Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
cybernetic art was shared by a number of artists, many of whom
were connected with the various groups corralled under the banner
of the 'New Tendency', which included the original participants
who exhibited at the 'Nove Tendenije' show in Zagreb in
, Group
Zero in Germany and the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV)
from France, among whose members was Jean Tinguely. Uniting
these groups was an interest in making objective, rational and
scientific art, which eschewed lyricism and subjectivity. Cybernetics
was important in these endeavours as both the basis for practical
work, and as the basis for a scientific theory of aesthetics.
1961
technology and the avant-garde
At the same time as artists were beginning to experiment with the
possibilities of technology, writers such as Marshall McLuhan were
considering its effects and possibilities. In particular McLuhan
looked at the transformative power of media technologies. Through
a number of topics, most notably
The Gutenberg Galaxy
,
24
Under-
standing Media
,
25
and
The Medium is the Message
,
26
he explored how
the development of successive media alters human relations with
the world. McLuhan was interested in the developments in media
technology that altered the human relationship with the environ-
ment, regardless of the message any medium might convey, or, as
he most famously put it, 'the medium is the message.' He was inter-
ested in the changing distributions in the ratio of the human senses,
as in, for example, the shift from an aural to a visual culture that
was concomitant with writing and, more emphatically, with print-
ing. With the coming of electronic media such as television he saw
a return to an oral paradigm and the emergence of what he famously
called the 'global village', a world linked by electronic communi-
cations. An important influence on McLuhan, a devout Catholic
convert, was the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French
philosopher-theologian. Teilhard's ideas were informed by scientific
