, p. 520), and as Dermot Moran maintains, ‘Sartre’s most interesting discussions concern the manner by which we come to consciousness of ourselves in the light of how others see us … our being-forothers (être-pour-autrui). This is a ‘third-person’ perspective on ourselves’ (Moran, 2000, p. 388–9). The installation’s collapse of distance and the participants’ etheric dialogs and embraces with those far away heightens and encapsulates this troublesome existential given. Across the telematic void we gesticulate and verbalize at one another, just as we have always done in physical space, unaware of quite where we are or who we are, apart from in relation to others. Unheimlich’s cybernetic system manifests this and extends it into trans-media spaces—like a séance, participants contact and undertake dialogues and adventures with ethereal figures from another plane. Gabriel Marcel was fascinated by, and attended many séances, and both his advocacy of disponibilité—being available, ‘open and exposed’ (Marcel, 1951, p. 145)—and his seemingly paradoxical concept of ‘separation with communion’ (1995, p. 39) accord closely with the mechanics and aesthetics of this artwork. ‘Separation with communion’ is the understanding that while human beings are always-already and forever alone, they continually seek intimate relationships and close communion with others. The concept also speaks loudly to 21st century culture where the existential status of our isolation but ultimate desire for communion with others has become ever more patent, marked, and voluminous as interactions migrate away from physical space and into mediated environments.

Participation and the many paths to transcendence For the religious Marcel and Kierkegaard, the quest for communion was not only with others but also with God, and across the philosophy transcendence constitutes a crucial element and ultimate goal of the life continuum. But it is not necessarily equated with a type of religious experience, like a Buddhist reaching Nirvana, and for different thinkers it denotes different forms of ascension—through personal transformation and realization (Nietzsche); by standing apart from the herd and ‘groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness’ (Heidegger, 1962 [1927], p. 223); or a self-transcendence achieved by freeing oneself from the past, facticity, and social conditioning (Sartre). Cybernetics, from its origins in the 1940s to its current iterations in complexity theory, posthuman philosophy, and techno-science, has in turn envisioned its own transcendent dreams of reaching above and beyond the everyday world: from new autopoietic organisms (Maturana, Varela) and advanced ecologies (Bateson) to man-machine symbioses (Warwick, 1997; Moravec, 1988). The participatory artworks and performances discussed in this chapter reverberate with these Cybernetic-Existentialist principles and produce experiences that transcend the normative and every day, and hint at new

Participatory art  145 perceptions, potentials, ecosystems and interrelationships. It is striking that academic commentators are increasingly and routinely encapsulating their ideas, tropes, and vocabularies, yet rarely speaking their names. Gabriella Giannachi, perhaps the leading analyst of Blast Theory’s work, is a case in point. In the space of just a few sentences, she invokes cybernetic mechanisms with fluid, porous boundaries that are continually redefined, and Existentialist concerns around responsibility, presence, facticity, being-withothers, the look, and ‘epiphanic’ transcendence: Blast Theory’s work has consistently challenged its audience by redefining the boundaries within which they are implicated. … a mixed reality, through which to experience both the artwork, and the everyday life context within which this is set. … Here technology does impact directly on whom we choose to be, in our relationships with others and in our engagement with locality as materiality, and in the ways these inform each other. … It is about looking and being looked at … [within] a Joycean, powerful epiphanic mechanism. (Giannachi, 2009, p. 117–118).

Transcending (and outsourcing) the ego One of Sartre’s earliest philosophical innovations remains among his most significant. In Transcendence of the Ego: An Existential Theory of Consciousness (1937) he denied the very existence of a transcendental ego—‘the self that must underlie all human thought and perception, even though nothing more can be said about it than the fact that it must be there’ (New World, 2015). He thereby negated Kant’s ideas on empirical self-consciousness, and most previous philosophical thought on the subject, including Husserl’s claim that it constituted an intentional phenomenon that ‘stands behind’ consciousness. Sartre begins directly and in fiery fashion: ‘For most philosophers the ego is an “inhabitant” of consciousness … [but] the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world. It is a being in the world, like the ego of another’ (Sartre, 1991, p. 31). He thus makes the radical and, for many, counter-intuitive claim that ego does not exist in, nor behind consciousness, but rather outside of it, as another object out in the world. Moreover, as Williams and Kirkpatrick note, he concludes that: consciousness has no contents. … There are no mental entities whatsoever … all so-called “images,” “representations,” “ideas,” “phenomena,” “sense data,” etc., are objects for consciousness, not contents in consciousness. When we see a mountain, or imagine one, it is a mountain we are seeing or imagining, not our idea of a mountain. … consciousness is a great emptiness, a wind blowing toward

146  Participatory art objects. … It is never “self-contained,” or container; it is always “outside itself.” (Williams and Kirkpatrick, 1991, p. 21–2) If this is true, it is a deeply disturbing concept, an almost Black Mirror style reversal of our normal understandings of who I or we are. It is not about a splitting of subjectivity, but a more profound transference, outsourcing, or even removal of it. It suggests we are akin to an empty screen and the world is projected onto us, while our self is one of the components, wandering around out there as we (as consciousness) look on and watch. But crucially ‘we’ still have freedom and can direct the action (which may actually be a logical flaw in the argument). Sartre’s discourse marked a turning point in phenomenology by transforming Husserl’s assertion that intentionality was a part of consciousness to an Existentialist phenomenology where ‘intentionality is consciousness’, which Sartre extends in Being and Nothingness to emphasize the radical distinction between consciousness and absolutely everything else, that is, between intentionality and the non-intentional … Thus, with no transcendental ego or contents to clutter up consciousness, phenomenology, or the reflexive study of consciousness, becomes directly occupied with human existence in its concrete relations to the world, with the nature of man as a consciousness of things, of himself, and of other selves. (Williams and Kirkpatrick, 1991, p. 22, 25)

Trans-ascending the everyday Other Existentialists stress above all that transcendence involves going beyond the everyday, yet through a phenomenological praxis also grounded in a physically embodied, worldly, lived experience. Marcel adopts Jean Wahl’s term trans-ascendence to emphasize a vertical ‘going beyond’ and insists that in daily life: ‘There must exist a possibility of having an experience of the transcendent as such, and unless that possibility exists the word can have no meaning’ (Marcel, 1951, p.  46). Yet the experience itself may be difficult to comprehend: There is an order where the subject finds himself in the presence of something entirely beyond his grasp. I would add that if the word ‘transcendent’ has any meaning it is here—it designates the absolute, unbridgeable chasm yawning between the subject and being, insofar as being evades every attempt to pin it down. (Marcel, 1973, p. 193)

Participatory art  147 Matt Adams echoes these ideas closely, stating Blast Theory’s artistic enterprise ‘is about accepting the full complexity and confusion of our existence, and trying to represent these enormously ineffable issues … it is so important to be able to find forms that enable us to represent this complexity’ (quoted in Chatzichristodoulou, 2009, p. 115). Sometimes encounters with strangers arouse the dark existential moods of anxiety and alienation, and reminders that despite all our passionate interactions with others, they will always remain strangers and we remain alone. In The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1959), R. D. Laing, who was intimately involved in both cybernetics and Existentialism, describes ‘the potentially tragic paradox that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness’ (1960 [1959], p. 26). The same is reflected in Nina Tecklenburg’s analysis of how Gob Squad use participatory performance strategies to attempt to create or pastiche different forms of utopia: The key actions of this utopia are the encounters with strangers, both intimate and framed by distancing barriers. Gob Squad always achieves at once a touching, emotional effect—the joy in approaching another—as well as a hesitation, a reticence, the shame and the unbridgeable gap between participants. (Tecklenburg, 2012, p. 32) This fundamental existential condition is foregrounded and encapsulated in the participatory work we have discussed, using cybernetic environments and mixed reality systems to confront audiences with intense experiences, existential encounters, or crises that bring them face to face with themselves and with the Other. The effects are transformative and aim toward a transcendence, in Existentialist understandings of the term, while highlighting the delicate balances and strange relationships between self and Other, ego and consciousness, presence and absence, separation and communion.

Notes 1 Bill Seaman, writing with Andrew Guagusch, challenges Maturana’s closed definition of autopoiesis, pointing out that this is a primarily linguistic formulation. They suggest that, like linguistic systems themselves, most are inherently ‘open and ongoing’ and in a continual process of becoming in relation to the environment and through reciprocal actions. They advocate ‘Open Order Cybernetics’, since they are ‘interested in the build-up of meaningfully formed conceptual constructions rather than presuming them absolutely and without awareness of their potential relative nature’ (Guagusch and Seaman, 2004, p. 18). 2 Moving away from Norbert Wiener’s classical ‘first order’ focus on mathematics, physics, and machines, this second order emphasized self-reflexive systems

148  Participatory art and drew more on models from living organisms and biology. Gordon Pask and Gerard de Zeeuw’s discourse (Pask and de Zeeuw, 1992) on the cybernetic shift in emphasis reflects pertinent changes of focus also taking place within arts and online culture at that time—moving from information to coupling, from data transmission to conversation, from external observation to active participation, and from Erwin Schrödinger’s ‘order-to-order’ (Schrödinger [1944], 1992) to von Foerster’s ‘order-from-noise’ (Foerster, 1960).

5 Theater art Staging cybernetics, dread, and the existential crisis

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Volume I (1971 [1843], p. 46)

To be or … As Hamlet confronts his own Nothingness and undergoes the most f­amous existential crisis in dramatic literature, the iconic American t­heater troupe The Wooster Group locates him within a dynamic cybernetic s­ystem. ­Hamlet (2007) is a kind of boxing match or balletic duet between E ­ lizabeth LeCompte’s company and a 1964 film of the Broadway production ­starring Richard Burton (directed by John Gielgud), which was shot live by 17 ­cameras and broadcast to 2000 US movie theaters. As we know, cybernetics is the study of systems and how they connect and interact, and the two systems of Hamlet on film and Hamlet on the stage continually vie with each other for dominance or consonance in the production. They have separate ontologies and they exist and pulsate in different ways, but this is of no concern to transdisciplinary, boundary-overflowing cybernetics: the important thing is that they communicate and connect. And while at times they seem to speak different languages, they nonetheless diverge and converge, igniting synapses and sparks, and sending electrical signals between one another. They establish positive and negative feedback loops to create one of the most original and memorable film-theater cybernetic circuits to date. The film plays on a large screen behind the theater set which roughly replicates the 1964 one, and the dialogue is heard sometimes from screen, sometimes from stage, at others from both as they synchronize, repeat, bleed into, and crisscross one another. Scott Shepherd’s Hamlet and Burton’s are differently intoned but Shepherd’s deferment to, and imitations of the screen version render this a poetic and powerful double act. The key is that both

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Figure 5.1  Scott Shepherd’s live Hamlet and Richard Burton’s film version share a moment of synchronicity in The Wooster Group’s Hamlet, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. (Photo: © Paula Court.)

are uncompromising, idiosyncratic, and courageous—‘in good faith’ (Sartre) even in their artifice. Burton’s version is a dangerously brooding persona, with darting, electrical eyes and a classically arch, mellifluous voice that flows from the slowest, quietest delicacy to machine gun speed and volume. Shepherd operates within the Wooster Group’s trademark post-Brechtian acting style: cool and self-aware, yet mercurial and dynamically energized; and hovering and crossing between the understated and overstated, the ­flatly filmic and the theatro-melodramatic. As the film plays, elements of the set and stage furniture (chairs and a long, retractable table) are moved quickly by actors and stagehands to align with the perspective of the particular camera angle of the film behind them. In addition, at times the video operators use VJ software to ‘scratch’ the v­ ideo, reversing and fast-forwarding it, and the actors respond instantaneously (watching screens in front of them) to keep in synch. As the scratching is live, it is slightly different every night, and there is a delicious spectatorship pleasure principle as the images are repeatedly misaligned and disrupted, then spontaneously rebalanced and matched up, as we watch the actors and stagehands scurrying around the stage to place themselves and the stage furniture into position, like frenzied cartoon characters or the Keystone Cops. Gregory Bateson’s take on somatic homeostasis and equilibrium ­famously introduces the concept of the difference which makes a difference, examining how the introduction of small differences can have significant effects on

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Figure 5.2  A retractable table is a key element within the mise-en-scène of The Wooster Group’s Hamlet, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. Pictured (left to right): Kate Valk, Casey Spooner, Scott Shepherd, and Ari Fliakos. (Photo: © Paula Court.)

information flows or throughout an entire system. He suggests the t­ echnical definition of information ‘is that which excludes certain alternatives’ and that a machine with a governor ‘prevents itself from staying in any alternative state; and in all such cybernetic systems, corrective action is brought about by difference’. In technical jargon, the system is ‘error a­ctivated’ with a corrective response to return it to the ‘preferred’ state. Thus, he ­concludes: ‘The technical term “information” may be succinctly defined as any d ­ ifference which makes a difference in some later event’ (Bateson, 1971, p. 381, original emphasis). For Bateson, ‘a difference which makes a difference is an idea or unit of information’ (318, original emphasis) and he illustrates this with the analogy of a man felling a tree, where: each stroke of the axe is modified and corrected according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. The self corrective (i.e., mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree-eyesbrain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree, and it is the total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind. (Bateson, 1971, p. 317)

152  Theater art Bateson also talks at length about systemic flexibility and the importance of the ‘mutability of frames’, while emphasizing that increasing flexibility in one area can decrease or be parasitic to flexibility in another: what Frederick Steier has called ‘Exercising Frame Flexibility’ (Steier, 2005, p. 36). Thomas Hylland Eriksen relates Bateson’s principle to changes to time and space within our working lives and how now, with omnipresent communications technology, ‘increased spatial flexibility entails decreased temporal flexibility’ (Eriksen, 2005, p. 59) since our personal time at home is squeezed by the expectation of keeping up with communications and emails; as Steier puts it, ‘we are, alas, always at work’ (Steier, 2005, p. 46). Bateson’s ‘difference that makes a difference’ is the key paradigm of Hamlet and in continual play during the performance, with the desired ­homeostatic reference value being the precise and harmonious mirroring of the stage and screen action. As some difference between them becomes evident it makes a difference and cybernetic error activators are triggered immediately in the form of the actors changing their poses and positions, and stagehands moving the furniture. They thus also enact a very literal and kinetic ‘exercising [of] frame flexibility’ on the stage to attempt to visually fuse and mirror the two elements; and when the doubling is perfect, the ­performance reaches real heights. The group performed the piece for a number of years, and became so adept that some breathtaking and seemingly impossible moments of homeostatic synchronization were reached. The actors on stage as well as on screen seem somehow to hark back from another, aptly ghostly, era. The monotone film and mise-en-scène emphasize this, together with the phantom-like effacements and defacements that are progressively digitally rendered on the heads and body parts of the film’s ­actors. As Burton’s Hamlet contemplates suicide, and confronts and struggles with his identity, those around him visibly begin to lose theirs in ‘a constant creation of a negative space, a perpetual erasure of presence’ (Woycicki, 2014, p. 125). As he asks ‘what is the quintessence of dust?’ his own face speckles and gradually dissolves to nothingness. A projection on a smaller monitor of a live-feed camera completes a sense of cybernetic recursion, the image stuttering and freezing at times for dramatic emphasis or random punctuation. The stage event therefore happens, night after night, as an ever changing, corrupting and evolving, autonomous and self-regulating cybernetic system of differences that make differences, while Burton and Shepherd’s Hamlets rehearse again and again and again the exquisite anxiety and madness of Shakespeare’s quintessential take on Being or not Being.

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard has been called ‘the grandfather of Existentialism … whose work served as the principal inspiration and springboard for the entire movement of modern existentialism, which flourished

Theater art  153 for more than a century after his death’ (Dodson, 2015). One of his most influential contributions is the central concern of this chapter: his notion of dread, and the related phenomenon of the existential crisis. Kierkegaard describes dread—also translated as angst or anxiety—as an ontological category in its own right, and a basic structure of human life, indistinguishable from existence: we are always-already in a state of dread. ‘Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’, he suggests in The Concept of Dread (1844), a state where ‘we desire what we fear, but fear what we desire’ (Kierkegaard, 1968 [1844], p. 38). Dread is thus paradoxical, and acts upon and with desire in a vicious circle, each prompting and perpetuating one another. Film theorist Kirsten Moana Thompson has used Kierkegaard’s ideas to analyze the appeal of horror movies and monsters, which excite in us the ‘paradoxical qualities of attraction and repulsion … [and] the conflicting desire to know and not know, to see and yet want to look away’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 18–19). Being a devout ­Christian, Kierkegaard entangles his concept of dread with the Biblical Adam and original sin, as well as with the Existentialist holy grail of freedom: ‘The prohibition [of eating the apple] induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility’ and the real dread of what to possibly do: ‘anxiety is about tomorrow’ (Kierkegaard, 1968 [1844], p. 80). As Slavoj Žižek notes, Kierkegaard’s dread and anxiety are thus equated with guilt and sin, as well as ‘the dizziness of freedom … of being confronted with the abyss of possibilities of what I “can do”’ (Žižek, 2006, p. 89). Žižek goes on to suggest that Kierkegaard omits a crucial part of the equation— ‘what Schelling called Zusammenziehung, primordial self-withdrawal, primordial egoistic contraction … which tears the subject apart, throwing him into the vicious cycle of sabotaging its own impetus—the experience of this deadlock is dread at its most terrifying’ (p. 89). But Kierkegaard’s vision is terrifying enough, as he elucidates our predisposition for sin, and the anguish associated with freedom’s radical choices, including killing oneself or other people. Dread is not about fear per se, it is about human paralysis and vertigo in the face of a yawning abyss of seeming nothingness and uncertainty that is also filled with infinite and frightening possibilities. Moreover, it seems to beckon us to jump into it, suicidally— and a part of us wants to jump: our dark side. Sigmund Freud reformulated Kierkegaard’s important psychological insight almost 100 years later as the Thanatos Drive (death drive), which he uses to explain numerous self-­ destructive behaviors (Dodson, 2015). Martin Heidegger similarly sees dread—or anxiety as it is generally translated in his work—as not just a, but the critical and overarching human ‘mood’. It lurks latently within Dasein and disquietingly underlies our everyday existence, and may suddenly come to the fore even in the most unlikely or innocuous situation. For Simon Critchley, ‘Anxiety is the experience of the tide going out, the seawater draining away, revealing a self stranded’ that becomes self-aware,

154  Theater art and thus able to recognize ‘a freedom to begin to become myself. Anxiety is perhaps the philosophical mood par excellence … the mood that launched a thousand existentialist novels’ (Critchley, 2009a).

The cybernetic scenography of Robert Lepage French-Canadian theater director Robert Lepage’s one-man versions of the Hamlet story—Elsinore (1996) and Hamlet|Collage (2016), both with sets designed by Carl Fillion—poignantly depict the protagonist’s anxiety and dread within cybernetic scenographies so vertiginous that they recall Kierkegaard’s vision of being on the edge of an abyss. In the latter, they include the protagonist lying in a revolving padded cell at an angle almost perpendicular to the stage, as he psychologically descends toward madness. Lepage’s treatment and evocation of scenic space is fueled by expressive technologies including kinetic screens, video projections, mirrors, and ingenious mechanical sets, with which to transform traditional proscenium arch stages into mutating locations and configurations. Indeed, explorations of space and the scenographic mechanics of spatial metamorphoses are far more central to Lepage’s aesthetic than traditional notions of characters

Figure 5.3   Robert Lepage delivers a Hamlet soliloquy at a 45-degree angle aboard Carl Fillion’s vertiginously kinetic, geometric machine set for Elsinore (1995). (Photo: Richard Max Tremblay/richard-max.tremblay@ sympatico.ca.)

Theater art  155 and plots. Hence, his first interpretation of Hamlet in 1996 takes its title not from Shakespeare’s protagonist, but from the wildly transformative space he inhabits in the production—Elsinore—while the name of his theater company announces proudly that the work comes first and foremost Ex Machina (out of the machine). This machine is distinctly cybernetic and Lepage is one of the foremost directors to scenographically stage cybernetics while consistently foregrounding Existentialist perspectives. His sets are systems that dynamically evolve, revolve, and metamorphose in front of us, conjuring remarkable theatrical sequences that segue, as he puts it, ‘from naturalism to fantasy and back again. It’s that sort of imaginative fluidity that I’m striving after’ (quoted in Christiansen, 2005). In Elsinore, Gertrude stands stage right in a stiff, gilded dress and delivers her speech from Act 4, Scene 4. She then physically breaks out of the dress, emerging from it as if from an imprisoning chrysalis, to become Ophelia in a flimsy white undergown. She crosses center stage and lies down on a large blue cloth, crossing her hands over her chest. The hydraulic stage set rises and splits, leaving a coffin-shaped opening in the center, into which the figure descends, enshrouded in the watery blue drape. As she drowns in the blueness, the vast stage machinery lifts and tilts, as Hamlet emerges from below to deliver a soliloquy. It is a coup de théâtre metamorphosis not only of space, but also of time, of characters, and of genders. These vividly imagistic transformations also operate as associative textual feedback loops that highlight correspondences and interconnections between characters. Ophelia’s metaphoric birth out of Gertrude’s body opens up a range of potent ideas and meanings: from the characters’ interconnections as objects of both Hamlet’s love and hate, to their representations as innocent young child and maternal monster who share the same body yet wish to escape it, to prefiguring their dual impending fates.

Joseph Svoboda’s psycho-plastic space The genealogy of Lepage’s metamorphic scenography can be traced as far back as the ancient Greek theater technologies he pays homage to in the name of his Ex Machina company, to the early film-theater experiments of Erwin Piscator and Frederick Kiesler in the 1920s and the Bauhaus ­designs for immersive theaters. But the most important historical predecessor ­sharing, and inspiring Lepage’s particular vision of a kinetic theater is the Czech designer/director, and cofounder in 1958 of the Laterna Magika, Josef Svoboda. Svoboda was the most accomplished proto-cybernetic scenographer of the 1960s and 1970s, using film projection in conjunction with multiple screens and kinetic scenery to create compelling illusions and fantasy spectacles. He developed complex ‘polyscreen’ systems in conjunction with moving conveyor belts and diffused and directional lighting effects to attain

156  Theater art a ‘theatrical synthesis of projected images and synchronised acting and staging’ (Svoboda, 1966, p. 142). He demonstrated for the first time the real potential for visual syntheses of the live and the mediatized in ways that expanded dramaturgical possibilities to create new meanings and artistic dimensions. Svoboda conceived dynamic, proto-cybernetic environments and what he termed psycho-plastic space, and, like Lepage, sought the cybernetic dream of a synthesis of different forms, and of the human and the technological. A comparison between Svoboda’s Brussels production of Hamlet in 1965 and Lepage’s Elsinore 30 years later reveals fascinating parallels. The set for Svoboda’s production suggested a massive wall composed of rectilinear elements, both solids and cavities. But then elements of the ‘wall’ began to move: parts slid forward to form platforms and staircases, while others receded and intermeshed to reveal still further configurations. Most striking of all, however, was the multiplication of this extraordinary effect by the mirror that hung over the full width of the set at an angle of forty-five degrees and provided a reflection of the set as seen from above. (Burian, 1971, p. 124)

Figure 5.4  A Josef Svoboda sketch of the geometric, kinetic scenography design for his 1965 Brussels production of Hamlet. (© Courtesy of the Josef Svoboda Society.)

Theater art  157 Lepage’s Elsinore is played on a computer-controlled hydraulic set, which, like Svoboda’s design, is a conglomeration of kinetic geometric shapes. The central flat has a large circular section that spins and tilts within a cutout rectangle, which opens and closes to represent multiple objects and locales such as a doorway, a window, a ship’s hatch, and a grave. The production achieves spatially disorientating effects, staging sequences from rear and overhead perspectives (echoing Svoboda’s effects achieved via the suspended mirror) within the moving set which ‘spins, flies, warps and endlessly reconfigures itself in a mesmeric geometrical ballet’ (Shuttleworth, 1996). Meanwhile, live camera projections relay and sometimes overlay simultaneous views of Lepage (and in later productions, Peter Darling) from multiple angles. Like Svoboda’s Hamlet, the moving set provides extensive transformations of time and space through movement and mechanics, and in Elsinore this includes a revolving table used for Hamlet’s dialog with Claudius. The two productions are also closely related conceptually, with Svoboda describing ‘Elsinore as a certain spiritual world, a microcosm of Hamlet’s world, one that must change psycho-plastically along with the development of the action. It became a world that grinds and weighs on man; it suggested the atmosphere of the Middle Ages, a castle without feeling, anti-human’ (Svoboda quoted in Burian, 1971, p. 127). Lepage achieves a similar effect, though using more advanced technology, including ‘infrared and thermal cameras, [and] sonar slides [that] make it possible to see behind walls, to see the colour of Hamlet’s despair, emphasizing … the play’s claustrophobic atmosphere’ (Change Performing Arts, 1996). Andy Lavender’s analysis emphasizes how the moving set not only reflects upon, but encapsulates and actuates the play’s existential themes: Elsinore is about instability, about a whirl of activity around a central figure, about continual tensions between a human figure and a piece of machinery (which one could express, metaphorically, as a tension between individual and state, or even the human and the cosmic). The mise en scène elaborates Hamlet’s discursive play with ideas of personal, psychological and political disturbance, the potency (or otherwise) of individual agency, and the turbulence of illicit action. (Lavender, 2001, p. 107–108) Jarka Burian’s 1971 analysis of Svoboda’s Hamlet design epitomizes the conceptual and scenographic harmonies between his 1965 production and Lepage’s 1995 Elsinore: It is possible to view the set in at least three ways: symbolically, as suggesting an inhuman, irresistible, crushing mass; functionally, as an embodiment of the alter ego interpretation; and theatrically, as an instrument for performance. … the principle of creating psycho-plastic space by means of three-dimensional kinetics. (Burian, 1971, p. 127)

158  Theater art Lepage is certainly conscious of Svoboda’s work and legacy, and my purpose here is not to argue any direct or major influence upon him, nor to suggest direct borrowing or conscious homage. Rather it is to demonstrate the explicit conceptual and aesthetic similarities and harmonies between their artistic visions and processes. By conjoining theater technology, cinematic conventions, and kinetic architectures, both Svoboda and Lepage explicitly stage cybernetic notions of interactive, evolving environments that integrate and synthesize humans and machines, while simultaneously exploring Existentialist philosophy’s ideas around the nature and complexities of human being and being-towards-death. Both directors are united by an overarching concern to achieve extraordinary visions of creative synthesis, by imaginatively combining a vivid sense of separate elements, images, and media to ‘express new insights into reality’ (Burian, 1971, p. 91). Both have worked to create a hybrid, synthesizing form of visual theater, akin to what Marshall McLuhan describes—without reference to the theater—as ‘true hybrid energy’. McLuhan describes how the ‘hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. … The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed on them by our senses’ (McLuhan, 1964, p. 55). In Beyond Scenography (2019) Rachel Hann argues that ‘Svobada’s legacy in arguing scenography as synthesis—of light, sound, movement and materiality—is that the concept and practice now applies to all manner of staged events’ (Hann, 2019, p. 23). She makes a case for scenography’s centrality to contemporary theater-making, and suggests that high-tech mise-en-scènes accord with Heidegger’s concept of worlding: ‘I argue that scenography isolates how an accumulation of material and technological methods “score” ongoing processes of “worlding”. … [and] operates as a generative force that orientates moments of action, reflection, and worldly experience’ (p. 2). She goes on to highlight the boundary crossing impulses of such immersive, intermedial practices: ‘To study scenography in the early twenty-first century is to study a practice that is always seeking, always implicated, within a transgression of borders, whether disciplinary, linguistic, geographic or practical’ (p. 2). She proposes a critique of ‘expanded scenography’, which transgresses and exceeds conventional notions of theater toward a ‘borderless concept of performance’ (p. 3).

Questions, questions … Cybernetics is a synthesizing force and method that crosses all borders and disciplines, and practitioners such as Bateson, whose work extended from ecology and anthropology to communications and family therapy, are considered visionaries operating not only across, but also ‘beyond disciplines’ (Montuori, 2005, p. 147). Alfonso Montuori suggests Bateson established a new approach to enquiry based on transdisciplinary processes that are

Theater art  159 ‘inquiry-driven rather than exclusively discipline-driven; meta-paradigmatic rather than intra-paradigmatic; informed by thinking that is complex, contextualizing, and connective; inquiry as a creative process combining rigor and imagination’ (p. 147). Andrew Kendon argues that Bateson significantly influenced ‘the kinds of questions that came to be asked about interaction, the kinds of phenomena that came to be looked at, and the strategy of investigation’ (1982, p. 447, emphasis in original). There are interesting parallels with phenomenology and Existentialism here, whose philosophers stress the importance of asking searching questions that reveal the limits of knowledge and the limitations and experience—asking what things cannot be answered. Sartre calls ‘authentic philosophy … the moment at which the question transforms the questioner’ (1984, p. 85). Austrian choreographer Michael Klien, who in the 1990s developed innovative stochastic systems such as The ChoreoGraph, which produces a generative time line with onscreen symbols to prompt contemporary dance improvisations, has been using Bateson’s cybernetics as his primary inspiration and methodology for a number of years, and it was the subject of his PhD. In his edited book Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change (2008) he discusses ‘metaphors of choreography as an aesthetics of change, and dance as a metaphor for thought … [in] the spirit of Gregory Bateson … who moved, step by step, his own and science’s consciousness towards an ecology of mind, towards “a regenerative ecology of ideas”’ (2008, p. 9). Bateson particularly focused on environmental and ecological issues toward the end of his life, and in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) he presents important ecological theories and argues that ‘any ongoing ensemble of events and objects that has the appropriate complexity of causal circuits and the appropriate energy relations will surely show mental characteristics’. It will process information, make comparisons, and respond to difference, thus becoming self-corrective. Moreover, he maintains: ‘no part of such an internally interactive system can have unilateral control over the remainder or over any other part. The mental characteristics are inherent or immanent in the ensemble as a whole’ (Bateson, 1971, p. 313).

Never act with … The mise-en-scènes of Italian theater group Societas Raffaello Sanzio provide arresting examples of such a holistic ecology, their cybernetic loops, and ‘causal circuits’ connecting an ensemble of adult actors (some with disabilities), babies, children, animals, robots, automata, and other machines. These activate alarmingly and evolve before our eyes, while the imagery and narratives deal with profound and disturbing Existentialist themes ranging from alienation, nausea, and being-towards-death to freedom and transcendence. Dermot Moran has noted that given the conviction of many Existentialists that God is dead: ‘Man’s project is to be God. However, no

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Figure 5.5  Theater director Romeo Castellucci’s exploration of what he terms the dis-human and dis-real includes the Biblical characters Cain, played by Renzo Mion (foreground) and Maria Luisa Cantarelli as Eve (background), in Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep (1999). (Courtesy of Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Photo: Luca Del Pia.)

project will actually provide the self-completion we aspire to [because of death], and therefore, as Sartre concludes at the end of the book [Being and Nothingness] “man is a useless passion”,’ (Moran, 2000, p. 372). Director Romeo Castellucci employs creative strategies around what he calls the dis-human and the dis-real, and has discussed his aim to steal the art of writing from God (Trapanese, 2015, p. 67). His version of the Biblical book of Genesis, Genesi: from the Museum of Sleep (1999), begins with a huge, mechanized arm of God descending holding a massive, pulsating pen. The sense of a giant, cybernetic synthesizing machine intensifies as the performance proceeds through dreamlike sequences and tableau where machines continue to pulsate: a spluttering ‘nuclear’ aquarium, a milking machine, a vice that crushes a cow’s skull, a convulsing hydraulic chair, and a masturbating mechanical stuffed dog. Meanwhile, a human contortionist writhes, trapped in a museum display cabinet; Abel is choked to death by the short, phocomelic arm of the actor playing Cain; body organs descend on wires from above; a headless anthropomorphic wire robot applauds; and a child dressed as a white rabbit murders another small girl. Eve, played by a mature female actor who has undergone a mastectomy, is naked and covered in vivid white makeup. She stares out as if in an alienated state, contemplating nothingness: in Castellucci’s words, ‘She is tired to be

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Figure 5.6   Mirroring poses from the Cappella Brancacci frescoes by fifteenthcentury Italian artist Masaccio, Maria Luisa Cantarelli plays a Biblical Eve who, in director Romeo Castellucci’s words, ‘is tired to be there, tired to be’, in Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep (1999). (Courtesy of Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Photo: Luca Del Pia.)

there, tired to be’ (in Trapanese, 2015, p. 235). She is revealed as one node in a highly developed cybernetic system that links human, machine, and nature within a complex interactive circuit, like a spider within a web, as Mathew Causey describes: Eve pulls at the strings that run across the stage to a large cylindrical frame of perhaps 100 spools of string that Castellucci names M ­ acchina Tessile. The cylinder spins back and forth, and the individual spools turn as well. The machine remains in a shaky motion like some type of life force whose threads issue from a single source but move out in multiple patterns. The threads run from Eve to the world as a result of the expulsion from paradise. (Causey, 2006, p. 133) He calls it a ‘performance of authenticity’ (p. 131) and significantly his analysis moves from cybernetically inflected ideas to Existentialist concepts: She is projecting herself through a throwness into the field of possibilities, echoing the anxiety in a historicity of being in time. … Castellucci’s stage is a space of not-being (seeming) that regurgitates spasmatically the presence of being … Paraphrasing Heidegger’s thesis on Nietzschean aesthetics, the not-being of the dis-human is worth more than the truth of the being of the human. … It is through the stage use of the dis-human and the dis-real that the real itself can be fully brought into presence. (Causey, 2006, p. 133–135, emphasis in original)

162  Theater art There is what W.B. Yeats called a terrible beauty to much of the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, and Genesi’s dis-human aesthetic of the becoming-real is extraordinary and sometimes nightmarish, and recalls Camus’ conception that ‘at the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman’ (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 5). Francesco Trapanese’s penetrating analysis also illuminates some of its Existentialist aspects, particularly in relation to Agamben’s discourses on the philosophy’s themes of profound boredom, potentiality, and Dasein as an experience of disconcealing. Like Causey, he deconstructs and sheds light upon the performance using the concepts and vocabularies of both Existentialism and cybernetics, describing how the production explores: the possibility of being … [in] a highly formalized inorganic mechanism in which the human body appears in its ‘bare life’ sharing with animals and automata an ontological proximity … a state of becoming-Dasein and becoming-other. I suggest that this set of pure potentialities marks the complex ecology of Genesi. Here, men, animals and machines appear on the stage in the betwixt, between a becoming-being of ‘beings’ and the impotentiality of not being. (Trapanese, 2015, p. 65, 69, 70)

The Builders Association: enmeshing and immersing New York-based ensemble The Builders Association (director Marianne Weems) state their objective as to ‘reanimate’ theater for a contemporary audience, ‘using new tools to interpret old forms … to create a world onstage which reflects the contemporary culture which surrounds us’ (Builders Association, 1997). These tools are highly technological, with the group creating complex cybernetic scenographies, often in collaboration with the innovative 3D design and media company dbox. For one such collaboration, SUPER VISION (2005), dbox designed a set comprised of large screens, and combined real and virtual architecture in an attempt to give the effect of a gradual collapse of the live into the virtual. Research into Renaissance paintings produced inspiration and formal models for the screen designs, as well as diptych and triptych-style sequences in which two or three scenes are played simultaneously, in parallel (stage left, center, and right). The classical art reference highlights how the family in one of the production’s three narratives is attempting to live the classic fantasy of the American dream. The mother and father are live actors who seem to inhabit a film—their setting is a projected AUTO-CAD graphic 3D design of the perfect, luxury modern home, where they interact with their child, represented by a video-projected virtual boy. In diptych sequences, at one side of the stage the live character of the mother plays with the videoed child in the virtual living room with

Theater art  163 windows overlooking a photographic backyard, while at the other side of the stage the live father sits perennially at his computer in his virtual ‘den’. dbox director James Gibbs conceived the visual design of the den space so that it would ‘physicalise electronic activity’ (in Kaye, 2007, p.  563) by creating a projected cyberspace effect which immerses the father in a 3D mesh grid of lines (like graph paper squares in 3D perspective). The father grapples with existential questions but reaches some misdirected conclusions, stealing his son’s identity to run up half a million dollars in credit card debt to pay for the family’s lifestyle—‘fate can be redesigned, it just takes knowhow’, he says. He becomes increasingly distanced from his family and the real world as he is obsessively caught up in his computer, the camera of which transmits a live-feed video image of his face in closeup, seen amidst other densely projected images within the mise-en-scène. As his actions get more and more out of control, his den space expands to invade and crush the onscreen living room set—an effect the company had achieved earlier with a physical set in their adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Master Builder (1994), where a life-size house was gradually demolished to reveal both its skeletal structure and the skeletons of the characters’ pasts. As director Marianne Weems explains, SUPER VISION (2005) is an attempt to ‘enmesh the performers in the media … by collapsing the video space into the stage space … [and] to combine these as intimately as possible’ (in Kaye, 2007, p. 561). The effect is a mysterious and uncanny mise-en-scène that theatrically prompts precisely the feelings of estrangement, detachment, and existential dread that Kierkegaard describes. Where Critchley (above) conjures the image of an ocean’s tide suddenly going out to leave us stranded, exposed, and contemplating the world’s awful incomprehensibility, the Builders Association achieve the same not by subtracting, but by adding layer upon layer of mediated feedback loops and virtual imagery. Their methods refract analytical perspectives developed in Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s book Remediation (1999), which highlight the tensions and pleasure principles at play between computer experiences which positively foreground the medium and interface (opacity and hypermediacy) and techniques that seek to immerse the user by making the interface disappear (transparency and immediacy). The group utilizes the first technique, multi-layering and satiating the media experience in order to progress to the latter: the falling away and disappearance of that state of illusion, which both the characters and audience experience in existential terms. For Bolter and Grusin, ‘the excess of media becomes an authentic experience’ (1999, p. 54). A downstage mobile screen further intensifies this visual sense of the characters’ increasing and inexorable immersions within their virtual worlds. It is used to powerful dramaturgical effect in the show’s second narrative about the airport border-crossing experiences of a Ugandan-born

164  Theater art Indian traveler. Mr. Shah has a nightmarish time as he is interrogated by passport control officers, and becomes increasingly beleaguered and dehumanized. A projected scanning beam moves down his body, and projections of two digital, life-size renderings of him suddenly appear to each side of him, their movements synched to his as the scene progresses. One officer is highly intrusive, discussing Shah’s medical history, then that of his family: ‘How’s your niece, is she feeling better?’ and throughout the scene, vast amounts of digital data builds up on screens behind and in front of him. Its volume and density increase progressively: thumbprints, signatures, retinal scans, credit card transactions, numbers, itineraries, facial recognition, names of his family members, his prescriptions, and his regularity of daily caffeine and tobacco use. The downstage screen data begins to visually obscure and erase the physical figure of Shah, who is immersed inside a mass of bureaucratic datasets, his body dissected, and his identity transposed, becoming ‘less of a physical presence and more of a presence defined in the body of data that accumulates around him’ (Weems in Kaye, 2007, p. 569). ‘In my work, technology is a performer’, says director Marianne Weems, ‘what you see are people isolated, melancholy, in various states of fragmentation. Technology is not creating communities that anyone would hope for. And this is a political message’ (in Zinoman, 2005, p. 15). It is interesting that a prevailing message of the Builders Association, who are at the cutting edge of technological theater and whom Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte acclaims as creating ‘a new genre entirely’ (in Zinoman, 2005, p.  15), is a damning critique of technology itself and its isolating human effects. Weems’ directorial approach combines massive cybernetic systems involving banks of computers relaying multiple layers of live and pre-recorded front and back projections, while physically emphasizing on stage the existential alienation, dread and crisis of her characters in the face of globalization and technological progress. In every performance, in all of our shows, for me it is about the performers being really isolated physically, but we are mediating them electronically and so what the audience sees is the network that is joining them all. None of the performers ever really look at each other … What is being staged is the network. They are in very isolated worlds, coming together in that bigger state picture—that is really the key. (Weems in Kaye, 2007, p. 569) So while embracing cybernetic and computer technologies aesthetically, the Builders Association continually question, critique, and challenge their socio-political impacts and implications. They share this with a number of other multimedia theater practitioners, including VR multimedia theater

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Figure 5.7  Becoming data … a traveler confronted at a border control gradually becomes ‘less of a physical presence and more of a presence defined in the body of data that accumulates around him’ in SUPER VISION (2005) (Weems in Kaye, 2007, p. 569). (Photos courtesy of The Builders Association.)

166  Theater art pioneer George Coates, who argues that: ‘Using technology to critique technology is no more a contradiction that it is to call the phone company to complain about the service or to use a calculator to challenge the bill. The use of a particular tool implies no endorsement of values beyond itself’ (Coates, 2000).

