Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3. The Digital Avant-garde
art and cybernetics
As the last chapter showed, the post-war era saw the development
not just of digital binary computers but a number of discourses
and ideas, which together would come to define and determine
our current digital culture. These included Cybernetics, Informa-
tion Theory, General Systems Theory, Structuralism and Artificial
Intelligence. Though the emergence of these various discourses
neither determined, nor were determined by, the invention of digital
technology, they shared many of the same concerns and would
become increasingly bound up with the ongoing development of
computing. Something similar can be seen in the arts. After the
War a number of artists and composers made work and developed
ideas that dealt with similar concerns, albeit expressed through very
different means. Among them were John Cage, Alan Kaprow, Ray
Johnson, members of Fluxus and others involved in Performance
and Mail Art, the Nouveau Réalistes, Isidore Isou and the Lettriste
movement, those involved with the experimental literature group
OuLiPo, and Kinetic and Cybernetic artists and theoreticians such
as Roy Ascott, David Medalla, Gordon Pask, Nicolas Schöffer and
Hans Haacke. The work these artists were doing reflected the
concerns of a world in which information and communications
technology and related concepts were becoming increasingly impor-
tant. This involved exploring questions of interactivity, multimedia,
 
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