Reflections on Art, Science and Technology

Artists’ Essays

Marga Bijvoet
Content:

Marga Bijvoet, Introduction

Marga Bijvoet , “Between Science and Nature”

Originally as: “Science Between Nature and Art,” in: Natural
Reality, Artistic Positions between Nature and Culture, Ludwig
Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen 1999, pp.76-85

Gyorgy Kepes, “Toward Civic Art,” Leonardo, Vol. 4, No. 1,

1971, pp. 69-73

Jack Burnham, selected items from: “Notes on Art and

Information Processing,” Software, Information Technology: Its
New Meaning for Art, Jewish Museum, New York, 1970, pp. 10-14

Paul Ryan, “Cybernetic Guerilla Strategy,” Radical Software,

No. 3, 1971, pp. 1-2 (incl. “Attempting a Calculus of Intention,”)

Nam June Paik, Selected Citations

Bill Viola, Selected Citations

Robert Morris, “keynote address,” Earthworks: Land

Reclamation as Sculpture, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA 1979,
pp.11-16

Agnes Denes, Art for the Third Millennium – Creating a New World
View, lecture
Revised version of an article published for Leonardo: Agnes Denes,
“Environmental Artwork, Visual Philosophy and Global Perspective,”
Leonardo, Vol. 26, No. 5, 1993, pp. 387-395

David Dunn & Woody Vasulka, Digital Space: A research

Proposal”, ARS ELECTRONICA 1990, Virtuelle Welten, Band II, Linz,
pp.268-275.
 Marga Bijvoet

Introduction

This internet publication contains a selection of essays and statements by

artists from the mid sixties to the nineties. The sequel is set up chronologically
to give the reader an insight into their interdisciplinary interests and influences
of disciplines beyond the arts at the times, and how they filtered into their
writing and their art works. They also set a frame for the exchange of ideas and
scientific and technical collaborations.
The theoretical background for this selection is formed by my former
publication, Art as Inquiry (1997), which constitutes an essential reference

According to the inherent capacities of the internet, we may add new articles or
hitherto unknown articles to enhance understanding of the underlying
developments and changes. I have therefore chosen for an open ending.

During the sixties there was a major upsurge in writings and statements by
American artists. Many set out to describe the ideas behind their own works
out of discontent with current art historical and art critical comments. A
smaller group went beyond that and tried to place their work in a larger
theoretical context, whereas a few artists sought a completely different
approach to art altogether.
In Art as Inquiry I have tried to describe and interpret the contextual
developments that took place from the sixties onward in two major art
directions: video - media art, and environmental - public art. The discontent
with the marginalization of the arts -- at least this is what artists thought had
happened -- was one of the reasons that led to an expansion of its formal
boundaries. The interdisciplinary ventures which followed in its wake led to
new concepts of art placing it in a more public ‘real world’ context. For,
collaborative projects with non-art disciplines were seen as one objective to
achieve a new more social function for the arts.
As described in the book, two main types of art where this direction found an
outlet were video art and environmental art; the first developing into projects
for television or community related ones, or computer-based works, the latter
growing into the art in public places which was defined as site-related and
site-dependent sculptural work. Both directions were from their onset in the
late sixties very much inspired by developments in science and technology.

Among the sciences that exerted an exponential influence in general were the
Systems Theory, originally developed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and
Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics.
By the early seventies their concepts had not only spread to various
disciplines within the scientific community, their infiltration was furthered
by the numerous practical technical appliances. As far as Cybernetics was
concerned, it entailed such discoveries as positive and negative feedback in
video technology, as well as the developments in computer and
communication sciences. Their linguistic terminology had become common
knowledge through popular publications. Can it be a surprise that a visual
arts community seeking new modes of expression felt attracted by these
sciences that represented the new scientific developments, in particular as
they promised interdisciplinary options to artists working in technologically
experimental fields. Among the much cited publications are Ervin Laszlo,
Introduction to Systems Philosophy, 1972, and Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics.
Or: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) and
his The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