Scenographic houses: uncanny sights and sites of childhood memory The life-size house constructed as a theater set has long been used by scenographers, directors, and playwrights to achieve a powerful visual impact and dramatic statement, whether used as a backdrop to action played in front of a house frontage façade or with the walls cut away to expose the domestic interiors inhabited by the characters. In recent theater productions, hi-tech kinetic and projection systems have been combined with life-size house sets to reinvigorate the paradigm and to create novel theatrical, psychological, and philosophical effects. In his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Heidegger argues that ‘the way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth is Buan, dwelling’ (1971, p. 147) and in 1957 he discussed the world as ‘the house in which mortals dwell’ (1957, p. 13). The following year, ­Gaston Bachelard reconceived and reversed the metaphor to propose a more concrete notion: the house as a world in itself; and he devoted most of the first two chapters of his influential book The Poetics of Space (1958) to the subject of the house. For Bachelard, the house constitutes a fundamental philosophical paradigm, which extends beyond a mere physical dwelling space to be its own poetic place-world, and a space of memory and dream. He maintains that in philosophical and psychological terms, the house and its interior can be considered more resonant and important to humans than the entire universe outside. This is because it is the primary space experienced around our births and throughout the formative stages of childhood: a house is ‘our first universe … [our] first world’ (1958, p. 4, 7). Our childhood house teaches the intense and ‘intimate values of inside space’ (1958, p. 31) and we inherit it bodily (through our continuation of physical habits and feelings first developed there), like a piece of genetic makeup, and then take it with us to all subsequent houses we inhabit or visit: Over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. … We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme. … The house, the bedroom, the garret in which we are alone, furnishes the framework for an indeterminable dream. (Bachelard, 1958, p. 14–15)

Theater art  167 Bachelard’s ideas of the house as an evocation of dream and early memory provide a perspective on why, in theatrical terms, the image of a house on stage often stirs in the audience personal memories and powerfully resonant, childlike feelings. The house presented in a larger interior space (the theater auditorium); this building-within-a-building microcosm and macrocosm becomes a play-within-a-play and evokes the image of a dolls house, which further compounds its childlike visual and mnemonic appeal that may act to trigger Proustian memories. The dolls house throughout the centuries has represented an ideal and an idyll: a miniature world for the child to explore and to enact fantasies in, once the hinged façade has been opened out, like a theatrical curtain being drawn back, to voyeuristically reveal its hidden, secret, interior world. For an audience, what the life-size scenographic house often achieves in theater is the at once pleasurable and unnerving experience of the uncanny. This ancient idea was given renewed prominence following Sigmund Freud’s long essay ‘Das Unheimlich’ (The Uncanny) published in 1919, and it is significant that the literal translation of the German word ‘unheimlich’ is ‘un-homelike’. Freud discusses the uncanny as a peculiar, foreboding feeling when the safe and familiar (as epitomized by the home) suddenly becomes strange, alien, or sinister: ‘the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, home-like, familiar; the prefix “un” is the token of repression’ (1985, p. 366). In The Architectural Uncanny (1992), Anthony Vidler relates Freud’s ­notion to the house which, ‘haunted or not’, appears or ‘pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror’ (Vidler, 1992, p. 11); there is a ‘general drift of the uncanny movement from homely to unhomely, a movement in most ghost stories where an apparently homely house turns gradually into a site of horror’ (Vidler, 1992, p. 32).

The house as a human body: La Fura Dels Baus and English National Opera In The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997), Edward S. Casey follows Bachelard to relate the house to a human body, arguing that: ‘to return to an inhabited room, whether in fact or in fantasy, is to return to an organic part of a house that is itself experienced as a megabody, with windows for eyes and a front door for mouth’ (1997, p.  291). This notion of the house as a body is explored to spectacular effect in La Fura Dels Baus’ ­acclaimed ­collaboration with English National Opera of György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre (2009) which opens with a gigantic video projection across the entire stage front-cloth of a woman crawling toward camera in the throes of a violent heart attack. The image freezes, and in a breathtaking coup de théâtre, the curtain rises suddenly to reveal the same image, in the same position, and to the same huge scale, on stage: a giant 3D fiberglass sculpture around 35-foot high of the entire naked woman on all fours. Her body fills the vast opera stage, staring out in pain in the throes of

168  Theater art

Figure 5.8  The human body set which operates like a house in La Fura Dels Baus and English National Opera’s production of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre (2009). (Photo: Bernd Uhlig.)

her being-towards-death, and towering over the audience, caught with realist precision in the same anguished physical position. As the performance develops and the body is covered in projections and rotates (on the stage revolve), singers and actors inhabit and come out of it, as though it is a house. Within the body structure, people appear and sing arias from inside the eyes, like they are windows, and its mouth and anus act as doors from which people emerge onto the stage. Different parts of the body (the stomach, a nipple, a thigh, a buttock, part of the head, etc.) are then opened up and exposed to reveal rooms where scenes take place. These rooms and the events within them closely reflect Bachelard’s ideas of how the axis of a house (from basement to attic) links to the physical and spinal axis of a human being. When a portion of the scenic head in Le Grand Macabre is opened up, it reveals a study, which like Bachelard’s attic represents ‘the rational zone of intellectualized projects’ (1958, p. 18), whereas when a buttock is opened up, a devilish nightclub appears, complete with scantily clad women, flashing red lights, and a glitter ball, suggesting the dark, libidinal subconscious. Like Bachelard’s bodily metaphor, the house’s attic is the space of day and physical and spiritual illumination, with the ­cellar being a place of perpetual night, murk, and repression: ‘In the ­attic, the day’s experiences can always efface the fears of night. In the cellar, ­darkness prevails’ (1958, p. 19).

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Figure 5.9  Characters appear in the eyes as though they are house windows, and sing a duet as digital projections render the face a skull in Le Grand Macabre. (Photo: Bernd Uhlig.)

Kinetic and cybernetic staging of the scenographic house in such productions excites a particular sense of existential anxiety and the uncanny because a home, a ubiquitous place of solidity, shelter, tranquility, and security, is suddenly positioned entirely out of its context on a theater ­ stage, an essentially ephemeral space where drama, intrigue, surprise, and ­(nowadays) deconstruction reign. When a curtain rises and a house set is revealed, we feel fond (and in Bachelard’s terms, childlike) recognition and pleasurable yearning, but also a disquieting sense of Kierkegaardian dread and the Freudian uncanny since the house is also boldly unreal and vulnerably out of place: a temporary structure, not a real house built for permanence. The uncanny effect of the house is particularly heightened by virtue of its ­scenographic grandeur and scale, as in the giant body ‘house’ in La Fura Dels Baus’ Le Grand Macabre. In German, when unheimlich (uncanny) is used as an adverb it translates as ‘dreadfully’, ‘awfully’, ‘heaps of’, and ‘an awful lot of’, and as Nele Bemong points out in relation to the uncanny: ‘Largeness has always been a condition to the weird and unsafe; it is overwhelming, too much or too big’ (2003).

The house as psyche: Heiner Goebbels A massive, white house set provides the overwhelming backdrop and psychological underpinning to Eraritjaritjaka (2004), a third production

170  Theater art collaboration between director Heiner Goebbels and actor André Wilms following Or the Hapless Landing (1993) and Max Black (1998), with lighting and set design by Klaus Grünberg. They all share the theme and metaphor of existence as a series of text fragments and diary notes that we both write and appropriate from other authors; and they particularly focus on the ­moment when one existentially faces and confronts oneself. Eraritjaritjaka (an archaic Aboriginal word meaning ‘full of longing for something lost’) is based on short texts and autobiographical fragments by Elias Canetti that reflect on ‘man’s territory’ (the title of a Canetti anthology) and particularly his habits and vanities, the places he goes and dwells, his sense of order, and his relationships to other people and to animals. When André Wilms first enters, a projected line appears on the stage floor, which gradually grows into a rectangle of light, with which he interacts, and wherever he moves, it follows him and illuminates his path. He speaks a C ­ anetti text about human relationship with animals, and a remote-­ controlled, insect-like robot with antennae appears which Wilms begins to play with as if it is a pet, saying: ‘every time you observe an animal attentively, you have the feeling that a human is hidden inside and is laughing at you’. The sentiment, and this image of a human interacting intimately with a robot animal, speaks to many cybernetic paradigms, from Grey Walter’s robot tortoises (see Chapter 6) and Wiener’s subtitle to his field-defining book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine to Donna Haraway’s polemically utopic urgings in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985) that we recognize our direct kinships with both animals and machines, and reconnect with them. Wilms then brings on a miniature house and places it center stage. He lies down, resting his head on its roof, and the house suddenly fills with light, illuminated from inside, and spilling dramatically out of the windows. The image conjures a sense of the house being not only a place of rest, sleep, and dreams, but also a metaphor for the mind and the psyche. The miniature house in Eraritjaritjaka relates to Bachelard’s argument that the miniature is ‘vast in its way’ (1958, p. 215, emphasis in original) and, as Casey puts it: To be in a house … is not only to feel protected from a hostile outer world; it is to experience oneself in a larger world in miniature. Not only the house, then, but even the most minute part of it is capable of containing a world—of being a world and not just being-in-a-world. … To feel such immensity is to feel infinity in intimacy, a universe in a grain of sand—one’s own grain on one’s own beach. I feel at one with the universe not because I am extended out into it, or can merely project myself there, but because I experience its full extent from within my discrete place in the house. … I connect the tiny and the enormous in one stroke. (Casey, 1997, p. 294, emphasis in original)

Theater art  171 Connecting the tiny and enormous in one stroke is a fundamental aim of theater: to offer images, events, and interactions on a tiny stage as a much grander metaphor for our lives and psyches—a microcosm of our experience and the world. Wilms stirs and then stands up, a smoke effect billows from the house, and the black drapes at the rear of the stage are pulled back to reveal for the first time, the miniature house’s ‘double’: a huge, life-size exterior façade of a white, two-storey house. A live camera shot of Wilms is projected onto the entire house, taken by cameraman Bruno Deville sitting in the third row of the stalls. Live musicians (the Mondrian Quartet from the Netherlands) enter and play as Wilms steps off the stage and walks up the aisle, and Deville with his camera follows him. The live video projection continues to play on the house set in real time, showing Wilms leaving the auditorium, walking through the theater foyer, going down in a lift, and exiting the building. He gets into the back seat of a waiting taxi (as does Deville) and talks to camera as the car drives off and weaves through the streets and lights of the city, which we see through the taxi’s windows behind him (Budapest, in the performance I saw). After several minutes and miles, the taxi stops in a busy city center street and Wilms gets out and the camera follows him as he walks, pushing by pedestrians, and then stops in front of a building and goes inside.

The sweet magic of traveling yet staying where you were There is a real sense of pleasure, even ‘magic’ in this sequence. We, the audience, still seem somehow to be with him, just as we were when he was in the theater. The explicit connection between audience and live performer so much discussed in performance theory still seems to hold true even though he is not physically present. Just as we were voyeurs of him on stage, now we vicariously become the camera or camera operator following him, continuing his surveillance. The direct sense of cybernetic connection with him would not be there if this were a recording, the key is that he is still live, albeit elsewhere, and we know it. But perhaps the real sense of uncanny cybernetic ‘magic’ is that we can journey with him outside the artifice of the theater and into the real, and real-time, world outside. In a very real sense, we are still palpably there with him, and are entranced. As we watch the video projection on stage, there is a strange sense of what one might term doubled-liveness brought about through the simultaneity of Wilms’ ‘live’ presences in different, and now very distant, spaces. This is enhanced both because he continues to speak and converse with the audience just as he did while on stage (and his tie microphone continues to amplify his voice with an equal volume and clarity as in the theater), and also because the video shot is clearly one continuous take that began when he was copresent with the audience in the theater (and there is thus a sense that a trace of him is still there), and we are certain that

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Figure 5.10  Heiner Goebbels’ Eraritjaritjaka (2004), clockwise from top left: André Wilms interacts with a robot; the miniature house, illuminated from the inside; a live video projection of Wilms presenting a book to camera in an apartment several miles away from the theater; and a live video image of Wilms traveling in a taxi through the busy city streets is relayed onto the house façade. (Photos: Krzytsof Bielinski.)

his journey, the traffic, and the crowds of pedestrians he hurries past on foot are absolutely real and absolutely live. As he walks upstairs, unlocks a door, and enters an apartment, the concern with live authenticity is emphasized when he picks up some letters from the doormat together with a newspaper, which the audience recognizes and confirms with approving laughter as ‘today’s’. He then rips off a page saying ‘28th’ from a day-by-day calendar to reveal the correct date: ‘29th’. He goes to a bookshelf-lined study, sits at a desk and writes, reads a book and holds it open to the camera, and then goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. At this point, I was aware of a brief moment of darkness on screen and the possibility of a ‘hidden cut’, as Alfred Hitchcock employs in the film Rope (1948) to enable an edit without the audience realizing it, so as to maintain the illusion of his entire film being shot in one continuous take. As the camera moves close in to the fridge door, it blacks the screen for a moment (where a shot which repeats that moment of blackness and continues the preceding action can be cut in) before the door opens fully and Wilms takes a bottle out. Later, it became clear that this may indeed have been the ‘cheat’ moment when the video was cut to then play prerecorded footage, although few in the audience would be likely to realize it.

Theater art  173 But the sense of authentic real-time video is cleverly maintained by a clock in the background that continues to show the correct time throughout (the performance started exactly 10 minutes late to ensure this accuracy). Wilms prepares an omelet, and in a wonderful piece of simulated liveness between the two spaces, he chops an onion in exact rhythmical synchronization with a piece of music by Ravel that the string quartet is playing on stage in the theater. He cooks and eats the omelet and the camera pulls back from the kitchen (Wilms is still in shot in the background) to reveal a darkened chessboard with a tiny miniature house on it, illuminated from inside. There is a knock on the door, Wilms opens it, speaks to a boy (redolent of, and perhaps a homage to, the Boy character in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952)), closes the door, returns to the study, opens a music score book, and begins to hum the tune—in precise synchronization with the live music the quartet is playing in the theater—and he and they unite as the piece climaxes and ends with a decisive musical ‘stab’ which Wilms marks in time by loudly slamming shut his book. The quartet then moves offstage and begins another piece of music, unseen. On the video projection on the house, we see Wilms walks to another ‘room’ where he looks into a wall mirror, but the reflection reveals the ‘bathroom’ he appears to be in as a miniature set. He has an agitated conversation with the disembodied voice of a woman, and, as he talks to her,

Figure 5.11   Musicians from the Mondrian Quartet play, and move all around the house, visible both through its windows and through live video projections onto the house façade, in Heiner Goebbels’ Eraritjaritjaka (2004). (Photos: Krzytsof Bielinski.)

174  Theater art he moves from room to room as if to locate her ghost-like form. He opens a door into a loft-like space, and there is a miniature cathedral, and a miniature bed. The camera follows him from behind as he goes to a window and opens a curtain. In one of the most sublime moments I have experienced in theater, at that precise moment an upstairs window within the house set is illuminated and the live, flesh-and-blood Wilms pulls back its curtain and stares out at the audience, while his video ‘reverse angle’ in the city center flat continues as a huge projection on the house set. The surprise (or trick) brings loud and amazed gasps, and then applause from the audience who, by virtue of the apparently continuous real-time video, genuinely believe Wilms to be miles away. One theater reviewer has described it as a piece of ‘dramatic alchemy’ (Clements, 2004) and another notes how the whole performance hinges on this moment, ‘causing us to doubt whether we are in a play or a film, and confusing us about where exactly fiction ends and reality begins’ (Klaeui, 2004). Wilms then goes downstairs (seen both live through the windows of the house set and on video), and we realize the camera is now relaying his actions live in the theater, and are unsure how long this has been the case. As he walks around the house, the video image shows him passing the musicians who continue to play, and the two downstairs windows at either side of the house illuminate to allow us to see them live, three in the Stage Left room, one in the Stage Right room. We also see the cameraman through the windows in the set as he moves around them, providing giant Close Ups on the exterior house projection, and we realize that the inside of the set being explored is an exact match of the city center apartment, down to the last detail. We wonder when, or if, he ever left the theater. According to German philosophy from Hegel to Heidegger, homesickness (heimweh) is a fundamental existential condition: a sense of never quite feeling at home wherever one is, yet desperately yearning for an unattainable (primordial or womb-like) home. This perhaps provides a clue to why the sight of a house on a stage has such an uncanny power. Its initial familiarity and beauty draws us in with a wondrous anticipation, but this gives way almost immediately to a sense of dark foreboding and existential dread, because it is simultaneously unfamiliar and strange: a specter house. Video projections and digital overlays increase this sense of an uncanny ghostliness: the cybernetically enhanced scenographic house, from the Builders Association’s SUPER VISION to Goebbels’ Eraritjaritjaka, is quintessentially a haunted house. As Nicholas Royle has noted in his lengthy study of The Uncanny (2003): As a theory of the ghostly (the ghostliness of machines but also of feelings, concepts and beliefs), the uncanny is as much concerned with the question of computers and ‘new technology’ as it is with questions of religion. Spectrally affective and conceptual, demanding rationalisation

Theater art  175 yet uncertainly exceeding or falling short of it, the uncanny offers new ways of thinking about the contemporary ‘return to the religious’ … as well as about the strangeness of ‘programming’ in general. (2003, p. 23–24) In Goebbels’ Eraritjaritjaka, the cybernetic, the existential, and the uncanny reach heights whereby our very perception of what is real and what is not, what is video and what is theater, what is a house and what is a set becomes so elastic that something genuinely profound takes place. As Jacques Derrida has written in relation to Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, something utterly compelling and extraordinary happens when the uncanny emerges, opening up an acute awareness of ‘paradoxes of the double and of repetition, the blurring of boundaries between “imagination” and “reality”, between the “symbol” and the “thing it symbolises”’ (1981, p. 220). In Eraritjaritjaka, the house is not only a theatrical symbol, but also a psychological and philosophical one. Through the vertiginous play of space, place, time, media, music, and text, and through the enigmatic interactions of people, robots, and ghosts, the house becomes elevated to a philosophical representation of the human psyche and ‘soul’. As Sabine Haupt has put it, in Eraritjaritjaka: women’s and children’s voices haunt the house: we are at the heart of the film, surrounded by associations of images and words, dazed by collages of text and music organized in counterpoints. But where are we really? Have we been transported to the hallucinated hell of a Jean Cocteau, or is it the grotesque meticulousness à la Jacques Tati which gives each gesture its worrying distance? From stage to film, from film to stage: characters, voices and sounds change place and vector as if their initial aim was to transgress limits. And it all takes place so lightly with an almost somnambulistic virtuosity, nothing is predictable but, nevertheless, it is all entirely convincing. If the word ‘genius’ did not have such pompous connotations, it would, with this production, be more than ever appropriate. (Haupt, 2004)

About the house According to Bachelard, the house is a place that has been ‘physically inscribed’ on us since childhood and a building that is itself, like us, a type of ‘body’ with its own ‘physical and moral energy’ (1958, p. 46). The house is a place where the concrete and the poetic combine, where inside and outside are copresent, and where we both become a world and experience the world in miniature. These conjunctions lead to what he terms ‘intimate immensity’ (1958, p.  193). For Casey, the intimate immensity of the house connects

176  Theater art place with space, where the dichotomy between finite (place) and the infinite (space) is overcome: In intimate immensity I enter space from place itself. I come to the immense from within rather than on the basis of exteriority … the in/out dyad has lost its divisive and diremptive character … In this situation, we enter ‘the entire space-time of ambiguous being’ [Bachelard]. Such being is at once virtual (i.e. not simply real) and general (i.e. not strictly universal). Place and space shed their usual differentia: the clarity and distinctness of the near and small in one case, the emptiness of the far and enormous in the other. They coalesce in a common intensity. (Casey, 1997, p. 294–295) For Bachelard, ‘Immensity in the intimate domain is intensity, an intensity of being, the intensity of a being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity’ (1958, p. 193) and the scenographic houses in the productions discussed can serve to excite and awaken in us an intensity of being that is also existential and personal. Simultaneously emotional and cerebral, these productions fuse the cybernetic, the analog, and the digital to present the scenographic house as an intense and uncanny representation of the world, and of conscious and unconscious human thought, memory, action, and desire. The initial sight of the stage house calls up childlike longing and reverie, which then gives way to foreboding feelings of haunting and the uncanny as the house façade gradually becomes a metaphor not of the exterior, but the interior—filled both with dark secrets and with joyous light. In the case of Eraritjaritjaka, the house becomes simultaneously and uncannily real and unreal, like the most powerful things we ever experience in life—like love and like death. The uncanny and the sublime are closely interconnected, whereby, in Edmund Burke’s sense, the sublime is instigated through ideas or feelings of the unknown, darkness and even terror (1990 [1757]). As Vidler puts it in relation to architectural spaces, the uncanny is an: outgrowth of the Burkean sublime … its favourite motif was precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same. … the ‘uncanny’ is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial confirmation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming. (Vidler, 1992, p. 3, 11)

Theater art  177 The scenographic houses in these theater productions reach out to the sublime, the liminal, and the uncanny, and particularly in the case of Goebbel’s Eraritjaritjaka, where the house becomes what Casey terms a place of ‘psychical paradise’ (1997, p. 296). Its rich temporal and aesthetic transformations also dramatically and quintessentially encapsulate Bachelard’s philosophical understanding of the house as being ‘one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind’ (1958, p. 6).

6 Performance art Actualizing science fiction and invoking transcendence

Man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future … if existence really does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is. … and he himself will have made what he will be. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (2000 [1957], p. 259)

Sci-fi fantasy and performance art actuality The visions of cybernetics and the narratives of science fiction are closely ­correlated and intertwined. From childhood, Norbert Wiener was ­wide-eyed in wonder and in love with the genre (particularly H. G. Wells and Jules Verne), and tried his creative hand at it, publishing stories under the pseudonym W. Norbert in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine. He gets a respectful direct mention in Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano (1952) and appears as a named character in an unsettling sci-fi novel, Bernard Wolf’s Limbo (1952) where he leads a ‘cybernetic brotherhood’ of prosthetics advocates and inventors. In his own book on cybernetics 2 years earlier, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Wiener arguably invents the ­concept for the Star Trek ‘beam me up, Scotty’ machine, describing precisely such a decoding and recoding of the body to physically transmit it through space (Wiener, 1954 [1950], p. 111). Sci-fi novelists and filmmakers have drawn extensively on the utopian or dystopian promises of cybernetics, and most patently its ideas of ­human-machine symbiosis exemplified in the figures of the human cyborg and AI robot. Interestingly, the decline (or discrediting) of cybernetics and its fall from grace since the 1970s has been linked to what some critics perceive as an unrealistic futurology and overblown hyperbole too close to the fantasies of science fiction (SF). Yet in this chapter, we will see that the a­ mbitions of performance artists not only align with cybernetic SF ­paradigms, but also in various ways achieve and actualize them, including in some uncanny ­developments in bio art, and through representations and realizations of the cyborg.

Performance art  179 Self-styled cyborgs invoke a new type of existential freedom, including Canadian artist Steve Mann who proposes ‘‘‘Existential Technology’’ as the technology of self-determination and mastery over our own destiny’ (Mann, 2003, p.  19). Mann has been ‘a living laboratory for the cyborg life-style’ for over 30 years (Mann, 2018), wearing a computer and headmounted camera system, and making memorable real-life performance interventions by turning the camera directly back into the faces of the stores, casinos, and official organizations that perpetrate surveillance. Few artists explicitly describe their practice as Existentialist, and Mann is a notable exception who states: ‘Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely ­different revolts against traditional philosophy. The refusal to belong to any school of thought and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy … I follow the existentialist tradition of not following a tradition’ (Mann, 2003, p. 19). He is a doubly rare individual in proclaiming himself simultaneously an Existentialist and a cyborg, operating within the traditions and philosophies of cybernetics, exploring, and enacting the linkages between humans and machines, integrating them proudly together within one holistic system.

‘To be a performance artist you have to hate theater …’ This chapter focuses on the Performance Art (as it is known in the US, or Live Art as it is known in the UK), and we must note from the start that performance art is entirely different from theater and eschews theater’s a­ rtifice and pretense. Michael Fried famously argues that ‘Art degenerates as it ­approaches the condition of theatre [and] … The success, even the ­survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre’ (Fried, 1968 [1967], p. 139, 141, emphasis in original); and as the doyen of performance art Marina Abramović puts it: to be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake … The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. (quoted in Hickling, 2010) For the most part performance art does not aim to tell a story, nor are its artists playing characters: they are themselves and they perform actions and events, often within site-specific or gallery installation settings. Crucially, performance art is not fiction. This is precisely why the conjunction of Existentialism, cybernetics, and science fiction in performance art is so ­ potent and revolutionary: its artists are not acting out some narrative of futurity; they are inventing and inhabiting it. While their works are narratives of sorts and ‘texts’ in the broad literary sense, they are not engaged with fictionalizing, but rather actualizing.

180  Performance art Actuals lie at the center of the history, theory, and creative impulse of performance art. Most famously theorized by the preeminent pioneer of performance studies in the 1970s, Richard Schechner, performance art events are ‘actuals’ that follow similar patterns to tribal rituals, whereby actions are performed in order to effect an actual result: shamanistic trance rituals actually cure patients, a rain dance makes rain actually happen. ­Performance art is efficacious and affects a real change in the real world, in contrast to theater (and fictional forms in general) that normally only affect change in the minds or emotions of the audience. Schechner elucidates five qualities and characteristics of actuals: 1) process, something happening in the here and now; 2) consequential, irredemiable, and irrevocable acts … 3) contest, something is at stake … 4) initiation, a change in status for participants; 5) space is used concretely and organically (Schechner, 1997, p. 18, emphasis in original) At first, these ideas seem to fly in the face of understandings of science ­fiction: making concrete change in a concrete space would appear by definition to require authentic, real-life acts that negate fictionality, scientific or otherwise. Yet when performance art turns its imagination into the realms of science fiction, by dint of its historical roots in tribal rituals, its allegiances with shamanism, and its egalitarian philosophies granting it interdisciplinary permission to embrace fiction as metaphor and to employ any media (even the much-hated theater), it inhabits an interesting, tension-filled l­iminal space that is, precisely science fiction. This space, like popular SF notions of outer space, mixes a reality of the known here-and-now with a ‘will’ to the unknown, the alien, and the future; and in the extreme territories and rituals of performance art, this will is as fearlessly Nietzschean and hardcore as that of any SF protagonist or monster. Schechner’s ideas also echo Existentialism’s concerns that Dasein remains a high-stakes enactment providing continual and irrevocable change in the here and now, and such actual transformations made by performance artists include cyborg bodily modifications, literalizing Richard Feynman’s maxim that ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it’ (quoted in Thacker, 2001, p.  155). Brazilian-born American Eduardo Kac was the first artist to have a microchip surgically implanted in his body in a performance entitled Time Capsule (1997); Catalonian artist Neil Harbisson perennially wears a head antennae and is co-founder (with Moon Ribas) of the Cyborg Foundation, concerned to ‘defend cyborg rights and promote the use of cybernetics in the arts … extending/creating new senses and perceptions by applying technology to the human body’ (quoted in Pearlman, 2015, p. 84); and ­Australian artist Stelarc underwent multiple surgical procedures—and seriously real-world septic complications—since 2003 to have an Internetenabled third ear developed on his left arm. These works are genuinely

Performance art  181 estranged, to borrow a term from Darko Suvin’s classic definition of science fiction: ‘the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition … [in] an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’ (Suvin, 1979, p. 7).

ORLAN and the politics of estrangement The work of French performance artist ORLAN provides a perfect demonstration of these ideas in action, adopting a cruel politics of estrangement aligned with a vivid cognitive exercise regime for her audience as she performs visceral hybridizations and bastardizations of classical art, culture, and myth. Her Self-Hybridization project (1998–2000) draws on mythological themes and ancient Mayan iconography to create grotesque and frightening digital reconfigurations of her visage, while The Reincarnation of Saint-ORLAN (1990-93) takes her theater of cruelty to the physical operating theater. Like a living Photoshop model, ORLAN’s face, through a long series of plastic-surgery operations, is transformed into a composite montage of elements of some of the most beautiful women from art history: the chin of Botticelli’s Venus (circa, 1485), the forehead of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (circa, 1505), and the mouth of Gustave Moreau’s Europa (circa, 1869). But it is the process of performance through each surgery, rather than their facial results, that provides the impact and power, and which has assured a revered place in performance art history. Under local anesthetic, ORLAN reads philosophical texts out loud (insuring that Suvin’s ‘cognition’ is stimulatingly in play) and talks cheerily via satellite to a global audience as her face is literally ripped open and sawn apart by masked surgeons. It is an ultimate act of estrangement; and like a scene from the most gorily outlandish science-fiction horror movie (Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), say)—and it happens live, existentially, actually.

Figure 6.1  ORLAN performing devilishly during her series of operating theater performances, The Reincarnation of St ORLAN (1990–93). (Courtesy of ORLAN.)

182  Performance art

Figure 6.2  In live, satellite transmitted performances, ORLAN’s face is authentically and actually cut open and torn apart by medical surgeons in The Reincarnation of St ORLAN (1990–93). (Courtesy of ORLAN.)

The contemporary science fiction-inspired performance artist has a notable historical lineage spanning the entire 20th and 21st centuries. In the 1910s and 1920s, the futuristic was very literally proclaimed by performance makers within the Italian Futurists: ‘Today it is the MACHINE that distinguishes our era. … We feel mechanically, and we sense that we ourselves are made out of steel, we too are machines, we too have been mechanized. … this is the principle of a new aesthetic’ (Pannaggi and Paladini, 2009 [1922], p. 272–73, emphasis in original). The first exhibition of the German Bauhaus was entitled ‘Art and Technology: A New Unity’ (1923), and the 1930s saw artists like Oscar Schlemmer conceiving ­artificial performers (wired and wireless remote controlled), while Russian Constructivist theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold and choreographer Nikolai Forreger trained their performers to act as man-machine cyborgs. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol continued the Futurists’ calls, quipping: ‘I want to be a machine, I think everyone should be a machine’ (quoted in Dixon, 2007, p. 271) and artists such as Bruce Lacey and Nam June Paik were inventing perambulatory robots to do their bidding. The 1970s saw Stelarc’s naked body suspended high in the sky like ­­Superman or an astronaut (held up by wires attached to hooks piercing his skin) and Chris Burden opened his own Doorway to Heaven (1973) by stabbing two live electrical wires directly into his chest with explosive, near-fatal results. By the twilight years of the 20th century, the industrial

Performance art  183 machine age had shifted to a digital one, where the prevailing SF prophecy of a convergence of humans and machines would become a distinctive and dazzling, if sometimes disquieting image. The 1990s digital revolution prompted a renaissance in performance art. Traditionalists stubbornly resisted the technological onslaught by probing their visceral, analog bodies with increasing intensity, while others adopted new technologies to ­either critique and ­deconstruct, or to herald and pioneer, their implications for the body. Every aspect of the SF genre was seemingly explored: from ­Chicano cyborgs [Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Ethno-Cyberpunk T ­ rading Post & Curio Shop on the Electronic Frontier (1994)] to cyberpunk ­robot wars ­ (Survival Research Laboratories’ The Unexpected Destruction of ­ laborately ­Engineered ­Artifacts (1997)) and from VR sex (Stahl Stensie E and Kirk Woolford’s CyberSM, 1994) to the ethics and disaster scenarios of biotechnology (Critical Art Ensemble’s BioCom, 1997).

Non-human performance art: the pioneering robots of cybernetics Some of cybernetics’ principal figures invented robots to test and demonstrate their theories, and to begin to actualize science fiction. Primarily modeled on animals, and interactive and adaptive in their behaviors, these were early artificial life forms and artificial performance artists. Claude Shannon invented a goal-seeking electronic mouse Theseus (1952), which like its real world counterpart could learn to find its way around and solve a maze; and Norbert Wiener created Palomilla (1949), better known as his moth-bedbug. A mechanized tricycle cart on wheels, it is equipped with a series of photocells facing in different directions, and navigates itself around spaces according to negative feedback loops responding to different inputs, particularly the intensities of external light sources, thus acting like a moth. In the same year, British cybernetician William Grey Walter invented a series of even more virtuosic mobile robots, encased in a rounded metal shell, which he named Machina Speculatrix (1949) but are more often ­referred to as tortoises. They are equipped with an onboard light bulb, and seek out moderate light conditions and move away from bright ones, while their heads are protruding, periscope-style photocells that complete 360-­degree rotations to scan the environment, like a lighthouse’s beam. As the tortoises explore, contact sensors enable them to locate and avoid other physical objects, and when two tortoises are placed in the same space with various lights and objects around, they negotiate the environment with an awareness of each other, sometimes as though flirting or dancing. Pickering calls the tortoises ‘specimens of ontological theater … [demonstrating] the performative and adaptive ontology of cybernetics … in action’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 88). Walter placed mirrors in their environment and notes how each robot will enact a strange mirror dance with itself, equating this with a type of selfconsciousness, as it

184  Performance art lingers before a mirror, flickering, twittering and jigging like a clumsy Narcissus. The behavior of a creature thus engaged with its own reflection is quite specific, and on a purely empirical basis, if it were observed in an animal, might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness. (Walter, 1963 [1953], p. 128–129) In a flurry of media attention at the time, international newspapers agreed with the analysis, with the UK’s Daily Mail aghast at the robots’ surprisingly lifelike qualities and senses, noting they possess memory and hunger as well as sight and touch; and the New York Times describing their spirit of adventure and ‘free will’ (in Kline, 2015, p. 79). A delightful 1950 BBC newsreel, ‘Bristol’s Robot Tortoises Have Minds of Their Own’ (available online), is full of charm and naïve wonder, and gives a glimpse of how much of another era all this was. It shows Walter and his wife Vivian— his co-author of eight papers—watching and interacting with two of the moving robots, called Elsie and Elmer, while relaxing in the living room of their home where Walter constructed them. Bob Danvers-Walker’s classically clipped and chirpy English gentleman voiceover describes the scene and, as Elsie moves into a semi-cylindrical metal construction, explains how ‘when her batteries begin to fail she automatically runs home to her kennel to charge up, and in consequence can live a much gayer life’ (BBC Newsreel, 1950). This self-charging, return-to-station instinct would be incorporated into the design of the first truly sophisticated and commercially available robot toy, Sony’s AIBO dog, half a century later in 1999. Within 3 years of the launch, the inventive US-based Australian art-­ scientist Natalie Jeremijenko was adapting them to become Feral ­Robotic Dogs (2002) for environmentally conscious guerrilla performances. They roam public parks and schoolyards sniffing for pollutants and contaminants, whereupon they bark, play the US National Anthem, roll over, and play dead. Grey Walter called his robots tortoises less because of their rounded shape, and more in tribute to the Tortoise character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, who is actually a turtle but is called Tortoise because, as the Mock Turtle explains: ‘he taught us’. Walter’s tortoises were ‘the first biologically inspired robots’ (Holland, 2003, p.  351) and taught a new ­generation of engineers and artists a consummate lesson in designing robots that respond to and follow specific stimuli—for his, it was light. For the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, the Polish artist Edward Ihnatowicz created another pioneering example, with his responding to sound. SAM (Sound Activated Mobile, 1968) is a metallically embodied, apparently sentient ‘performance artist’ that turns its flower-shaped head directly toward visitors to listen to them, and is considered ‘the first moving sculpture which moved directly and recognizably in response to what was going on around it’ (Zivanovic, 2017).

Performance art  185

Robot lobsters and mescaline flashbacks Three years later, art robots took another leap into the scientific future with Ihnatowicz’s hydraulic, computer-controlled robot Senster (1971), which ‘applied cybernetic thinking to kinetic sculpture and in so doing made the crucial step of endowing automata with automated reasoning’ (Penny, 2008, p.  152). An imposing 15-foot long and 8-foot high kinetic machine with four sensitive microphones in its head, it used a sophisticated open computer program to enable the robot to adapt and learn, and was ‘the most technically ambitious computer-based artefact’ of its time (Benthall, 1972, p.  78). Its microphones gauge gallery visitors’ positions and movements, and it exhibits a distinct personality as a curious yet shy creature whose lifelike responses include moving its head toward quieter or slow moving visitors, as though in search of food, while retreating immediately away from anyone moving quickly or acting loudly. Its physical design is based on the shape and articulation of a giant lobster’s claw and would have caused Sartre nightmares—throughout his life he suffered vivid flashbacks from a mescaline drug trip where he had visions of being followed by a giant lobster. When out walking, Sartre suffered recurring, anxious feelings that he would turn around, or turn a corner and there it would be … awaiting him with its huge claws snapping open and shut. For the rest of his life he had a serious shellfish phobia. By the 1990s, cybernetic machines such as Simon Penny’s Petit Mal (1995) had broken entirely new ground. A thin, aluminum reactive robot aboard two bicycle wheels, it takes journeys of discovery, kinetically responding to and subtly interacting with nearby humans within its space. It has been exhibited in art galleries around the world, with its delicate proxemics dances fascinating visitors for decades. It is ‘a landmark attempt to create robots with genuine autonomy’ (Wilson, 2002, p.  247) and an A-Life prototype actual that appears to possess charm, wit, social skills, physical grace, style, elegance, intelligence, and EQ—so, far better than most humans, and a remarkable achievement for the mid 1990s. Sadly, however, as Penny observes, cybernetic, machine and robot art has remained ‘marginalized by both art history and the histories of engineering and computing’ (Penny, 2008, 154).

Stelarc: ‘The body is obsolete’ Stelarc is the quintessential Cybernetic-Existentialist performance artist, who has taken the core element and medium of the art form—the physical self—and sought, through the paradigm of actuals, to inscribe the language of cybernetics and science fiction onto his body, and imbricate the technologies of science fact into his body in existential acts of performance. Where in ORLAN’s work, ‘no longer does art imitate life … life imitates art’ (Giannachi, 2004, p.  49), with Stelarc both his life and his art imitates— and realizes—science fiction. Since testing the limits of his body by piercing

186  Performance art his skin with multiple hooks and being suspended in mid-air in various configurations in performances from 1976 to 1988, he has used numerous technologies and high-tech robotic prostheses to explore what he calls ­‘alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body’ (Stelarc, 2013). These include swallowing an expanding, endoscope-style probe to create a Cronenbergian Stomach Sculpture (1993), becoming a body-for-others and involuntarily ‘dancing’ in response to electrical shocks sent by remote gallery visitors in different cities simultaneously touching his computer-screen avatar (Fractal Flesh, 1995), and writing the word EVOLUTION on a sheet of glass using three hands, one of them a sophisticated robotic third hand— a perspex and metal forearm and hand appendage, custom-designed for him in Japan and controlled by muscle activity in different parts of his body (Handswriting, 1982). Stelarc’s philosophical mantra and website slogan for many years—The Body Is Obsolete—was distinctly cyberpunk, and he genuinely considers his body (always referred to in the third person: the body, this body, never ‘my’ body) as an evolutionary entity. Human-machine cybernetic visions, ­Existentialist subject-object relations, and Suvin’s concept of estrangement

Figure 6.3  Some of Stelarc’s Cybernetic-Existentialist experiments in actuality—in chronological order, clockwise from top left: Sitting/Swaying: Event for Rock Suspension, Tamura Gallery, Tokyo, 1980. Photo: Keisuke Oki; Handswriting, Maki Gallery, Tokyo, 1982. Photo: Keisuke Oki; Fractal Flesh, Telepolis, Luxembourg, 1995. Diagram: Stelarc; and Exoskeleton, Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana 2003. Photo: Igor Skafar. All images © Stelarc.

Performance art  187 are all stretched to logical conclusions with Stelarc’s consideration of his body ‘not as a subject but as an object—NOT AS AN OBJECT OF DESIRE BUT AS AN OBJECT FOR DESIGNING’ (Stelarc, 1991a, p. 391, emphasis in original). It is an experimental site and laboratory specimen for enhancements, but unlike ORLAN, Stelarc is a self-surgeon who takes no interest in or influence from classical art: he is a futurist conceiving his own modifications. Stelarc’s performance actuals are not ORLAN’s postmodern critiques that hold up a mirror to society’s notions of beauty, art, and the body as canvas. Rather, and in true science-fiction style, they attempt to smash the mirror and have us fly off into an entirely new world. He is, in his own words: an evolutionary guide, extrapolating new trajectories … a genetic sculptor, restructuring and hypersensitizing the human body; an ­architect of internal body spaces; a primal surgeon, implanting dreams, transplanting desires; an evolutionary alchemist, triggering mutations, transforming the human landscape. (Stelarc, 1984, p. 154) These ideas of transforming both internal bodily spaces and external landscapes close the circle of accord with Suvin’s definition of science fiction as operating not only through the interaction of estrangement and cognition but also within ‘an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’ (Suvin, 1979, p. 7). This would include Stelarc’s p ­ erformances in the online world of Second Life (since 2005) where multiple avatars of the artist ascend, descend, float, and rotate in gravitationless space around a huge 3D heart and alongside other disembodied organs. ­Stelarc’s accompanying voice-over describes Organs without Bodies, reversing ­Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation (first coined by Antonin Artaud) of bodies without organs, while performances such as Exoskeleton (1998) ignite correspondences with the philosophers’ notions of Becoming. ­Stelarc stands on a rotating turntable atop of a giant six-legged pneumatically powered robot, and controls its spiderlike walking movements via computer-translated arm gestures. Other examples of Stelarc ‘becoming animal’ include his Walking Head (2006), another perambulatory robotic creation, this time without the artist on board; in his corporeal stead is an LED screen with his animated 3D avatar head, and its positioning almost directly on top of the legs bears an eerie resemblance to the horrific spider-with-human-head mutation in John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing. Such images are metaphors for the conjunction and co-evolution of humans and machines that are the very stuff of science fiction—but also, of course, of science fact.

