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associated more readily with the grimy world of industry than with the lofty
realms of high art; they lack the static and quasi-eternal quality of paintings
and sculptures, foregrounding processes of becoming and emergence instead;
as discussed before, interactive artworks tend to dissolve the primacy of the
artist, thematizing real-time interplay between artwork and “user” (rather
than “viewer”); they also threaten the social demarcation between artists and
engineers; and, of course, they need more and different forms of curatorial at-
tention: a sculpture just stands there, but machine art requires technological
servicing to keep it going.
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In this sense, the marginality of machine art, including cybernetic art, is
just the other side of the hegemony of modernity, and what calls for more
thought is the move toward cultural centrality of works like the Colloquy.
But this is no great puzzle. In earlier chapters we have seen many examples
of crossovers fostered by an ontological resonance between cybernetics and
the sixties counterculture, and that the Colloquy briefly positioned Pask in a
sort of countercultural artistic vanguard can, I think, be similarly understood.
Strange art hung together with novel forms of life in many ways.
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The other
side of this connection is that, as I said earlier, cybernetic art went down with
the countercultural ship and very quickly lost its presence in the art world.
“Cybernetic Serendipity might be considered the apogee of computer-aided
art, considered as a mainstream art form. . . . [But] the late 1960s were both
the apogee and the beginning of the end for . . . the widespread application
of Cybernetics in contemporary art. . . . Cybernetic and computer art was
[after the sixties], rightly or wrongly, regarded as marginal in relation to both
the traditional art establishment or to avant-garde art practice” (Gere 2002,
102-3).
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After the sixties, then, “Kinetic, robotic, cybernetic and computer art prac-
tices were largely marginalized and ignored. With the odd exception . . . no
major art gallery in Britain or the United States held a show of such art for
the last 30 years of the twentieth century.”
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“But this does mean that . . .
other kinds of art involving technology did not continue to be practised,”
even if they no longer commanded the heights of the art world (Gere 2002,
109,110). Much of the contemporary art discussed in chapter 6 under the
heading of hylozoism—by Garnet Hertz, Eduardo Kac, Andy Gracie—is
robot art, though I focused on the biological element before. Simon Penny's
work is at the Paskian engineering end of the spectrum.
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And these names
are simply a random sample, examples that I have happened upon and been