We find their concepts in the writings of Gyorgy Kepes, Nam June Paik
and Paul Ryan. In particular the books of Kepes deserve re-reading. Kepes
was well informed about current scientific theories. Being in touch with the
foremost scientists of his time, he was able to exchange thoughts and ideas
about related developments in both the arts and sciences, and presented them
in exhibitions The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), Explorations
(1970), and publications (such as his VISION and VALUE Series)

The new media were theoretically sited and explained by the much quoted
(although often misunderstood) Marshall McLuhan. In particular Marshall
McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) gained a
broad reputation. To these theoretical considerations came practical
resources, such as the famous Bell Telephone Laboratories, where Billy
Kluver facilitated access and was able to turn the (at first little) interest of
engineers and technicians into a number of creative collaborations with
artists.
Collaborations with engineers (camera, sound, editing etc.) at public
television stations like WGBH, Boston or WNET, New York were just as
important practical resources. Nam June Paik, among many others, made
some productions for them. Paik’s theoretical expositions about new media
and their future at large were also inspired by the writings of Wiener and
McLuhan.

Soon, concerns about environmental issues began to appear in their writings

too. Ecology was gradually becoming accepted as a serious science. The
publications of the Club of Rome (1971), for instance, contributed to this
effect in no small way. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1964) impressed
many artists. Not to forget the first Earth Day in New York in 1970, where
Paik participated and made one of his documentations using the relatively
new portable video camera.

Paul Ryan already published on his early environmental, ecological concerns

in Radical Software. This magazine featured contributions of many
disciplines, ranging from physics, anthropology, psychology, to art theory.
Interdisciplinary exchange, as related to the new technological developments
and in particular the new communication media, was high on the agenda.
The artists’ contributions were mainly by video artists, like Paul Ryan, Frank
Gillette, and Ira Schneider. In retrospect, Radical Software can be considered
representative of the visions and ideas that reigned among ‘media artists’.
Also the publications of Jack Burnham have proven seminal, even if he
may not have thought so at some point. (John G. Hanhardt, Video Culture,
1986) Early on he saw the relations between the radical changes that took
place in the art world during the sixties, when artists took to experimental
media that were predominantly characterized by their non-object, non-
precious, ephemeral or temporal qualities, and the interest in the scientific
theories of systems analysis and cybernetics.
For instance, Hans Haacke had been working with natural and biological
processes or a few years when he met Burnham, and both artists / writers
began to exchange ideas which led Haacke to interpret his work in terms of
systems, and Burnham to see the future development in the arts being from
the object d’art to système d’ art.

There also was another aspect involved: the exchange of ideas with, and
investigative collaboration with engineers and scientists, occasionally
leading to new discoveries and unusual applications of a technology, not
intended before.
Some artists now perceive their work as inquiry, or investigation, if not as
“scientific” or “science”. Woody Vasulka and Steina Vasulka have
described some their early works as such. Agnes Denes already called her
work “investigations” during the sixties.

In addition, this kind of collaboration changed the role of the artist from
within. Collaboration means sharing of ideas, and the artist is no longer the
sole inventor of his work. Thus, occasionally the final object, or product, was
no longer an authentic art object, even.
The location to put these ideas into practice was the public environment at
large. After having gone into the desert to make their marks, a number of
land and earth artists returned to the urban and industrial environment at
large. Although some would see the proposals of Robert Smithson (1971/2)
(reclamation of deserted surface mines) as the beginning of this
development, or even earlier the mound projects of Herbert Bayer (1955) at
Aspen, Colorado, basically the “movement” can be said to have been given
major impetus with Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture in Seattle,
Washington, 1979. The essay of Robert Morris presents us a “keynote” on
the state of affairs at the time.

The subsequent change from monumental public sculptural object to an art in

public places taking into account a whole array of elements related to the site
is among others represented by the works of the work of Helen Mayer
Harrison and Newton Harrison, Alan Sonfist, Agnes Denes, or Lloyd
Hamrol, whose early initiatives stand out in having played a major role in
further theoretical and practical developments during the eighties and
nineties of the last century. Theoretically, Robert Irwin’s attempt to define
this kind of public works in the distinct typology of site-dominant, site
adjusted, site-specific, and site-conditioned or site-determined, still pertains
in many art writings.
An important aspect in these writings presents us with a view of
interdisciplinary collaborations as practical solution to achieve a new
function of public and media art.
The projects of these artists show the move away from studio work made
individually and presented in galleries and museums, to large
interdisciplinary public projects, including the design of urban planning and
land reclamation of former industrial locations left wasted, or the
rehabilitation of natural habitats. Following the overall interest which
developed in the environmental sciences and its related ecological
movement, and among certain political parties, also environmental and
ecological issues have therefore become an integral aspect of inquiry within
the context of the projects.