The cyber-aesthetics of transcendence Stelarc’s declaration that ‘the body is obsolete’ has always been more a mantra of provocation than precision, and Amelia Jones notes how when

188  Performance art seeing his performances they excite in her the opposite effects to his rhetoric. Despite his protestations, the body has a ‘brute centrality’ in his work, where Jones finds herself ‘responding in a deeply empathetic, deeply embodied way … Tears came into my eyes’ (Jones, 2006, p.  168). She discusses Stelarc’s assertion that ‘My events are involved with transcending normal human parameters, including pain’ (quoted in p. 171, emphasis in original) in ­relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas on transcendence and feminism. In The Second Sex, says Jones, ‘she points to the way in which transcendence in patriarchy is aligned with masculinity, while immanence (being in the flesh) is projected onto femininity—and female subjects’ (p. 171–172). In his own arc toward transcendence, Stelarc is as uncompromising in his life and art as any Existentialist. Seemingly masochistic works such as Fractal Flesh, where he receives electric shocks from remote audiences, express his particular and idiosyncratic approach to existential freedom, in the same way that Sartre was fascinated to describe repeatedly how imprisoned people under torture could still remain noble, silent, and defiant, ‘precisely because it is an “extreme situation” in which human freedom shows itself in its purest form’ (Thody, 1971, p. 116). At the same time, many of ­Stelarc’s most important works enact his freedom at the other extreme—in a startlingly self-assertive and powerful display of Existentialist self-creation and the body-for-itself, extending his with custom-built robotic appendages including a Third Hand (1980), an Extended Arm (1999), and his large walking robot Exoskeleton (1998) described above. He thus plays both the supplicant and the warrior, and performs Sartre and Beauvoir’s interchangeable dialectics of master and slave, sadist, and masochist—where we adopt one or other role according not only to whom we are with but also to the changing, moment-to-moment circumstances between us—moving from one end of the spectrum to the other. While taking a Kierkegaardian leap of faith toward Sartrean notions of freedom from facticity, Stelarc is explicit about his conscious use and faith in cybernetics: cybernetic corporeality is an extended and extruded embodiment that connects a multiplicity of remote bodies, spatially separated, but ­electronically connected … technology does not only replace what is missing from the body, but rather it constructs unexpected operational architectures. The body is not about lack, but rather about excess. … We are all prosthetic bodies with additional circuitry that allows us to perform beyond the boundaries of our skins and beyond the local space we inhabit. Operating in electronic space and electronic architectures, the body has spatially extended, telematically scaled loops of interaction. (Stelarc quoted in Klitch and Scheer, 2012, p. 168) While employing the language and technologies of cybernetics here, Stelarc’s ideas on ‘lack’ (‘the body is not about lack, but rather about excess’), render

Performance art  189 a supposed negative into a positive, which also echoes Existentialist views. Beauvoir argues that: ‘being is lack of being, but this lack has a way of being which is precisely existence. … a negation of the negation by which the positive is re-established. Man makes himself a lack, but he can deny the lack as lack and affirm himself as a positive existence’ (Beauvoir, 2000 [1947], p. 280). This could be Stelarc talking, and his work highlights both the lack and the excess of the body, and of Being. His performances symbolize the inadequacy of the human form in the face of technology, but simultaneously encapsulate a Nietzschean will to power to harness technology toward an actual evolution of the body using cybernetics and robotics. Ultimately, Stelarc’s affirmations of his existence and his art (which are really inseparable) are positive and total, and most crucial to applying an Existentialist reading to Stelarc’s work is his absolute commitment to selfcreation and going beyond his limits, from his early ‘suspension pieces’ to the actual surgical creation of his Ear on Arm. In Ear on Arm Suspension (2012) the two images are combined powerfully when for 15 minutes, and at the age of 65 years, Stelarc (now registering a little more pain and spilling a little more blood than in the past) is suspended above, and then lowered down onto, a giant white sculpture of his arm with its ear appendage.

Figure 6.4  In Ear On Arm Suspension (2012), Stelarc reactivates his mid-air ‘suspension’ paradigm of the 1970s and 1980s to hover above, and be lowered onto, a giant sculpture of his Ear on Arm—a scale model of the actual ear that has been surgically constructed on his left arm. Performance at Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne, 2012. (Photo: Polixeni Papapetrou; © Stelarc.)

190  Performance art The unforgettable image encapsulates Sartre’s re-interpretation of the word transcendence—the title of a 50-page chapter in Being and Nothingness—as meaning to rise above and overcome conformity, everydayness, and facticity. Stelarc insists that the suspensions ‘are not actions for i­nterpretation, nor ­require any explanation. They are not meant to generate any meaning. Rather they are sites of indifference and states of erasure. The body is empty, absent to its own agency and obsolete’ (Stelarc, 2012, emphasis in original). His provocations on the body’s absence and obsolescence are, in Beauvoir’s terms, precisely ‘a negation of the negation by which the positive is re-established’, and his redesigns of his own body accords with Existentialist concerns to construct the self through positive choices and authentic deeds: actions are not actions of the self; rather, the self is a product of a series of actions. Hence it is more correct to speak of ‘actions generating me’, some of them generating me authentically, than to speak of ‘my actions’. One’s authenticity, then, is the sum-total of authentic selfgenerating actions. (Golomb, 1995, p. 151) In the self-generation of Stelarc, cybernetics has always been a primary methodology, and he consistently uses cybernetic parlance when discussing how in his work ‘the body becomes a reactive node in an extended virtual nervous system … consuming and consumed by the information stream’ (Stelarc, 1991b); and how through his use of prosthetic body extensions ‘the human-machine system collapses into one operational unit’ (Stelarc, 1993). He adopts both cybernetic and Existentialist principles in avoiding using the first person ‘I’ (preferring instead terms such as ‘this person’) and has written about ‘the body without an “I”, without a self’ (quoted in Zurbrugg, 2000, p. 188), while ‘exploring intuitively new realms of aesthetics and images … those thresholds, those zones of slippage, those areas of interface, with anxiety, with hope and desire, but without romantic nostalgia’ (Stelarc, 1995, p. 49). His techno-evolutionary thinking accords with myriad texts from science fiction, and with Wiener’s 1954 pronouncement that ‘we have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment’ (Wiener, 1954 [1950], p.  46). Echoing and extending the philosophies and concerns of both epistemologies, Stelarc emphasizes that the human condition is not a fixed position, but a constantly metamorphosing one that, crucially, we are able to personally affect. For many decades Stelarc has continually confronted audiences with those changes, choices, and potentialities, and like no other artist in the world expresses the fact that we are inexorably evolving entities.

Twitching buttocks and cyborg enfreakment Dutch artist Dani Ploeger uses concepts of ‘self-enfreakment’ and ‘­queering the sonified body’ when describing his own idiosyncratic takes on sci-fi

Performance art  191 estrangement, evolution, and being a cyborg. He explains that in his p ­ erformance Electrode (2011) he is drawing on ideas spanning cybernetics, posthumanism, gender theory, Gibson’s notion of affordances, Bakhtin’s grotesque, and Lacan’s fragmented body (Ploeger, 2012). Ploeger stands ­naked, dramatically and clinically lit by a spotlight above, facing away from the audience and toward a large projection of two graphs. A wire hangs down from between his twitching buttocks, which alternately tighten and relax as Ploeger contracts and releases to try to replicate the zigzag line pattern of the top graph. The bottom graph (excuse the pun) shows the unfolding, real-time graph needle results of his muscular efforts as registered via two medical devices used for incontinence treatment: an Anuform® anal electrode inside him, which is connected to a modified Peritone EMG s­ ensor. Ploeger attempts, again and again, to perfectly match his bottom graph with the line pattern of the top graph, which traced around 70 seconds of the anal contractions of an anonymous male subject during masturbation and ejaculation during a 1980 medical research study into the nature of the male orgasm (Bohlen el al., 1980). I watched around 50 of Ploeger’s attempts, and he sometimes got close but always failed. The performance is far more intriguing, humorous, hypnotic, and frankly entertaining than it sounds. His physical efforts are sonically treated, synthesized, and amplified, creating a darkly sonorous, mercurial score. Each effort has a different sonic treatment and musical texture, ­generated via the GENDY (GENeration DYnamique) algorithm developed in 1992 by French-Greek electronic composer Iannis Xenakis, one of the most prominent artists featured at the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968. Perhaps predictably, Electrode’s tour drew some ironic media commentary, with the Czech Republic national newspaper Lidové Noviny dubbing Ploeger ‘the Jimi Hendrix of the sphincter’ while the UK music magazine The Wire was less kind, suggesting ‘this piece featured two assholes too many’. But it also attracted serious academic critiques including in the leading performance journal TDR: The Drama Review, edited by the performance theorist of ‘actuals’, Richard Schechner (Clarke, 2013). At one level, Electrode is a type of ridiculous and comic joke; at another it is a highly focused and deadly serious attempt to make the body perform the output of a machine, and to thereby enact the body as a machine. But the exactitude of the task is near impossible and the attempts are always failures, and as the minutes and number of efforts progress, the audience increasingly begins to will him to draw the perfect replica graph as we watch. As the time passed, I became conscious of the growing intensity and brilliance of this cyborg-critique art-joke, as all around this trendy basement arts venue in Brighton, UK, the audience’s buttocks began to twitch and squeeze agonizingly in harmonic empathy with his. By the end, I was personally itching to get up, strip off, and show him how it should be done. Like many of the most memorable performance art pieces, it is a conceptual work involving a straightforward task—like Marina Abramović

192  Performance art

Figure 6.5  In Electrode (2011), Dani Ploeger attempts again and again to replicate the exact line graph pattern of anal contractions registered by an anonymous male subject in a 1980 sex research study just prior to and during orgasm. (Photo: © Martin Popelar/OCNM.)

Performance art  193 screaming until her voice gives out in Freeing the Voice (1973), or Marianna Simnett making herself pass out through self-induced hyperventilation in Faint With Light (2016)—and it accords with ideas from both Existentialism and cybernetics. Its repetitions stage Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence (aka eternal return, discussed further in Chapter 8) where ‘the eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887], p.  273) and concerns a human being t­ rying to become not simply a body-for-others, but a body-of-an-Other (the man in the 1980 sex research study) in order to cybernetically synchronize human and machine to replicate the signal waves of the graph. This brings to mind the work of tortoise inventor Grey Walter, a cybernetician who was a clinical psychiatrist and neurophysiologist who spent decades analyzing similar dynamic line graphs taken using his homemade frequency analyzers and ground-breaking EEG apparatus. The first person to diagnose and locate a cerebral tumor using EEG, and the first to discover and define the unusual brainwave patterns of epileptics, Walter was a ‘swashbuckling’, iconoclastic aesthete and anarchist with ‘contempt for those who followed well paved paths’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 37). His most lasting legacy to brain science is his 1960s discovery and theory of the Expectancy Wave (E-wave) in the human cerebral cortex, which is highly pertinent to Ploeger’s task and perhaps, explains its ultimately Sisyphus-like futility. Walter’s theory begins by describing how, for most people; there is a marked slowing down of brainwave activity when confronted with a recurrent stimuli or task. It prompts a distinctive and recurring pattern in the electrical brainwave activity in the frontal lobes, beginning with a brief period of positive, anticipatory stimulation, followed by a short period of negative response, and finally ‘a prolonged negative wave which submerges the negative component of the imperative response’. Thus, the human reaction and response time—and by implication Ploeger’s command and control of his body—is materially affected by the brain. This effectively dampens, overrides and miss-times Ploeger’s will for mimetic accuracy: ‘the E-wave is accompanied by economical abbreviation of the motor reaction time’ (Walter, 1964, p. 309).

Sci-fi utopias, ecologies, and societies As Ursula K. LeGuin puts it: ‘All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors’ (LeGuin, 1987, p. vi). Among her examples is a future ‘alternative society’, a theme that has consistently fascinated performance artists as well as SF writers, particularly in relation to depictions of utopia. In 1964, Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno famously argued over the political interpretations and contemporary meanings of this term, with Bloch arguably winning the hermeneutic joust, acknowledging that while the importance of utopia as a concept had declined or been discredited, utopian thinking was still very much alive and well; it just comes in new names and guises, he

194  Performance art said, most notably ‘Science Fiction’ (Bloch and Adorno, 1988 [1964], p. 2). In 1982, Fredric Jameson added to the debate, suggesting that sci-fi not only shows how visions of the future position and illuminate understandings of the historical present and reflect our own limits and closures, but also demonstrates the increasing difficulty with which society can relate to historicity or imagine future utopias (Jameson, 1982). Carol McGuirk reminds us that utopian science fiction provides important parables because ‘utopia is inherently didactic’ (McGuirk, 1995, p. 138), while Matthias Bottger and Ludwig Engel discuss the genre as ‘our favorite form of reflection on society … a poetic and an indirect form of social critique’ (Bottger and Engel, 2011, p. 159). The idea that utopian science fiction simultaneously invents the future while poetically critiquing the present comes vibrantly to life in New Zealand-born Hayden Fowler’s performance installation Anthropocene ­ (2011). Featuring a utopian ‘floating island’ dominated by three large white spheres and surrounded by lush, tall grasses, the performance has Fowler emerging from a circular hole in the center sphere (as if through the iris of a huge eyeball) dressed only in loincloth-style shorts and a small piece of white animal skin draped around his shoulders. He surveys the surroundings, sits, and eats. Living in a white futuristic utopia, he has become caveman and ­animal zoo exhibit—the mise-en-scène is the idealized zoo enclosure of polar bears and penguins in captivity. But while apparently ­returning to a Garden of Eden and a state of nature, closer inspection reveals that Fowler’s food is junk from tins, and rats surround him.

Figure 6.6  Hayden Fowler’s performance installation and critique of an imagined utopia, Anthropocene (2011). (Photo: Joy Lai; © Hayden Fowler.)

Performance art  195 The future casting of SF and utopian thinking in general (be it from artists, philosophers, politicians, or urban planners) has always contributed to human development and social evolution—envisioning a future and trying to shape it accordingly, whether toward the construction of a dreamed utopia or the avoidance of a dystopian nightmare. In the 1920s, architect and techno-sociologist Lewis Mumford made clear that the real function and value of utopia is social progress and change, and his contemporary Anatole France echoed the sentiment with words that resonate vividly in relation to Fowler’s ‘caveman-utopia’ performance: ‘Without the utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city. … Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future’ (quoted in Mumford, 2003 [1922], p. 22).

Baudrillard’s ‘end of science fiction’ By definition, utopia is where you are not, and Anthropocene functions like any utopian discourse or SF vision to provide a commentary on where we might go, or what we might become, but in strict and absolute relation to where we are now. Fowler’s performance installation takes that great staple theme of SF—a speculation on where and how people might live one day— and simultaneously offers a pastiche and critique on contemporary utopian thinking around ‘designer living’. In Jamesons’ terms, it can be viewed as a parodic ‘anti-Utopia’ (2005, p.  176). This is an idyll with a dark side, encapsulating the increasing desire for—and seductive allure of—antiseptic aesthetics and existentially inauthentic lifestyles. Fowler himself muses on ‘whether this is a post-apocalyptic scene, a vision of the last surviving biological inter-relationship [man and rats], or the dawn of a whole new nature’ (Fowler, 2012). The themes of his hyperreal diorama fit neatly across all three of Jean Baudrillard’s celebrated ‘orders of simulacra’ (natural, productive, simulation): To the first category belongs the imaginary of the utopia. To the second corresponds science fiction, strictly speaking. To the third corresponds—is there an imaginary that might correspond to this order? The most likely answer is that the good old imaginary of science fiction is dead and that something else is in the process of emerging (not only in fiction but in theory as well). (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981], p. 121; emphasis in original) Baudrillard conceives that the ‘real’ has vanished since the three different orders of simulacra increasingly absorb/reabsorb one another, and the distance between the real and the imaginary abolishes itself. His ideas are pertinent to, and even literalized in, Anthropocene since, as Baudrillard puts it: ‘This projection is maximized in the utopian, in which a transcendent

196  Performance art sphere, a radically different universe takes form (the romantic dream is still the individualized form of utopia … the island of utopia stands opposed to the continent of the real)’ (p. 122). For Baudrillard, science fiction ‘is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere’ (p. 126) and thus, in typically dramatic and nihilistic style, he proclaims ‘the end of science fiction’ (p. 124). With trademark panache, he miraculously reconfigures this end as a new beginning. This entails a cessation of excess and ‘romantic expansion … freedom and naïveté’ and a reversed trajectory and implosive evolution that looks to the past rather than the future in order to ‘requotidianize’ ourselves and recapture fragments of the ‘so-called real world’ (p. 124). These notions are important in relation to expressions of science fiction within live performance art, since it is an art-form that exists quintessentially in the real world—a corporeal body in a palpable space—and all its theories and histories are steeped in discourses of flesh-and-blood materiality, of here-and-now liveness, and ephemerality. Performance artists are congenital manipulators (and lovers) of the concrete, the visceral and actual. Perhaps more than in any other medium, the performance artist (as in Fowler’s work) is able to activate and actualize both Baudrillard’s theory of the three orders of simulacra and his own hopes for science fiction. While staging SF images and narratives of futurity, performance artists can simultaneously exist in the quotidian and recapture/reinterpret the real, as well as operate within and across the potent, sliding territories that comprise the three orders of simulacra: ‘Between the operatic (the theatrical status of theatrical and fantastical machinery) … the operative (the industrial) … and the operational (the cybernetic)’ (Baudrillard, 1994 [1981], p. 127, ­emphases in original).

Singularity and the rational robot Baudrillard’s own narratives of apocalypse—from the collapse of the real and the inexorable march of simulacra to the end of science fiction—find embodiment in the singularity machine that is the ultraintelligent, sentient robot. A simultaneously alluring and fearful figure at the heart of many of the greatest science fictions, robots have a long lineage as artificial ‘performance artists’ stretching back through antiquity. Both Aristotle and Pindar record anthropomorphic automata performing, and the Turkish sorcerer automaton smoking a hookah that famously defeated Napoleon in a game of chess in 1807 (discussed in Chapter 3) echoes a portentous and iconic event in the history science fiction: the supercomputer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s film of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) taking murderous control of the spaceship after defeating Frank Poole at chess. In the early 1960s, Clarke was not only acquainted with cybernetics but utterly absorbed in it, and was ‘mesmerized’ by Wiener’s work (Rid, 2016, p. 120). In a Playboy article in July 1961, he enthuses about Wiener and argues that ‘a careful reading’ of his work shows that: ‘The tool we have invented is our

Performance art  197 successor … To put it bluntly and brutally, the machine is going to take over … We are still decades—but not centuries—from building such a machine’ (quoted in Rid, 2016, p. 121). Interestingly, the first pioneer to research the potentials of a chess-playing computer was the father of information theory, Claude E. Shannon who was also an enthusiastic sci-fi fan like Wiener (whom Shannon acknowledged laid the statistical groundwork for the theory that he took up, expanded, and made famous). Shannon’s research began a journey continued by others that would culminate almost half a century later in IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeating chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in a six game series in 1996. Shannon’s celebrated 1949 article ‘Programming a Computer for Playing Chess’ had not predicted such a scenario, downplaying the project’s real world implications: ‘Although perhaps of no practical importance, the question is of theoretical interest’ (Shannon, 1950 [1949], p. 256). Kasparov reflected on his defeat by speculating on the aesthetic potentials of cybernetic technology: ‘If a computer can beat the World Champion, a computer can read the best books in the world, can write the best plays, and can know everything about history and people’ (quoted in King, 1997, p. 5). There are delightful parallels here with the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre and his own, voraciously ambitious intentions: he read avidly, wrote some of ‘the best plays’ of the 1940s (The Flies [1943], No Exit [1944]), and once told a friend ‘I want to be the man who knows most about everything’ (quoted in Cox, 2016, p. 24). Director Stanley Kubrick’s scientific consultant on supercomputers for 2001: A Space Odyssey was an originator of the theory of the technological singularity, I. J. Good. His musings on an ‘intelligence explosion’ (Good, 2003 [1965]) resulting from an ultraintelligent machine designing ever better machines would inspire Vernor Vinge to talk of machines ‘awaken[ing]’, Damien Broderick to conceive a ‘futurological abyss’ called The Spike (2002), and Ray Kurzweil to pronounce that The Singularity is Near (2005). Good’s original 1965 article describes how ‘Man will construct the deus ex machina in his own image’ (Good, 2003 [1965]), and many artists have attempted to create such robot God-machines, often in a lighthearted vein that recalls J. G. Ballard’s joke that ‘Robotics = The moral degradation of the machine’ (Ballard, 1992, p. 273). Ballard’s humorous glossary defines science fiction as ‘the body’s dream of becoming a machine’ and satirizes cybernetics: ‘The totalitarian systems of the future will be docile and subservient, like super-efficient servants, and all the more threatening for it’ (p. 277).

Them Fuckin’ Robots, a bloodsucking bio-bot, and a glow-in-the-dark bunny In 1988, Canadian artist Laura Kikauka assembled a female robot from junkyard items, including a squirting oil pump, bedsprings, a sewing machine treadle, and a boiling kettle. Separately and independently, her collaborator Norman White built an anthropomorphic male mechanical

198  Performance art robot that sported assorted flickering gauges and rotating appendages. They brought the two machines together for a blind date that turned distinctly sexual, in a performance called Them Fuckin’ Robots (1988). Kikauka and White connected different pipes and pistons from one robot to the other (connection points were the only technical specifications they had revealed to each other) and the robots proceeded to copulate while a robotic voice redolent of early sci-fi B-movies repeated the mantra ‘Abnormal Sex Behavior’. The two machines responded to one another’s motions and magnetic fields, charging capacitors and increasing the speed of pumps and pistons until the performance reached an electrically sparked and comic climax as gooey fluid spurted intermittently from one of the male robot’s tubes. What is interesting here is that the traditions of performance art—as a bodily practice—guide the SF narrative and subvert its implications. All genres are ‘drenched in ideologies’ (Schenck, 1993, p.  282), and the body remains the abiding and absolute one within performance art, even in its convergences with science fiction. Therefore, where ‘singularity’ in most SF concerns an ‘immanent transcendence’ of machine consciousness (Broderick, 2002, p.  113) or a self-cognition, as in the Skynet computer system becoming self-aware in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, director: James Cameron), the singularity moment in this robot performance does not lead to machine messianism, apocalypse, or transcendence, but to a much ­simpler and biological impulse: ‘fuckin’’. The event horizon of this singularity is not an ‘intelligence explosion’ but an ejaculation of a quite different order, heralding the onset of lustful and procreating monstrous machines. Although an ironic and comic performance, this ‘becoming animal’ (or ­becoming human) of the machines has depth and significance. It is an ­actual dramatization of contemporary culture’s increasing fascination with the conjunction of technology and sexuality (Springer, 1996), as well as a warning about the humanization of the machine, robot sexual desire, and the promise of their ultimate procreation: ‘put a Dog Machine and a Bitch Machine side by side, and eventually a third little machine will be the result’ (Bernard de ­Fontenelle quoted in Laqueur, 1990, p. 155). Performance art’s excursions into science fiction emphasize the cybernetic message that nature and robots are not oppositional forces, but rather the closest and most intimate allies. Indeed, in the realms of robot performance art, they have become one and the same. Performance artists sometimes celebrate this notion in their work, but just as often they present cautionary tales: warnings about a reciprocal process whereby there is an increasing humanization of machines and a gradual ‘dehumanization and machinization’ of humans (Dixon, 2007, p. 276). Eduardo Kac and Ed Bennett’s performance A-positive (1997) depicts this theme graphically, with a robot machine being ‘humanized’ with the actual blood of the performer Kac. Like the technological ‘jacking in’ of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) or the battery-cell human slaves of the film The Matrix (1999, directors: The Wachowskis), Kac is corporeally connected to the robot via an intravenous

Performance art  199 needle, and his blood actually ‘feeds’ it, visibly pumping through a clear tube. But the bloodsucking bio-bot is more than a vampire parasite. It extracts oxygen from the plasma to keep a tiny flame burning, and is catalyzed into a reciprocal feeding gesture, sending intravenous shots of dextrose into Kac’s body: the man-machine symbiosis is mutually beneficial. Like many of the most significant performance art works, it is a quiet but efficacious ritual that is conceptually simple, and intensely distilled and focused. And like many of the most significant science fictions, it tells a hypnotic, multifaceted story with deep psychological, sociopolitical, and existential resonances. This blood kinship ritual between man and machine is performed with dignity and grace—like an idealized wedding photo, formal and elegant, a dignified and apparently spiritualized union. It is, in the utopian reading, reassuring and serene, this image of man and machine in perfect harmony. But from the dystopian perspective, it is a Gothic wet dream of the undead feeding on the living—a Frankenstein meets Dracula meets Alien SF-horror par excellence. But what is most resonant, and most deeply unsettling, is not A-positive’s conceptual sense of ambiguity, but rather the lack of it when seen in performance: the blissful and casual state of compliance that Kac conjures about where we (and the robots) are, where we are heading, and what we will become.

Figure 6.7   Eduardo Kac and a blood-sucking bio-bot get intimate, exchange bodily fluids, and feed off one another in Eduardo Kac and Ed Bennett’s A-positive (1997). (Photo detail courtesy of DAM Gallery, Berlin.)

200  Performance art Kac’s varied Kierkegaardian and Deleuzian becomings throughout his oeuvre provide a fascinating case study of performance art as actual and performance artists as existential embodiments of science fiction. In Time Capsule (1997), Kac became the first artist to actually implant a microchip into himself, injecting it into his left leg using a special hypodermic syringe during a live performance broadcast on Brazilian television. He put his leg into a scanner and a remote telerobotic finger thousands of miles away in Chicago then activated the scanner, which displayed the chip’s embedded ID number. He completed the performance by going online to a database that utilizes the same technology to identify pets, whereupon he registered himself as an owner and as an animal. Kac’s particular take on ‘becoming animal’ took a different line of flight when, using a process of zygote microinjection, he genetically modified an albino rabbit, integrating an enhanced green fluorescent protein into its genome. On 14 May 2000, the rabbit gave birth to Alba, GPF Bunny [Green Florescent Protein Bunny] (2000), an independent and autonomous, genetically engineered and highly controversial live-performance art-work actual that glows in the dark under the right lighting conditions and was raised as a member of Kac’s family. As he puts it, aesthetics ‘in the context of transgenic art must be understood to mean that creation, socialization, and domestic integration are a single process’ (Kac quoted in Elwell, 2011, p. 8).

Becoming the God trick As Rosi Braidotti notes, ‘contemporary culture has shifted the issue of genetic mutations from the high-tech laboratories into popular culture’ ­ raising ‘metamorphosis to the status of a cultural icon’ (Braidotti, 2002, p.  178–79); and Kac is the self-styled ‘first transgenic artist’ investigating what he calls ‘a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering techniques to create unique living beings’ (quoted in Elwell, 2011, p. 7). His first was a Petri-dish-dwelling, live, and evolving bacteria called Genesis (1999), which had been implanted with a ‘God code’ formed by converting a piece of text from the Bible (beginning ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…’) into Morse code and translating the dots and dashes into a base pair of genes that were then created in a laboratory and implanted into a non-specific bacterium. Kac’s casting of ‘God’ at the living (if not breathing) center of this performance piece is conceptually blatant and as hermeneutically clear as a divine thunderbolt of retribution. It provides an interesting take on creationism, opens important debates around ethics in both genetic science and art, and turns a microscopic organism into a cross-genre SF blockbuster: Frankenstein Gothic meets messianic cloning in a fervent future world of genetic mutation. As Deleuze and Guattari point out: ‘Science fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegetable, and mineral to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things imperceptible’ (1980, p. 248). Kac

Performance art  201 continued his personal SF molecular narrative into full parthenogenesis territory when he integrated his own genetic material into a petunia to create (if not quite give birth to) a new living being called A Natural History of the Enigma (2009). It won the Golden Nica for Hybrid Art at the Ars Electronica Festival, a notable arts honor that was awarded to another performance artist, Stelarc, for his Extra Ear project in 2011. In philosophical theory, becoming, from Kierkegaard’s to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations, encompasses a continual process of progressive iterations and potentials, seemingly a new poetics and metaphysics of transformation. But it actually opposes metaphysics by making an ontological distinction between being and becoming, denying the metaphysical notion of ‘pure being’ and elevating pure becoming in its place. Moreover, as Slavoj Žižek puts it: ‘this pure becoming is not a particular becoming of some corporeal entity, a passage of this entity from one to another state, but a becoming-it-itself, thoroughly extracted from its corporeal base’ (Žižek, 2004, p. 9; emphasis in original). Where being’s temporality is the present, becoming never ‘actually occurs’; rather, like the starting point of all science fiction, which Deleuze and Guattari praise for its nomadic force, it is ‘always forthcoming’ but equally, for Deleuze, ‘already past’ (quoted in Žižek, 2004, p. 9). Becoming is the philosophical paradigm with arguably the closest empirical fit with science fiction, and SF in its turn propounds its own distinctive theories of becoming. In dystopian texts, the plots are almost by definition about (disastrous) becomings and have a frequent habit of suddenly reaching apocalyptic end-points—anti-Deleuzian ‘becoming-finalities’—as certain metamorphoses are recognized as irreversible, with terminal results. Yet in more optimistic SF texts, a category in which I would include the majority of performance artworks dealing with similar themes of futurity, becoming is explored and depicted as adventurous and liberating, desirable, playful, joyful, and—perhaps most importantly—inevitable and necessary. Science fiction in performance art is simultaneously a political gesture; a cybernetic praxis; a technical feat; and an embodied existential process that both looks forward to ‘becoming the future’ and actualizes a version of it in the present, live in front of us. This actualization in real time and space operates dialectically as an estrangement of the actual, eschewing the quotidian. As Carl Freedman has noted: ‘SF, like dialectics, refuses any simple acceptance of the mundane; and in evoking a world which is not ours but which could, at least in principle, become ours, it estranges the actual through an insistence on the primacy of historical specificity’ (Freedman, 1987, p. 200). As potently as any sci-fi writers or filmmakers, performance artists have taken on what Braidotti calls ‘the visionary and didactic role’ of science fiction to enact, with corporeal bodies in real time and space, a powerful ‘post-humanist, bio-centered egalitarianism’ that estranges and displaces our world-view and establishes ‘a continuum with the animal, mineral, vegetable, extraterrestrial and technological worlds’ (Braidotti, 2002, p. 183). Eugene Thacker describes the construction of ‘narratives of progress … on

202  Performance art the contingencies of the future, and the necessity of re-imagining the present’ (2000, p. 73); Sartre defines the human first-and-foremost as ‘the being who hurls himself toward a future’ and has a consciousness of, and agency in, constructing that imagined future (2000 [1957], p. 16); while Deleuze is emphatic that our ‘only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming’ (1990, p. 171). Crucially, in the quotidian world, the evolutionary becomings of humans and machines have for some time now operated in parallel, both metamorphoses moving on their own revolutionary trajectories. Their symbioses and dazzling lines of flight toward, across, into, and through one another are captured compellingly in live performance art through a disquieting and breathtaking dance of ideas, bodies, technologies, and actuals.

7 Identity art The adaptive system of the authentic self

[Technology] has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer be meaningfully separated from the human subject … subjectivity is dispersed through the cybernetic circuit … the boundaries of the self are defined less by the skin than the feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a techno-bio-integrated circuit. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999, p. xiii, 72)

Identity and complexity In Digital Performance (2007) I describe the body as ‘the most revered, fetishized, contested, detested, and confused concept in contemporary ­ ­cultural theory’ (Dixon, 2007, p. 212) but would revise this to suggest that notions of human identity have now overtaken the human corpus to claim that schizophrenic and prismatic description. That is not to say that the body has disappeared, but its flame has waned a little within cultural theory, and arguably within contemporary arts, while more political and conceptual aspects of self/identity have moved forward to upstage, if not entirely replace, the previous fascination with the physical body. Academic interest in human identity intensifies but is of course nothing new and comes in many forms: personal, political, gendered, sexual, virtual, cultural, ethnic, national, religious, socio-economic, geographical, diasporic, collective, … and the list goes on. Forms, definitions and perspectives on identity abound, and the field is awash with debate and contestation, and positive and negative readings, particularly in relation to the politics of identity. For example, the righteous causes of marginalized groups to assert and celebrate their identities are lauded, while those of people seeking to control, oppress or colonize others are certainly not. It may further social collectivism and happiness to raise pride in a local cultural identity, yet too much tribalism begets civil wars, ultra-nationalism may slide toward fascism, and too much self is selfish. We are entering difficult territory.

204  Identity art Cybernetic discourses celebrate the distinctive identities of systems and autonomous machines, such as Walter’s tortoises and Ihnatowicz’s Senster, ascribing them unique personalities, and Maturana and Varela maintain that ‘autopoietic machines have individuality … they actively maintain an identity’ (1980 [1972], p. 80). But specifics about human selves and personalities are rarely discussed since human identity is essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied action. … In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and ­computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot ­teleology and human goals. (Hayles, 1999, p. xii, 3) Thus, when a human is part of a cybernetic system, as the observer is in second-wave cybernetics, their individuality has little relevance: they simply serve as one functioning part of a wider whole, subsumed within the metaorganism. It is the identity and autonomy of the system that is paramount. Paul Anthony Stokes notes the social sciences’ recent ‘infatuation’ with identity and the emergence of what he calls an ‘identity society’ that has ‘now replaced the society of the masses … In an identity society, identity and complexity emerge as dancing partners’ (Stokes, 2006, p. 128). He suggests its foundation and its future lies in cybernetics, and draws on cybernetician Stafford Beer’s ideas on how social relationships have shifted increasingly from the vertical to the horizontal resulting in more personal independence, autonomy, and individuation. Beer demonstrates how contemporary identity is an intrinsically cybernetic concept as well as sociological one, including through one of the discipline’s favorite activities—boundary crossing: Social units are no longer separate: they share common boundaries, which the inhabitants freely cross. … Above all, technological change—in communication, computation, and the ability to travel— has affected the family tree stereotype of organization to the point where the boundaries it seeks to maintain can be maintained no longer (Beer, 1975, p. 30). Stokes argues convincingly that the identity of both organizations and individuals operate and evolve in relation to an interrelated, five-fold ­cybernetic process: enactment (their actual strategic actions, and interactions with others); pattern (the communication norms and culture they establish); homeostasis (balancing and stabilizing their personality in relation to the environment, and seeking to minimize threats and maximize opportunities); anticipation (evaluating potential consequences of actions, and imagining

Identity art  205 ‘possible future identities’); and closure (the achievement of a sense of selfidentity) (Stokes, 2006, p. 135).

Authenticity, self-creation, and Jeff Koons In this chapter, I consider identity in terms of the evolving personalities and beings of both cybernetic systems and artistic human beings, with particular reference to Existentialist perspectives on personal freedom, ­defining an authentic self, and the grand or fundamental project. In doing so, the problematic nature and changing meanings of authenticity should be acknowledged. As previously noted, Existentialism emphasizes the high ­demands and difficulties of living an authentic life in good faith, but is quite specific and unambiguous in how it understands the term. ‘The ideal of authenticity is a project of becoming the person you are. … [It] is the ultimate task of life’ summarizes Charles Guignon (2004, p. 3), noting its German translation eigentlich comes from a stem meaning ‘own’ (eigen) which ­carries with it a connotation of ‘owning oneself, owning up to what one is becoming, and taking responsibility for being one’s own’ so as to realize and embody the qualities of authenticity: ‘wholeness, continuity, coherence, constancy, purposiveness and responsibility for self’ (p. 134, 145). But in the West, the cultural status and meaning of authenticity has changed, and more than once, since the philosophy of Existentialism matured in the 1940s. By 1967, Guy Debord was reflecting that ‘the present age … prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence, truth is considered profane and only illusion is sacred’ (quoted in Jones, 2006, p. 164). His words were the direct inspiration for Daniel J. Martinez’s robot performance to make a blind man murder for the things he’s seen, or happiness is over-rated (2002). In a gallery space, a kneeling and realistic life-size automata figure of Martinez repeatedly slashes its own wrist with a razor. Martinez’s violent, visceral, and overtly Cybernetic-Existentialist works draw influences from Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the Theater of the Absurd, and tinges expressions of the darker edges of existential despair with a sharp, absurdist black humor. In the 1970s, Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity (1973) launched a powerful attack to reinforce a message that Existentialism’s authenticity is a ‘bombastic … untruth’ and ‘pretense of deep human emotion’ (Adorno, 1973, p. 3, 9), and as new postmodern discourses took hold, authenticity was disdainfully kicked into the gutter, seemingly never to appear again. By the late 20th century, artists placed inauthenticity on the pedestal. Theater group Forced Entertainment explained that ‘We didn’t want anything authentic, we wanted a third-rate copy—we loved that more dearly than anything authentic’ (Etchells, 1999, p. 32), while American Jeff Koons took leaps toward becoming the world’s richest living artist by making giant copies of commercial and vulgar, third-rate figurines.

206  Identity art His seemingly impossible success in raising the cultural status of these sentimental sculptures to a type of aesthetic sublime is framed and informed by Existentialist sentiments. He holds a Sartrean view of his identity as being without essence and, most fundamentally, as nothingness: ‘I have no perception of Jeff Koons, absolutely not. Your perception of Jeff Koons is probably much more realistic than mine, because to me I am nonexistent’ (quoted in Thomas, 2005); and has an uncompromising approach to both art and self-determination: ‘Art is about your own possibilities as a human being. It’s about your own excitement, your own potential, and what you can become. It affirms your existence’ (Koons, 2018, emphasis in original). But while to the cool postmodern consciousness of the late 20th century, it seemed that truth had left the building and authenticity wasn’t just passé, it was impossible, recent years have witnessed a miraculous, evangelical revival. As argued previously, authenticity has become the new necessity (at least ostensibly), and one of the central totems of Existentialism has returned with a bang. The word is heard and the concept revered everywhere, and in ways that would make Adorno shudder—as the new real, whether employed as a no-nonsense kite-mark of truthfulness or wholesome quality, or shrouded in a type of mystical, new age aura. Perhaps most surprising and remarkable of all is that it has even made a comeback in the vocabulary of cultural theory and criticism. In Singapore, where I live and where food is king, 99% of restaurant signs boast of authentic cuisine (I’m only slightly exaggerating), while in some South-East Asian cities there are street market-stalls with signs proclaiming proudly: ‘authentic fake Rolex watches’. Globally, the authenticity concept has been flattened into noisy popular culture jargon, commercialized through bland marketing and carpe diem T-shirt slogans, and championed by media celebrities who are obsessed with it.1 Authenticity has become the new necessity in carving, expressing, or faking identities—personal, political, and commercial—and Authentic Leadership is the bold new message (or bullshit) in management studies, with Existentialist platitudes writ large including, on one website, a quote from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who gives a simultaneous nod to cybernetics’ concerns with eliminating noise: Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others drown out your inner voice … [you] already know what you truly want to become. (Jobbs, 2005) Authenticity has reemerged to such an extent that it is becoming a field of academic study unto itself. In Authentic TM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012), Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that authenticity has become a brand that is an absolute requirement for commercial corporations,

Identity art  207 which are carefully crafted to ensure a public-facing aura of authenticity. Meanwhile, lifecasting (the uploading of individual’s everyday lives on social media) is an equally advanced branding process: ‘the self is a product’ where personal authenticity is demonstrated in different ways, from autonomous individual actions to entrepreneurial activities proving ‘that the individual can “free” him- or herself from the state’ (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 76, 118). Stephen Lyng agrees, urging that personal authenticity should become a politics of resistance against ‘the disciplinary society … in acts of transgression and transcendence … The need for dramatic action to liberate the self becomes ever more urgent’ (Lyng, 2005, p. 47). Wendy Hui Kyong Chun acknowledges that the American obsession with authenticity may seem counter-intuitive, since so much of its culture is artificial. But she maintains that authenticity and artificiality are not necessarily opposites and easily separated, insightfully citing US President, Donald Trump as an example of someone who is simultaneously both, and calling his 2016 victory the ‘authenticity election’. Switching to a more cybernetic perspective, she argues that personal authenticity is now so crucial because it has become algorithmic and methodological, and coins the term Algorithmic Authenticity to describe the ways in which users are validated or authenticated by network algorithms. The imperative ‘be true to yourself’ or simply ‘be true’ makes our data valuable—that is, recognizable—across the many media platforms we use. Fundamentally about recognition, algorithmic authenticity buttresses human and machinic pattern recognition. (Chun, 2017).

Identity in Existentialism All Existentialist philosophers generally agree on a central tenet: we are all free, and able to determine, forge, and create our own identities. But there is disagreement on how much each individual is inevitably (or at least partially) a product or amalgam of how, where and when they are ‘thrown’ into the world, and the broader politics, realities, or accidents of what constitutes or informs their identity: gender, sexuality, geography, ethnicity, socio-economic position, and so on. As we have seen, Sartre suggests these aspects must be examined to determine how they may inhibit and restrict us since, he insists, if they act as obstacles we are still able to overcome and transcend them in the pursuit of freedom and an individuated self: I do not know what I shall be, but I do know that it will not be what I now am, and also that nothing I now am or can know will determine what I shall be. My anguished being, therefore, is a freedom to become what I am not, to be it already under the mode of not being it. (Sartre, 2003 [1943], p. 32, emphasis in original)

208  Identity art Existentialism’s understanding of the becoming of personal identity is defined in relation to what one does rather than what one is, since Sartre’s mantra ‘existence precedes essence’ makes clear that at birth we simply exist and we define our own essences and essential selves only through decisive action and by what we do. Equally, cybernetics ‘is more concerned with what entities do rather than what they are’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 28, emphasis in original). In performance art during the 1960s and 1970s, a number of artists including Jackie Apple, Martha Wilson and Adrian Piper did something significant in defining their essences by presenting work based on the notion of entirely changing their own identities. In 1970, artist Judy Gerowitz (née Cohen) rejected using the surname of either her father or late husband, and publicly changed her identity to Judy Chicago in a full-page advert in Artforum protesting against the oppressively patriarchal art world. Her Dinner Party (1974–79) remains one of the icons of feminist art. In the late 20th century, changing identities became as much a political act as a personal or aesthetic one, a self-critique that also sought to critique the world outside, and to effect change in the minds and behaviors of others; as R. D. Laing puts it: ‘Any transformation of one person invites accommodating transformations in others’ (quoted in Pickering, 2010, p. 198). Nietzsche discusses creating oneself in aesthetic terms, advocating that one should endeavor to ‘become what you are’ through self-reflexivity, and by giving form, shape and ‘style to one’s character’, like constructing a narrative or a work of art (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887], p. 290). He describes how ‘we want to be poets of our lives’ (p. 299) and suggests people ‘survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye’ (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887], p. 290). Arland Ussher relates ­Existentialist notions of identity formulation to Buddhist and Taoist notions of ‘Wandering in the Great Void’ where the ‘Existential Will … learns to know itself and trust itself, may make men well adjusted, and therefore free’ (Ussher, 1968, p. 9). Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset espouses the Existentialist ­doctrine that ‘man is an entity that makes itself’ (Ortega, 1961, p. 201) but disagrees with Sartre’s claim that we can overcome facticity, arguing that we will always be a product of our environment and circumstances, and are only able to diminish but never extinguish their indelible marks on our identity. This is a down-to-earth and commonsense perspective that may be helpful to bear in mind as we consider the vast and intricate c­ omplexities of identity/personal selfhood, and the innumerably diverse ways that ­artists interrogate, critique, and articulate it. As such, it is difficult to take any ­progressive narrative through-line here, and I will instead adopt a type of Hydra case-study approach, using the trope of ID as … x, y, z, to consider the bifurcating, writhing, multi-headed monster that is contemporary identity.

