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aided methods of Oulipian literary production. But the important
issue here is less that members of OuLiPo used computers and
more that their work, computer-aided or not, directly anticipated or
articulated methods and practices relevant to a world increasingly
mediated by information and communications technologies. Again,
like many of the other movements described above, their importance
is increasingly acknowledged, not least in the proliferation of Web
sites dedicated to their work.
cybernetics and art in europe
Most of the work discussed above neither used computers (other
than, at most, as a tool) nor referred explicitly to computing tech-
nology or its associated ideas. Their importance for digital culture
is the degree to which the ways of thinking and doing they offered
anticipated the more general issues of a culture mediated by such
technologies. But, at the same time, some artists began to show an
active interest in computing, Cybernetics and Information Theory,
as sources of inspiration for both subject matter and method, as well
as actual means. Curiously perhaps this was, at least at first, a largely
European phenomenon. Jack Burnham, a critic and curator with
a particular interest in the relationship between art, science and
technology, suggested in
that Europe was a decade ahead of
the United States in its appreciation of the implications of Cyber-
netics for art. 19 In Britain for example it had a marked effect. In the
1950
1968
s the Independent Group, whose members included Eduardo
Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull
and Alison and Peter Smithson, looked to the United States for
alternatives to the combination of English parochialism and Euro-
pean avant-garde seriousness that prevailed in the arts at that
time. America offered glamorous images of prosperity, as well as of
the benefits of advanced technology and science that contrasted
starkly with the austerities of a post-war Britain. Cybernetics and
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