In the mean time the scientific and technological interests of those artists
seemed to shift somewhat. As far as technology was concerned, new
computer and communication media could now be adapted or introduced
almost immediately. As far as science was concerned, – never before so
specialized – it was something else. Yet, among a small group of scientists,
mainly physicists, there was a keen interest in eastern philosophies, where
they thought to have found ideas that showed remarkable congruencies with
their own discoveries, especially in quantum mechanics, chaos theory, fractal
geometry, etc. It became known as the New Physics. One notion that filtered
into popular thinking was that of the holographic paradigm, to the extent that
it began to lead a life of its own in terms of meaning, which did not have
much in common any more with the scientific concept. It was these notions
that also interested artists (and with them the public at large). Publications of,
for instance, Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics, David Bohm’s Wholeness and
the Implicate Order, or James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on
Earth - to mention just a few! - were widely read among artists. (Quite a
few artists from that time practice some kind of meditation, even are
practicing Buddhists.) And recent studies of the brain which leave the
concept of its functioning as a computer and now perceive it as a neural
network, i.e. a living organism, have in particular interested Bill Viola. The
media works and writings of Viola are an example involving all these aspects
woven into a multi-layered complex of meaning.

The selection of essays and quotations that I have chosen to republish in this
internet publication intend to present the reader a view over the important
contextual and operational change which took place in the arts of media and
environment during the second half of the twentieth century, a change which
almost could be called a change in paradigm; from the first video art toward
the new media art forms, and from the old monumental public art toward the
new kind of site-specific art in public places. As far as content and meaning
is concerned, they hopefully also reveal some of the patterns and paths by
which artists follow related interests in contemporary scientific discoveries
and philosophical ideas of these decades.
It is quite a small selection, indeed. However, I believe they give the reader
an idea about the technological and scientific interests that existed among
these artists, and how they sought to incorporate certain ideas into their art.
Hereby my sincere thanks to those who gave their permission to republish
their articles, thus making this publication possible.
 1

Marga J. Bijvoet

Between Science and Nature

Whoever crosses our mind when we think of artist-scientists - he (and

increasingly she) is standing in the shadow of Leonardo da Vinci. Famous for
his paintings, he was also an ingenious master-builder, especially in the fields
of hydraulic and mechanical engineering, architecture and military equipment.
Now, after a period of 500 years wherein artists, technicians and scientists have
gone different ways, we again encounter the combination the artist-scientist
and artist-engineer; although still a rare breed and mostly found in "technical"
or "environmental" fields of art. Collaboration between artists and specialists
of other disciplines has become relatively normal for public art works. The
works of art developed in this context are often characterized by their
investigative nature – not to be confused with science proper. Whether
coincidental or not, both aspects can be found in the work of a number of
artists who participate in the exhibition: scientific inquiry combined with
environmental concerns. (See my Art as Inquiry, 1997)

Mel Chins Revival Field, for example, is based on a collaborative venture with
an agronomist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and sets out to
examine to what extent different plants are able to absorb toxic substances.
Similarly, Georg Dietzler’s project Qyster Mushroom eats Toxic Residues -
Selfcomposting Laboratory Unit for the Detoxification of Earth containing
PCB involves the work of scientists whose data from soil analysis are part of
the art. Bettina Pousttchi’s Pulse uses the knowledge of micrography employed
in medical laboratories. Sculptress Eve Andrée Laramée collaborates with bio-
geographer Duane Griffin. Alan Sonfist, and Helen Mayer Harrison and
Newton Harrison started to work with scientists of various disciplines way
back in the seventies. Research has become integral to their work; it is an
essential aspect in understanding the content and purpose of their projects,
which is what they have grown to become.