Identity art  209

ID as fundamental project: Gilbert and George Gilbert and George would doubtless relish the description ‘double-headed monster’. They have long dubbed themselves ‘two people, one artist’ (quoted in Preston, 2014) and are perennially fierce and fiery aggressors with teeth and genitals bared—contemporary mythical beasts looking to take on all comers. They wholeheartedly advocate Sartre’s call to overcome one’s circumstances by asserting individual freedom through what Sartre calls a grand or fundamental project: ‘a spontaneous original choice that depends on the individual’s freedom’ and which escapes self-deception through a bold personal commitment to living authentically: ‘proper exercise of freedom creates values … [and] each authentic project expresses a universal dimension in the singularity of a human life’ (Onof, 1995). Gilbert and George have made this their life’s work, and as noted previously, they pronounced themselves ‘existentialists’ in 2015 (Gilbert quoted in Furniss, 2015). Others have described them as ‘existential clowns’ ­(McGill, 1985) and ‘visual messengers that boldly translate questions about life into questions about art, and transform esthetic questions into existential ones’ (Wechsler, 1981). Their patent Existentialism includes rejection of authority, conventions, and others’ value systems through direct provocations, as in their early DIRTY WORD PICTURES (1977) show, featuring pictures with such titles as BENT SHIT CUNT (1977) through to their BANNERS (2015) series almost 50 years later. Each banner has the words ‘Gilbert and George say’ scrawled in red paint above a spray-canned, capitalized slogan in black, declaring sentiments such as BURN THAT BOOK; FUCK THE PLANET; and BAN RELIGION. Their anti-authoritarian ethos is encapsulated in their personal X Commandments (1995), the first being ‘Thou shalt fight conformism’, followed by ‘Thou Shalt be the messenger of freedoms’, with others reading ‘Thou shalt reinvent life’; ‘Thou shalt have a sense of purpose’; ‘Thou shalt give something back’; and ‘Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shalt do it’. Their lives manifest the philosophy through an absolute commitment to leading a unique and authentic existence, and undertaking extreme artistic explorations of the intensities of life—religion and spirituality, sex, crime, hate, hope, desire, pain, lust, fear, identity, and the specter of death—as well as life’s ridiculous absurdities. Most of their pictures are infused with a sense of the tragicomic, with them frequently pulling funny faces, as well as deadpan, grotesque, or horrific expressions. They have much in common with one of the philosophy’s founding figures, Kierkegaard, who describes himself as a Janus figure with one face laughing while the other cries: ‘I too have both the tragic and the comic in me. I am witty and the people laugh— but I cry. … What the English say of their home I have to say about my sadness; my sadness is my castle’ (quoted in Hubben, 1980 [1952], p. 16). George echoes the melancholy pathos: ‘We’re more interested to say that

Figure 7.1  In Fates (2005), Gilbert and George show some of their many faces, including the Kierkegaardian tragic and comic, and combine imagery that hints at both the sacred and the profane. (426 × 760 cm © Gilbert & George. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019. Photo: Gilbert and George Studio.)

210  Identity art

Identity art  211 we’re miserable than to say we are happy. … Sadness is a fantastic human emotion’ (quoted in McGill, 1985). Their almost three hundred LONDON P ­ ICTURES (2011–12) exemplify their fascinations with melancholia, human hopes that turn to failure, danger, crime, and death. They combine imagery with sensational newspaper posters, ‘stolen’ by the artists over many years, which present modern urban life in all its volatility, tragedy, absurdity and routine violence. Brutal and declamatory, these brooding and disquieting pictures … are Dickensian in scope and ultra-modern in sensibility. … revealing without judgment the ceaseless relay of urban drama, in all its gradations of hope and suffering. (Bracewell, 2012) Personal identity is the explicit subject of one of their most famous early works, as they self-declare the essence of who they are: George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit (1969) in a photograph of the two artists smiling, those words emblazoned proudly in cut-out letters across their respective chests. Their pejorative self-labeling is ‘a pivotal work … not just designed to offend but show that the pair refused to be dependent on the art industry’s opinion, arguably the work’s main legacy’ (Zurakhinsky, 2018). For over 50 years, they have made a quite unique contribution to the history of art, undertaking a journey where they have literally made their art and their lives indistinguishable. Along the way, they have been critically acclaimed and publically denounced, picked up the Turner Prize, and been among the first Western artists to exhibit in major museums in China and in Russia. They have created some of the most distinctive, vivid, lurid, unsettling, scatological, revolting, bold, visceral, ugly, beautiful, spiritual, and iconic images in contemporary art. They are true outsiders and Jo-Ann Furniss points to their ‘studied strangeness’ and the fact that they are ‘profoundly serious’ and committed to creating work: that says something important and connects with people. They are libertarians and non-conformists, openly gay upholders of traditional values, radical atheists with a profound spiritual dimension, and the most established anti-establishment artists working in Britain today. (Furniss, 2015) Their lives, or perhaps more appropriately their life (they are a­lmost conjoined) is both a system—of routines, habits, repetitions, and ­ evolutions—and a definitive existential statement of freedom, absolute ­ choice, and rebellion against social conformism. They are mercurial and chameleonic in appearing to represent all points along the extremities of the Existentialist political spectrum—the Sartrean left, the Heideggerian right,

212  Identity art and Camus’ anarchism—and play at being unashamedly ‘posh’, including supporting the conservative Margaret Thatcher during her socially divisive time as UK Prime Minister, to the chagrin of most of their artist peers. Their website’s Introduction page in 2018 says only: We want our Art to: Bring out the Bigot from inside the Liberal And conversely to Bring out the Liberal from inside the Bigot (Gilbert and George, 2018) Since graduating from Saint Martin’s School of Art in London in 1969, ­Gilbert and George defined and committed themselves totally to their singular fundamental project with clarity of purpose that apparently has never wavered. Sartre emphasizes that authentic acts and self-determination are both difficult and partial, and that determination, rigor and dedication is required for them to be continuously re-asserted and renewed: the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether. (Sartre, 1989 [1946]) In their unique fundamental project Gilbert and George equally undertake and become a form of cybernetic autopoiesis in the terms by which Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who coined the term, describe. They are self-regulating and ‘self-contained’ (Maturana and Varela, 1980 [1972], p. 89), and throughout their lives have been careful to insulate themselves from outside forces, generally spurning external influences, including avoiding seeing other artists’ work lest it influences them. They are highly organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) … continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) … [constituting] (the machine) as a concrete unity in space’ (Maturana and Varela, 1980 [1972], p. 78). The autopoietic machine that is Gilbert and George is a closely integrated (person to person) network that is unified, advanced, uncompromising, and ‘continuously regenerating’. It is also a didactic machine, with the clear aim to make meaning in an absurd world, and conceiving the artist-­ creators themselves as immovable objects of absolute certitude placed at the solid center of that world, while uncertainty, chaos, and complexity

Identity art  213

Figure 7.2   Gilbert and George reveal something of their existential essences, standing either side of the most basic product of the cybernetic human circularity system, in Naked Shit (1994). (253 × 355 cm © Gilbert & George. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019. Photo: Gilbert and George Studio.)

swirl all around. Their world conforms to cybernetic concepts of circularity, with repetitious cycles and variations on specific themes central to their oeuvre. They describe their art as coming from three main ‘life forces’ (the head, the soul, and the sex), which are continually vibrating and moving into different formations and arrangements: ‘Each one of our pictures is a ­frozen representation of one of these “arrangements”,’ they say (Gilbert and George, 1970). Different series encompass scores or hundreds of large works, such as the Naked Shit Pictures (1994–95), featuring photographs of the naked artists standing amidst images of their own turds. These monumentally sized, vividly colored works open up, in the most graphic of ways, the basest circularity and system of the human body. Systems thinking and circularity are also paramount in their life patterns: they are rigorously ordered, and their regimes and routines are the stuff of legend. They include, for the past 20 years, walking from their home in Fournier Street, London, every evening for 1 hour to the same Kurdish Restaurant in Dalston, where they always sit at the same table and order precisely the same meal for months on end, before considering something else on the menu, and then eating that same dish for many more months, and so the cycle continues. This eccentricity may

214  Identity art seem absurd, but it is purposive—designed to keep every moment focused away from trivia and mundane choices, and toward their fundamental project. They never cook, shop, clean, or do household chores, have few friends or ‘educated conversations’ with Others since that would ‘interfere’, and continually seek to ensure, as they put it, that their ‘purpose is set in the right direction. It needs redefining every day, every second. That sounds religious’ (quoted in McGill, 1985). It also sounds Sartrean. Gilbert and George have created one of the most idiosyncratic and original identities not only in art, but in social anthropology; for Louisa Buck, they are ‘ageing Lords of Misrule’ who have ‘followed in the footsteps of Andy Warhol in achieving the three-way formula for contemporary artistic success: ubiquity, inscrutability and—above all—controversy’ (Buck, 2000a, p. 20). In their ambitious fusion of art and life they unite cybernetic autopoiesis with Existentialist ideologies of freedom, self-creation, and the fundamental project. They have transformed themselves and seek in turn to trigger transformations in Others. They are authentic Existentialists, the real deal: ‘Our reason for making pictures is to change people and not to congratulate them on being how they are’ (Gilbert and George, 1970).

ID as erasure: Michael Landy and John Baldessari In 2001, British artist Michael Landy undertook his own life-changing fundamental project with a formidable act of erasure. In 1970, American artist John Baldessari had done the same, burning all his art dated from May 1953 to March 1966 at a local crematorium in Cremation Project (1970). He thereby ritualistically obliterated part of his past and moved on from it, cleansing and regenerating his artistic self. Landy echoes Baldessari’s destructive sentiments in Art Bin (2010), a metal and transparent Perspex structure shaped like an office waste bin that is the size of a house (600 m³) in which other artists and the public are encouraged to dispose of their failed works of art; willing participants include Gary Hume, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Michael Craig-Martin. But Landy’s landmark work, Break Down (2001) took the idea to a new level in an ultimate artistic expression of the existential identity crisis and an active rejection of his past. His 2-week performance involved the destruction of all his worldly belongings (7,227 items, painstakingly cataloged) including his car and every identity validation from birth certificate to passport. For the process of destruction, he built a complex system of conveyor belts, a ‘disassembly line’ (Harvie, 2013, p. 91) along which each item traveled, taking 10 minutes to complete its circuit before being pulverized at the end. Landy thus performs Existentialism’s palimpsest-like philosophy of identity whereby there is a continual process of ongoing negation and erasure of the past self in favor of continual regeneration and self-creation

Identity art  215

Figure 7.3  F amous practitioners including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and lesser-known artists alike have deposited their failed works in Michael Landy’s Art Bin (2010). Installation view at the South London Gallery. (© Michael Landy, courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Andy Stagg.)

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Figure 7.4  In Break Down (2001), Michael Landy enacted a classic existential identity crisis, and ‘negated everything’ (Landy, 2008). Using an elaborate conveyor belt system, he ritually destroyed every single thing he owned, including his car. (Courtesy of Michael Landy and Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Photo: Hugo Glendinning.)

Identity art  217 through authentic action. ‘I’m always trying to get rid of myself,’ says Landy, ‘so that I can move on. … [It was] a huge rush, I was on cloud 9 … I’d negated everything’ (Illuminations Media, 2008). Landy claimed that the experience was so transformative that following it he could see no point in making art, and it was over a year before he resumed. He reflects that Break Down ‘was the best thing I ever did in my life’ (Arts Documentaries, 2014)—a similar conclusion to that reached by Baldessari following his ­Cremation Project (1970): ‘I really think it is my best piece to date’ (quoted in Mundy, 2012). Both works have parallels with Jean Tinguely’s auto-destructing Homage to New York (1960, with Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg), a giant and junkyard-style cybernetic sculpture incorporating numerous rotating bicycle wheels, a bathtub and a piano. At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the 27-foot high machine self-destructed explosively in a 27-minute performance conceived ‘out of total anarchy and freedom’ and manifesting ‘a direct connection between creation and destruction … humor and poetry’ (Tinguely quoted in Klüver, 2003 [1961], p. 213). In 2010, Landy paid homage to the Swiss sculptor and metamechanic in a video documentary as part of a special Tate Liverpool (UK) exhibition, Joyous Machines: Michael Landy and Jean Tinguely (2010), and presented his 160 drawings of Tinguely’s creations, including two painting machines exhibited at the historic Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition (1968). In a humorous work echoing Landy’s Break Down, American artist ­Michael Mandiberg advertised every one of his possessions and spent a year trying to sell them all online (Shop Mandiberg, 2001) with the sales pitch that since we are what we own, ‘by buying my objects you can participate in the disintegration of my identity’ (quoted in Blais and Ippolito, p. 116). Other critiques subverting the Internet’s commercial feedback loops include The Body of Michael Daines (2000), with the 16-year old Canadian offering his body for sale in the eBay sculpture category; and Keith Obadike who tried to sell his African-American identity on eBay in Blackness for Sale (2001): ‘by echoing the slave auctions within the virtual world, Obadike illustrated that the body’s identity politics (gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) are just as significant in today’s digital/virtual age’ (Tribe et al., 2006, p. 38). In Australian groups Aphids and All The Queens Men’s collaboration, Game Show (2014), Tristan Meecham pastiches a charismatic TV-show host, with ultra-white painted teeth and super-shiny black hair painted on his baldpate. He explains that each night 50 audience contestants ‘will compete live on stage for the chance to win a grand showcase of prizes which includes everything that I own’ from his fridge to his troll collection, his television to his eczema cream. ‘My possessions are your prizes!’ he declares. Behind him, glamorous male assistants in superhero-style leotards hold up or lovingly touch some of the array of Meecham’s objects, clothes,

218  Identity art and furniture displayed on tiered platforms. This gloriously camp critique of celebrity, competition, and consumer greed ‘playfully challenges the notion that artists should give something of themselves in their work’ (All The Queens Men, 2014) and includes an array of guest performers including acrobats, a huge community choir, and a dance group. Asher Warren notes that Game Show’s dramaturgy relies on the contestants’ ‘unrehearsed authenticity’ although their agency is compromised by ‘absurd … demeaning’ and innuendo-laden games to win the prizes, and the fact that no-one is allowed to ‘outshine the host. … Game Show jumps between a series of discursive registers, jumping from the authenticity of the sacrifice to the artifice behind [the audience’s] “shallow” participation’ (Warren, 2016, p. 63–68).

ID as political activism: Adrian Piper Explorations of identity erasure also manifest in the work of American ­artist Adrian Piper. An analytic philosopher, Piper is concerned about the care and precision with which commentators discuss and interpret her works, and this extends to her providing a fascinating and cautionary set of guidelines for art critics, in three sections: (1) Make sure you get the facts right (2) Do not instrumentalize the artwork as a psychological artifact for making inferences about the artist’s mental states (3) Interpret and analyze the artwork, not the artist (Piper, 2016) I therefore tread cautiously with this critique and begin with the explicit statement that all the descriptions and interpretations I make here are e­ ntirely subjective, personal, and my own. Piper’s interrogations of ­identity erasure include a series of photographs of people with their faces eerily rubbed out, including Everything #2.8 (2003), a black-and-white photograph of a couple that has been photocopied onto graph paper. Their faces have been entirely scratched away with sandpaper, and the phrase Everything will be taken away is blazoned across them in old-fashioned typewriter-style lettering. In Everything #6 (2004), the same being-towards-death maxim is repeated in red with one word each (this time with the words ‘every’ and ‘thing’ divided) on the foreheads of faded black and white, wallpaper-style portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy—all victims of untimely deaths through politically motivated assassination. Piper is also preparing for, and actively engaging with her own beingtowards-death in the form of an ongoing artwork she has been adding to since 1985. What Will Become of Me (1985-ongoing) contains, among other things, documents, and over 30 years’ worth of all her cut hair and nail clippings, and will eventually include her cremated ashes. It is bequeathed to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which held a celebrated Piper

Identity art  219 retrospective in 2018, the first time an entire floor of MOMA has ever been devoted to a living artist. In the 1970s she produced a series of self-portraits, often exaggerating clichéd ideas of identity to highlight racial prejudice. The Mythic Being series (1973–75) includes performances documented on video and photographs with her in drag as a working class man with a fake moustache, Afro wig, and sunglasses. The photos are later embellished with oil-crayon drawings and text statements such as ‘I EMBODY EVERYTHING YOU MOST HATE AND FEAR’. In her Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981) drawing, she stares out accusingly and piercingly at the viewer; and her photographic Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (1995) is embellished with oil-crayoned scribbles and a thought bubble reading ‘WHUT CHOO LOOKIN AT MOFO’. Isiah Matthew Wooden suggests that these two works: reveal a concern with engaging and occasioning a kind of Heideggerian questioning of identity. … [and] show her in the process of losing something or—perhaps more precisely—someone. Loss is made arrestingly visible in both works, functioning as a unifying thread and theme … demand[ing] retrospection and introspection while grappling with urgent existential concerns and questions of meaning. (Wooden, 2018, p. 35–36) Her Safe #1-4 (1990) installation includes photographs of smiling Africans and African Americans overlain with screen printed red phrases announcing that ‘You are safe’, ‘We are among you’, ‘We are around you’, and ‘We are within you’—drawing not only on racist fears but also, I would suggest, on positive ideas of being-with-others. Cherise Smith argues that artists such as Piper, Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, and Anna Deavere Smith are ­‘Enacting ­Others’ in a ‘Politics of Identity’ that asks crucial questions: ‘Is identity ­constant or shifting? Does one decide one’s own identity, or is it applied from outside? Is identity biologically determined, socially constructed, or performative, and what is the role of the audience in the process’ (Smith, 2011, p. 4). Piper’s processes are proto-cybernetic, and she explains that she is ­‘interested in the construction of finite systems, that is, systems that serve to contain an idea within certain formal limits and to exhaust the possibilities of the idea set by those limits’. She describes their objectives in terms that relate to the discipline’s concerns with closed feedback loops, evolution, and emergence, explaining that they involve patterns combining first ‘the emergence of a kind of intuition’, second ‘a subconscious focusing of elements’ and third ‘an analysis of this particular idea determining the possibilities’ so as to ‘to evolve a kind of static, idealized form … a nebulous THING that is in my mind and will eventually evolve into a physically constructable form’ (Piper, 1999 [1996], p. 5, emphases in original).

220  Identity art Piper performs erasures of identity (with sand paper), transformations of identity (she has entirely redone her Wikipedia page), exaggerations of (racial) identity, and confrontations with identity clichés and stereotypes. Reviewing Piper’s 2018 MOMA retrospective, Lexi Manatakis notes the rich diversity in the over 290 works on display but identifies a singular unity of purpose—political activism: ‘Piper has completely owned the idea of direct action within art: the powerful energy of all of her works intending to spark action in viewers about their perceptions of social constructs and to use this understanding to change the world … Piper [is] one of the most revolutionary artists of our time’ (Manatakis, 2018).

ID as data archive: Josh Ginsburg In Walkabout (2011) South African artist Josh Ginsburg takes a journey through his past and uses circular feedback loops to respond impulsively to users’ inputs and requests by sending them pieces of data-art selected from over 30,000 elements in a vast personal database archive he has assembled. They include his video, audio and voice recordings, cellphone images, text fragments, and unfinished ideas from his notebooks. Walkabout has been staged variously: as a theater work, a cinematic event, a seminar/conference presentation, a TED talk, and as a one-to-one performance conversation. It ‘remains immaterial and constantly in flux’, and focuses on private thinking … the emergence and logic of a digital archive of thoughts … a tactical framework to store, promote, and facilitate engagement with the world. … What is the relationship between a purely private cognitive event and its articulation in the world for public consumption’? (Ginsburg, 2014, p. 98–99) The title of his book chapter ‘I Am Equipment: Artist as Interface’ (2014, original emphasis) emphasizes his role as not only central to, but synonymous with the system, with Ginsburg situated as the observer/participant at the epicenter of a second-wave cybernetic organism. He essentially becomes the ‘black box’ that mysteriously and invisibly reads the input, interprets and reorients it, and converts it into an output. He responds to users’ ­interactions in real time, using his archive’s idiosyncratic, subjectively associative, and continually evolving tagging and annotation system to individually select which data fragments to send them. Cybernetic principles of negative feedback loops, negative entropy, autopoiesis, and complexity theory are overt in Ginsburg’s reflections on the importance of maintaining a stable, structured system while also employing the powerful agents of disorder … uncertainty is at the philosophical centre of this project … [and] the acceptance of complexity. …

Identity art  221 Complex adaptive systems comprise strategies that look to harness the haphazard element inherent in complex systems, rather than trying to filter it out as an uncontrollable or destructive force. … Effectively ‘managing’ a symbiotic relationship between order and chaos, these systems are essentially iterative, self-correcting processes of action, ­reflection, and adaptation’. (Ginsburg, 2014, p. 101, 102, 106, 107, 108) The archive has become an increasingly important phenomenon in art and philosophy, which Michel Foucault discusses as ‘an apparatus’ that ‘emerges in fragments’ (Foucault, 2011 [1969], p. 147). Giorgio Agamben elaborates on this notion to insist that ‘the apparatus is a network’ (Agamben, 2009, p.  1–2) and Gabriella Giannachi argues: ‘it is only possible to talk about the archive from within its apparatus’ (Giannachi, 2017, p.  182). Ginsburg is decidedly within his, and simultaneously renders himself as the apparatus itself, encapsulating Giannachi’s contention that ‘archives can be used as strategies for the rewriting of our pasts … by embodying the archive, we inhabit our past and adventure into the future’ (p. 184). In undertaking his archival adventure, Ginsburg re-experiences and re-writes his personal life history, and makes clear the importance of

Figure 7.5   One of many installation configurations of Walkabout (2011), Josh Ginsburg’s personal exploration of complexity, uncertainty, chaos and order—here at Zink Theatre. (Courtesy of Josh Ginsburg, with thanks to John Nankin. Photo: Jonx Pillemer.)

222  Identity art ­xistentialist perspectives and influences on the work. He quotes the E ­imprisoned Meursault’s musings on the vastness of one’s forgotten memories in ­Camus’ The Outsider: ‘I realised then that a man who had only lived one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison’ (Camus, 2000 [1942], p. 79) and Heidegger’s poetic idea that ‘to think is to be underway’ (quoted in ­Ginsburg, 2014, p.  104) which triggered a shift in Ginsburg’s thinking, prompting him to realize that ‘to think’ is ‘to do’ (p. 104). He goes on to relate Walkabout to the simultaneous sense of present-ness and withdrawal in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present (2010), in which she sits impassively and stares at gallery participants who sit opposite her for as long as they care to stay, and its relationship to Heidegger’s famous ‘parable’ of the different states of a hammer in relation to whether it is present-at-hand (an unused object), ready-to-hand (being used), or unreadyto-hand (broken). What is conceptually striking about Walkabout is that its essential ­structure is both cybernetic and Existentialist: it is classically constructed as a responsive and evolving system of instantaneous feedback loops while being simultaneously conceived in relation to ideas of ‘present-ness’, being-for-others, dialogs with the self, and the construction of identity. The latter is predicated not only on choices and through actions, but also via the reorientation of the facticity of past circumstances, experiences, and memories into new potentialities and realizations—of future possibilities, of becoming: ‘The system is thus a networked database that both stores and generates ideas … the process of art-making is, for me, a form of philosophical wandering—a constant and non-hierarchical interplay of action, feedback and reflection. … the artwork is a process’ (Ginsburg, 2014, p. 113, 120, 129). J. Sage Elwell echoes Ginsburg’s idea of ‘philosophical wandering’ in his critique of explorations of identity in database art, but casts it in a negative light. He correlates the whole field with a type of existential and spiritual crisis, encapsulating the unique expression of the death of God in digital culture. … the principal content of database art is the self and … its metaphorical structure discloses the self as data … a process of self-extension, selfcancellation, and a final rupturing of the embodied, narritival self from its own digitally extended data self. This, I conclude, is an expression of the death of the subject in the digital age. (Elwell, 2011, p. xviii)

ID as media reflection: Entang Wiharso, Gavin Turk Portraying or performing the self in direct relation to, or as a reflection of, movie and media imagery has been a strategy of a number of artists, including Cindy Sherman’s photographic self-explorations in different personas

Identity art  223 captured in moments from imagined movies, such as her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) series, and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s portrayals of fictional alter egos in interactive films, online platforms and gallery installations. Nancy Burson digitally synthesizes photographs of movie stars to create composites with an almost theological aura: her First Beauty Composite (1982) fuses Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe; while for Big Brother (1983) Burson places the visages of more sinister figures into her alchemical digital mortar: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Khomeini, and Mao. Indonesian artist Entang Wiharso’s Self Portrait (2015) comprises four large, clear plastic wall hangings with pockets containing over 400 acrylic rectangles in the size and shape of a smartphone. Each one is screen-printed with different images of Asian and Western politicians, music icons (including David Bowie and Alice Cooper), news events (the first moon landing, Osama Bin Laden) stills from movies (such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Wicker Man, and 1984), and text fragments of news (including the Stonewall ‘riots’ for LGBT rights, a 1971 Indonesian Census report, and a 1977 report on sales of the first Apple computer). Its title Self Portrait ­implies that Wiharso’s identity is primarily composed of the media ­content he has consumed or which has had the most lasting impact on him. It seems a type of memory map, or aide memoire tracing his most personally highly charged, media-catalyzed emotional or aesthetic moments. His existential condition is synonymous with his mediatized and cybernetic one; and equally, as Agung Hujatnikajenong observes, since he has sourced the ­images from the Internet, in combining these images into a self portrait, Entang is trying to both juxtapose and to connect a projection of himself with images and texts associated with other people’s memories … [and to] allude to the ­projection of a ‘self’ that is no longer authentic in the presence of media technology. (Hujatnikajenong, 2015, p. 7). British artist Gavin Turk’s exploration of his identity is simultaneously a self-promotion and self-exploitation that parodies the art world’s reverence toward A-List artists. At the beginning of his career, in his final exhibition for his Masters degree at the Royal College of Art in London, he cleared out his studio and left only a blue plaque on the wall, in the style of English Heritage’s signs placed on UK houses where famous people have lived, stating ‘Borough of Kensington/Gavin Turk Sculptor/Worked Here 1989-1991’. Cave (1991) was awarded a fail mark by the examiners. Turk’s acerbic sense of humor while mythologizing himself as a star continued with balls of his masticated chewing gum mounted pompously in a glass display case in Floater (1993); and heroic life-size waxworks of himself in the guise of French revolutionary Marat (The Death of Marat, 1998) and South

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Figure 7.6  Gallery view details of Entang Wiharso’s Self Portrait (2015)—in the form of 400 smartphone-shaped, acrylic rectangles, during exhibition at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), Singapore. (Photos: Steve Dixon.)

American revolutionary Che (1999) Guevara. In Pop (1993), the glass-encased waxwork of Turk is dressed as Sex Pistols musician Sid Vicious in The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle (1980, Director: Julien Temple) movie scene where he sings My Way and shoots a gun into the audience. His physical pose with gun in hand is simultaneously a la Elvis Presley, as depicted by Andy Warhol in 1963, and is ‘a multi-referential statement about how our culture both reverses and neutralises any authentic expression of rebellion’ (Buck, 2000a, p. 99). Charles Lindholm suggests ‘the dominant trope for personal authenticity in modern America is emotivism—the notion that feeling is the most potent and real aspect of the self’ (Lindholm, 2008, p. 65) including experiencing extreme events and sensations. He discusses the increasing numbers of authenticity-seekers undertaking activities ranging from going back to nature or discovering God to engaging in the ‘eat, fuck and skydive’ philosophy of risky sports, looking to ‘find an authentic reality in the undeniable but fleeting truth of intense emotion’ (p. 50, 71). He notes the rise of extreme tourism, with jungle adventurers hoping ‘to free the savage within’ (p. 42)

Identity art  225 and traces commonalities between violent criminals, ‘edgeworkers’, anarchists, and extreme sports enthusiasts who all seek the intoxicating sensation of exercising control in chaotic and dangerous situations … to give a vivid sense of significance to life … [and] want that really real feeling. They are the most enthusiastic acolytes of the church of authenticity, exemplars of real life inspiring the pale souls stuck in a world saturated with the fake and the simulated. (Lindholm, 2008, p. 51)

ID as multitudinous: The Internet Taking a lead from Lev Manovich,2 I will now cast The Internet as an artist or performer. It too is a ‘world saturated with the fake and the simulated’ and is a site for myriad identity transformations—personal, political, social, sexual, and aesthetic—with the World Wide Web constituting ‘the largest theater in the world, offering everybody fifteen megabytes of fame’ ­(Dixon, 2007, p.  4). One hundred and fifty years after Walt Whitman’s Song of ­Myself (1855) rejoiced that ‘I contain multitudes’ of identities, vast numbers of people began to sing this for themselves online. Multi-identities are a fundamental existential condition and in The Presentation of Self in ­Everyday Life in 1956, Erving Goffman highlights how everyone constantly adjusts their social performance according to whom they are with. But a key change brought about by the Internet was firstly a proliferation of online environments that triggered more widespread and deeper engagement with alternate identities and plural selves, and secondly an apparent anonymity that emboldened people in their identity experimentations. the authenticity of human relationships is always in question in c­ yberspace … Masks and self-disclosures are part of the grammar of cyberspace … a syntax of identity play: new identities, false identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities (Rheingold, 1993, p. 152) Identity play in the Web’s first heydays of the 1990s belied different intentions and desires: from the childlike pleasure of playacting to the psychologically therapeutic, and from sexual gratification to a quest for the spiritual. For some, this was carnivalesque participation in a transgressive, liberating masked ball; for others it was a role-play to enhance self-confidence, selfesteem, and self-image. For others there was a flexing of the subconscious or a search for the true self (or non-self) through discovering one’s multiple selves, since an ‘endless series of masks points both to the emptiness of the idea of the self as well as its profound depths’ (Jones, 2006, p. 42). For still others, there was an innate desire to use the then novel cybernetic medium

226  Identity art to experience a new form of guiltless voyeurism and alterity: to become Other so as to have anonymous encounters with other people’s Others. Many artists subverted and satirized the Web’s multi-identity craze. In be right back/The Stolen Identity Project (2000), Austrian company Bilderwerfer stole the web identities of various real people including the Shah of Iran, a death row inmate and a deaf housewife. They then spent an anarchic year ‘being’ and misrepresenting them (while pointing to the shallowness of online multi-identities), working in both live performance and online contexts: we aired their confessions live on stage, we invaded their privacy … We seduced a young man from the Philippines … We played virtual priests to somebody’s confession … we screamed ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Kill the Jews’ and ‘Fuck Bill Gates’ … we continue doing it night after night. (Bilderwerfer, 2000) Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña similarly employed ironic humor to pour scorn on these new anthropological performances: Today, I’m tired of ex/changing identities on the net. In the past 8 hours, I’ve been a man, a woman and a s/he. I’ve been black, Asian, Mixteco, German and a multi-hybrid replicant. I’ve been 10 years old, 20, 42, 65. I’ve spoken 7 broken languages. As you can see, I need a break real bad, just want to be myself for a few minutes. ps: my body however remains intact, untouched, unsatisfied, Unattainable, untranslatable. (Gómez-Peña, 1996, p. 45) Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1997) was an influential text interrogating both sociological and psychological ­perspectives on the online multi-identity phenomena at that time. She ­celebrates the Internet as a site where people effectively become authors of themselves in ‘dramas in which we are producer, director and star’ (Turkle, 1997, p.  20) and argues that the previously conceived unitary self transforms into a multiple self: ‘identity on the computer is the sum of your distributed presence’ (p. 12). Her research case studies of people adopting multi-identities emphasize their profound identifications with their alteregos, a common belief that RL (real life) is just one of their life’s many parallel windows, and the fact that online interactions can be as meaningful and affecting as those in RL—a point made vividly with reference to the psychological effects suffered by victims of the infamous virtual rape in LambdaMoo in 1993. But by the late 1990s, a veritable army of critical discontents were lining up to attack what they perceived as naïve utopianism, and to warn of the

Identity art  227 danger that a proliferation of fantasy selves may lead to self-delusion and psychological instability. Jon Stratton describes a negative cleaving open of the Cartesian mind-body split and ‘the increasing acceptance that the “self” can exist apart from the “body”’ (Stratton, 1997, p. 28), while Michael Punt argues that these negative and seductive role-play spaces lead users into ‘incipient sickness and schizophrenia’ (Punt, 1999, p. 42). Interestingly, in 1959, the Existentialist-cybernetician R. D. Laing presented a similar diagnosis in the real world from his expert perspective as a clinical psychiatrist in The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1959), which was influenced by Gregory Bateson’s theory of the ‘double bind’, ­examining how contradictory messages act on the receiver: Being like everyone else, being someone other than oneself, playing a part, being incognito, anonymous, being nobody (psychotically, pretending to have no body), are defences that are carried through with great thoroughness in certain schizoid and schizophrenic conditions. (Laing, 1960 [1959], p. 111) In 1996, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker echoed with a chilling broadside attack on The Divided Self borne of the Internet: Electronic technology terminates with the radically divided self: the self, that is, which is at war with itself. Split consciousness for a ­culture that is split between digital and human flesh. A warring field, the ­electronic self is torn … [and retreats] into an irreal world. (Kroker and Kroker, 1996, p. 247) But I would also reflect that this paradigm of online participants exploring multi-identities with one another actually aligns clearly with cybernetic and Existentialist precepts. While the authenticity issue may be a moot point, there are recursive feedback loops at play, and a circularity principle this is both technological and psychological, as participants undertake a practical workshop in Existentialism’s palimpsest philosophy of identity. While ostensibly building new selves, the process is equally importantly about erasing the old self. The cycle of rematerialization necessitates dematerialization and I believe an unconscious strategy of disappearance into nothingness actually lies at the core of such online explorations. Finding the liberated, ludic, new self involves the concealment or ­obliteration of the socially formed old self. The creation of multi-identities is in one way an additive process, but in another a subtractive one. It is a peeling away of masks to reveal inner beings that lurk under the surface—and ‘beneath the mask is another mask’ (Claude Cahun quoted in Jones, 2006, p. 42). So while multi-identities appear to be an outer path of externalizing one’s multiple facets, they are just as significantly an inner self-examination, an auto-psychoanalysis.

228  Identity art I believe such processes explore what we really are—not fixed, single selves, but plural, hybrid beings who seek our true selves through the projection of alternate identities and an intense and transformative empathy with others. Online explorations of multi-identities offer a consciously cybernetic, philosophical, and performative strategy to address the key existential problem and paradox that you can never know yourself, because there is no self. We are split, we are multiple, and we merge with others.

Notes 1 For Oprah Winfrey, authenticity is key to confronting yourself and your struggles (Guignon, 2004, p. 1), and ‘plus size’ model Ashley Graham announced in 2018 that ‘Being authentic is beautiful’ in an Instagram message to her 6.7 million ­followers, who responded with half a million ‘likes’. Displaying her swimsuit images entirely untouched by digital airbrushes she explains: ‘I’m not ashamed of a few lumps, bumps or cellulite … and you shouldn’t be either’, adding that it is time to reverse the ‘epidemic of low self-esteem’ in girls and women as a result of social media (BBC News, 2018). 2 Lev Manovich argues that computer hardware and software systems constitute, in and of themselves, the greatest artworks, and that ‘the greatest interactive work is the interactive human-computer interface itself’ (Manovich, 2003, p. 15). I adapt his notion here by casting the Internet as an ‘artist’ actively involved in the construction of human identity, including though people’s adoption of multiple ones (multi-identities). The Internet has proved a perfect cybernetic medium for individuals to explore, rehearse, and enact Existentialism’s idea of carving one’s own unique identity and continually reinventing it. Forums such as Facebook (since 2004) and Instagram (since 2010) provide spaces to construct and brand identities, and to document and share lives. Earlier, with the public launch of the World Wide Web in 1991, millions of people began to actively explore and construct alter-egos and multi-identities in online environments, chat rooms, MUDs, MOOS, massively multiplayer games, and graphical avatar worlds.

8 Uncanny art Existential absurdity within cybernetic environments

[With the Uncanny] one makes contact with the other including the other within oneself. —Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny)’ (1976, p. 530).

When the ordinary becomes extraordinary In extending my argument here, I focus on the uncanny in contemporary arts and note that we have already discussed many works that fit this category, from Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead and Susan Collin’s speaking street mouth In Conversation to the telematic arts of Paul Sermon. The concept accords with both cybernetic systems and the existentialist experience of being in the world— with the sense that things are partly worldly and familiar but also strange, mysterious, eerie, or unreal. Its German form unheimlich translates as ‘un-homely’ and suggests a place that may at first feel homelike and welcoming but is then sensed or revealed not to be so. Across the philosophy there is fascination with the concept, with Heidegger a leading voice who stresses its fundamentality: ‘At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny’ (Heidegger, 1975, p. 54) he writes in one publication, and in another: ‘The manifold uncanny holds sway / And nothing uncannier than man’ (Heidegger and Jaspers, 2003, p. 151). It manifests itself in different ways: with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something supernatural … feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced … a crisis of the proper … a crisis of the natural … one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world. (Royle, 2003, p. 1) This mysterious feeling leads to a sense of alienation or vertigo where we ‘ “hover” in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it

230  Uncanny art induces the slipping away of beings as a whole’ (Heidegger, 1993 [1929], p. 103). Heidegger’s notion of thrownness suggests that we are cast into the world and remain irrevocably lost, eternally seeking our true home that is forever denied us, since it does not exist, and he argues that homesickness is a fundamental existential condition. Homelessness and the uncanny haunts the writings, and the life of Nietzsche, who reacted by declaring: ‘Human existence is uncanny and still without meaning … I will teach men the meaning of their existence— the overman … God died: now we want the overman to live’ (Nietzsche, 1954 [1883], p. 132, 399). In his book section ‘Uncanny Cybernetics’, Jörg Kreienbrock relates Nietzsche’s critique of the will to power to the explosive and dystopian robot war performances of San Francisco based Survival Research Laboratories (SRL, director Mark Pauline), which ‘seek to create an uncanny effect that will haunt or even frighten their audience into an acknowledgement of the will to power that is rooted in … their day to day relationship with technology’ (Kreienbrock, 2013, p. 30). SRL has conceived ‘a heavy metal theater of cruelty—scary, stupefyingly loud events’ (Dery, 1996, p.  111) where huge tele-operated and computerprogrammed robots conduct spectacular smoke-filled battles to the death in site-specific outdoor spaces. The giant robots are constructed from industrial scrap metal and spliced with technologies including real jet engines, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers. They are shaped in the form of surreal and kinetic animals, birds, dinosaurs, military tanks, cannons, industrial arms, and fire-spewing representations of mythical figures like Medusa. These monstrous cybernetic machines move around the space, crash through glass windows, destroy movie-set buildings, and enact their existential fates in a psychotic orgy of annihilation and death in performances such as The Unexpected Destruction of Elaborately Engineered Artifacts (1997), A Complete Mastery of Sinister Forces Employed with Callous Disregard to Produce Catastrophic Changes in the Natural Order of Events (2007), and An Explosion of Ungovernable Rage (2010). Director Mark Pauline lost three fingers and a thumb in an explosive accident in the pursuit of his artistic ‘grand project’ and Frankenstein-like, had two of his toes grafted onto his hand in their place. He describes his vision in scientific terms: ‘to release the most energy in the shortest possible time’ (quoted in Wilson, 2002, p. 432), and in political ones: ‘a satire of kill technology, an absurd parody of the military-industrial complex’ (Dery, 1996, p. 123). His use of the word absurd brings us to another key element of this chapter, discussed in detail later in relation to the philosophies of Albert Camus and Søren Kierkegaard, and its expression in the plays of Samuel Beckett and the art of Francis Alÿs. The absurd and the uncanny have much in common, and sometimes (though not always) converge. In SRL’s early work, that convergence is intensified by the disquieting incorporation of dead animals into the robot machines: a backward-walking Rabot (1981) comprising a rabbit carcass with internal robot exoskeleton; a machine with a cow’s head and pig’s feet called Piggly-Wiggly (with Monte Cazzaza, 1981); and a ghoulish

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Figure 8.1  Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) director Mark Pauline, pictured at the opening of his exhibition of robots in Chelsea, New York in January 2018. (Courtesy of Scott Lynch/Pacific Press/Alamy Stock Photo.)

‘Mummy-Go-Round’ carousel of dissected and mummified animals in A Cruel and Relentless Plot to Pervert the Flesh of Beasts to Unholy Uses (1982). More recently, developments in anthropomorphic robot design have reached an ‘uncanny valley’ (Mori, 1970, p. 33) point of creepy realism—as well as Cybernetic-Existentialism—with Japanese scientist-artist Hiroshi Ishiguro creating performing android doppelgängers of himself and his daughter, and collaborating on robot theater works with playwright Oriza Hirata.

