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struck by.
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Beyond these individual efforts, however, we can note that some
sort of institutional social basis for this sort of art has also been emerging.
Charlie Gere (2002, 110) mentions the Ars Electronica Centre and annual
festival held in Linz, Austria, since 1979 as a key point of condensation and
propagation of such work, and also that having directed the Linz festival from
1986 to 1995, Peter Weibel moved to direct the Zentrum für Kunst und Medi-
entechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, itself a “highly funded research
centre and museum dedicated to new media arts.”
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As in previous chapters,
here we find traces of the emergence of a new social basis for cybernetics and
its descendants, now in the sphere of art, not within mainstream institutions
but in a parallel social universe (echoing the ambitions of Trocchi's sigma
project).
And to round off this line of thought, it is instructive to think of the career
of the British artist Roy Ascott, whom we encountered in the previous chap-
ter as the man who first introduced the musician Brian Eno to cybernetics.
Ascott was the leader in Britain in introducing cybernetics into art, having
first encountered the field in 1961, reading the works of Ross Ashby, Nor-
bert Wiener, and Frank George (Shanken 2003, 10). As head of foundation at
Ealing College of Art, he introduced the Ground Course (1961-63), focused
on cybernetics and behaviorism, which “fundamentally affected the work of
those who taught it and of their students” (Stephens and Stout 2004, 31, 41).
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Despite his influence on British art in the 1960s, Ascott has been “largely
ignored by the British art establishment. The Tate Gallery . . . does not own
any of his work. He has, however, achieved international recognition for his
interactive work, and his teaching” (Gere 2002, 94). Indeed, in 2003 Ascott
became the founding director of a novel pedagogical institution called the
Planetary Collegium, “a world-wide transdisciplinary research community
whose innovative structure involves collaborative work and supervision both
in cyberspace and at regular meetings around the world.” Those altered states
and technologies of the nonmodern self we have been discussing also loom
large in the collegium's self-description:
The Planetary Collegium is concerned with advanced inquiry in the transdisci-
plinary space between the arts, technology, and the sciences, with conscious-
ness research an integral component of its work. It sees its influence extend-
ing to new forms of creativity and learning in a variety of cultural settings. Far
from eschewing the study of esoteric or spiritual disciplines, it seeks to relate
ancient, exotic, even archaic knowledge and practices to radically new ideas
emerging at the forward edge of scientific research and speculation, and thereby