Uncanny bodies and embodiments Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer brings strangers together on the streets to experience uncanny interactions in his monumental ‘Relational Architecture Installations’ such as Body Movies (2001). Robotic projectors beam giant photographic images of over 1,000 people taken on the streets of various cities (projected as groups of five or six at a time) onto the 90 meters long and 22 meters tall façade of the Pathé Cinema in Schouwburg Square in Rotterdam. However, they are washed out and rendered invisible by bright lights also directed onto the building, and only become discernible once the dark shadows of passersby in the square are cast onto them, via powerful lights at ground level. The pedestrians’ vast shadows on the façade suddenly reveal the previously invisible images of other people and ‘contain’ them inside their bodies’ outlines.

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Figure 8.2  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s monumental and uncanny outdoor installation Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6 (2001), staged as part of V2 Cultural Capital of Europe at Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. (Photo: Jan Sprij.)

It produces a startling and uncanny effect, which prompts passersby to interact in different ways with the images of the strangers ‘inside’ them. They increase and decrease their shadow’s size by walking to vary their distance from the lights, often adjusting their body positions as well as their scales so as to precisely mirror the physical size and stances of the projected subjects, effectively ‘embodying’ them. The participants’ movements also interact with and affect the projected imagery within Lozano-Hemmer’s flexible and responsive environment that incorporates a camera-based tracking system, robotic controllers, custom-made software, and three networked computers. Body Movies accords with the feedback loop and circularity paradigms of cybernetic systems, with concepts of being-with-others and being-for-others, and with theories of the uncanny, whereby: The uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter … it disturbs any straightforward sense of what is inside and what is outside. The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality. … It may thus be construed as a foreign body within oneself, even the experience of oneself as a foreign body, the very estrangement of inner silence and solitude. (Royle, 2003, p. 2)

Uncanny art  233 In Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Julia Kristeva discusses how through the uncanny ‘we know that we are foreigners to ourselves’ (1991, p. 170); and Hélène Cixous highlights how with the experience of the uncanny ‘one makes contact with the other including the other within oneself’ (1976, p. 530). Body Movies literalizes this idea, with the in-shadow projections of Others appearing strangely hallowed within the participants’ body outlines; an eerie presence that may suggest different evocations: from a fond memory of a family member or the ghost of a loved one, to an Id or alter-ego.

Being strangers to ourselves Ten years later, Lozano-Hemmer extended the paradigm and the technologies in People on People (2011), staged inside a gallery of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, by using moving video imagery (both pre-recorded and live) of the other participants in the installation (past and present). These appear inside your shadow, and move or freeze respectively as you either reveal them or move away. The complex system incorporates hi-res surveillance cameras with face recognition software and 3D tracking capabilities, live compositing, and rotoscoping. It turns the exhibition room ‘into one of the world’s most advanced scanners … a platform for embodiment and interpenetration … a continuation of Lozano-Hemmer’s search for experience of co-presence’ (Lozano-Hemmer, 2016).

Figure 8.3  Uncanny and ghostlike effects are created as gallery visitors ‘see themselves as other people’ (Lozano-Hemmer, 2007, p.  142) in People on People (2010) during exhibition at Recorders, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia in 2011. (Photo: Alex Davies.)

234  Uncanny art The primary effect of these installations is to provoke a type of existential shock or self-transcendence (Sartre) through an abrupt revelation and appreciation of the nature and reversibility of human subject-object relations. Indeed, it renders a direct, literal expression of being-for-others—since suddenly and unexpectedly, the Other appears visually embodied within your body’s shadow; and Lozano-Hemmer echoes Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves notion in calling his installations ‘a window to an artificial reality’ that enables gallery visitors ‘to see themselves as other people within that space’ (Lozano-Hemmer, 2007, p. 142). He correlates Existentialism’s call for freedom with the cybernetic quest to develop organisms that evolve unique lives of their own, when describing his delight in creating interactive environments in order ‘to sit back and to let the pieces have their own life. To not try and control people or censor or moderate in any way, but just let the pieces speak for themselves and then for the people to have that freedom to represent themselves’ (LozanoHemmer, 2012). In so doing, Lozano-Hemmer conceives processes that are complex and adaptive, and which link different circuits and behaviors that are simultaneously techno-scientific and socio-performative. It is precisely in these fecund zones of hybrid, cross-disciplinary arts that CyberneticExistentialism continues to flourish.

Crashing-toward-death Humans and machines combine with lethal consequences in Singaporean artist Urich Lau’s installation, Vision Collision (2012), which enables gallery visitors to interact dynamically with video footage of an actual fatal car crash. Lau’s appropriated online video clip shows a dramatic nighttime recording of a taxi pulling away from traffic lights as they turn green, and a speeding car (driven by a drunk driver) appearing suddenly from the left, striking the taxi hard and making it spin several times. As it does, its headlights swing violently around to face and dazzle the camera repeatedly, the light entirely filling the screen, like an explosion. The installation allows gallery visitors to slow down or speed up the sixsecond sequence to almost any speed they wish using an interactive interface. This incorporates a video-jockey turntable to spin and scratch the footage in either directions, and a 4-way video mixer, where turning knobs instantly prompts different visual effects, from colorizations to splitting the screen into 4, 16, or 64 frames of the same moving image. The installation’s main screen display has been configured separately for different exhibitions: from a large hanging screen to the windscreens of adapted cars and a Filipino tricycle trishaw. The interface is sensitive to touch and the cybernetic system feels responsive, organic and instantaneous—like driving the high-powered car that caused the fatal accident. The feedback loops are strong, and the responsiveness so delicate and immediate, that there is real novelty in continually looping the video footage back and forth with such ease. The night I

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Figure 8.4  Three projection screen views and the VJ user interface for Urich Lau’s dazzling and disturbing reworking of a fatal car crash, Vision Collision (2012). (Courtesy of Urich Lau.)

participated, scores of people—young, middle-aged, and old—delighted and laughed as they spun the images ‘between the proverbial beauty and chaos’ (Lau, 2012, p.  23) slowly, quickly, extremely slowly, extremely quickly, scratching the dramatic footage as though conducting a visual symphony— this vivid and dangerous light show, this delightful dance of death. The work is uncanny in a number of ways. In the most influential analysis of the subject, Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny, 1919), Sigmund Freud discusses how ‘on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’ (Freud, 1919, p. 224–25). Vision Collision’s uncanniness derives partly from the fact that since we have become inured to images of car crashes in movies and videogames, they are rendered ‘familiar and agreeable’ to us, and most people do not hesitate to interact with the installation’s actual fatal images, that would normally be ‘concealed and kept out of sight.’ In Art and Fear (2000) Paul Virilio quotes Camus’s description of ‘This pitiless century, the twentieth’ before mounting a vitriolic attack on the violent, sick, and pitiless nature of contemporary art: Today, with excess heaped on excess, desensitization to the shock of images and the meaninglessness of words has shattered the world

236  Uncanny art stage. PITILESS, contemporary art is no longer improper. But it shows all the impropriety of profaners and torturers, all the arrogance of the executioner. (Virilio, 2006 [2000], p. 15, 19) His assault then extends to Existentialism as he describes: ‘what is now conveniently labelled the crisis in modern art or, more exactly, the contemporary art of the crisis of meaning, that NONSENSE Sartre and Camus were on about’ (p. 35, emphasis in original). Lau’s installation emphasizes our alienated stance and psychological distance from violent documentary footage, a theme also taken up by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, who appropriates and collages gruesome web images of the mutilated corpses of war victims to excite an even darker sense of the uncanny in works such as The Incommensurable Banner (2007), Collage-Truth (2012), and Touching Reality (2012).

When touching death becomes Touching Reality Touching Reality (2012) is a video installation set within an entirely black room, with a large screen on one wall showing a 4 minute 45 second loop of a female hand on an iPad, which flicks through horrific images of real male corpses with their heads or bodies splattered apart. The fingers flick through the images speedily and nonchalantly, sometimes pausing and lingering, apparently pruriently, before thumb and index finger splay to enlarge a gory detail, such as the viscera of an exploded head, before the fingers recommence scrolling. The video is shot to simulate a POV, situating and implicating you as a voyeur of, and a being-towards, death; and the piece brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s analysis of war’s distantiation effects and the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt, 1963). The hand in Touching Reality manipulates a ubiquitous touch screen interface (that we now take for granted), while Vision Collision’s dual-controls user interface is custom-designed. But at the conceptual heart of both works is a highly attuned cybernetic communication and control system, its feedback loops responding to the user with such lightning speed and accuracy that it harmonizes human and machine— in an uncanny fashion. Melanie Pocock’s analysis of Touching Reality highlights the haptic feedback loops at play, not only within the pre-recorded video, but also via the empathetic associations the viewer experiences by virtue of the POV camera angle: ‘when the female hand in the video touches the images, we too feel as if we are “touching” them … [and] we may further hurt or bruise the bodies and implicate ourselves in pseudo violence’ (Pocock, 2018, p. 13). The hand becomes a ‘trigger’, which creates haptic connections between touch and violence, while the camera operates both as a means of capture and as an agent of the violence that it records, evoking ‘universal questions of violence, culpability, and representation’ (p. 5).

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Figure 8.5  A female hand scrolls through some horrors of war with a sense of alienated nonchalance in Thomas Hirschhorn’s video installation Touching Reality (2012). Exhibition view from ‘Intense Proximity’, La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012. (Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Photo: Romain Lopez.)

F.W.J. Schelling defines the uncanny ‘as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ (Freud, 1919, p.  241), and this seems a conscious and provocative strategy on Lau’s and Hirschhorn’s parts. Their artworks are rendered uncanny by directly confronting the user with the simultaneously real yet seemingly unreal nature of such documentary imagery, which exposes the normally hidden or forbidden—Hirschhorn’s extreme images are not available in mainstream media, only via the darker side and sites of the web. Lau’s installation users and the hand in Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality manually manipulate and ‘touch’ death, and emphasize Existentialism’s abiding concern with authenticity. As Hirschhorn puts it: ‘I am interested in Truth … a way to touch Truth. Truth is irreducible; therefore the images of destroyed human bodies are irreducible … I want to see with my own eyes’ (quoted in Stephens, 2017). Freud: Many people experience the feeling [of the uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. … some languages in use today can only render the German expression ‘an unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house’. (Freud, 1919, p. 241)

238  Uncanny art French performance artist ORLAN has also reflected potently on this idea: Few images force us to close our eyes: Death, suffering, the opening of the body … Here the eyes become black holes in which the image is absorbed willingly or by force. These images plunge in and strike directly where it hurts, without passing through the habitual filters, as if the eyes no longer had any connection with the brain. (ORLAN, 1998, p. 315)

The great Venice Biennale art swindle There is nothing quite as uncanny as seeing a real corpse, and using similar internet-sourced photographs to Hirschhorn’s, featuring real murder victims in domestic settings with their heads splattered apart, Italian born, New York-based artists Eva and Franco Mattes created a memorable art ‘swindle’. Operating under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org, they created a fictional Serbo-Slovenian outsider artist, Darko Maver (1998-1999) and posted ‘fake news’ and reviews about him leaving realistic, life-size gory death dolls in various locations, while posting and positing the horrific real death photographs as documentation of his site-specific artworks. Fascination with Darko Maver intensified in the art world in 1999 when news emerged that he had been jailed for his controversial political art, and then more (fake) news and photos circulated of his (staged) death in a Podgorica prison during a NATO bombing. His posthumous work was featured and feted at the Italian Pavilion of the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, whereupon the Mattes suddenly lifted their veil to reveal in a press release: In 1998 we invented a reclusive artist named Darko Maver. … He roamed ex-Yugoslavia depositing gruesomely realistic puppets of murder victims in abandoned buildings and hotel rooms. The models were so realistic that they apparently shocked the people who found them. No sculpture ever existed, the images documenting his artworks were photos of real atrocities found on the internet. … The photo of his death, that circulated widely on the media, was actually taken in our garret in the center of Bologna. (Mattes and Mattes, 1999) Questioning the ethics of aesthetics, and quandaries of what is real and what is not, what is art and what is rot (their images came from rotten. com), the Mattes complicated and ‘mutated reality to mimic fiction but in doing so produced an alternative reality’ with the message that ‘while artists are making shocking artwork, absorbed by the market, real violence is being perpetrated and ignored by a media-anesthetized world. … How

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Figure 8.6  A supposedly authentic corpse photo entitled Darko Maver Dead (1999) that proved to be staged, as part of Eva and Franco Mattes’ art hoax Darko Maver (1998–99) at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999.

can we recover from media-inspired numbness?’ (Blais and Ippolito, 2006, p. 123). The uncanny sensations brought about through the haunting replaying of recorded images of death in the works of Mattes, Hirschhorn, and Lau call to mind Roland Barthes’ theories of the photograph and Jacques Derrida’s writings on ‘spectographies’ of media. For Barthes, death is the eidos of any photograph of a human being, with every click of the camera constituting ‘a micro-version of death … I am truly becoming a specter’ (Barthes, 2000 [1980], p. 14). Through a type of alchemy the subject appears, uncannily, and for Barthes, literally alive again: ‘in flesh and blood, or again in person’ since photography is ‘an emanation of a past reality: a magic, not an art’ (p. 79–80, emphases in original). For Derrida: We are already specters of the ‘televised’. … We are spectralized by the shot, captured or possessed by spectrality in advance. … Film plus psychoanalysis equals a science of ghosts. Modern technology increases tenfold the science of ghosts. The future belongs to ghosts. (Derrida, 2002, p. 115, 117)

Chaos, complexity and spectacle In the Cybernetic-Existentialist society of the spectacle, works like Vision Collision directly celebrate ideas from chaos, complexity, and crash theory,

240  Uncanny art while Touching Reality and Darko Maver offer brute and uncanny reminders of our inexorable being-towards-death. As discussed in Chapter 2, Existentialism stresses the personal rather than general nature of this concept: ‘Recognizing that I must die, rather than just that everybody dies, entails a way of comprehending myself as an individual, rather than simply one among the crowd’ (Reynolds, 2006, p. 45, my emphasis). Heidegger sees death as a type of crowning end point, like a resolving chord concluding a symphony that ultimately confers meaning and selfidentity. Sartre agrees on the significance of acknowledging individual finitude as a motivational force to drive one’s actions decisively: ‘If I make myself, I make myself finite and hence my life is unique’ (Sartre, 2003 [1943], p. 567), but his views diverge from Heidegger’s in relation to the importance of the moment or act of death itself, because unlike Heidegger, he does not believe that we experience it. ‘Death is in no way an ontological structure of my being,’ says Sartre, ‘it does not penetrate me. The freedom which is my freedom remains total and infinite’ (Sartre, 2003 [1943], p. 567, 568). Rather ‘it is the Other’ (family and friends) that actually experiences and is affected by one’s death. In some ways this is a reassuring notion and Sartre stresses that therefore for us there should be ‘no place for death’ since it is not founded from within us, and is nothing more than ‘an external and factual limit of my subjectivity … a certain aspect of facticity and of beingfor-others. It is absurd that we are born. It is absurd that we die’ (Sartre, 2003 [1943], p. 567). The Sartrean position is mirrored in Lau’s installation, where the deceased victims of the car crash are now indeed only ‘for the Other’ (the gallery visitors) and the absurdity of life and death is played out at a distance, with a nonchalant, and carefree view toward death, since it is both inevitable and arbitrary, and something we will actually escape because we will not experience it: ‘Since death is always beyond my subjectivity, there is no place for it in my subjectivity’ (Sartre, 2003 [1943], p. 568). Lau reflects on how the installation subverts the content of the incident and operates in a way that mixes fiction with non-fiction, and balances the ‘guilt’ of the visitor playing the artwork with their ‘fun’ in continually replaying the footage and ‘reliving’ others deaths (Lau, 2016). While cars are dangerous and environmentally unfriendly, Lau takes a philosophical and cybernetic viewpoint—they are ‘an essential element’ of modern urban life. ‘The city is a stagnant pool if without a system of mobility,’ he says. ‘Mobility begets communication and interactivity of ideas and thoughts. Without communication and interactivity, contemporary art would fail to grow and stays in stagnancy’ (Lau, 2012).

TC&A: Frankenstein creations designed for destruction Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, the Australian artists behind The Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) are contemporary Doctor Frankensteins breathing

Uncanny art  241 life into new creatures and modified organisms, who are equally fascinated by the impending being-towards-death of their bio-creations. Their work provides not only a fascinating take on how art-related scientific cybernetic systems are reorienting understandings of what constitutes existential creation and freedom, but also an unusual perspective on what it means to die—by engaging audiences directly in the death rituals of their organic life forms. TC&A makes ‘an attempt to challenge people’s perceptions of life … and bring into question deep-rooted perceptions of life and identity, concept of self and the position of the human in regard to other living beings and the environment’ (Catts and Zurr, 2006, p.  153–154). Scavenging discarded remnants from medical research and food production, they utilize living tissues to create what they term ‘Semi-Living sculptures’, which are tended and manipulated to take different shapes. These include three sets of 4-cmwide wing-shaped Pig Wings (2002) constructed from pig bone marrow stem cells, Extra Ear – ¼ Scale (2003), a collaboration with Stelarc to create a small ear-shaped organism, and a series entitled Technologically Mediated Victimless Utopia (2000–05) using animal biopsies to create edible foodstuffs such as ‘Semi-Living’ steaks and frogs ‘meat’. For Disembodied Cuisine (2003) two coin-sized steaks were fed and tended over three months in the run up to a performance culminating in a Nouvelle Cuisine style dinner where the artists and six audience members ate them. We are back into the realms of actuals as discussed in Chapter 6. The Semi-Livings are housed within sterilized ‘Techno-Scientific Body’ incubators and vessels; and over weeks or months they grow, change, mutate

Figure 8.7  Extra Ear – ¼ Scale (2003) by TC&A (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr) in collaboration with Stelarc, which combines biodegradable polymer and human chondrocytes cells. Dimension of original: 3 cm × 1.5 cm × 1.5 cm.

242  Uncanny art and die, moving through all the dynamic cycles of life. In some works, cells are cancerous, and grow and divide continually. TC&A artists Catts and Zurr operate as cyberneticians and employ the language of the field when discussing their naturally adaptive system. They assert that their work operates according to a biological systems principle whereby, given the right circumstances, any cell from any living creative ‘when brought into contact with any other cell, however foreign, will fuse with it. Cytoplasm will flow easily from one to the other, the nuclei will combine, and it will become, for a time anyway, a single cell with two complete, alien genomes, ready to dance, ready to multiply’ (Harris, 1985, p. 177). Their work is cybernetic and seemingly alchemical, with a ‘sense of mystery and transgression [that] has always attached to cybernetics, and accounts … for much of its glamour—the spell it casts over people’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 7). The artists emphasize their intention to ‘spawn “philosophy in action’’’ (Catts and Zurr, 2006, p. 166) and adopt a Kierkegaardian notion when describing how the audience ‘must exercise a leap of faith to believe they are “really” alive and not a hoax’ (p. 155, my emphasis). Since audiences initially tend to focus on the technological apparatuses and conceptual aspects of the works rather than the Semi-Livings themselves, the artists use interactive strategies to confront them more directly, including what they call ‘phenomenological rituals of Feeding and Killing’ (p. 156). In the Killing ritual, the artists don specially designed laboratory coats combining the livery styles of doctors, chefs, and car mechanics. They take out the Semi-Livings from their sealed containers and ask the audience to touch them and be touched by them. In doing so, the microscopic germs and fungi on their hands contaminate the organisms, sometimes making changes to their colors and shapes, and hasten their demise. The artists insist that the gallery directors and curators who invited them also participate and share some ‘responsibility’. Many audience members note that only when killing the sculptures do they have a sudden realization that they are really alive. Like increasing numbers of artists, Catts and Zurr speak the language of Cybernetic-Existentialism proudly, with an engaged consciousness of their disponible role as an integral and integrated part of a living, adapting, and evolving system, where they operate in relation to a care structure (see p. 35) and as beings-for-others: The Semi-Livings ‘make’ us perform, in front of an audience, our care for them. The excessive act of engineering a ‘new sort of life’ made us perform a ritual which emphasises our subordination to its needs/ demands. These Semi-Livings have made us part of their techno scientific body – as much as they are creations/extensions of our bodies, we are theirs. … they are also ironical agents that reveal to us, humans, our (sometimes reluctant) submissiveness to the actuality of being an unseparated part of the greater life continuum. (Catts and Zurr, 2006, p. 166–167)

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Figure 8.8   The TC&A’s Cybernetic-Existentialist creation fusing bone cells and polymer, Victimless Leather—A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific ‘Body’ (2004).

Francis Alÿs: absurdly restaging The Myth of Sisyphus I now want to consider the important concept of the absurd in Existentialism, particularly as described by Albert Camus, and relate this to the novels

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Figure 8.9   Francis Alÿs evokes Neitzsche’s eternal recurrence, Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, and Beckett’s ‘fail again, fail better’ in Rehearsal 1 (El ensayo). Video (29 minutes 25 seconds). Tijuana 1999-2001, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega. (Courtesy of Francis Alÿs.)

and dramas of Irish writer Samuel Beckett and the art of Belgian born and Mexico-based Francis Alÿs, who combines explorations of existential absurdity with cybernetic paradigms. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) uses the Greek mythological figure condemned forever to push a boulder up a mountain and then to watch it roll back down again as a powerful metaphor for the absurd. Its parable of futile repetition is staged in a new form in Francis Alÿs’ Rehearsal 1 (El ensayo) (1999-2001 with Rafael Ortega). On a very steep, unpaved backstreet road in Tijuana, Mexico, in synchronization to the sounds of a Tijuana brass band in rehearsal stopping and starting a song numerous times, a red VW Beetle car drives up the hill again and again but never reaches the top—instead, it stops, then slides backward down before recommencing its quest. A 29-minute single-channel video documents its 33 vain attempts, and the first feelings of empathy or frustration many viewers experience give way to a realization of the comic absurdity of the piece, and finally a deep satisfaction at the metaphor. As Camus concludes, the Sisyphus myth serves to demonstrate that we should both embrace and boldly confront the absurd, since ‘the struggle itself … is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy’ (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 123). Alÿs’ Rehearsal 1 reimagines Sisyphus to express not just the ridiculous and repetitive nature of existence, but also the stubbornness and nobility of

Uncanny art  245 human endeavor in the face of an apparently meaningless world. It recalls Husserl’s idea of a noble but futile quest for the ‘Being of the ideal as a possible Being of the real’, that we can never achieve or become, but continue to strive for despite the fact that we “must fail”.’ (Husserl quoted in Derrida, 1997 [1978], p. 134) As Samuel Beckett puts it: ‘it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity … it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity’ (Beckett, 1959 [1953], p. 133). Rehearsal 1 also encapsulates Beckett’s most quoted aphorism: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Enough’ (Beckett, 2009 [1983], p. 81). Beckett’s ‘bleakly uplifting’ advice is the inspiration behind an intriguing work by renowned Australian media artist Jeffrey Shaw, Fall Again, Fall Better (2012, with Sinan Goo), where the interactive viewer may endlessly rehearse ‘a Beckettian betterment’ by pulling down on a subway train-style handle, just above head height, on which the title is emblazoned (Shaw and

Figure 8.10  Installation details of Jeffrey Shaw and Sinan Goo’s interactive work Fall Again, Fall Better, where computer avatars collapse and fall to the ground, but never land in the same positions twice.

246  Uncanny art Goo, 2015). This prompts around a dozen computer-modeled human figures on a large screen in front of the viewer to collapse to the floor in the same physiological way that a string-based toy push-puppet does when its button is pressed underneath. Sinan Goo’s custom algorithm incorporates a randomizer to ensure the figures never fall in the same positions and places twice, so that the fallen bodies’ composition—some figures collapsed on top of one another and others in isolation—is always unique. Releasing the handle brings the figures back to their feet, and it’s time for them, and you, to fail again and fail better. It is a delightfully absurdist artwork with Sisyphus-like repetitions, and the artists consider that: ‘Failure and falling are synonyms in a language of anxiety that haunts the global consciousness’ from the story of the Fall to natural disasters, ‘the Buster Keaton tragicomedy of our everyday mishaps’ and our ultimate mortality. They call it ‘a monument to the fallen’ (Shaw and Goo, 2015).

The looping pratfalls of The Last Clown A human falling is also the subject of Francis Alÿs’ The Last Clown (19952000), which depicts a man walking along a path with his head down, who

Figure 8.11  Francis Alÿs’ The Last Clown (2000) character about to meet his nemesis in the form of a small dog that trips him up, repeatedly. Animation (2 minutes 44 seconds loop) and paintings. (Courtesy of Francis Alÿs.)

Uncanny art  247 passes a small dog coming from the opposite direction. The dog’s curved tail brushes against the man’s foot and he trips and falls to the ground. The idiosyncratic installation comprises a continuous video loop of a short, handpainted animation sequence of the action, together with an archive of preparatory sketches, and a number of small canvasses of the different paintings used to make the animation, assembled on a shelf in storyboard style. The Last Clown is another strange and uncanny piece of humorous absurdity, with a proto-cybernetic twist by virtue of the circularity of the continually looping short film, and the dialogic system it forms with the materials and canvasses that originated it. The protagonist is an unwitting clown whose life here is, as Alÿs puts it: ‘reduced to a simple anecdote where the loop effect makes one trapped always in between two thoughts’ (Tate, 2008). He explains that in exhibiting all the generative elements that made up The Last Clown animation, the ‘creative process before the product is probably the most lively moment of the piece,’ adding that he often sees his completed works—films, paintings, and so on—less as finished products and ‘more like the evidence of the whole process that happened before. For me, it’s in a sense where the essence of the work happens’ (Tate, 2008). In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) (1997) Alÿs draws attention to the transitory nature of things, and life, in a performance action and literal enactment of being and nothingness as he pushes a large block of ice around the streets of Mexico City until it melts and disappears. It is both a pointless and absurd action, and a profound one: a conceptual meditation on reality, temporality, and impermanence. Video documentation of another flâneur work sees Alÿs illegally purchase a real loaded gun and take it on a walk through busy Mexico City streets, visibly holding it in his hand. He walks for twelve and a half minutes, a police car arrives and he is quickly frisked, arrested, and bundled into the car. Reportedly, he bribed the police to release him and to participate in a reconstruction later the same afternoon,1 when Alÿs restaged the action taking exactly the same route but holding a replica gun (Lyver-Harris, 2015). At the same location where the police car had previously arrived, it does so again and the same policemen re-stage the arrest. The two separate video sequences, filmed by collaborator Rafael Ortega, play side-by-side; one labeled ‘real’ the other ‘re-enactment’ and synchronizes at the point of arrest in Re-enactments Mexico City 2000 (2000). Alÿs’ actions are existentially extreme, and risk the actuality of his being-towards-death in the process, as he explores ‘the palpably absurd … [and] the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence’ (antiAtlas of borders, 2017). A number of his works involve risk of an unpleasant causal feedback loop in the form of arrest or physical harm, from dribbling The Green Line (2004) of paint from a large can as he walks along and traces the contested 1948 armistice border between Israel and Jordan, and his series of dangerous Tornado (2000–10) chasing adventures, to physically confronting four angry, barking dogs in El Gringo (2003) in a disturbing single-channel video

248  Uncanny art

Figure 8.12   Francis Alÿs’ two-channel video places side-by-side documentation of two walks he took along the same route through Mexico City streets holding a gun, both culminating in his arrest by police officers. Re-Enactments (2000, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega), 5 minutes and 20 seconds. (Courtesy of Francis Alÿs.)

POV shot where they violently attack him, and his camera, which he finally drops and leaves.

Enacting Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence In the Sisyphus-like repetition of the car driving up the hill, the endless looping of the clown’s pratfall, and the re-enactment of an urban walk holding a gun, Alÿs enacts cybernetics’ paradigm of circularity and Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence (aka the eternal return). Similar concepts are discussed in terms of repetition by Kierkegaard, and in Heidegger’s account of a Hermeneutic Circle—a self-reflexive circular process of systematically interpreting the meaning of one’s daily experiences. The eternal recurrence paradigm derives from antiquity, for example, through Hindu and Buddhist beliefs in cycles of time and reincarnation, and the ancient Egyptian’s concept of eternal renewal and rebirth, symbolized by the omnipresent hieroglyph of the scarab (dung) beetle. In The Gay Science (1887), Nietzsche presents a new perspective by asking the reader how they would feel if a demon appeared when they were at their lowest point and in their ‘loneliest loneliness’, and told them they were condemned to repeat everything they had experienced in life again and

Uncanny art  249 again, infinite times: ‘every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you’ (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887], p. 273). He asks if such an idea would fill you with joy, because your life has been so extraordinarily vibrant and fulfilling, or crush you with despair. He upholds that this parable be considered to guide every choice and action one ever makes in life, since continually asking ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ (p. 273), reminds one just how existentially crucial all decisions are. He concludes by arguing that one should always act in a manner by which you would positively will for exactly the same thing to reoccur continually. One should affirm every action with ‘the greatest weight’ in order to live life to the fullest and ‘crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal’ (p. 274, emphasis in original). Following his famous proclamations that ‘God is Dead’, here Nietzsche offers a contrary view to Christian perspectives which consider this world as an inferior place that prepares us for a better one (heaven) by providing an alternative conception of immortality where love of life is the only salvation (Westacott, 2018). Nietzsche returns to the idea in different forms in other works including The Wanderer and His Shadows (1879) where he cautions that: ‘The sting of conscience is, like a snake stinging a stone, a piece of stupidity. Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: Remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second’ (Nietzsche, 1996 [1878-1880], p. 323); and in The Will to Power: Everything becomes and recurs eternally—escape is impossible! … To endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new means against the fact of pain; … the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the ‘will’; abolition of ‘knowledge-in-itself’. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 1056, 1058, emphasis in original)

Suicide—‘the only one truly serious philosophical problem’ Camus and Kierkegaard are the leading Existentialist commentators on the absurd, and they outline three main responses or resolutions to its problem: an acknowledgement to be met with defiance, non-acceptance and revolt (Camus); a leap of faith to a transcendent reality through religion (Kierkegaard); or suicide, which they both discuss. Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus (1942) remains a breathtaking piece of polemical writing, with a discourse as or more relevant today than it ever was. Opening with the declaration that suicide is the ‘only one truly serious philosophical problem’, he considers whether suicide may be a solution to the absurd (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 1). He lists factors that may prompt it, from honorable acts of political protest to instances where it is a melodramatic confession that ‘life is too

250  Uncanny art much for you or you don’t understand it’ (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 5), before discussing the ‘ridiculous character’ of the absurd: ‘the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering’ (p. 6). But Camus concludes that suicide just adds to the absurdity of the world rather than solving it. Instead, he advocates embracing and confronting absurdity, since from it he derives three crucial consequences: ‘my revolt, my freedom, and my passion … the meditation on the absurd returns at the end of its itinerary to the very heart of the passionate flames of human revolt’ (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 64). While the world may lack logic or clear meaning, our lives need not be without purpose, ‘all great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning’ (p. 12) and we control our own happiness and destiny. The absurd and happiness co-exist as two inseparable ‘sons of the same earth’ and Sisyphus has a ‘silent joy’ because he knows this and owns his own fate: ‘His rock is his thing’. In the same way, meditation on the world’s absurdity and the human torment within it provides a route to freedom and transcendence: There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. … he knows himself to be the master of his days. (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 122–123) Kierkegaard too encourages our acceptance of an absurd world and a rejection of the suicide option, recommending instead the transcendental possibilities of religious faith, which in turn Camus attacks cynically as tantamount to ‘philosophical suicide … [the thing] in which God most rejoices: “The sacrifice of the intellect” … Kierkegaard was swallowed up in his God’ (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 28, 37, 45). A friend’s suicide directly prompted Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period (1901–04)2 and the theme has inspired haunting artworks including The Suicide by Édouard Manet (1881) and Otto Dix (1922), George Grosz’s Suicide (1912), Frida Kahlo’s The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939), and Sarah Lucas’ Is Suicide Genetic? (1996); while artists who have taken their own life include Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, and Vincent Van Gogh. Contemporary artists’ variations on the theme include Suicide Box (1996), a chillingly bleak and simple cybernetic art system developed by US-based Australian artist Natalie Jeremijenko, who set up a surveillance camera on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It incorporates a motion detecting system, triggering the camera every time there is a significant vertical motion from the bridge. The result was the recording of 17 suicides over the 100-day period of the installation. The artwork process includes Jeremijenko’s official announcements on the data, delivered in a cold, factual, robotic tone: ‘System Efficacy: Suicide Box system supplied public, frame-accurate data of a social phenomenon not previously accurately quantified’ (quoted in Sutton, 2004, p. 26).

Uncanny art  251 The Severn Bridge, which spans the River Wye connecting England and Wales is an almost identically designed suspension bridge, and the site of the mysterious disappearance in 1995 of Richey Edwards, the acclaimed lyricist and guitarist of the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers, who once carved the legend 4 Real into his arm with a razorblade in front of a journalist. At the age of 27, he abandoned his car there and is assumed to have jumped from the notorious suicide spot, although his body was never found. British artist Jeremy Deller placed an advert in Spectators of Suicide, the band’s fanzine to elicit fan’s memorabilia and presented the results in his exhibition The Uses of Literacy (1997). It includes ‘one fan’s shelf-full of suitably intense Manics’ recommended books—Sartre, Plath, Levi, Camus’ (Buck, 2000a, p. 123). Existentialist thinkers have been criticized for casting suicide in a romantic or heroic light, and a number of characters in Sartre’s plays choose to self-terminate. In his hell-in-a-room set No Exit (1944), Inès describes her suicide pact with her girlfriend, and how she had previously driven her lover’s husband to take his own life; and in Men Without Shadows (1946), the French resistance fighter Sorbier is tortured by Nazis and decides to jump to his death from a window rather than risk weakening and betraying his leader’s location. De Beauvoir argues that situations such as imprisonment may mean that a return to the positive is impossible, where the future is radically blocked off. Revolt can then be achieved only in the definitive future of the imposed situation, in suicide. … freedom can always save itself, for it is realized as a disclosure of existence through its very failures, and it can again confirm itself by a death freely chosen. (Beauvoir, 2000 [1947], p. 287)

The philosophy of Samuel Beckett Beckett is not normally included in the pantheon of Existentialist philosophers, but perhaps should be so. He presents original perspectives and a uniquely tragicomic take on the absurd, alienation and the existential condition, infusing a devastatingly caustic sense of humor into a philosophy known more for its nihilistic intensity: ‘nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ he writes in Endgame (1957). Visual artists such as Jake and Dinos Chapman have taken this Beckettian notion forward into the 21st century, with aplomb: ‘We reflect upon the conditions of our experience, first as tragedy, then as farce’, they say (Chapman and Chapman, 2018) and demonstrate, as in their interventionist defacing with clown masks of the faces in Goya’s Disasters of War etchings or their sculpture of Steven Hawking stuck in his wheelchair at the edge of a high precipice, in their idiosyncratic take on Nietzsche’s übermensch (1995). While the preeminent philosopher of nothingness is Sartre, Beckett is nothingness’s most poetic creative writer. The very word opens arguably

252  Uncanny art the twentieth century’s most important play, Waiting for Godot (1953): ‘Nothing to be done’, which also acts as a concise summary of the action, and Beckett echoes and elaborates Sartre’s ontology of nothingness repeatedly across his oeuvre. ‘The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something,’ he writes in Watt (Beckett, 1959 [1953], p.  74), and in the being-towards-death narrative of Malone Dies (1951) he conjures a simple and devastating aphorism: ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’ (Beckett, 1956 [1951], p. 16). Beckett’s comic pessimism is noted by Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh in their book re-considering the Theater of the Absurd playwrights in relation to ecological issues and anxieties, which they suggest underlie his vision of a ‘bleak, futural world’, and note Adorno’s observation that he was writing in the shadow of the atomic age at a time when it was thought the world might literally end at any moment, almost ‘as a matter of course’ (Lavery and Finburgh, 2015, p. 10, 11). But Beckett also directly critiques and rejects some of Existentialism’s assumptions such as human freedom, with a character in his novel Molloy (1951) pondering: ‘Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into’ (Beckett, 1955 [1951], p. 36); and in Endgame (1957) Beckett satirizes the idea that authentic action will confer meaning to our lives when Clov asks: ‘We’re not beginning to … to … mean something?’ to which Hamm replies: ‘Mean something? You and I, mean something? [Brief laugh.] Ah, that’s a good one!’ The philosophy’s concept of always regenerating oneself by moving forward and never looking back with any regret is undermined humorously in Watt: Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end. (Beckett, 1959 [1953], p. 37) Rather than transcending the contexts of their facticity and the places they were thrown, his characters are irreversibly stuck in them, often literally, with people incarcerated in identical grey funeral urns (Play, 1963), dustbins (Endgame, 1957) and, most iconic of all, the tragicomic figure of Winnie in Happy Days, half-submerged in the center of a mound, seemingly powerless to break free or even act. In line with my argument that there is considerable renewed interest in Existentialist ideas and texts, there have been many important revivals of Beckett’s works, including high-profile UK productions of Happy Days in 2015 by Katie Mitchell with Winnie (played by Julie Wieninger) submerged in muddy water, and Sarah Frankcom’s 2018 production (starring Maxine Peake) foregrounding a plastic-littered set and climate change meta-narrative, where ‘Existential crisis of the self has become existential crisis of the species—perhaps even of the planet’ (Love, 2018).

Uncanny art  253 In stage productions, the mound is most often made of sand, and Winnie is firmly imbedded within it and quite immovable. By contrast, Francis Alÿs’ When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) is an implausible and Beckettian action to attempt to move at least the surface of an enormously large sand dune outside Lima in Peru by just a few inches. The process, as documented in videos, photographs and paintings is heroic and extraordinary. A long line of 500 volunteers, all dressed in white shirts, move together along its summit, using shovels to dig and move the surface layer of the sand of the massive dune throughout an entire day. The 500-strong inputs to the system are considerable and impressive but the cybernetic output is finally hard to discern; it remains the same sand dune and the action was entirely transitory: ‘The next day, no one could recognize that the huge sand dune had been moved. The true aftermath of the work lies in the ripples of anecdote and image that radiate out from it’ (Alÿs, 2002). It is another mythic and beautifully poetic Sisyphus act of Beckettian failure. When Faith Moves

Figure 8.13  Two Chinese proverbs/stories—愚公移山 (‘Mr. Fool Wants to Move the Mountain’) and 精诚所至, 金石为开 (‘Faith Moves Mountains’)—instruct that absolute sincerity, belief, and focus can enable one to crack open rocks or realize the seemingly impossible. These ideas are evoked in Francis Alÿs’ epic attempt, with 500 white-shirted collaborators, to move a mountain in Lima, Peru—an action that proved quite invisible the next morning. Video documentation of When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), in collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina. (Courtesy of and photo by Francis Alÿs.)

254  Uncanny art Mountains is a willful, wistful, strategic, consummate, epic, tragic, and perfect expression of the absurd. Jean Fisher argues that through this work ‘the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth’ (Fisher, 2007, p. 116). In Beckett’s terms, it is a nothing that must be expressed: The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. (Beckett, 1965, p. 139).

‘That double-headed monster of salvation and damnation—Time’ Beckett’s and Alÿs’ truths align amidst such uncanny and poetic realms of the possible and impossible, in the eternal human struggle for meaning and purpose, in a tenacious, head-on confrontation with an irrationally absurd world, and in what Tina Howe calls (in relation to Beckett) ‘the courage to dramatize the existential “Why?” And what thrilling drama it is! Harrowing, hilarious and eerily familiar’ (in Kalb, 2007, p. 7). But in staking a claim for Beckett as a philosopher in his own right, even more important than his perspectives on the absurd are his unique takes on Existentialism’s insights on time and mortality, which he demystifies, illuminates, and extends. In the opening paragraph of his first published book, a critical study of French novelist Marcel Proust (1931), Beckett offers a memorable metaphor for what would become the single most enduring leitmotif of his oeuvre: ‘that double-headed monster of salvation and damnation—Time’ (Beckett, 1931, p. 1). While his theatrical works all broadly explore aspects of existential anguish and absurdity, most also make Time an abiding and quintessential theme, for example, in the repetitious, inexorably continuous present of Waiting for Godot, once famously described as a play in two Acts in which ‘nothing happens, twice’ (Mercier, 1956, p. 6, emphasis in original), or the protagonist’s obsessive and regretful replaying of his audio diaries in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Where Bergson and the Existentialists meditate on the metaphysical and philosophical implications of duration and the impossibility of time’s capture, Beckett elucidates this in direct relation to the human experience, through a bleakly humorous critique. In Beckett, Time appears simultaneously limitless and meaningless, since ‘a step forward is, by definition, a step back’ (Beckett, 1929, p. 22) and human life is simultaneously too long and too short. In Waiting for Godot, the tramp Vladimir conjures an indelible image of a gravedigger standing in a grave and acting as a midwife, ‘lingeringly’ putting on forceps to deliver ‘a difficult birth’ while relating how ‘We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries’ (Beckett, 1975 [1953], p.  90–91; Act 2 Line 795). Existentialism’s being-towards-death message

Uncanny art  255 that the moment we are born we are dying has been explored by a number of artists and dramatists, including Antonin Artaud, whose cry that ‘being born has for a long time smelled of dying’ has been discussed at length by Derrida (quoted in Derrida, 1997 [1978], p. 180). But for me, it is driven home more decisively and terrifyingly in Godot than anywhere else in literature. It climaxes in Pozzo’s parting shot, where he insists that life is so brief that, ultimately: ‘one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second … They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (Beckett, 1975 [1953], p.  89; Act 2 Line 773). In That Time (1976), only the head of ‘the Listener’ is lit and visible, suspended ten feet above the stage, as he is confronted by three disembodied voices speaking through loudspeakers to his left, right, and above. The estranged Listener is suspended and lost in space within a mise-en-scène that conjures a darkly mysterious visual metaphor for second-wave cybernetics, where the observer moves from the outside to the inside and becomes integral to the system—affecting and affected by the other elements and agents. But as its title suggests, the real protagonist is time, and this particular system is a time machine where The mutant and miscreant Time is the enemy that forces the protagonist’s exile and slow deterioration. … Because of Time, life is viewed by the protagonist as a loss, an insult, a dominating, enslaving, imprisoning, and torturing indignity. Worst of all, it feeds illusions … (Knapp, 1990, p. 65) The case studies in this chapter explore uncanny and sometimes tortured illusions, and present intimate encounters with Time and mortality, with the world, with Others, and with ourselves. They engage with boundaries of difference; with our simultaneous sense of estrangement and dependency on shared humanity; and with vivid realizations and dramatizations of the concepts of being-for-others and being-towards-death. Their effects on audiences are somatically intense and cerebrally exhilarating, and excite recognitions of the absurd and sensations of the uncanny, which, in keeping with the principles of both cybernetics and Existentialism, are both disorienting and re-orienting. Finally, my analytical methodology using the bi-focal lens of cybernetics and Existentialism extends critical traditions of deconstruction, and in his definitive study of The Uncanny (2003), Nicholas Royle suggests that: Another name for uncanny overflow might be deconstruction. Deconstruction makes the most apparently familiar texts strange, it renders the most apparently unequivocal and self-assured statements uncertain. With a persistence or consistency that can itself seem uncanny, it shows how difference operates at the heart of identity, how the strange

256  Uncanny art and unthinkable is a necessary condition of what is conventional, familiar, and taken-for-granted. Deconstruction involves explorations of the surprising, indeed incalculable effects of all kinds of virus and parasite, foreign body, supplement, borders and margins, spectrality and haunting. (Royle, 2003, p. 24)

Notes 1 Opinion is divided about the timing of this reenactment, with some commentators suggesting it took place the following day rather than the same afternoon. 2 In 1901 at the age of 19 years, following the suicide of his 20-year old close friend Carlos Casagemas, with whom he shared a studio; Pablo Picasso painted his portrait as a corpse in the style of Van Gogh: The Death of Casagemas (1901). His friend’s passing directly prompted Picasso’s Blue Period (1901–04): ‘It was thinking of Casagemas that got me started painting in blue’ (Picasso quoted in Harris, 2003, p. 868).

9 Conclusion The eternal return and being-in-new-systems

If the study of intellectual history is to have any ultimate justification, it is its capacity to rescue the legacy of the past in order to allow us to realize the potential of the future. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (1984, p. 20)

The influence and legacy of Existentialism and Cybernetics To evaluate the precise impacts and legacies of the two fields is complex, but I contend that more than any other modern philosophy, Existentialism influenced politics, cultures and societies, and changed lives: ‘By feeding feminism, gay rights, the breaking down of class barriers, and the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, it helped to change the basis of our existence today in fundamental ways’ (Bakewell, 2016, p. 282). Moreover, it continues to exert a lasting influence on subsequent philosophical ideas and movements, from post-structuralism to speculative realism, and the legacy of Existentialism is ‘alive and well’ across areas as diverse as cognitive science, psychiatry, health care, and environmental philosophy (Aho, 2014, p. 140). Sartre was one of the boldest and most original philosophers of the 20th century, and Heidegger remains by some distance the most influential, discussed, and cited. With The Second Sex, Beauvoir spectacularly ignited a post-war women’s movement, and united it around a clear Existentialist message about the primacy of individual freedom; ‘Perhaps no single book of the twentieth century had quite such an impact on individual consciousness’ (Appignanesi, 2005, p.  84). Considered the ‘mother of the modern women’s movement’ one newspaper announced her death with the headline ‘Women, you owe her everything!’ (The Guardian, 2005) and numerous leading thinkers have acknowledged their debt to her including Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Judith Butler, who opens her influential Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) with Beauvoir’s most famous words: ‘On ne naît pas femme, on le devient’ (‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’, Beauvoir, 1989, p. 295).1

258 Conclusion Equally, it should never be forgotten that cybernetics changed the world, and its seismic legacy is currently being re-evaluated: ‘the impact of systems theory and cybernetics on all aspects of human endeavor is difficult to estimate—or overestimate’ (Shanken, 2015, p. 13). It paved the way for the Apollo 11 moon landing and the digital revolution, and although its name may have faded from view, far from having disappeared, cybernetics remains omnipresent in contemporary culture and makes the 21st century world go round.2 Increasing numbers of writers argue its continued relevance today, emphasizing that while it became unfashionable itself, it laid much of the groundwork for the most fashionable and important technological developments from AI and neural networks to robotics and new man-machine interfaces.3 Doug Hill reassesses Norbert Wiener in an article proclaiming him as ‘The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)’, suggesting that ‘technology is just catching up with ideas Wiener proposed more than half a century ago’ (Hill, 2014). A visionary and an outsider in the Existentialist tradition, Wiener’s astonishing achievements include transforming industrial processes, leading the medical team that invented the first thought-controlled bionic arm, and (co-) developing the first intelligent automated machines and the first modern computers. He is the father of the Information Age … [whose] footprints are everywhere today, etched in silicon, wandering in cyberspace, and in every corner of daily life. … His work has shaped the lives of billions of people. (Conway and Siegelman, 2005, p. ix). Contemporary global robotics and AI projects began with, and still reference back to cybernetic breakthroughs such as Grey Walter’s autonomous robot tortoises (1949) and Ross Ashby’s homestat (1948). The latter cost just £50 to build yet became a worldwide media phenomenon with Time magazine proclaiming it ‘the closest thing to a synthetic human brain so far designed by man’ (January 1949) and the UK newspaper The Herald relegating news of the naming of the baby heir to the throne Prince Charles to second place on their front page, announcing instead: ‘The Clicking Brain Is Cleverer Than Man’s’ (13 December 1948). Ashby, who spent most of his life treating patients in mental health institutions, designed the homestat as a machine to model states of ‘madness’, so as to explore new ideas on how to temper or reverse the polarity of his patients’ neuroses, psychoses and conditions: a machine to help to restore their mental balance and homeostasis. One of Ashby’s contributions to the wider AI project was to demonstrate that the brain is not simply a calculation or language machine, but is—in line with Existentialism—much more crucially, all about choice, behavior and action: ‘The brain is not a thinking machine, it is an acting machine; it gets information and then does something about it’ (Ashby, 1948, p. 379, emphasis in original)—in cybernetic terms, it receives inputs and acts upon them to deliver outputs.

Conclusion  259 But John Benthall suggests the field’s most lasting legacy is its holism in tracing complementary relationships and providing a common language between disciplines: It is doubtful, for instance, whether our present concern for ecology on a global scale would be so articulate if cybernetics had not taught us to think of the biosphere as a single system consisting of hierarchies of subsystems … new metaphors have always been crucial to scientific advance. (Benthall, 1972, p. 43) The legacies of these epistemologies continue to confront, confound, influence, and inspire. In researching all this, there was a special moment when I learned that Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr. read, and was influenced by Heidegger and Sartre’s writings, with some of their ideas filtering into his—on civil rights and non-violent resistance, and his historic ‘I have a dream’ speech on 28 August 1963. His dream is very much his own, as well as a collective dream for all people. It burns with nobility in the face of the flames of centuries of oppression, colonialism, racism, and slavery. But it is a dream shared and evangelized by Existentialism—freedom. As the speech builds to its climax, the word is repeated over and over like a mantra, with seven sentences beginning ‘Let freedom ring …’ concluding: Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! It is the greatest speech of all time. But the world still awaits Dr. King’s dream.

The complementarities of Cybernetics and Existentialism This book is the first to highlight and explore in detail the complementary ideas, intersecting themes, and syntheses between cybernetics and Existentialism. My provocation of an artistic theory of Cybernetic-Existentialism adds to the recent resuscitation of interest in both fields, and to their reevaluation within a contemporary context. It provides a new critical lens and methodology with which to examine artworks, using hybrid conceptual frames and vocabularies.

260 Conclusion The two disciplinary fields share much in common, and conceptually they are marked far more by their similarities than differences. Both advocate openness, interactivity, experimentation, boundary crossing, adaptation, evolution, and synthesis. Both had their heydays between the 1940s and 1960s; and both are now experiencing something of a revival. Cybernetics also ‘shares a common vocabulary’ with complexity theory (Phelan, 1999, p. 237), where the study of the sometimes unpredictable behaviors of multifaceted dynamic systems including organizations and societies reveals how they adapt, evolve, and grow through circular feedback loops and interactions between the system and its environment (Érdi, 2008). This corresponds closely with how Existentialism conceives that the unpredictable complexities underlying human choices, actions, and interactions will ultimately determine an individual’s freedom and the evolution of their self-identity. An equal obsession with rigor and randomness underlies and unites the spirits of cybernetics and Existentialism, and those ‘qualities’ are similarly at play in some of the most telling examples of contemporary art. The projects of cyberneticians such as Stafford Beer can be understood as interrogations of: a cybernetic ontology of unknowability and becoming: a stance that recognises that the world can always surprise us and that we can never dominate it through knowledge. The thrust of Beer’s work was, thus, to construct systems that could adapt performatively to environments they could not fully control. (Pickering, 2004,p. 499) Existentialist philosophy has parallel themes, where ‘unknowability’ equates with Nothingness, where ‘becoming’ is perpetual (since self and identity are never fixed), where life is continually ‘adaptive’ and ‘performative’ (through being-with-others and being-for-others), and where we exist in a context we can never fully control since we are always-already being-towardsdeath. When Heidegger was once asked what he thought might take the place of philosophy in the future, he gave a one word answer—‘Cybernetics’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 390).

Performativity Cybernetic systems and machines are built to perform. Existentialism is a philosophy of action, and recent discourses declare that the whole field of ‘phenomenology is a performative exercise’, a praxis involving performed actions, perception shifts and ‘a transformation of our way of experiencing things … not a theoretical doctrine, but an exercise’ through which we ‘objectify ourselves, others and the world’ (Guidi et al., 2017).4 The Existentialist branch of phenomenology represents the movement at its most performative, and was made famous as much by the intensely dramatic

Conclusion  261 novels and plays of its literary proponents including Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus, and Genet as by its philosophers. The philosophy is ‘dramatic, often melodramatic … [with] a bracing sense of the menace and challenge of existence. … Existentialism is a philosophy for thought adventurers … a way of thinking for an age of experiment, tension and stress’ (Ussher, 1968, p. 9). Sartre and Marcel are not only philosophers but renowned dramatists; and the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche employ highly theatrical parables and intense allusions and imagery.5 The impassioned performativity of these philosophers is indicative of their desire to seize their audiences like evangelists in order to transform their lives and convert them to the Existentialist cause. Heidegger’s lectures were ‘a form of theatre, masterfully staged’, and so mesmeric that there was ‘an air of danger … something occult about them’ (Bakewell, 2016, p. 57). Wiener too, was a hypnotic performer in the lecture hall—and famously, sometimes even when he had shown up to the wrong venue but delivered the class like a showman anyway, entirely oblivious to the fact. He worked without notes yet scribbled out 5-foot-long equations on the blackboard at blistering speed, and held students in rapped, ‘breathless attention, while he manipulated his ideas in flares of vision’ (Dirk Struik quoted in Conway and Siegelman, 2005, p. 83). I would go further than calling the two disciplines performative—both were virtuosic performances, in the theatrical sense, with many of their leading players’ charismatic stars barnstorming the stage to capture the hearts and minds of a wide public audience. But like the theater, the two fields also proved ephemeral—initially bursting onto the stage with life, energy, and light, but disappearing promptly after the curtain call to become just a fading memory. But a major revival is now being staged, which may be set to run and run.

Feedback loops and being-for-others Feedback loops, intimate connections, and networks lie not only at the core of cybernetics, but also at the heart of Existentialism. In his play No Exit (1944), Sartre stretches these metaphors to extremes, invoking cybernetic loops and circuit imagery in his Existentialist vision of an inescapable hell here on earth in the shape of a hot bourgeois living room where Garcin is left to reflect on the inseparable interconnectedness of people: they’ve laid their snare damned cunningly—like a cobweb. If you make any movement, if you raise your hand to fan yourself, Estelle and I feel a little tug. Alone, none of us can save himself or herself; we’re linked together inextricably. (Sartre, 1944) Ideas from both fields relate back to Socrates’ dictum ‘Know thyself’ and Plato’s reading of it. In Socratic times, this self-knowledge necessitated an

262 Conclusion understanding of one’s place within and one’s function in relation to the world, and the cosmic order. It was not concerned with egotistical desires, personal wishes, or intentions, which were seen as ‘negative traits’ (Guignon, 2004, p. 13). Thus, Marcel and Sartre directly follow Socrates and Plato in urging human subjects to consider themselves also as objects, as beings for others, and as part of a wider picture and the greater good. As Plato puts it: ‘you are created for the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of you’ (Plato, 1937, p. 645). As noted in Chapter 4, such issues were grappled with by both disciplines in relation to the dangers of solipsism and the need for subjects, whether within a system or interacting with the outside world, to know their place and give as much or more than they receive.6 Connectivity and interactivity unite both fields, and each is forward looking, urging action and transformation. Existentialists proclaim ‘a radical shift in how human beings should think about themselves and their responsibilities towards others’ (MacDonald, 2000, p. 5) while cyberneticians such as Bateson conceived ambitious globally holistic and ecological systems. Both fields look to break old paradigms and to expand new ones: cybernetics regards material forms and containers (human, animal, vegetable, and mineral) as immaterial when conjoined within a dynamic system, and disciplinarity as interdisciplinarity; Existentialism rejects the idea of a fixed psychological self or singular unitary body—rather, subjectivity is intersubjectivity. Throughout this discourse, I have drawn out the parallel perspectives, methods and themes of the two epistemologies, and now proffer a table of some of their direct links and complementarities: Cybernetics

Existentialism

Anti-disciplinary

Anti-conformism

Feedback loops

Being-for-others

Homeostasis

Equilibrium

Circularity

Eternal recurrence

Negative entropy

Being-towards-death

Autonomous organisms

Authentic action

Emergence

Becoming

Autopoiesis

Self-creation

Synthesis

Freedom

In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus ponders the meaning of the world and what science teaches about it. He concludes that not only are there close affinities, but there are no discernible differences between science, philosophy, the absurd, and the arts—all are bound by a fundamental mystery and incomprehensibility. While science may describe the world and classify it, as

Conclusion  263 with philosophy and the arts, all its knowledge still does not amount to a clear picture, nor give any assurance and certainty that ‘this world is mine’: At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the electron … [and] tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry … So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. (Camus, 1991 [1942], p. 25)

Falling into the abyss: whatever became of Cybernetics and Existentialism? In 2001, Baudrillard called Sartre’s philosophy an outdated curiosity, asking: ‘Who cares about freedom, bad faith and authenticity today?’ (Baudrillard, 2001, p.  73). I counter that times have changed in the short period since he posed the question, and it is no longer rhetorical, since the answer has changed to ‘multitudes’, in a world that cares increasingly and with conviction about issues of authenticity, and personal and political freedom. Writers like Pepe Escobar urge that ‘In An Age of Hollow Men and Existential Angst, Re-read Sartre’ since his ideas are more crucial than ever and ‘his capacity to think “against himself” and his moral intelligence still illuminate our times’ (Escobar, 2017). The philosophy may have become largely anonymous, but it is regenerating in new forms, and continues to manifest novel outputs and artworks, just as cybernetics remains ‘in fact, alive and well and living under a lot of other names’ although ‘the temptation is to assume that it died of some fatal flaw’ (Pickering, 2010, p.  15). But while Pickering rejects this fatal flaw idea, it is actually worth pursuing. Both fields shared flaws that hastened their demises, perhaps most fundamentally in being overly didactic and ideological—ultimately, cybernetics proved to be more an ideology than a science, and Existentialism was as much ideology as philosophy. Both were visionary, speculative, and overambitious, seeking all-encompassing revolutions that neither could truly bring about. While cybernetic arts had its heydays in the late 1960s, cybernetics itself had been coming under fire many years earlier, including by Ralf Gerard at the 1950 Macy cybernetics conference, who criticized the group ‘for switching from an “as if” idiom to the “is” idiom, for treating analogies as reality’ (Kline, 2015, p. 46), and argued that the brain and the nervous system are a lot more than simple on-off neurons and electrical impulses. His presentation led to discussions on whether the brain was primarily an analog or digital system, which then led to heated disagreements about the origins and meanings of the words analog and digital. Such tensions and divisions were soon appearing more marked and open, with key figures

264 Conclusion resigning from the Macy conferences in the early 1950s; and a major break between Wiener and conference Chair, Warren McCulloch significantly undermined the field’s unity and direction. In the 1960s, attempts to revive its image and reputation included the CIA-backed establishment in 1964 of The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC)7 and its associated journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing, followed in 1965 by an IEEE group on Systems Science and Cybernetics (SSC) with its own Journal of Cybernetics launched in 1971. But the relationship between the two (representing, respectively the first and second waves of the epistemology) was defined more by conflict than harmony, and United States funding for cybernetics research declined significantly thereafter, being redirected into ‘disciplines into which cybernetics had fragmented—such as neuroscience, information theory, and control theory’ (Kline, 2015, p. 200). Meanwhile, many of the key figures of Existentialism spent as much time arguing and fighting as philosophizing. Kierkegaard ‘was a born goader’, who persistently quarreled with his peers and ‘made difficulties out of everything’ (Bakewell, 2016, p. 18), while Sartre fell out with virtually everyone, including long-term collaborator Merleau-Ponty, and even Camus who was among his closest friends. Both fields were highly argumentative, sometimes aggressively so, and the fatal flaw of hubris might be leveled against some pioneers in both fields. The passing of Norbert Wiener in 1965 led to reflections on the parallel passing of cybernetics, but in reality most considered that to a large extent that had already taken place sometime earlier. Some believed cybernetics had become discredited because Wiener had hyperbolized and oversold it, others pointed to a lack of rigor in its thinking, over-ambitious ideas, and the shallowness of its meta-claims. Mark Nunes criticizes an unrealistic ‘cybernetic ideology driven by dreams of an error-free world of 100 percent efficiency, accuracy and predictability’ (2011, p. 3); and by 1972, art and technology writer John Benthall was reflecting on the difficulty of assessing the work of cybernetic artists such as Gordon Pask since they may be drawing on ideas that are: dangerously contaminated by ‘bad’ science—that is, science that is over-enthusiastic, over-speculative and contradictory. But if we accept that art is autonomous, grazing where it will, then art should be able to draw its nourishment on disreputable as well as reputable sources. It is impossible to predict whether the more extravagant speculations of certain artists and commentators will be looked back on in fifty years as generally clairvoyant or as a fad of the 1960s. (Benthall, 1972, p. 73) This book makes a case for the former and elucidates how cybernetic clairvoyance has been an integral part of the conceptual themes and modus operandi of diverse contemporary artists.

Conclusion  265

The psychedelic sixties Associations with drugs, free love, radical politics, and the countercultural movements of the 1960s did nothing to help the image of the two fields either. From the mid-1940s through to the 1960s, Existentialist became a type of shorthand or insult for an individual who was sub-cultural or countercultural—rebellious nonconformists, antiestablishment discontents, leftists and anarchists, free lovers, drug users, and party animals. Sartre and Beauvoir fit these descriptors like a glove. Roy Ascott praises the creative effects of the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca, and explores it in his ayahuascatec.net project, while Grey Walter’s activities ranged from ‘robotics pioneer, home guard explosives expert, wife swapper, t.v.-pundit, experimental drugs user and skin diver to anarcho-syndicalist champion of leucotomy and electro-convulsive surgery’ (Hayward, 2001, p. 616). The writer William Burroughs, together with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, drew on Grey Walter’s flicker experiments with stroboscopes and used them to enhance their drug experiences. Shockingly to today’s sensibilities, as part of his psychiatric clinical research in the 1950s, Walter experimented with stroboscopes on human subjects including schoolchildren to induce and study reactions, which included epileptic fits and hallucinations. The Beat artists adopted and adapted these, sharing the techniques with psychedelic aficionados including Aldous Huxley, Tim Leary, and Brion Gysin. Together with Ian Somerville, Gysin built a Dream Machine (1962), which was included in a number of exhibitions: a simple, revolving, cylindrical construction with slots (like an elongated zoetrope) and a light in the center, which was billed as providing the effects of an LSD trip without the drug, and ‘the first artwork in history made to be viewed with closed eyes’ (Gysin quoted in Pickering, 2010, p. 82). Stafford Beer had eight children, ‘taught tantric yoga, loved women, and drank continuously’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 216); and in 1974 after the trauma of the Chilean coup that ended his Project Cybersyn experiment in Chile (Chapter 3), he renounced material possessions including his Rolls Royce car and went to live in a cottage in Wales where he grew a long beard and was visited by admirers including musician Brian Eno. In a strange synchronicity as I complete this book comes the launch of the most ambitious and explicit Cybernetic-Existentialist artwork of all time, with a rumored budget of $100 m, with music by Brian Eno, Roy Ascott’s mentee and a cybernetics aficionado. Russian Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU (2019) tells the story of Nobel-Prize winning nuclear physicist Lev Landau, who was not only one of the innovators of the Soviet atomic bomb but also an advocate of free love, with an equal fascination for esoteric spiritual practices. Eno remarks: You often hear things described as ‘ambitious’. Nothing I’ve ever encountered comes close to the ambition of DAU … It’s the most extraordinary and multi-layered art-project I’ve ever heard of, involving

266 Conclusion many thousands of people—artists, actors, musicians, artisans … cartographers, scientists, shamans, and thousands of ordinary humans (Eno quoted in Brown, 2018)

DAU … reaching the extremes of Cybernetic-Existentialism DAU creates a world that brings together a complex and evolving social cybernetics system, and the most intensely existential mass human experience ever staged for the sake of art, involving 400 ‘ordinary humans’ working as actors for months at a time over a three-year period. In an uncompromising world and type of ‘Stalinist Truman Show’ (Brown, 2018), the 400 paid volunteers live together in a specially constructed city set in the Ukraine. It is a precise copy (down to the toilet paper) of the Kharkov Institute of Experimental Physics (1938–68) where Landau worked, and where they wear the same clothes and eat the same food as their predecessors from decades ago. Art, philosophy, politics, and life fuse with the non-actor participants encouraged to work like the most obsessive of method actors, around the clock, within a cybernetic organism that is self-regulating and autopoietic, with its own harsh rules and reference values for homeostasis. These are

Figure 9.1  A scene in the specially constructed set for DAU (2019) which precisely replicates the Kharkov Institute of Experimental Physics (1938–68) where Soviet nuclear physicist Lev Landau worked on projects including the Soviet atomic bomb. (© Phenomen IP, 2019; Photo: Joerg Gruber.)

Conclusion  267 modeled on the former Soviet surveillance, and command and control systems, and include people being punished (one woman is forced by a Police Officer to sexually defile herself with a bottle) and imprisoned if they step out of line. It critiques the human costs and social consequences of totalitarian societies, while recalling the famous 5-day social psychology experiment at Stanford Prison (1971) but lasting considerably longer. It uses just one professional actor and some guest appearances by Existentialist-aligned artists Marina Abramović, Romeo Castellucci, and former Wooster Group performer Willem Dafoe. Thirteen feature films are one of the results of the process, and attest to the existential anguish, angst, and intensity experienced as the workers immerse themselves in their characters to enact dark, semi-scripted sequences, and improvised actions day after day. Though DAU is a wholly artificial construction, existential extremity and authenticity is its hallmark and will assure its fame or infamy, with people falling in love and getting pregnant (14 children were reportedly conceived) while others reportedly suffered post-traumatic stress and breakdowns. This is combined with an extreme exploration of, and meditations on, temporality and duration. This is foregrounded both by the project’s own duration—over 10 years in all (6 years in editing) including many uninterrupted months for its participants—but also its long, unedited cinéma vérité sequences. These include two janitor characters, cleaners in real life, who get really drunk, beat each other up and then begin making violent love. The 40-minute scene, filmed in a single take, is by turns moving, revolting, violent and extraordinarily pornographic. Punches to the face, vomiting and sex are unsimulated. (Mathews, 2019) But such graphic intensities give way in other films to languorous sequences that are dull and banal, dealing with the empty drudgery and nothingness of life, to the infuriation of critics: I’ve spent many long hours visiting DAU since it opened here on January 24 [2019], and I’ve found the films at turns maddening, boring, and pornographic. I’ve never encountered a project whose monumental, megalomaniacal ambitions are so dramatically at odds with the uneven final product. Although maybe that’s the point. (Donadio, 2019) Life finished for the constructed film set of the Kharkov Institute of Experimental Physics, and work concluded for its employees when the Jewish director Khrzhanovsky provocatively invited some neo-Nazis from Moscow onto the set, who promptly ran riot and destroyed it. The dancing flames and brute realities of their vicious critique provide DAU’s shocking

268 Conclusion

Figure 9.2  Images from director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU (2019), which combines an autopoietic social cybernetics system with the most intensely existential mass human experience ever staged for the sake of art. (© Phenomen IP, 2019; Photos: Joerg Gruber, Olympia Orlova, Volker Glaeser.)

dramatic climax. As discussed in Chapter 3, many Existentialists and cyberneticians aligned themselves with the socio-politics of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, and in catalyzing the destruction of his own artwork, Khrzhanovsky gives a respectful nod to the 19th century godfather of Russian anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin (Donadio, 2019). In its performance installation incarnations, DAU has a one-word subtitle encapsulating anarchism’s and Existentialism’s shared, ultimate vision: FREIHEIT (Freedom).

Cult status In 1966, while sitting on his roof staring at the sky during an LSD trip, Stewart Brand came up with his conception for The Whole Earth Catalog, a hugely popular publication from 1968 to 1971 that encapsulated the American countercultural, back-to-nature, and psychedelic zeitgeist. It combines Existentialist ideas of freedom and self-realization with overtly cybernetic messages about holism and circularity in human, earthly, and cosmic systems. Its first edition is crammed with cybernetic discourses, including a poem by novelist Richard Brautigan imagining a harmonious utopia of cybernetic meadows, forests, and ecologies All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (1967), and no less than seven reviews personally written by Brand of classic books on cybernetics including by Wiener and Ashby. Brand was a

Conclusion  269 close friend of Gregory Bateson and was obsessed by cybernetics, setting up The Whole Earth Catalog as a sort of pre-Internet interactive website and community blog, where readers became user-participants, commenting on and adding to discourses and advice-threads, setting up extensive feedback loops that made the publication grow from an initial 62 pages in 1968 to 449 pages by 1971: He wanted the catalog to be part of something that would create an equilibrium. The catalog was part of a whole system, a dynamic and self-regulating system. Brand would collect the crucial negative feedback in the supplement every few months and loop it back to the land by mail, to the readers-turned-cogs of this machine of loving grace. His publications, as he saw it, were part of an adaptive machine, not unlike the magnetic forces that governed the adaptive behavior of Ashby’s homeostat. (Rid, 2016, p. 171) A fan and follower of Brand and his catalog at that time was Steve Jobs, later the CEO of Apple, whom I would certainly cast firmly in the role of a Cybernetic-Existentialist, and one of this era’s most influential. The edited book Steve Jobs and Philosophy has sections and chapters emphasizing his Existentialist credentials with titles including ‘the rebel’, ‘the crazy one’, ‘counter-culture capitalist’, ‘anti-social creator’, ‘the misfit’ and ‘Heidegger and Jobs square off on technology’. As discussed in Chapter 7, Jobs has made bold statements about personal authenticity and not wasting one’s life by conforming to other people’s thinking, and in 2005 the computer guru addressed graduating students at Stanford University with more Existentialist messages and visions: Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything [else] … just fall[s] away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. (Jobbs, 2005) He concludes his address: When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand … with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. … On the back cover of

270 Conclusion their final issue … were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’ It was their farewell message as they signed off. … I wish that for you. (Jobbs, 2005) But this spirit of foolishness, and too ready association with drug-fuelled and idealistic countercultural ideas finally undermined the seriousness and scientific credibility of cybernetics. This was compounded by its embrace of, and by, writers of science fiction and fantasy, and its attractiveness to a ‘lunatic fringe’ including controversial groups such as Dianetics/scientology and Technocracy, so that its image began to turn into what cybernetician John F. Young calls a ‘form of Black Magic, a sort of twentieth century phrenology’ (quoted in Kline, 2015, p. 183). At the same time, Existentialism’s attractiveness to the countercultural youth had turned its image from serious philosophy into a type of pre-punk lifestyle choice with its name encapsulating ‘everything from the moral and political torments of idealistic youth to the latest fashions in clothes, hairdos, song and dance’ (Appignanesi, 2005, p. 76). This leads me to another point shared by both fields, and which contributed to their downfalls. Both were seen, and arguably set themselves up as, types of cults, attracting intense or obsessive people on the fringes and at the edges; activists and outsiders—including artists. Cults are generally formed and led by larger-than-life, charismatic figures, and this was certainly true of Wiener and Sartre, and their statuses as popular public celebrities ended up working against them, raising questions about their seriousness and authority. Yet neither shared the fate of most cult leaders to be finally revealed as false prophets. Cults are famous for proffering answers to everything, and cybernetics is ‘a theory of everything’ (Pickering, 2010, p. 145) while Existentialism attempts to provide every answer to understanding the nature of human Being—both are meta-discourses of supposed universal truths. Cults tend to rise quickly and decline even more rapidly—they fall from grace suddenly, and both fields shared this fate. In the West, by the time of the more conservative 1970s, the radical natures of their ideas, grand designs and tough demands had become less palatable to a new generation, and attitudes and people quickly changed. Jack Burnham is a case in point. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, his article ‘Systems Esthetics’ (1968) had significantly influenced artists and signaled a cybernetic aesthetic turn, but by 1974 he was disillusioned and existentially troubled, suggesting that ‘ultimately … systems theory may be another attempt by science to resist the emotional pain and ambiguity that remain an unavoidable aspect of life’ (Burnham, 1974, p. 11). His disenchantment was complete by 1980 when he declared ‘electrical and electronic visual art … a dismal failure’ in an essay entitled ‘Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed’ (1980, p.  206), following which ‘he renounced systems aesthetics and retreated into an obscure, cabbalistic mysticism … [and] disappeared from the art world altogether’ Skrebowski 2006).

Conclusion  271

Still fanning the flames: Roy Ascott and Michael Apter But others’ faiths have never dimmed, including Roy Ascott, who like Burnham, wrote an influential article on cybernetic arts in 1968, and still continues to teach its creative messages and influence new generations of artists. He is the topic of a special 2018 issue of the ASC’s journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing entitled ‘A Tribute to the Shaman Messenger: Roy Ascott’ (Vol. 25, Issue 2–3). In his 1968 Leonardo journal paper, Ascott announces a new ‘cybernetic sprit’ in art, which was extended by Michael Apter the following year in the same journal. ‘Cybernetics and Art’ (1969) begins by considering the confusion around what cybernetics is: Cybernetics is not just another name for automation, or for information theory, or for computer technology. It involves more that the concept of feedback. It consists more than a simple analogy between men and machines. What it does represent, above all, is a certain attitude to complex purposeful systems and a host of precise conceptual techniques for dealing with them. (Apter, 1969, p. 261) It is these concepts and principles that I have applied to a consideration of recent practices in order to demonstrate how the keen cybernetic ‘attitude to complex purposeful systems’, and what Apter calls its ‘synthesizing attitude’ has not just become an aesthetic side-issue or fringe activity, but a significant and powerful theme in contemporary art. As I have argued, these are often linked and intertwined with ideas from Existentialism, itself a synthesizing philosophy promoting the conjunction of its thought with the conduct of people’s lives as ‘purposeful’.

Recent acclaim: Anne Imhof and Tehching Hsieh In concluding my argument I will look at what, at the time of writing, are recent artworks and events that further underline not only the pervasiveness of Cybernetic-Existentialist perspectives and practices in contemporary arts, but more crucially, their real significance and currency. I maintain that Cybernetic-Existentialism is not just evident in contemporary arts, but is central to some of its most groundbreaking and acclaimed work, from Pierre Huyghe’s After A-Life Ahead (2017) which opened this book to the pavilion which drew the longest lines of queues at the 2017 Venice Biennale (curator: Christine Macel) and picked up its coveted top prize, the Golden Lion award. For German artist Anne Imhof’s Faust (2017), visitors walk around and stand on transparent floors, and below them and around them, for five hours, a complex cybernetic system of actions, reactions and interactions unfolds. Doberman guard dogs roam caged enclosures while male and female performers intermittently dance, lie down, sing, climb, march to order,

272 Conclusion bang walls, yell, then check their cellphones mindlessly—their gadgets seem like sinister machines of isolation and alienation. Imhof’s major work the previous year was Angst (2016), and in Faust, her young, mostly beautiful, moody-looking performers seem full of it, and are clad all in black, looking like models from central casting for a 1960s Existentialist movie by Jean-Luc Godard. Sometimes they work together as an ensemble, but more often they are alone, sullen, distracted, bored, distanced, alienated. They stare blankly—at us, into space, and into their devices. As one reviewer puts it, this is a ‘masterpiece of modern-day angst, ceaselessly investigating the power structures of both past and present that dictate our lives and enslave us with their promises of freedom and self-expression’ (Artsy Editors, 2017). At the same 57th Venice Biennale was Taiwan’s retrospective of the Taiwanese born and US based performance artist Tehching Hsieh, entitled Doing Time (2017, curator: Adrian Heathfield). The recent rediscovery and celebration of his work further underlines the re-emergence and increasing interest in Existentialist and cybernetic ideas. Hsieh completed an astonishing series of performances from the late 1970s to the early 1990s each lasting an entire year. His first, One Year Performance 1978-1979 (or Cage Piece) involved him living in and never exiting from a cage, nor ever conversing, reading, writing, or consuming any media. Another year was spent living outside in Manhattan without ever seeking shelter (not even a doorway) or entering a building, although he was briefly forced to do so following an arrest—a harrowing video in the Venice exhibition documents his desperate screaming and flailing in protest as he is dragged inside. For Art/Life One Year Performance (or Rope Piece) (1983–84), Hsieh made an enduring feedback loop to an Other for a year, never once undoing an 8-foot-long rope physically linking him to artist Linda Montana (whom he barely knew), and the ground rules forbad them to physically touch one another. These works are cybernetically attuned and homeostatic rule-based systems that are truly existential leaps of faith, and which surprisingly made little impact in the 1980s art world. But now, following the scholarship, publications and curatorial work of Adrian Heathfield and others, and exhibitions at MOMA and Guggenheim in 2009, followed by Liverpool Biennial (2010), São Paulo Biennial (2012) and the 2017 Venice Biennale, Hsieh has emerged as something of a superstar. His viewpoint and statements combine ideas from both epistemologies emphasizing rigor and systems thinking together with a commitment to openness, change, authentic choice, freedom, and the pursuit of a grand project that is yours alone: What matters is that you stay within the rules, it doesn’t matter how good or how terrible it gets. … But to stay in the present you [also] have to change direction, you have to keep turning different ways. … I still went ahead, went my own way, although there was no response from the art world. I just tried to develop my philosophy of where

Conclusion  273 I should go. In this I have freedom. … I’m still in the process of passing time, as I always am. Life becomes open and uncertain once again. (Hsieh in Heathfield and Hsieh, 2009, p. 334–339) For One Year Performance 1980–1981 (or Time Clock Piece), Hsieh shaved his head at the start of the year then let it grow. Every hour on the hour, he

Figure 9.3  Tehching Hsieh eternally returned to punching a time clock card, every hour on the hour for an entire year in One Year Performance 1980–1981 (or Time Clock Piece) (1980–81). (Courtesy of Tehching Hsieh.)

274 Conclusion punched a time clock in his studio and then turned to face a fixed camera and took a still photograph. Among other things, the action required him to always keep close to the location and to continually interrupt his sleep. His film replaying each of those still frames in sequence has Hsieh standing in animated, jittery motion staring out grimly beside the time clock, its hand spinning round at a startling speed (more than two full rotations per second). It reveals the sheer madness of the action, and Hsieh’s utter, almost inhuman commitment to an Existentialist grand project that defines you—and his project is simultaneously absurd and profound. As Hsieh’s hair grows progressively longer and his appearance more unkempt, the film becomes like a stop-frame-animated Waiting for Godot, where the human being becomes a tramp lost in repetition amidst the wastes of time (pun intended). It captures, humbly, quintessentially and breathtakingly, Heidegger’s metanarrative of Being and Time, Sartre’s of Being and Nothingness, and Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. This book offers the thesis that an eternal recurrence of the fascinating themes and perspectives of Existentialism and cybernetics is taking place, and finding synthesis within contemporary art.

The future of crisis Human beings have always been in crisis, it is an existential condition, and art has always reflected it. The anxieties of Dasein and the latencies of nothingness and death haunt us. Kierkegaard and Sartre conjure images of standing at dizzying heights and staring down into an abyss symbolizing our own freedom and choices, as well as nothingness and death—an existential abyss. But today there may be a new chasm of different symbols and warnings—of an intensification of alienation, and separation without communion, of an increasingly cybernetic, posthuman ontology, and even of the loss of the human itself—where taking a leap into the abyss will not result in freedom or disappearance into the void, but into the machine. The figure of the posthuman or the cyborg finds increasing prominence in art, cultural discourses and everyday reality, and it is a pure and absolute personification of Cybernetic-Existentialism. The word cyborg is a shortened form of cybernetic organism while its ontology is a new form of existential Dasein: a cybernetic being that encapsulates fundamental issues within the philosophy, from its promises of a radical freedom to its problems of being alien, alienated and Other; or being a mere slave to technology, as both Wiener and Heidegger warn against—‘everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it’ (Heidegger, 1977 [1954], p.  311). Its evolution may yet challenge or overcome one of the philosophy’s basic tenets in a reconceptualization of mortality towards science fiction’s promised land of an end to being-towards-death.

Conclusion  275 The immortality scenario and Ray Kurzweil’s envisioning of the singularity, is the starting point of the 13-artist group exhibition ARTIFICIAL TEARS. Singularity & Humanness—A Speculation (2017, curator Marlies Wirth, MAK Gallery, Vienna), which is one of an increasing number to critique the posthuman condition. It is filled with works that ‘evoke a gloomy mood’ and ask fundamental questions about freedom and ‘humanness’, including whether we ‘want to escape our increasing marginalization through technologies controlled by capitalist and political systems and whether we will work up the courage to fight for our freedom as a society and as individuals’ (Wirth, 2017). Its curator Marlies Wirth was among notable speakers at the Global Art Forum: ‘I Am Not A Robot’ 2018 conference in Singapore, whose denialinflected title is indicative of the largely negative perspectives presented on its theme of the ‘power, paranoia and potentials’ of automation, AI, and robotics. Wirth joked that we must now be artificial beings since we can’t find our way around without apps. More seriously, Honor Harger warned of the ‘existential danger’ we face, Wei Qing suggested the world has become a computer, and Noah Raford mused on our ‘existential anxiety’ about how our robot slaves might become our super-intelligent masters, and quoted the Dalai Lama: ‘a scientist … could be reborn as a machine’. The title and content of Sara M. Watson’s presentation ‘I AM DATA’, reflect both the cybernetic information paradigm and the Existentialist viewpoint that you are what you do, while warning of the powers and insidious perils of Big Data. Best of all was British artist Wesley Goatley’s demonstration of the current limitations of AI in his hilarious and absurd Cybernetic-Existentialist artwork The Dark Age of Connectionism (2017). It casts the voices of Siri and Alexa, the world’s most widely used chattering AI agents of their time, as the disembodied dramatis personae of a performance installation largely composed of microphone stands, where in real time they ask one another conceptual and existential questions they have absolutely no idea how to answer: Siri: ‘Alexa, will you be around forever?’ Alexa: ‘Sorry. I didn’t understand the question I heard’. The previous year at the same ArtScience Museum venue, the Human + : The Future of our Species touring exhibition (2017, curator Catherine Kramer) exemplified the hi-tech side of the Cybernetic-Existentialist zeitgeist, reveling in prosthetic limbs (including Aimee Mullins’ Cheetah Legs (1996)), body modifications (including sinister ones imposed on Agatha Haines’ creepily realist, kinetic newborn baby sculptures, Transfigurations (2013)), bio-arts (TC&A’s tissue-engineered Semi-Living Worry Dolls (2000) expressing facial Angst), the cyborg and the robot. A single-channel video of Propel: Body on Robot Arm (2015) shows Stelarc being spun dizzily around 360 degrees for half an hour by a giant robot arm, with human and machine becoming ‘one interactive and aesthetic operational and performing system’ (Kramer, 2017, p. 35); while another industrial robot arm lovingly tends and rocks a crying artificial baby in its cradle (Aggie Wagenknecht’s

276 Conclusion

Figure 9.4  Video documentation of an industrial robot spinning Stelarc around all angles in Propel: Body On Robot Arm, presented as part of the Human + touring exhibition (2017, curator Catherine Kramer). Originally performed at Demonstrable, Autronics/Lawrence Wilson Gallery, Perth, 2015. (Courtesy of Stelarc; Photo: Steven Aaron Hughes.)

Optimization of Parenting 2, 2012). Louis-Philippe Demers’ motion-sensing Area V5 (2010) installation tracks the movements of gallery visitors, and dozens of life-sized robot half-skull heads rotate in unison and stare blankly towards them, giving them the ‘evil eye’ that Freud describes (citing Hoffmann’s story of The Sandman) as inspiring a feeling of The Uncanny (Freud, 1919). Julijonas Urbonas takes the being-towards-death theme even further with his scale-model design for the ultimate steel rollercoaster that not only thrills but kills: Euthanasia Coaster (2010). For decades there has been aesthetic interest in the potentials of new technologies and emerging systems, and previously much of this was positively enthusiastic. But nowadays artists are far more likely to critique or demonize the socio-political impacts of technologies than celebrate them. Or perhaps more accurately, the most interesting and important artworks tend to do this. The dark, disturbing and dystopian sides of technologies fascinate artists far more than the bright sides, and the negative themes of cybernetics (such as entropy, or Big Brother-style control paradigms) and Existentialism (alienation, the master-slave dialectic, the existential crisis etc.) are highlighted. Some relate this back to parallel dysfunctions occurring in 21st century society, in part as a consequence of technological mediation becoming the dominant form of communication and interaction. The Human + exhibition encapsulates the profound cybernetic and existential questions facing the future, arising from the ‘shift from the human to the posthuman, which both evokes terror and excites pleasure’ (Hayles, 1999,

Conclusion  277 p. 4). Back in the 1940s, Wiener was the most prophetic voice of all in his warnings about the devilish forces inherent in the new technology he helped to sire … the first person to sound alarms about intelligent machines that could learn from experience, reproduce without limitation, and act in ways unforeseen by their human creators, and he called for greater moral and social responsibility by scientists and technicians in an age of mushrooming productive and destructive power. Wiener wrote and spoke passionately about rising threats to human values, freedoms, and spirituality that were still decades in the offing. (Conway and Siegelman, 2005, p. xii, x)

Finally Gregory Bateson argues that the essence of cybernetics is not about ‘exchanging information across lines of discipline, but in discovering patterns common to many disciplines’ (1972, p. 23). As this book demonstrates, not only are the patterns of cybernetics and Existentialism directly complementary, but they also align closely with threads and themes within contemporary art and performance, and across a significant body of practice. The case studies examined are diverse, from Disney’s movie Frozen and theatrical spectacles to visual and conceptual art, participatory works, bio-arts, and robot and cyborg performance. But like some cybernetic organism they seem to cohere and adhere, looping and feeding back across and into one another, traversing parallel terrains, exploring common concerns. Most fundamentally, they highlight a renewed interrogation into the nature of systems and of existential Being—who we are, how we fit into the world, how we connect with others, and who we may become. My theory of Cybernetic-Existentialism provides a novel perspective, and critical lens and methodology with which to analyze issues and conceptual trends that have emerged in art and performance, as well as in broader society. The merging of knowledge from cybernetics and Existentialism is potent in shedding critical light to illuminate new and renewed creative methodologies, issues and themes. Cybernetic principles are increasingly manifest in artists’ explorations: of circuits and information flows; of intimate entanglements with networks; of ‘communication and control’ relationships; in the enmeshing of bodies and technologies; in the collapse of boundaries; and in evolutionary paths toward a human-machine symbiosis. Existentialism is awash with parallel themes that are increasingly foregrounded in arts: of intimate connections and recursive feedback loops, of freedom from everydayness and facticity, of understanding embodiment in different ways, and of developing new appreciations of one’s place in the world as part of a wider system of interrelationships.

278 Conclusion Across cybernetics, Existentialism, and posthumanism, we find a common theme of devotion to a grand project and movement toward the future and the infinite. Marcel declares that: ‘I am the stage rather than the subject’ (Marcel, 2000 [1933], p.  91, emphasis in the original); and Sartre advocates a ‘new relation of man to his project’ that recognises that ‘he is both inside and outside’ (Sartre, 2000 [1948], p. 302). For both cyberneticians and Existentialists, the concrete approaches to Being are defined, first-andforemost, by relationships with others—with other nodes, networks, and systems in cybernetics, and with other human beings in Existentialism. As Sartre puts it: in vain would we seek the caresses and fondlings of our intimate selves … since everything is finally outside, everything, including ourselves. Outside in the world among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man among men. (Sartre, 1972, p. 5) They are separate churches preaching similar religions (and both are fond of analogy); cyberneticians brought Existentialist concepts into science, and the Existentialists evolved a proto-cybernetic philosophy. Cybernetics is the science of change; Existentialism is the philosophy of change; and a common element of the exemplar artworks discussed is that they explore or encapsulate the aesthetics of change. Humans and cybernetic systems are regenerating continually and in a constant state of becoming—that central pillar of Existentialism, which is also core to Wiener’s philosophy: ‘We are whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves’ (Wiener, 1954 [1950], p.  96). Across the two fields, we find abiding common themes: becoming, devotion to a grand project, and a visionary belief in and trajectory toward the future, the infinite, and the transcendent: To be in the world is not to escape from the world toward oneself but to escape from the world toward a beyond-the-world which is the future world. … I am my possibilities. (Sartre, 2003 [1943], p. 223, emphasis in original)

Notes 1 Julia Kristeva hosted an international conference in honor of Beauvoir’s centenary in 2008; Hélène Cixous dedicated ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ in the volume of L’Arc (1975) to her; and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) makes Beauvoir a central reference point, although she also challenges and contrasts what she calls Beauvoir’s ‘dualist’ view with her own performative theory of gender. 2 Michael Apter points out that the Apollo 11 moon landing was dependent on the application of the principles of control theory, information theory, and artificial

Conclusion  279 intelligence, and would have been inconceivable without Norbert Wiener’s breakthroughs in the 1940s (Apter, 1969, p. 262). Doug Hill argues that as the ‘father’ of information theory, Claude Shannon is ‘the progenitor of the digital revolution’, whose 1937 Master’s thesis on Boolean logic and 1948 communication theory article ‘together blew the theoretical doors wide open for the computer era’ (Hill, 2014). 3 ‘People working in those new disciplines seem to have forgotten their cybernetic predecessors’, says Francis Heylighen, adding that ‘the problem of building a global theory is much more complex than any of the more down-to-earth goals of the fashionable approaches’ (Heylighen, 1991). But he suggests that cybernetics suffered from its abstraction and generality, and that any future revival of the field will depend on it coming ‘back into contact with reality’ and becoming relevant again through the creation of real-world applications and innovations (Heylighen, 1991). This is an astute, and doubtless accurate summation, and I would argue that many of the case studies in this book are precise examples of such relevant, real-world applications crafted by contemporary artists, who also work in abstractions and conceptual generalities, yet go on to ground them in concrete actualities. 4 Lucilla Guidi and her co-authors draw on J. L. Austin, Derrida, Foucault and Butler. Their 2017 Dresden conference ‘Phenomenology as Performative Exercise’ explores the theme from perspectives including Iris Laner’s ideas on ‘Performing Criticism’, dance artist and phenomenologist Susan Kozel’s notions of ‘Affective Choreographies’ and Federica Buongiorno’s examination of ‘Extended Selves … [and] Digital Processes of Subjectification’ (Guidi, 2017). 5 Karl Jaspers calls Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ‘exceptional in every sense … creative in language to the degree that their works belong to the peaks of the literatures of their countries … an unprecedented intensity of self-consciousness’ (Jaspers, 1955 [1935], p. 34, 37, 40). 6 Merleau-Ponty highlights the revelatory importance of self-objectification and realizing the reciprocity of one’s gaze—whereby seeing the bodies of Others also remind us of our own object-hood to others. This punctures what he calls our solipsistic illusion … I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes … through the other body I see that, in its coupling with the flesh of the world, the body contributes more than it receives, adding to the world. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 143–144) 7 The start-up impetus for The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) was covert and came from the CIA, which wanted to keep abreast of, and hopefully ahead of, developments in the Soviet Union, which embraced cybernetics seriously and extensively at the same time that similar research declined in the USA. Its associated journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing continues at the time of writing in 2019.

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Index

0100101110101101.org 238–9; Darko Maver 238–40; Dark Maver Dead 239 1968 (political/cultural events) 6, 21–2, 25, 36–7, 98, 268–9, 271 1984 (film) 223 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 196 4’33” (music composition) 138 A Descent Into the Maelström (story) 49–51 Abrahams, N. 24 Abramović, M. 28, 30, 37–40, 66, 179, 191–3, 222, 267; The Artist is Present 222; DAU 267; Freeing the Voice 191–3; Rhythm 0 37–40 Abrams, S. 104 absence (and presence) 10, 13, 43, 79, 89–90, 99, 136, 147, 190, 250 absurd, the/absurdity i, 4, 9, 13, 26, 30, 40, 53, 58, 60, 63, 82, 88–9, 97, 100–1, 125, 131, 133–4, 141, 205, 209, 211–14, 218, 230, 240, 243–55, 262, 274–5 abyss 27, 51, 153–4, 197, 263, 274 Acconci, V. 23 Action Directe group actuals (Schechner) 180–3, 185–7, 189, 191, 196, 198–202 adaptive systems/adaptability i, 2–4, 7–8, 18, 30, 79, 108, 132, 183, 203, 221, 234, 242, 260, 269 Addams Family, The (TV) 41 addiction (technological) 74 Adiga, A. 20; The White Tiger 20 Adorno, T. 13, 193–4, 205–6, 252 affordances, theory of (Gibson) 132–3, 191 Agamben, G. 44, 162, 221

Aho, K. A. 257 Ai Weiwei 60, 65; Dropping a Han Dynasty Vase 65 AIBO 184 AISB 2018 Symposium: Cybernetic Serendipity Reimagined exhibition 33n6 Albu, C. 33n7 Alexa 275 Algorithmic Authenticity (Chun) 207 algorithms 2–3, 21, 68, 191, 207, 246 Alice in Wonderland (novel) 184 Alien (film) 199 alienation/alienated i, 10, 13–14, 26, 77, 82, 86, 120, 133, 139, 147, 159–60, 164, 229, 236–7, 251, 272, 274, 276 All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (poem) 268 Allende, S. 102–3 alter-ego 157, 223, 226, 228n2, 233 Alÿs, F. 30, 231, 243–8, 253–4; El Gringo 247; The Green Line 247; The Last Clown 246–7; Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) 247; Re-enactments Mexico City 2000 247–8; Rehearsal 1 (El ensayo) 244–5; Tornado 247; When Faith Moves Mountains 253–4 American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) 264, 271, 279n7 Americans, The (TV) 15 analogies 11, 18, 49, 70, 76, 100, 110, 151, 263, 271, 278 anarchism/anarcho-syndicalism 6, 96–8, 100–4, 105n4, 133, 193, 212, 217, 225–6, 265, 268 anarchist cybernetics (Swann) 102 Anarchy journal 102

Index  305 Anderson, B. 56 Anderson, J. 56 Andre, C. 23 angst i, 9–10, 16, 53, 63, 130, 141, 153, 263, 267, 272, 275; see also anxiety animals 17, 62–4, 110, 159–60, 162, 170, 183–4, 187, 194, 198, 200–1, 230–1, 241 anti-aircraft gun (Wiener) 68, 70–1, 88, 93 anti-disciplinary 6, 262 anti-hero/anti-heroine 14–16, 66, 133 anti-Semitism 105–6n4 Anti-University of London 104 antiAtlas of borders 247 anticipation 9, 35, 40, 52, 54–8, 66–7, 174, 204 anxiety 9–10, 13, 15, 43, 47–8, 51, 67, 83, 105, 147, 152–4, 161, 169, 190, 229, 246, 275; see also angst Aphids and All the Queens Men 217–18; Game Show 217–18 Apollo 11 moon landing 258 Appignanesi, L. 114, 129, 257, 270 Apple 74, 223 Apple, J. 208 Apter, M. J. 73, 271, 278–9n2; ‘Cybernetics and Art’ 73, 271, 278–9n2 Arbus, D. 250 Architectural Association, London 24 Arendt, H. 105n4, 236 Aristotle 130, 196 Ars Electronica 91, 201 Art & Language 23 Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World exhibition 63–4 Art and Technology: A New Unity exhibition 182 Art Story, the 211 Artaud, A. 187, 205, 255 Artforum 22, 208 Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Artificial Life (AL) 6–7, 18, 40, 94, 183, 196, 275, 278–9n2 ARTIFICIAL TEARS: Singularity & Humanness—A Speculation conference 275 Artist’s Voice, The exhibition 28–9 ArtScience Museum, Singapore 275–6 Artsy editors 1, 272 Ascott, R. 21–2, 25, 139, 141, 265, 271; ayahuascatec.net project 265;

‘The Cybernetic Stance: My Process and Purpose’ 22, 271; Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) exhibition 25; ‘Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?’ 139, 141; ‘A Tribute to the Shaman Messenger: Roy Ascott’ 271; students 139 Ashby, W. R. 6, 8, 40, 46, 258, 268–9; black boxes 40; contribution to AI 258; homeostat 6, 258, 269; time 46 atom bomb 10, 71, 265–6 Auster, P. 84 authenticity i, 4, 9, 12–17, 20, 26, 28, 30, 35, 38, 40, 45, 49, 51, 53, 57–8, 64–7, 82, 85, 92, 95–6, 98, 100, 116, 118, 120–1, 140, 144, 159, 161, 163, 172–3, 180, 182, 190, 195, 203, 205–9, 212, 214, 217–18, 223–8, 228n1, 237, 239, 252, 262–3, 267, 269, 272 automata 93, 159, 162, 185, 196, 205; see also robots autonomy/autonomous 31, 52, 85, 96, 102, 109–10, 132, 136, 152, 185, 200, 204, 207, 258, 262, 264 autopoiesis/autopoietic system i, 4, 7, 30, 97, 108–10, 126, 132, 144, 147n1, 204, 212, 214, 220, 262, 266, 268 availability see disponibilité (availability) avatars 186–7, 228n2, 245 Baader-Mainhof Group 101 Bachelard, G. 166–70, 175–7 Bacon, F. 19 bad faith 16, 82, 263; see also authenticity Bakewell, S. 5, 11, 15, 19–20, 85–7, 98, 100, 113, 125, 128–9, 133, 257, 261, 264 Bakhtin, M. 79, 191 Bakunin, M. 268 Baldessari, J. 23, 214, 217; Cremation Project 214, 217; Information exhibition 23 Ballard, J. G. 34, 197 Banet-Weiser, S. 206–7 Bardiot, C. 25 Baring, E. 19 Bariona (play) 128 Barnes, H. E. 8 Barthes, R. 18, 239

306 Index Bateman, J. 15 Bateson, G. i, 4, 7–8, 25, 38, 75, 94, 102, 104, 130, 133, 139, 144, 150–2, 158–9, 227, 262, 269, 277; blind man’s stick 38, 94; difference which makes a difference 150–2, 159; double-bind 227; eco-systems/ ecology 133, 144, 158–9, 262; identity/adaptive self 8; negative entropy/somatic homeostasis 130, 150; politics 102, 104; relationships/networks 75, 94, 277; transdisciplinarity 158–9 Baudelaire, C. 88 Baudrillard, J. 195–6, 263 Baugh, B. 19 Bauhaus 155, 182 BBC 16, 24, 184, 228n1 Beauvoir, S. de. i, 4–6, 9, 11, 17, 38, 45, 79, 84–5, 97–8, 100–1, 107, 113–14, 125–6, 128–9, 134, 188–90, 251, 257, 265, 278n1; and Camus 134; The Ethics of Ambiguity 107; freedom 38, 84–5, 97–8, 100, 107, 126, 251; and Giacometti 11; identity/self-creation 17; Légion d’Honneur 129; life 5–6, 79, 101, 113–14, 265; The Mandarins 114; master-slave relationships 38, 84, 127–8, 188; negation 189–90; Other(ness) 84–5; politics 6, 97–9, 100, 129; and Sartre 5, 79, 113–14, 265; The Second Sex 5, 11, 84–5, 98, 188, 257; sex 113–14; suicide 251; women/women’s movement 84–5, 98, 188, 257, 278n1 Beck, J. 104 Beckett, S. 13, 30, 53, 173, 230, 244–5, 251–5; Endgame 251–2; Happy Days 252; Krapp’s Last Tape 254; Malone Dies 252; Play 252; Proust 254; That Time 255; That Time 255; Waiting for Godot 252, 254–5, 274; Watt 252 becoming 4, 11, 19, 45, 49, 116, 147n1, 162, 165, 187, 197–8, 200–2, 205, 208, 222, 260, 262, 278 Beer, S. 6–8, 103, 204, 260, 265; life 265; Cybernetics and Management 103; organizational/management cybernetics 7–8; Project Cybersyn, Chile 103–4; team syntegrity 8 being-for-others i, 2, 4, 8, 30, 32, 37–9, 73, 77–80, 84, 88, 92, 94–5, 107,

110–11, 120, 123, 125–6, 222, 232, 234, 255, 260–2 being-towards-death 1–4, 9–10, 13, 27–8, 30, 35, 40, 52–4, 56, 61–6, 158–9, 168, 218, 240–1, 247, 252, 254–5, 262, 274, 276 being-with-others 84, 219, 232, 260 Bellow, S. 35 Bemong, N. 169 Benford, S. 126, 133 Bennett, E. 198–9; A-positive 198–9 Benthall, J. 185, 259, 264 Berdyaev, N. 113 Bergson, H. 45–6, 254 Bernardini, A. 44 Berners-Lee, T. 104n1 Bertalanffy, L. von 23–4, 111 Betancourt, M. 138 Beuys, J. 108–9; The Last Nine Minutes 109 Bigelow, J. 68, 70 Bilal, W. 30, 72–3, 75–82; Domestic Tension 72–3, 75–7; 3rdi 80–2 Bilderwerfer 226; be right back/The Stolen Identity Project 226 Bio Art 178, 180–1, 183, 189, 198–201, 240–3, 275, 277 Bishop, C. 95–7, 108 black box 40, 220 black magic, cybernetics as 270 Blais, J. 110–11, 217, 239 Blast Theory 30, 124–33, 145, 147; Day of the Figurines 131–3; Kidnap 126–7, 130; Uncle Roy All Around You 124–6 blind man’s stick 38, 94 Bloch, E. 193–4 blood 52–3, 60, 76, 179, 189, 197–9 Boal, A. 111 body (human) as cybernetic system 31, 76, 108, 110 body-for-others 77–8, 83, 186, 193 Boeckel, J. van 94 Bohlen, J. G. 191 Bolter, J. 163 Bonaparte, N. 93 Bottger, M. 194 Botticelli Venus 181 Boulé, J-P. 78 boundary crossing 8, 17, 19, 23, 25, 28–30, 48, 53, 81, 85, 94, 109, 116–18, 126, 145, 149, 158, 175–6, 188, 203–4, 255, 260, 277 Bourgeois, L. 13

Index  307 Bourriaud, N. 107–8, 143 Bowie, D. 223 Boyhood (film) 14 Bracewell, M. 211 Brady, I. 20 Braidotti, R. 200–1 Brand, S. 268–70; The Whole Earth Catalog 268–70 Breaking Bad (TV) 16 Brecht, G. 23 Breton, A. 97 British army 54 Broderick, D. 197–8 Brown, L. S. 100 Brown, M. 225–6 Bu hezuo fanghsi/Fuck Off exhibition 60 Buber, M. 79–81, 100, 104n2; anarchism 100; I and Thou 79; influence on Bakhtin 79; openness to the world 81; reciprocity 80 Buck, L. 43, 214, 224, 251 Builders Association 30, 162–5, 174; Master Builder 163; SUPER VISION 162–5, 174 Buongiorno, F. 279 Burden, C. 72, 183; Doorway to Heaven 182; Shoot 72 Burgin, V. 23 Burian, J. 156–8 Burke, E. 176 Burnham, J. 22, 25, 36–7, 66, 270–1; ‘Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed’ 270; ‘Systems Esthetics’ 22, 36–7, 66 Burroughs, W. 265 Burson, N. 223; Big Brother 223; First Beauty Composite 223 Burton, R. 149–52 Butler, J. 257, 278n1, 279n4; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity 257, 278n1 Button, V. 43 Cage, J. 25, 138; 4’33’’ 138; Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering 25 Cahun, C. 227 Cain, A. 13 Callas, M 27 Calle, S. 30, 43, 83–8; The Detective 83–5; Impossible to Catch Death 43; La Filature/The Shadow 83–4; Suite Vénitienne / Please Follow Me 86–7 Cameron, J. 198

Camhi, L. 56 Camus, A. i, 4–5, 9, 11, 16, 26, 38, 40, 85, 97–8, 100–1, 105n4, 125, 133–5, 141, 162, 212, 222, 230, 235–6, 243–4; and Beauvoir 134; death 134; life 133–5; The Myth of Sisyphus 26, 125, 243–4, 248–50, 262; The Outsider 16, 40, 133–4, 222; politics 98–9; The Rebel 97, 101, 125, 133–4; and Sartre 133–4, 264 Canetti, E. 170 Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana 186 Cannon, W. 111 Cantarelli M. L. 160–1 Cappella Brancacci frescoes 161 Cardew, C. 104 care/care structure 35, 47, 242, 263 Carmichael, S. 104 Carpenter, J. 187; The Thing 187 Carrol, L. 184 Casagemas, C. 256n2 Casey, E. S. 167, 170, 175–7 Castellucci, R. 159–62, 267; DAU 267; Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep 159–62; Macchina Tessile 161 Castro, F. 98 Cattelan, M. 43 Catts, O. 240–3, 275; see also TC&A causal circuits see circular causality Causey, M. 261–2 Cazzaza, M. 230; Piggly-Wiggly 230 Chameleons Group 141–4 Change Performing Arts 157 Chapman, D. 251 Chapman, J and Chapman, D. 251; Disasters of War 251; übermensch 251 Chapman, J. 251 Chatzichristodoulou, M. 124, 126–7, 147 chess playing automata/computers 93, 196–7 Chicago, J. 208; Dinner Party 208 child prodigy 68–9, 71, 129 childhood/children 16–17, 20–1, 27, 43, 54, 60, 68–9, 71, 113, 129, 133–4, 141, 159–60, 162, 166–7, 175–6, 178, 225, 265 Ching, V. T. 80 choices 9–10, 14–16, 40, 43, 79–80, 85, 88, 95, 99, 128–9, 153, 190, 209, 211, 214, 222, 249, 258, 260, 269–70, 272, 274

308 Index ChoreoGraph, The stochastic system 159 Christiansen, R. 155 Chun, W. H. K. 32, 207 CIA 264, 279n7 circular causality 6, 102, 108, 132, 159, 247 circular/circularity i, 4, 6, 11, 32, 52, 64, 76, 102, 108, 118–19, 132, 213, 220, 227, 232, 247–8, 260, 262, 268 Cixous, H. 229, 233, 257, 278n1 Clark, L. 32n5 Clarke, A. 191 Clarke, A.C. 41, 196 Clements, A. 174 closed and open systems 22, 24–5, 38, 63, 79, 109–12, 133, 147n1, 185, 273 Coates, G. 166 Cocteau, J. 175 Cohen-Sohal, A. 82 Collins, S. 30, 135–8; In Conversation 135–8 Combat newspaper 98 communication/command and control systems 4, 7, 17, 25, 30, 33n8, 70–2, 75–6, 88, 91–2, 95, 97, 102, 126, 157, 182, 185–7, 193, 232, 236, 258, 260, 267, 276–7 communion see separation with communion complexity theory 23, 54, 144, 220, 260 conceptual art 4, 21, 23–4, 28, 36, 41–4, 88, 191–2, 277 conformism/non-conformism 10, 15–17, 20, 28, 35, 66, 80, 121, 138, 190, 209, 211, 262, 265, 269 contingency 2, 8, 10, 35, 89, 101, 124, 202 control theory/systems 33n8, 70–2, 75–6, 91–2, 95, 100, 127, 159, 264, 278n1 Conway, F. 18, 49, 69–71, 93, 258, 261, 277 Cook, T. 74 Cooper, A. 223 Cooper, D. 104 Corris, M. 23 counterculture 17, 98, 116, 265, 268–70 Cox, G. 11, 19, 40, 52, 101, 114, 134–5, 197 Craig-Martin, M. 13, 214 Cranston, M. 35

Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity colloquium 33n6 Creed, M. 41–3, 66; Work No. 227: The lights going on and off 42–3 Critchley, S. 153–4, 163 Critical Art Ensemble 183; BioCom 183 Crowell, S. 9, 11 Csuri, C. 21 cult aspects of cybernetics and existentialism 268–71 cybernetic art 13, 21–2, 24–5, 35–7, 40–1, 73, 108–9, 127, 183–5, 204, 217, 271 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition 21–2, 24, 33n6, 184, 191, 217 Cybernetic Serendipity: A Documentation exhibition 24 cybernetician robots/inventions 6, 8, 24, 40–1, 68–9, 70–1, 88, 183–5, 197, 204, 258 Cybernetics and Human Knowing journal 264, 270–1 cybernetics and: abstract expressionism 11; analogies 18, 49, 70, 76, 151, 263, 271, 278; anti-disciplinarity/ interdisciplinary 6–7, 130, 262; funding 10, 17–18, 33n8, 264; human body 31, 76, 110; military research 7, 10, 17–18, 68–71; performativity 8, 183, 260–1; politics 10, 71–2, 98, 101–4; politics/anarchism 71, 101–4; science fiction 178–9, 197; solipsism 118–20, 262; time 46; warnings against technology 74, 274, 277 cybernetics, history and definitions 6–11, 17–18, 23, 34, 68–72, 76, 111–12, 263–5, 268–71 cybernetics, influence/impact of (general) 1, 70–1, 74, 159, 257–8, 278–9n2; influence/impact on art 1, 21–5, 36, 258, 270–1 cybernetics, similarities with Existentialism 8, 17–19, 26–7, 30–2, 78–9, 94, 97–8, 101–2, 104, 108, 110, 112, 118–20, 127–8, 144–5, 159, 208, 259–65, 268–71, 277–8 cyborg 18, 33n8, 170, 178–80, 182–3, 191, 274–5, 277 Cyborg Foundation, the 180 Dafoe, W. 267; DAU 267 Daines, M. 217; The Body of Michael Daines 217

Index  309 Dalai Lama 275 DAM Gallery, Berlin 199 Darby, T. 139 Darling, P. 157 Darwin, C. 68 Dasein 9, 34–5, 51, 56–7, 66, 99, 105n4, 153, 162, 180, 274 Davis, B. 223 Davis, D. 109; The Last Nine Minutes 109 Dbox 162–5; SUPER VISION 162–5 Death see being-towards-death Debord, G. 205 Deep Blue IBM chess computer 197 Deleuze, G. 19, 98, 187, 200–2 Deller, J. 24, 251; The Bruce Lacey Experience 24; The Uses of Literacy 251 Demers, L-P. 30, 91–5, 276; Area V5 276; The Blind Robot 91–5 Derrida, J. 18–19, 175, 239, 245, 255, 279n4 Dery, M. 230 Descartes, R. 116 despair 10–11, 13, 157, 205, 249, 277 destruction/destroying 14, 27, 54, 62, 65–6, 71–2, 86, 90, 130, 138, 153, 183, 212, 214–17, 221, 230, 237, 240–2, 267–8 Deville, B. 171 Dialectics of Liberation conference 104 Diamond, M. M. 104n2 Dianetics 270 difference which makes a difference (Bateson) 150–2, 159 digital revolution 32, 183, 258, 279n4 disconnected 78, 84, 123, 212 disponibilité (availability) 8, 30, 32, 38, 40, 79, 92, 123, 139, 144, 242 Dix, O. 250; The Suicide 250 Dixon, F. 121–3; Does anyone want to talk about anything? 121–3 Dixon, S. 124, 182, 198, 203, 225; Unheimlich (Uncanny) 141–4 Doctor Who (TV) 24 Dodson, E. L. 35, 152–3 dogs 62–5, 160, 184, 198, 246–8, 271 Doig, P. 26; Cabins and Canoes: The Unreasonable Silence of the World 26 Donadio, R. 267–8 Dornan, J. 16 Dostoevsky, F. 11, 65–6, 97, 126, 261 double(s) 19, 26, 120, 141, 149, 171, 175, 209, 227, 254

Dourish, P. 133 dread 9–10, 30, 43, 77, 141, 152–4, 163–4, 169, 174; see also anxiety drugs 16, 104, 109, 114, 116, 121, 185, 265, 270 Duda, J. 102 Dumas, M. 26 duration/durée 45–6, 54, 254, 267 durational performance 37–40, 58, 72, 77, 81, 120–1 Dylan, B. 20 dystopia 178, 195, 199, 201, 230, 276; see also utopia ecology/environment 1–3, 8, 10, 18, 36–7, 79, 89, 112, 132–3, 144, 152, 158–9, 162, 184, 190, 193, 204, 240–1, 257, 259–60, 262, 268 ecosystems i, 4, 130, 145 Edwards, R. 251 EEG 193 ego, transcendence of 145–7, 153 ego/alter-ego 157, 223, 226, 228n2, 233, 262 ekstasies of time 45–6 Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) exhibition 25 Eliasson, O. 22 Elkhaïm, A. 114 Elpidrou, A. 118 Elwell, J. S. 200, 222 emergence i, 4, 7, 46, 219, 262; see also evolution Emin, T. 214–15 Emmanuel, V. 80 Encyclopedia Britannica 100 Engel, L. 194 English National Opera 30, 167–9; Le Grand Macabre 167–9 Eno, B. 25, 139, 265–6; DAU 265–6 entropy/negative entropy 4, 130, 133, 139, 220, 262, 276 environment(al) see ecology epiphany 35, 124, 145 equilibrium 111–14, 150, 262, 269 erasure 11–13, 65, 152, 164, 190, 214–18, 220, 227 Érdi, P. 260 Eriksen, T. H. 152 errors/errancy 75–6, 99, 137–9, 151–2, 264 Escobar, P. 101, 263

310 Index essence(s) 34, 99, 115–16 (‘existence precedes essence’), 121–3, 178, 205–6, 208, 211, 213, 247, 277 Esslin, M. 13 estrangement 163, 181, 186–7, 191, 201, 232, 255 Etchells, T. 205 eternal return/recurrence i, 30, 193, 244, 248–9, 262, 273–4 ethics 8, 16, 64, 85, 95, 97, 107, 112, 114, 129, 183, 200, 238 Evers, M. 218 everydayness 17, 120, 140, 144, 190, 277 evolution 2, 8, 24, 46, 53, 63, 126, 132, 186–91, 195–6, 200, 202, 211, 219, 260, 274, 277; see also emergence Ex Machina 154–8 existential crisis 27, 30, 132, 149, 153, 252, 276 Existentialism and literature 11, 40, 65–6, 126, 133–4, 154, 222, 260–1 Existentialism and performativity 260–1, 279n4; anarchism 100–1; anti-hero/anti-heroine 14–16, 66, 133; politics 5–6, 97–101, 104, 105–6n4, 128–9; religion 79, 113, 128, 144, 249–50; solipsism 78, 82, 118–20, 262, 279n6 Existentialism, history and definitions 4–5, 8–11, 13–19, 34–5, 179, 263–5, 270 Existentialism, influence/impact of (general) 18–20, 26, 85, 100, 257, 259, 263; influence/impact on art 13, 80, 222, 233, 250, 267 Existentialism, similarities with cybernetics 8, 17–19, 26–7, 30–2, 78–9, 94, 97–8, 101–2, 104, 108, 110, 112, 118–20, 127–8, 144–5, 159, 208, 259–65, 268–71, 277–8 Expectancy Wave (E-wave) 193 expectation see anticipation Exploratorium gallery, San Francisco 24 Export, V. 32n5 extreme(s) 4, 10, 15–16, 26, 28, 40, 48, 57, 66, 77, 80, 95, 98, 109–11, 116, 125–6, 180, 188, 209, 224–5, 234–7, 247, 249, 261, 266–7 Eyes Without a Face (film) 181 Facebook 88, 121, 123, 228n2 facticity 17, 35, 45, 95, 132, 140, 144–5, 188, 190, 208, 222, 240, 252, 277

Factory, the (Warhol) 15–17 Faith Moves Mountains 精诚所至, 金石 为开 (story) 253 Fall, The (TV) 16 fallenness 35, 44 Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine 178 Farías, V. 105n4 Farver, J. 25 Faye, E. 105n4 fear 10–11, 15–16, 43, 47, 63, 86, 124, 126, 128–9, 134, 153, 168, 176, 180, 196, 209, 219, 235, 252 Feedback Age, the 73–4 feedback/feedback loops i, 1–2, 4, 6–7, 11–12, 14, 18, 25, 32, 37, 41, 48, 53, 56, 58, 60, 63, 68, 73–7, 81–4, 87, 89, 92, 94–5, 107, 121, 123, 126–7, 132, 136, 139–40, 149, 155, 163, 183, 203, 217, 219–20, 222, 227, 232, 234, 236, 247, 260–2, 269, 271–2, 277 Fenemore, A. 141–4 Ferguson, R. 121 Fernández, M. 25, 108 Feynman, R. 180 Fillion, C. 154 Finburgh, C. 252 First Man, The (novel) 134 first wave (aka order) cybernetics 23, 88, 110, 147n1, 264 Fisher, J. 254 flâneur 88, 247 FlatFile Galleries, Chicago 72 flexibility/‘frame flexibility’ (Bateson) 130, 133, 152 Fliakos, A. 151 Flies, The (play) 11, 133, 197 Flores, F. 104 Fluxus 57, 108 Flynn, T. R. 4, 45 Foerster, H. von 7, 110, 118–20, 139, 148; autopoiesis 110; order-fromnoise 139, 148n2; second wave cybernetics 7, 110, 118–20, 139; solipsism 118–20 Fok, S. 60 Foley, M. 4, 40 Fontenelle, B. de 198 Forced Entertainment 205 Ford, J. 57 Forreger, N. 182 Forum theater 111 Foucault, M. 18–19, 221, 279n4

Index  311 Fowler, H. 194–6; Anthropocene 194–6 Frankcom, S. 252; Happy Days 252 Frankenstein (novel) 199–200, 230, 240 Franklin, B. 93 Fraser, A. 22 Frazer, J. H. 24 Freedman, C. 201 freedom i, 4, 6, 9, 13–14, 16–17, 19, 31–32n3, 35, 37–40, 45, 57, 65–6, 77–8, 80, 82, 85, 87–90, 95, 97–8, 100–4, 107–18, 126, 128–31, 138, 140, 146, 153–4, 158–9, 179, 188, 196, 205, 207, 209, 211, 214, 217, 234, 240–1, 249–52, 257–60, 262–3, 268, 272–7 Freiburg University 10, 99, 105n4 French Resistance 40, 98–9, 128–9, 251 Freud, S. 153, 167, 169, 175, 229, 235, 237, 276; Das Unheimlich/The Uncanny 167, 175, 235, 237, 276; Thanatos Drive (death drive) 153 Fried, M. 179 Frozen (film) 16–17, 277 Fry, E. 67 Fuchs, M. 141–4; Unheimlich (Uncanny) 141–4 Fullerton, E. 53–4 fundamental project see grand project Furniss, J-A. 209, 11 Futurism 63, 106n4, 138, 182 Gadamer, H-G. 45 Galleria Continua 47 Gallimard, M. 134 Galloway, K. 109 games (in art) 3, 72–3, 124, 126, 131–2, 134, 141, 196–7, 217–18, 228n2, 235 Gates, B. 226 Gayford, M. 28, 44 gaze see look, the (of the other) GENDY (GENeration DYnamique) algorithm 191 General Systems Theory (Bertalanffy) 23–4 Genet, J. 13, 86–7, 126, 261 genetics 3, 76, 166, 187, 200–1, 250 Gerard, R. 263 Ghose, S. 54 Giacometti, A. 11 Giannachi, G. 126, 133, 145, 185, 221 Gibbs, J. 163 Gibson, J. J. 132, 191 Gibson, W. 33n8, 198 Gielgud, J. 149

Gilbert and George 28–30, 209–14; BANNERS 209; BENT SHIT CUNT 209; DIRTY WORD PICTURES 209; Fates 210; George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit 211; Khilafah 29; LONDON PICTURES 211; Naked Shit Pictures 213; X Commandments 209 Ginsberg, A. 104, 265 Ginsburg, J. 220–2; Walkabout 220–2 Glaserfeld, E. von 76 Glitch Art 138–9 Global Art Forum: ‘I Am Not A Robot’ conference 275 Goatley, W. 275; The Dark Age of Connectionism 275 Gob Squad 30, 114–20, 124, 147; Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) 114–19; What Are You Looking At? 120 God 26, 70, 113, 144, 159–60, 197, 200, 222, 224, 230, 249–50; death of God 159, 222, 230, 249 Godard, J-L. 11, 272 Godber, R. 26 Goebbels, H. 30, 169–77; Eraritjaritjaka 169–77; Or the Hapless Landing 170; Max Black 170 Goffman, E. 225 Gogh, V. van 250, 256n2 Goldberg, M. 5 Golem 93 Golomb, J. 14, 51, 82, 116, 190 Gómez-Peña, G. 30, 183, 226–7; The Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post & Curio Shop on the Electronic Frontier 183 Gommel, M. 139; Delayed 139 Goo, S. 245–6; Fall Again, Fall Better 245–6 good faith 16, 150, 205; see also authenticity Good, I. J. 197 Goodman, P. 102, 104 Gordon, D. 27, 30, 54–8, 66; Five Year Drive-by 57–8; The Making of a Monster 27; 24-Hour Psycho 54–6 Gorky, A. 11 Gormley, A. 51 Goya, F. J. de 251; Disasters of War 251 Graham, A. 228 Graham, D. 23, 32n5

312 Index grand/fundamental project 58, 85, 205, 209, 212–14, 230, 272, 274, 278 Grassino, P. 28–9; Zero 28–9 Grau, O. 140 Green, N. 24–5 Grosz, G. 250; Suicide 250 Grünberg, K. 170 Grusin, R. 163 Guagusch, A. 110, 147n1 Guardian, The 20, 51, 257 Guattari, F. 19, 98, 187, 200–1 Guevara, C. 98, 224 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 64 Guggenheim Museum, New York 37, 63, 67n1, 272 Guidi, L. 260, 279n4 Guignon, C. 205, 228n1, 262 guns 38, 40, 54, 68, 70–7, 88, 93, 224, 247–8 Gysin, B. 265; Dream Machine 265 Haacke, H. 21, 23, 35–7, 67n1; Chickens Hatching 36–7; Condensation Cube 36–7; New Alchemy: Elements, Systems and Forces 37; Norbert: ‘All Systems Go’ 37 Haines, A. 275; Transfigurations 275 Haldane, J. B. S. 71 Hamlet (play) 149–57 hammer (Heidegger’s ontology of) 38, 98, 222 Hammond, D. 111 Hann, R. 158 Hanru, H. 63 Hansen, M. B. N. 54, 56 Happenings 108 Haraway, D. 170 Harbisson, N. 180 Harcourt, B. E. 19 Harger, H. 275 Harman, G. 32n2, 38–9 Harris, H. 242 Harris, J. C. 256n2 Harvard University 70 Harvey, M. 20–1; Myra 20–1 Harvie, J. 214 Hassan, I. 32n4 haunted houses 174–6, 237 haunting 48, 90, 167, 174–6, 230, 237, 246, 250, 256, 274 Haupt, S. 175 Hayles, N. K. 17–18, 75, 119–20, 203–4, 276 Hayward, R. 265

Heartney, E. 63 Heathfield, A. 272–3; Doing Time 272 Hegel, G. 34, 38, 84, 97, 116, 127, 174 Hegyi, L. 28–9; The Artist’s Voice exhibition 28–9 Heidegger, M. 4–5, 9–10, 16–17, 19, 34–5, 38, 44–5, 49, 51–2, 57–8, 66, 98–101, 104–6n4, 116, 128, 141, 144, 153, 158, 161, 166, 174, 211, 219, 222, 229–30, 240, 248, 257, 259–61, 269, 274; angst/ anxiety 141, 153; anticipation/beingtowards-death 35, 52, 56–8, 66, 240; authenticity 17, 35, 51; Being and Time 44–5, 128, 274; care 35; cybernetics 260; das man/herd/the they 10, 16, 51, 66, 144; Dasein 34–5; hammer ontology 38, 98, 222; hermeneutic circle 248; homelessness/ home sickness 141, 166, 174; hut 49; influence on others 4, 19, 99, 128, 257, 259; nothingness 10; ‘On the Essence of Truth’ 99; politics and Nazism 5, 99, 101, 105–6n4; and Sartre 99–100; thrown/thrownness 35, 116, 161, 207, 230, 252; time 44–5, 100; uncanny 229–30; warning against technology 274 Hendrix, J. 191 Henri B. 87 Hepburn, A. 223 Heraclitus 111 herd, the/the they/the Anyone 10, 16, 66, 144 heterarchy/heterarchic systems 38, 75–6 Heti, S. 85–6 Heylighen, F. 279n3 Heyward, M. 14 Hibben, J. G. 68 Hickling, A. 179 Hill, D. 23, 258, 279n2 Hindley, M. 20–1 Hirata, O. 231 Hiroshima 10, 71 Hirschhorn, T. 30, 236–7, 239–40; Collage-Truth 236; The Incommensurable Banner 236; Touching Reality 236–7, 239–40 Hirst, D. 22, 30, 51–3, 66, 214–15; The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 52; A Thousand Years 52–3 Hitchens, C. 25 Hitler, A. 98–9, 223, 226

Index  313 Hodges, A. W. 6–7, 17, 98 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 276; The Sandman 276 Holland, O. 184 homelessness 9, 95–6, 121, 230 homeostasis i, 76, 111–12, 114, 130–1, 150, 152, 204, 258, 262, 266, 272 Honert, M. 27; Foto 27 Hong, S. S. 14–15; On the Beach At Night Alone 14–15 house (in philosophy/critical theory) 166–70, 174–7 house (in theater scenography) 166–77 Howe, T. 254 Howell, A. 111–12 Hsieh, T. 272–4; Art/Life One Year Performance (or Rope Piece) 272; Doing Time 272; One Year Performance 1978-1979 (or Cage Piece) 272; One Year Performance 1980–1981 (or Time Clock Piece) 273–4 Huang, Y. P. 63–4; Theater of the World 63–4 Hubben, W. 9, 65–6, 79, 114, 209 Hujatnikajenong, A. 223 Human + : The Future of Our Species exhibition 275–6 human body as a cybernetic system 31, 76, 108, 110 Hume, G. 214 Husserl, E. 4, 9–10, 19, 45, 145–6, 245; becoming 19; ego and intentionality 145–6; noble quest 245 hut (Heidegger’s/Wiener’s) 49, 99 Huxley, A. 104, 265 Huyghe, P. 1–3, 37, 229, 271; After ALife Ahead 1–3, 37, 229, 271 I AM A PROBLEM exhibition 26–7 I have a dream (speech, King, M. L, Jnr.) 259 iconic 6, 13, 121, 149, 196, 211, 252 identity 8, 13–14, 26, 30–1, 74, 84, 86, 108, 116, 121, 152, 163–4, 203–28, 240–1, 255–8, 260, 278n1; multiidentities 225–8; see also self Ihnatowicz, E. 30, 184–5, 204; SAM (Sound Activated Mobile) 184; Senster 184–5, 204 Ilfeld, E. J. 18, 138 Illuminations Media 217 Imhof, A. 31, 271–2; Angst 272; Faust 31, 271–2

immune system and art 110 Index of Prohibited Books 128 individuality 9–10, 35, 52, 98, 116, 204 Information Age, the 18, 25, 33n8, 62, 68–9, 73–4, 258 Information exhibition 23 information/information systems/theory i, 4, 6, 7, 17–18, 23, 25, 32–3n8, 46, 71, 75–6, 87, 119, 130, 136–8, 148n2, 151, 159, 190, 197, 204, 258, 264, 271, 275, 277–9n2 input(s) 2, 6, 8, 41, 46, 63, 70, 74, 76, 135–6, 140, 183, 220, 253, 258 Instagram 83, 228n1 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London 21–2, 24 Institute of Phenomenological Studies 104 interactivity 6, 8, 21–2, 25, 30, 32, 38, 68–97, 109, 116, 118, 131–2, 136–7, 140, 143, 158–9, 161, 183, 223, 228n2, 234, 240, 242, 245, 260, 262, 269, 275 International Symposium on PostModern Performance 32n4 interpretation 4, 10, 23, 31, 70, 80–1, 133, 137, 155, 157, 162, 190, 193, 196, 218, 220, 248 Interspatial: E.A.T., Cybernetic Serendipity, and the Future of Creative Collaboration symposium 24 Invisible Theater 111 Ionesco, E. 13 iPhone/smartphone 74, 223, 272 Ippolito, J. 110–11, 217, 239 Isherwood, C. 116 Ishiguro, H. 231 isolation 9, 16, 28, 118–19 (‘isolation in exposure’), 120, 144, 246, 272; see also alienation Jameson, F. 194–5 Jasper, D. 44 Jaspers, K. 79, 105n4, 113, 229, 279n5; dedication to spouse; on Heidegger 105; on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 279n5; religion 113; uncanny 229 Jay, M. 257 Jayaram, M. 80 Jeffries, S. 43, 86, 88, 97 Jennicam 30, 88–90 Jeremijenko, N. 184, 250; Feral Robotic Dogs 184; Suicide Box 250

314 Index Jobbs, S. 206, 269–70 Jobson, C. 47 Jonas, J. 32n5 Jones, A. 187–8, 205, 225, 227 Jones, C. A. 22 Jones, J. 51 Jones, R. 83 Jopling, J. 53 Journal of Cybernetics 264 Joyce, J. 145 Kac, E. 30, 180, 198–201; A-positive 198–9; Genesis 200; GPF Bunny 200; A Natural History of the Enigma 201; Time Capsule 180, 200 Kafka, F. 11, 19, 126, 261 Kahlo, F. 250; The Suicide of Dorothy Hale 250 Kalb, J. 254 Kant, I. 145 Kapoor, A. 30, 46–51, 66; Descension 46–51; Descent into Limbo 48; Vantablack ™ 48 Kaprow, A. 108 Kasparov, G. 197 Kassovitz, M. 54–5 Kawara, O. 23, 26; Information exhibition 23; I AM A PROBLEM exhibition 26 Kaye, N. 163–5 Kelly, G. 223 Kempelen, W. de 93 Kendon, A. 159 Kennedy R. F. 218 Kennedy, J. F. 218 Kestner, G. 33 Kharkov Institute of Experimental Physics 266 Kholeif, O. 25 Khomeini, R. 223 Khruschev, N. 89 Khrzhanovsky 31, 265–6, 268; DAU 31, 265–6, 268 Khrzhanovsky 31, 265–8 Kierkegaard, S. i, 4, 9–10, 15, 17, 19, 30, 38, 45, 79, 100–1, 112–14, 126, 141, 144, 149, 152–4, 163, 169, 188, 200–1, 209–10, 230, 242, 248–50, 261, 264, 274, 279n5; the absurd 249–50; authenticity 38; becoming 200–1; The Concept of Dread 30, 141, 152–4, 274; ‘Diary of a Seducer’ 112–13; Either/Or 15, 112–13, 149; equilibrium 112; ethics/modes of

existence 38, 112–13; influence on others 19; leap of faith 10, 17, 100, 113, 188, 242, 249; life and personality 209, 264, 279n5; on marriage 79; repetition 248 Kiesler, F. 154 Kikauka, L. 30, 197–8; Them Fuckin’ Robots 197–8 Kim, M-H. 14–15 Kiner, E. D. 79, 104n2 Kinetica Art Fair, London 24 King, D. 197 King, M. L. Jr. 218, 259 Kingsley Hall 104 Kirkpatrick, R. 145–6 Klaeui, A. 174 Klien, M. 159 Kline, R. R. 6, 18, 25, 33n8, 71, 98, 130, 184, 263–4, 270 Klitch, R. 188 Klüver, B. 25, 108–9, 217; Homage to New York 217; Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering 25; Telex Q & A 108–9 Knapp, B. 255 Knowlton, K. 21 Kochi-Muziris Biennale 48, 50 Kooning, W. de 11–12 Koons, J. 205–6 Kozakiewicz, O 114 Kozel, S. 140–1, 279n4 Kraatz K. 260, 279n4 Kramer, C. 275–6; Human + : The Future of our Species exhibition 275–6 Krauss, R. 36, 48 Kristeva, J. 18, 233–4, 257, 278n1 Kroker, A. 119, 227 Kroker, M. 227 Kubrick, S. 197 Kuo, M. 25 Kurzweil, R. 197, 275 La Fura Dels Baus 30, 167–9; Le Grand Macabre 167–9 La Haine (film) 54–5 La Révolution Prolétarienne 101 Lacan, J. 191 Lacey, B. 24, 182; The Bruce Lacey Experience 24; R.O.S.A. B.O.S.O.M (Radio Operated Simulated Actress Battery Or Standby Operated Mains) 24 lack 8, 10, 85, 95, 102, 188–9, 250

Index  315 Laden, O. B. 223 Laing, R. D. 8, 104, 147, 208, 227; Anti-University of London 104; Dialectics of Liberation conference 104; The Divided Self 147, 227 LambdaMoo rape 226 Landau, L. 265–6 Landy, M. 214–17; Art Bin 214–15; Break Down 51, 214, 216–17; Joyous Machines: Michael Landy and Jean Tinguely 217 Laqueur, T. 198 Laterna Magika 155 Lau, U. 54–6, 234–7, 239–40; Intersection: Video Diptych 54–5; Vision Collision 234–7, 239–40 Lavender, A. 157 Lavery, C. 259 Lawrence Wilson Gallery, Perth 276 Le Libertaire 101 leap of faith 17, 113, 188, 242, 249 Leary, T. 104, 265 LeCompte, E. 149–52, 164; Hamlet 149–52 Lee, P. 35–6 Leeson, L. H. 223 Légion d’Honneur 129 LeGuin, U. K. 193 Lehman, P. 58 Leibnitz, G von 10 Leonardo Da Vinci Mona Lisa 181 Leonardo journal 271 Lepage, R. 30, 154–8; Elsinore 154–7; Hamlet|Collage 154 Let It Go (film song) 16–17 Levinas, E. 125 LeWitt, S. 23 Libération newspaper 98 Ligetti, G. 167–9 Ligotti, T. 136 Limbo (novel) 178 Lincoln, A. 218 Lindholm, C. 224–5 Lingham, S. 80; You, Other; I, Another exhibition 80 Linklater, R. 14; Boyhood 14 Lippard, L. R. 22–3, 67n1 Long, R. 23, 32n5 look, the (of the Other)/the gaze 30, 78, 83–6, 107, 124, 139, 279n6 loop(s) see feedback/feedback loops Loren, S. 223 Love, C. 252

Löwith, K. 105n4 Lozano-Hemmer, R. 30, 231–4; Body Movies 231–3; Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6 232; People on People 233–4 LSD 104, 265, 268 Lucas, S. 250; Is Suicide Genetic? 250 Lucie-Smith, E. 111 Lyng, S. 207 MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) 37 MacDonald, P. S. 79, 132, 262 Macel, C. 271 Macy conferences 6, 23, 25, 264 magic/magical 14, 17, 51, 92–3, 109, 116, 136, 143, 171, 239, 270 Maher, E. 134 MAK Gallery, Vienna 275 Maki Gallery, Tokyo 186 Maly, T. 68, 70 Man, J. F. 16 Manatakis, L. 220 Manchester, E. 95 Mandarins, The (novel) 114 Mandiberg, M. 217; Shop Mandiberg 217 Manet, E. 250; The Suicide 250 Manic Street Preachers 251 manifesto(s) 25, 63, 109, 138, 170 Mann, S. 179 Manovich, L. 225, 228n2 Manson, M. 19 Mao Z./Maoism 101, 223 Marat, J-P. 223 Marcel, G. 4, 8–9, 38, 40, 79–80, 92, 98–100, 113, 118, 123, 125, 144, 146, 254, 261–2, 278; devotion to Jacqueline 79; disponibilité (availability) 8, 38, 40, 79, 123, 144; life 79, 261; religion 79; and Sartre 99–100; separation with communion 118, 144; trans-ascendence 144, 146 Marcuse, H. 104 Maricar, M. 80 Marinetti, F. T. 106n4 Marshall, P. 100 Martinez, D. J. 205; to make a blind man murder for the things he’s seen, or happiness is over-rated 205 Marxism 98, 101, 104, 128, 257 Masaccio 161 mask(s) 121, 225, 227, 251

316 Index Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 69 master-slave relations 4, 38–40, 85, 88, 100, 127, 136, 188, 198, 207, 274–6 Masterman, M. 22; Computerized Haiku 22 Mathews, O. 267 Matrix, The (film) 198 Mattes, E. and Mattes, F. 238–9; Darko Maver 238–40; Darko Maver Dead 239 Maturana, H. R. 4, 76, 108–10, 147n1, 204, 212; autopoiesis 108–10, 144, 147n1, 204, 212; circularity 76, 108; closed systems 109–10, 147n1; inductive systems 76 Matzner, F. 46 Mayr, O. 76 McCulloch, W. 6, 38, 75–6, 264; heterarchic systems 38, 75–6; Macy conferences 6; neural networks 75–6; and Wiener 264 McDermott, E. 2 McEwan, J. 102 McGill, D.C. 209, 211, 214 McGuirk, C. 194 McLean, B. 23 McLuhan, M. 23, 74–5, 158 McShine, K. 23; Information exhibition 23 Mead, M. 4, 6–7, 130 Medina, C. 253–4; When Faith Moves Mountains 253–4 Medina, E. 102–3 Medusa 230 melancholy 14, 120, 164, 209, 211 memento mori 35, 53, 60 memory 166–7, 177, 222–3, 233, 261 Men Without Shadows (play) 251 Menkman, R. 138 Mennekes, F. 43 Mercier, V. 254 Merewether, C. 60, 65 Merleau-Ponty, M. 34, 38–9, 45, 93–4, 98, 128–9, 264, 279n6; blind man’s stick 38, 93–4; the Other 279n6; phenomenology 34; and Sartre 98, 128, 264; things themselves 38–9; time 45 messianic 106n4, 112, 116, 118, 198, 200, 267 metamorphosis 37, 48, 53, 74, 78, 154–5, 190, 200–2

metaphysics 10, 43, 97, 111, 201, 254 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 3 Meyer, D. 74 Meyerhold, V. 182 Mignonneau, L. 25 military research 7, 10, 18, 68–71 Millerman, J. 105 minimalism 23, 36, 43 Minujín, M. 23 Mion, R. 160 Mitchell, K. 252; Happy Days 252 mixed reality 145, 147 Mixed Reality Laboratory 131–3; Day of the Figurines 131–3 MMK Museum, Frankfurt 26–7 Mondrian Quartet 171–4 Mondtag, E. 26–7; I AM A PROBLEM exhibition 26–7 Monk, P. 58 Monroe, M 223 monsters 27, 153, 155, 180, 197–8, 208–9, 230, 254 Montana, L. 272; Art/Life One Year Performance (or Rope Piece) 272 Montfort, N. 8 Montuori, A. 158–9 moods 9, 43, 77, 99, 147 Moorman, C. 109; The Last Nine Minutes 109 Moran, D. 47, 67, 89, 101, 105n4, 144, 159–60 Moravec, H. 144 Moreau, G. 181; Europa 181 Mori, M. 231 Morris, C. 25 mortality see being-towards-death Mosley, P. 45 mothers 43–4, 84, 89, 129, 134, 257 Mr. Fool Wants to Move the Mountain 愚公移山 (story) 253 Mr. Robot (TV) 15 Mullins, A. 275; Cheetah Legs 275 multi-identities 225–8 Mumford, L. 195 Mundy, J. 217 Munroe, A. 63; Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World 63–4 murder 15–16, 20, 40, 134, 160, 196, 205, 218, 238 Murdoch, I. 11 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles 58

Index  317 Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 233 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York 23, 217–20, 272 Mussolini, B. 223 My Way (song) 224 Nagasaki 10, 71 Nannucci, M. 29; New Times for Other Ideas, New Ideas for Other Times 29 NASA 109 Nasher Prize 3 Nasher Sculpture Center 3 National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC 24 Nauman, B. 23, 26; I AM A PROBLEM exhibition 26; Information exhibition 23 Nausea (novel) 11, 35, 89, 101 nausea 9, 11, 35, 67, 77, 89, 101, 159 Nazism 5, 45, 99, 105–6n4, 123, 128–9, 251, 267 negative entropy 4, 130, 122, 220, 262 negative feedback 11–12, 41, 75–6, 183, 220 nervous system 34, 46, 76–7, 108, 190, 263 Neuendorf, H. 64 Neuman, J. von 4, 48, 71, 118; second wave cybernetics 48, 118; solipsism 118 neural networks 38, 76, 258 Neuromancer (novel) 33n8, 198 New Alchemy: Elements, Systems and Forces exhibition 37 New World Encyclopedia Contributors 145 Nietzsche, F. 4, 9–11, 16–17, 19, 38, 57, 80, 97–8, 100, 106n4, 112, 126, 128, 144, 161, 180, 189, 193, 208, 230, 248–9, 251, 261, 274, 279n5; anarchism 100; eternal return/ recurrence 193, 248–9, 274; The Gay Science 247–9; herd 10; identity/ self-creation 144, 208; influence on others 19, 98; shepherd parable 11; slave morality 38, 127–8; Thus Spake Zarathustra 11; Űbermensch (Overman) 98, 230, 251; The Wanderer and His Shadows 249; The Will to Power 100, 112, 180, 189, 230

Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering performances 25 Nitsch, H. 110–11, 139; Orgies Mysterien Theater 110–11; Tempting Failure Biennial of Performance Art and Noise 138–9 No Exit (play) 77, 251, 261 noise i, 4, 23, 48, 63, 73, 75, 137–9, 148n2, 206 nomadism 19, 98, 201 non-conformism see conformism Norbert, W (pseudonym) 178 Norman, D. 132 nothingness i, 4, 9–13, 40, 42–3, 47–8, 59, 80, 89–90, 100–1, 118, 128, 149, 152–3, 160, 206, 227, 247, 251–2, 267, 274 Nunes, M. 139, 264 Obadike, K. 217; Blackness for Sale 217 Object Oriented Ontology 38–9 Obrist, H. U. 109 obsession/obsessed 13, 15, 20, 33, 57–8, 74, 93, 106n4, 114, 126, 163, 206–7, 254, 260, 266, 269–70 Oiticica, H. 23, 26 On the Beach At Night Alone (film) 14–15 Onfray, M. 101 Ono, Y. 104 open and closed systems 22, 24–5, 38, 63, 79, 109–12, 133, 147n1, 185, 273 open relationship (Beauvoir and Sartre) 5, 113–14 Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 exhibition 24 Oppenheim, D. 23, 28–9; Device to Root Out Evil 28; Information exhibition 23; Lightning Bolt Men 28–9; Reading Position for Second Degree Burn 28 Orestes 128 organism(s) 8, 18, 23–4, 35, 37, 46, 53, 89, 92, 108–12, 116, 127, 133, 144, 148n2, 200, 204, 220, 234, 241–2, 262, 266, 274, 277 original project see grand project ORLAN 30, 181–2, 185, 187, 238; The Reincarnation of St ORLAN 181–2; Self-Hybridization 181 Ortega y Gasset, J. 132, 208

318 Index Ortega, R. 244, 247–8, 253; Re-enactments Mexico City 2000 247–8; Rehearsal 1 (El ensayo) 244–5; When Faith Moves Mountains 253–4 Other, the 30, 40, 78–80, 84–92, 115, 118, 120–1, 123–4, 128, 147, 229, 233–4, 240 Ott, H. 105n4 output(s) 6, 41, 46, 63, 70, 74, 76, 136, 140, 191, 220, 253, 258 Outred, F. 26 Outsider, The (novel, aka The Stranger) 16, 40, 133–4, 222 outsider(s) 16, 28, 40, 66, 86, 133–4, 211, 222, 238, 258, 270 outsourcing authenticity (Bishop) 96 Oxford English Dictionary 32n2 Ozark (TV) 15 Paik, N. J. 21, 25, 46, 109, 126, 182; ‘Art and Satellite’ 109; ‘Cybernated Art’ 25; Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) 25; Electronic Superhighway, TV-Moon / Phasenvershiebung 46; The Last Nine Minutes 109 Paladini, V. 182 Palais de Tokyo gallery, Paris 237 Palestine Liberation movement 98 Pannaggi, I. 182 Parker, C. 54, 66; Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 54 Parkview Museum, Singapore 28–9 parody 37, 116, 195, 217–18, 223, 230 participatory art 1, 30, 33n7, 58, 107–48, 217–18, 242, 247, 277 Pask, G. 6–8, 21–2, 24, 102, 139, 148, 264; artworks 8, 21–2, 148n2, 264; The Colloquy of Mobiles 22; as polymath 24–5 patterns 1, 37, 49, 68, 70–1, 76–7, 80, 130, 161, 191–3, 204, 207, 213, 219, 277–8 Peake, M. 252 Pearlman, E. 180 Peng Y. 30, 59–66; 天使 (Angel) 58–9; 体儿 (Body Link) 60; 老人院 (Old People’s Home) 60; 一个或所 有 (One or All) 61; 犬勿近 (Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other) 62–4; Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World exhibition 63; Freedom 65

Penny, S. 185; Petit Mal 185 performance art 28, 30, 36, 108, 111–12, 138–9, 178–202, 208, 238, 266, 272–4 Performance Studies International Conference 143 performativity 8, 53, 183, 219, 228, 234, 260–1, 278n1–9n4; in cybernetics 8, 183, 260–1; in Existentialism 260–1, 279n5 persistence of vision 56 Pezzack, H. 88 Pfohl, S. 18 Phelan, S. E. 260 phenomenology 9, 19, 34, 48–9, 93, 108, 115, 118, 140, 146, 159, 242, 260, 279n4 Philon of Byzantium 76 Photoshop 181 Picasso, P. 250, 256n2; The Death of Casagemas 256 Pickering, A. 7, 11, 25–6, 98, 100, 104, 136, 183, 193, 208, 242, 260, 263, 265, 270 Pindar 196 Pinter, H. 13 Piper, A. 23, 30, 32n5, 208, 218–20; Everything #2.8 218; Everything #6 218; Information exhibition 23; Mythic Being 219; Safe #1-4 219; Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady 219; Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features 219; What Will Become of Me 218 Piscator, E. 155 Plastique Fantastique 27 Plath, S. 251 Plato 47, 68, 130, 261–2 Player Piano (novel) 178 Ploeger, D. 75, 190–3 Pocock, M. 236 Poe, E. A. 49–51 politics i, 5–6, 10, 13, 17, 19, 59, 61, 63, 67n1, 70, 72, 95–106n4, 111, 116, 120–1, 123, 128–30, 157, 164, 181, 193, 199, 201, 203, 206–8, 211–12, 217–20, 223, 225, 230, 238, 247, 249, 257, 263, 265, 263–8, 270, 275–6 Pollock, J. 11 Polt, R. 4 posthuman(ism) 14, 17–18, 32n4, 57, 74–5, 92–3, 95, 141, 144, 191, 204, 274–6, 278

Index  319 presence (and absence) 10, 13, 43, 79, 89–90, 99, 136, 147, 190, 250 Presley, E. 224 Preston, J. 209 Price, S. 22 Priest, S. 40 Primavesi, P. 118 Private Museum, Singapore 80 Project Cybersyn, Chile 102–4 Proudhon, P. J. 100 Proust, M. 167, 254 psychiatry 8, 104, 193, 227, 257, 265 Psycho (film) 54–6 psycho-plastic space (Josef Svoboda) 155–7 psychoanalysis 13, 239 psychology/psychological 6–7, 10, 41, 55–6, 63, 86, 93, 114, 153–4, 166, 169, 175–6, 199, 218, 225–7, 236, 262, 267 Punt, M. 227 Quinn, M. 53–4, 66; Self 53 Rabbi of Prague 93 Rabinowitz, S. 109; Hole in Space 109; Satellite Arts Project: A Space with No Geographical Boundaries 109 Raford, N. 275 Rainer, A. 27; Cadeveri 27 Rainer, Y. 23, 25; Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering 25; Information exhibition 23 Raines, H. 32n2 Ramin, L. von 260, 279n4 Ratio Club, London 6–7 Rauschenberg, R. 11–13, 25, 217; Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 11–13; Homage to New York 217; Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering 25 Read, H. 101 Reassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire 98 reference value 63, 75, 152, 266 regret(s)/no regrets 14, 20, 99, 249, 252, 254 Reichardt, J. 21; Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition 21–2, 24, 33n6, 184, 191, 217 relational aesthetics 36, 107–8

religion 79, 113, 128, 130, 144, 174–5, 203, 209, 214, 249–50 Rembrandt van R. 53 responsibility 9–10, 14–16, 28, 38, 40, 43, 45, 77, 99, 101, 110, 112–13, 129, 145, 205, 242, 262 Rey, E. 114 Reynolds, J. 19, 38, 78, 84, 90, 118, 240 Rheingold, H. 225 Ribas, M. 180 Richter, G. 32n5 Rid, T. 25, 196–7, 269, 279 Rinaldo, K. 25 Rinder, L. 86, 88 Ringley, J. 30, 88–90; Jennicam 88–90 ritual 110, 180, 199, 214, 216, 241–2 robots/robot artworks 6, 8, 15, 21, 24, 69, 72, 77, 91–5, 101, 159–60, 170, 172, 175, 178, 182–9, 196–200, 204–5, 230–2, 250, 258, 265, 275–7 Roget, P. M. 56 Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (film) 20 Rope (film) 172 Rosenthal, N. 20 Roszak, T. 98 Rothko, M. 250 Rothman, J. 99, 105–6n4 Round House, London 104 Rousset, D. 98 Royal Academy, London 20–1 Royle, N. 174, 229, 232, 255–6 Rozario, R. de 80 Ruf, T. 26 Ruggiero, G. de 32n1 Rusha, E. 23 Russell, B. 70 Russeth, A. 1–2 Russolo, L. 63, 138 Saatchi Gallery, London 61 Sabatini, F. 13 Sade, M. de 97 Sadler, S. 49 sado-masochist relations 38, 128, 188 Salem-Wiseman, J. 105n4 Salvo, D. de 24, 121 Sandman, The (story) 276 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 12 Sánchez, C. V. 44 São Paulo Biennial 272

320 Index Sartre, J-P. i, 4–6, 8–11, 13–14, 16–17, 19–20, 26, 32n3, 34–5, 38, 40, 42, 45, 47, 51–2, 58–9, 77–83, 85–7, 89–90, 92, 95, 97–101, 107–8, 112–15, 118, 124, 128–9, 132–4, 141, 144–6, 150, 159–60, 178, 185, 188, 190, 197, 202, 206–9, 211–12, 214, 234, 236, 240, 251–2, 257, 259, 261–5, 270, 274, 278; absence and presence 89–90; anxiety/anguish 10, 47; atheism 89; authenticity/good/ bad faith 14, 16, 82, 159, 212, 263; and Beauvoir 5, 79, 113–14, 265; Being and Nothingness 9, 11–12, 17, 42–3, 59, 77–8, 89, 90, 99, 114, 128, 146, 160, 190, 274; being-for-others 8, 38, 78–9, 92, 118, 124, 144, 262; body 77–8, 83; and Camus 133–4, 264; contingency 89, 101; (his) death 17; on death 52, 240; drugs/addiction 114, 185; ethics 32n4; Existentialism and Human Emotions 178; facticity 95, 132, 144; The Flies 11, 128, 133, 197; freedom 17, 20, 38, 128–9, 188, 240, 263, 274, 278; and Genet 86–9; grand/fundamental project 58, 209; and Heidegger 99, 128; identity/self-creation 206–9, 212, 278; Iron in the Soul 16, 40; Légion d’Honneur 129; life 5–6, 11, 17, 40, 81–3, 101, 128–9, 265; and Marcel 99–100; Men Without Shadows 251; Nausea 11, 35, 89, 101; No Exit 77, 251, 261; nothingness/negation 89–90, 206, 251–2, 274; politics 6, 97–101, 129, 133; public profile 17, 270; sado-masochism 38, 128, 188; sex 113–14; transcendence 51, 59, 144–6, 190, 234; voyeur(ism)/the look of the Other 78, 112, 118, 124; What is Literature? 19; WWII/French Resistance 128–9 satellite artworks 109, 181–2 Schechner, R. 180, 191 Scheer, E. 188 Schenck, C. 198 Schipper, S. 14; Victoria 14 Schlemmer, O. 182 Schöffer, N. 21 Schrödinger, E. 148n2 science fiction 178–202, 270, 274 scientology 270 Scorsese, M. 20 Scott, S. 13

Scott Livesey Galleries, Arnadale, Australia 189 Seaman, B. 110, 147n1 Searchers, The (film) 57–8 Second Life 187 second wave (aka order) cybernetics 7, 48, 55–6, 110, 118, 127, 139, 147–8n2, 204, 220, 255, 264 Sehgal, T. 22 self 8, 13, 16, 31, 34–5, 53, 78–80, 84, 105n4, 116–17, 125, 144–7, 153–4, 160, 176, 181, 185, 188–90, 198, 203–28, 233–4, 240–1, 252, 260–2, 268, 278–9n6; see also identity self and the Other 84, 107, 113, 118, 125, 147, 229, 233 self-creation/self-determination 4, 8, 13, 17, 20, 35, 44, 79–80, 82, 100, 110, 116, 131, 153–4, 179, 188–90, 203–28, 240, 252, 260–2, 268, 278–9n6; see also identity self-portrait 53, 83, 219, 223–4 self-regulating/self-organizing systems 7, 16, 30, 38, 53, 73, 76, 102–3, 108, 111, 123, 126–7, 130, 132, 142, 152, 212, 266, 269 selfie 80, 82–3 Sensation exhibition 20–1 separation with communion 8, 118, 120, 141–2, 144, 147, 274 Sermon, P. 30, 139–44, 229; Telematic Dreaming 139–40; Unheimlich (Uncanny) 141–4 sex/sexuality 5–6, 13, 22, 86, 89, 112–14, 116, 128, 183, 191–3, 198, 207, 209, 213, 225–6 Shah of Iran 226 Shakespeare, W. 34, 149–52, 154–7 Shanken, E. A. 1, 25, 118, 258 Shanmugaratnam, T. 20 Shannon, C. E. i, 4, 6, 40–3, 75, 136–8, 183, 197, 279n2; Boolean logic PhD 279; information theory 6, 136–8; noise 137–8; ‘Programming a Computer for Playing Chess’ 197; science fiction 197; Theseus 183; The Ultimate Machine—The End of the Line 40–1, 43, 75 Shaw G. B. 20 Shaw, B. 20 Shaw, J. 245–6; Fall Again, Fall Better 245–6 Shepherd, S. 149–52

Index  321 Sherman, C. 222–3; Untitled Film Stills 223 Shillito, C. 111–12; Hi I’m Claire 111 Shuttleworth, I. 157 Siegelman, J. 18, 49, 69–71, 93, 258, 261, 277 Sierra, S. 30, 95–7; Black Flag (Part 2) 96–7; 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People 95; 8 Foot Line Tattooed on 6 Remunerated People 95 Siew, K. L. 80 SIGGRAPH Conference 143 Simnett, M. 193; Faint With Light 193 Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore 224 singularity, the 196–8, 275 Siri 275 Sisyphus/Myth of Sisyphus (Camus) 26, 125, 193, 243–6, 248–50, 253, 262 Skrebowski, L. 23–4, 36–7, 270 slave see master-slave relations Sluga H. D. 105n4 Slyce, J. 121 Smith, A. D. 219 Smith, C. 219 Smithson, R. 23 social media 14, 32, 83, 88, 90, 102, 121, 207, 228n1 socialism 98, 102–3, 128–9; see also Marxism Socialism and Freedom 98, 128–9 Societas Raffaello Sanzio 30, 159–62; Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep 159–62 Socrates 261–2 Sofyan, L. 80 Solidaridad Obrera 101 solipsism 78, 82, 118–20, 262, 279n6 Sommerer, C. 25 Sommerville, I. 265; Dream Machine 265 Song of Myself (poem) 225 Sontag, S. 125–6 Sook, A. 53 Sorokine, N. 114 South London Gallery 215 Spectators of Suicide fanzine 251 speculative realism 38–9, 257 Speiser, A. E. 138 spiritual 32n1, 66, 92, 105n4, 113, 157–8, 199, 209, 211, 222, 225, 259, 265, 277 Spooner, C. 151 Springer, C. 198 Stalag 12D 128–9 Stalin, J. 223

Stanford Prison psychology experiment 267 Star Trek (TV) 178 Steier, F. 152 Stein, G. 90 Stelarc 30, 180, 182, 185–90, 201, 241, 243, 275–6; Ear on Arm 189, 201; Ear on Arm Suspension 189; Exoskeleton 186–8; Extended Arm 188; Extra Ear 201; Fractal Flesh 186, 188; Handswriting 186; Propel: Body On Robot Arm 275–6; Sitting/ Swaying: Event for Rock Suspension 186; Stomach Sculpture 186; Third Hand 188; Walking Head 187 Stensie, S. 183; CyberSM 183 Steyerl, H. 75 Stokes, P. A. 204–5 Stonewall ‘riots’ 223 Stoppard, T. 13 stranger(s) 43, 83–8, 111–12, 118, 121–7, 133–6, 139, 147, 231–4; see also Other, the Stratton, J. 227 Struik, D. 261 subject-object relations 4, 80, 86, 107, 110, 186, 234 subjectivity/subjectivism 45, 117–18, 128, 143, 146, 203, 240, 262 sublime, the 51, 176–7 suicide 10, 70, 114, 152, 249–51, 256n2 Sun Y. 30, 59–66; 天使 (Angel) 58–9; 体儿 (Body Link) 60; 老人院 (Old People’s Home) 60; 一个或所有 (One or All) 61; 犬勿近 (Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other) 62–4; Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World exhibition 63; Freedom 65 Sunshine, S. 100 surveillance 72, 84–5, 87, 171, 179 Survival Research Laboratories 183, 230–1; A Complete Mastery of Sinister Forces Employed with Callous Disregard to Produce Catastrophic Changes in the Natural Order of Events 230; A Cruel and Relentless Plot to Pervert the Flesh of Beasts to Unholy Uses 231; An Explosion of Ungovernable Rage 230; PigglyWiggly 230; Rabot 230; The Unexpected Destruction of Elaborately Engineered Artifacts 183, 230 Sutton, G. 250 Suvin, D. 181, 186–7

322 Index Svoboda, J. 156–8; Hamlet 156–8 Swann, T. 102 symbiosis 2, 61, 136, 144, 178, 199, 201–2, 277 synthesis 156, 158–9, 260, 274 system(s) i, 1–4, 6–8, 11, 18, 22–5, 30–2, 33n8, 34–9, 41, 46, 48, 52–3, 56, 60, 62–4, 66, 68, 70, 72–6, 79, 81, 84, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97, 102–3, 107–12, 116, 118–20, 123–4, 126–7, 130–3, 136–44, 147, 149, 151–2, 155, 159, 161, 164, 166, 179, 190, 197–8, 204–5, 211, 213–14, 216, 219–22, 228n2, 229, 232–4, 236, 240–2, 247, 250, 253, 255, 258–60, 262–4, 266–72, 275–8 Systems Esthetics (Burnham) 22–3, 36–7, 66, 270 Systems Science and Cybernetics group 264 systems theory 32–3n8, 35–6, 66, 130, 258, 270 Tamura Gallery, Tokyo 186 Tate Gallery, London and Liverpool 24, 43, 217, 247 Tati, J. 175 TC&A 240–3, 275; Disembodied Cuisine 241; Extra Ear – ¼ Scale 241; Pig Wings 241; Semi-Living Worry Dolls 275; Technologically Mediated Victimless Utopia 241; Victimless Leather—A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific ‘Body’ 243 Technocracy movement 270 Tecklenburg, N. 120, 147 telematic art/performance 139–44 Telepolis, Luxembourg 186 Temple, J. 224; The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle 224 temporality see time Terminator 2: Judgment Day (film) 198 Tessile 161; DAU 267 Texas Chainsaw Massacre (film) 223 Thacker, E. 180, 201 Thatcher, M. 212 theater 4, 8, 13, 30, 111, 114–17, 120, 141, 149–77, 179–83, 205, 220, 225, 230–1, 252, 254–5, 261 Theater of Cruelty 181, 205, 230 Theater of the Absurd 13, 205, 251–2, 254–5, 276 Themerson, F. 21 thermostat 37, 75

Thing, The (film) 187 Thody, P. 128–9, 188 Thomas, K. D. 206 Thompson, K. M. 153 thrown/thrownness 35, 116, 161, 207, 230, 252 Time magazine 6, 258 time/temporality 3–4, 11, 23, 26, 28, 41, 44–6, 50–9, 70, 75, 83, 100, 109, 115, 124, 139, 152, 155, 157, 159, 173, 175–7, 191, 193, 201, 247–9, 252, 254–5, 267, 272–4 Tinari, P. 63 Tinguely, J. 217; Homage to New York 217; Joyous Machines: Michael Landy and Jean Tinguely 217 Tomazzo G. 48 Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo 53 tools 38, 40, 71, 93, 103, 162, 166, 196, 244, 248–9, 262, 269, 273–4 torture 20, 111, 128–9, 188, 236, 251, 255 Townsend, P. 139 transcendence 17, 30, 51, 59, 79, 97, 116, 140, 144–7, 187–8, 190, 195, 198, 207, 234, 249–50, 252, 278 transgenic art see Bio Art transgression 32n4, 132, 139, 158, 175, 207, 225, 242 Trapanese, F. 160–2 Trawney, P. 105n4 Tribe, M. 217 Trinity College Cambridge University 70 Truman Show, The (film) 266 Trump, D. 14, 32n2, 207 truth 28, 32 (post-truth), 78, 99, 116, 118, 125, 129, 134, 158, 161, 205 (untruth), 205–6, 224, 237, 254, 270 Tsai, W-Y. 21 Tufts University 70 Turing test 6, 94 Turing, A. 6–7 Turk, G. 223–4; Cave 223; Che 224; The Death of Marat 223; Floater 223; Pop 224 Turkle, S. 226 Turner Prize 24, 43, 211 Tuters, M. 126 Ulman, A. 82–3 uncanny 1–2, 13, 30, 48, 57, 69, 94–5, 124, 136, 141–2, 166–7, 169, 171, 174–8, 229–33, 235–40, 247, 254–5

Index  323 Unger, C. 72–3, 75–6, 78 University of Liverpool, UK 24 unpredictability 2, 63, 130, 133, 260 Urbonas, J. 276; Euthanasia Coaster 276 Usselmann, R. 22 Ussher, A. 15–16, 81, 208, 261 utopia 6, 18, 100, 103, 107, 124, 147, 178, 193–6, 199, 226, 241, 268; see also dystopia Valk, K. 151 Vantablack ™ 48 Varela, F. J. 4, 109–10, 144, 204, 212; autopoiesis 109–10, 144, 204, 212; open systems 109–10 Venice Biennale 31, 43, 46, 238–9, 271–2 Verne, J. 178 vertigo/vertiginous 47–8, 67, 153–4, 175, 229 Vicious, S. 224; The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle 224 Victoria (film) 14 Victoria text-to-speech software 135–6 video/video art 27, 43–4, 46, 54–8, 63, 65, 72, 95, 109, 114–15, 121, 138–9, 141–2, 150, 154, 162–3, 167, 171–5, 217, 219–20, 233–7, 244, 247–8, 253, 272, 275–6 Vidler, A. 167, 176 Vinge, V. 197 Viola, B. 43–4; Nantes Triptych 43–4 violence 16, 47, 49, 54–5, 63–5, 134, 167, 205, 211, 225, 234–8, 248, 267 Virilio, P. 235–6 VJ interfaces 150, 234–5 Vonnegut, K. 178 voyeur/voyeurism 78, 86, 112–13, 118–20, 136, 167, 171, 236 Wachowskis, the (brothers) 198 Wagenknecht, A. 275–6; Optimization of Parenting 275–6 Wagner, C. 106n4 Wagner, R. 106n4 Wagstaff, S. 3 Wahl, J. 146 Waiting for Godot (play) 173, 252, 254–5 Walsh, J. 43 Walter, W. G. 4, 6, 8, 102, 170, 183–4, 193, 204, 258, 265; anarchism 102, 193; E-Wave and EEG breakthrough

193; robot tortoises/Machina Speculatrix 6, 170, 183–202, 258; stroboscope experiments 265 Ward, C. 102 Wardrip-Fruin, N. 8 Warhol, A. 32, 114–17, 182, 214; Kitchen 114; Screen Tests 114; Sleep 114 warnings against technology 74–5, 164–6, 196–7, 274–7 Warren, A. 218 Warwick, K. 144 Watson, S. M. 275 Wayne, J. 57–8 Wearing, G. 121–2; Confess all on video. Don’t worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian … 121; Signs that say what you want them to say not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say 121–2 Weaver, W. 136–7 webcam 88–90, 126, 130, 135 Wechsler, M. 209 Weems, M. 162–6; Master Builder 163; SUPER VISION 162–5, 174 Wei Qing 275 Weil, S. 98, 125–6 Wells, H. G. 178 Westacott, E. 249 whirlpools 49–51, 278 Whitechapel Gallery, London 25 White Cube gallery, London 53 White, N. 30, 197–8; Them Fuckin’ Robots 197–8 White Tiger, The (novel) 20 Whole Earth Catalog, The 268–70 Wicker Man, The (film) 223 Wiener, N. i, 4, 6–7, 10, 17–18, 25, 37, 46, 49, 68–72, 74, 76, 88, 93–4, 98, 130, 147n2, 170, 178, 183, 190, 196–7, 258, 261, 264, 268, 270, 274, 277–9n2; AA (anti-aircraft) gun 68, 70–1, 88; automata 93; Cybernetics book 17, 46, 72, 98, 170; FBI 71–2; human nervous system 76; The Human Use of Human Beings 178; life 17–18, 68–72, 258, 261, 264; and McCulloch, Warren 98; military research 10, 17–18, 68, 70–2; nature 49, 278; negative entropy 130; Palomilla/moth-bedbug robot 69, 183; politics 71–2, 98; public profile 17, 270; ‘Relativism’

324 Index 94; and Russell, Bertrand 70; science fiction 178; ‘A Scientist Rebels’ 71; time 46; and Turing, Alan 6–7; warnings against technology 74, 274, 277; whirlpools 49, 278; Yellow Peril report 70–1 Wieninger, J. 252 Wiharso, E. 223–4; Self Portrait 223–4 Williams, F. 145–6 Wilms, A. 170–4; Eraritjaritjaka 169–77; Or the Hapless Landing 170; Max Black 170 Wilson, M. 208 Wilson, R. 46; 20:50 46 Wilson, S. 143–4, 185, 230 Winfrey, O. 228n1 Wire, The magazine 191 Wirth, M. 275; ARTIFICIAL TEARS. Singularity & Humanness—A Speculation 275 Wiseman, E. 43 Wolf, B. 178 Wong, S. 80 Wooden, I. M. 219 Woods, N. 141–4 Woolford, K. 183; CyberSM 183 Wooster Group 30, 149–52, 164, 267; Hamlet 149–52 World War I 10, 79, 97, 133

World War II 7, 10, 17, 32n1, 45, 88, 97–9, 128 Woycicki, P. 152 X, Malcolm 218 Xenakis, I. 25, 191 YBAs (Young British Artists) 20–1, 51–4 Yeats, W. B. 162 Yeo, C. K. 80 Yolles, M. 139 You, Other; I, Another exhibition 80 Young, A. 21 Young, D. 37 Young, J. F. 270 Zapp, A. 141–4; Unheimlich (Uncanny) 141–4 Zeeuw, G. de 148n2 Zhenqing, Gu 63 Zimbardo, T. 109, 139 Zinoman, J. 164 Zinovieff, P. 22; Music Computer 22 Zivanovic, A. 184 Žižek, S. 153, 201 Zurakhinsky, M. 211 Zurbrugg, N. 190 Zurr, I. 240–3, 275; see also TC&A