Although the natural sciences and the humanities developed in – one could
perhaps say - opposite directions since the 16th century, the visual arts never
quite gave up attempting to bridge the gap. For, regardless of the increasing
specialisation and individualization since the Renaissance, artists, scientists and
technicians maintained the exchange of ideas and technical inventions and
processes in many fields. Where as relationships between architecture,
literature, music and the humanities were often direct, and of a personal kind,
contacts between the fine arts and natural sciences became mostly indirect,
mediated by methods and techniques. It was going to take time, however, until
the social character of these technically and scientifically mediated relations
would find its long awaited outlet again.

During the first half of the 20th century, one could still describe the
relationships between art and science as follows: artists took up the current
scientific theories and related technologies, by using newly introduced
industrial materials like steel, glass, plastics, synthetic colours, and the
accompanying techniques of construction that came with them into art.
Institutions like the Bauhaus supplied a platform for exchange between art and
industry. As a matter of fact, it was the Bauhaus that became itself a major
laboratory for industrial design and new architectural forms, at first in
Germany and later on in United States with the general purpose to bring art and
life closer together again, i.e. by making the aesthetically beautiful object
available to a larger public.
Artists like Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg or Kazimir Malevich are known
to have been familiar with the discoveries of Max Planck in the field of
elementary physics, and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Yet, their
interest and interpretation moved at once on a metaphysical level. The artists
philosophized and speculated about space and time, about non-Euclidean
geometry, and the Fourth Dimension in one breath. (Linda Dalrymple
Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern
Art, Princeton 1983)
The Realist Manifesto of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner (1920) shows that
their attempts at opening up the three-dimensional sculptural form and the
introduction of mechanical movement into their work, that certain essays by
Mondrian and van Doesburg in De Stijl (1919/20) were inspired by the
physical and mathematical theories of a ‘space-time-continuum’ and
discussions on ‘n-dimensionality´.
The scientific paradigm that was formed in the first decades of the nineteenth
century announced itself – partially intuitively – as abstraction in painting,
making the illusionist depiction of nature of less and less interest for the art
avant-garde. This enormous change occurred only slightly later than the
introduction of mathematics in the sciences, upon which it is now completely
based. When the sciences continued to research a non-visible subatomic reality
in the structure of matter in a rising science quantum theory, art strived to find
its invisible reality behind nature as metaphysical abstraction.

During the sixties the relationship art, science and technology began to change
once again. Also now, the view of nature as interpreted by researchers played
an important part. Interestingly, it was systems theory and cybernetics with
their new terminology that took a leading role. Their discovery was timely
indeed, as the new technologies of computer and communication were
introduced around the same time and spread so rapidly that we cannot imagine
living without them any longer. (Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, New York
1948; and The Human Use of Human Beings, Boston, MA 1950)
Terminology like positive or negative feedback, randomness (like random
access), open and closed systems, infiniteness, etc., having a very specific
meaning in these respective sciences, had filtered into our daily language by
the early seventies; and self-evidently into the language of art. Here they
obtained their own meaning, like in other non-scientific disciplines. Robert
Smithson, who severely criticized contemporary art writing for the use of
biological references, adopted words like indefiniteness, or randomness to
describe new movements in articles like Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of
Space, 1966; A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, 1968)
Jack Burnham perceived the developments in the visual arts as moving from
“objet d’art to système d’art”, for instance. (Jack Burnham, Systems Esthetics,
Artforum 1968)

Hans Haacke was among the first group of artists who projected biological
systems into their works. He even described his projects in terms of biological
systems. Haacke, who is known today mainly for his social criticism and
economic analysis of the art system, experimented with biological processes in
the early sixties, both inside and outside, using natural and artificial conditions.
He grew grass and rye under museum lamps to see it wilt at the closing of the
exhibition, he studied the freezing and melting of water drops on a rope.
Haacke released tortoises, or transplanted moss to watch the growing processes
under various conditions. The experimental character of this work has been
compared to scientific research. For Haacke, however, there was never a doubt:
his motives were to make art, therefore his work was to been seen as art.
(Edward F. Fry, Hans Haacke: Werkmonographie, Cologne 1972)

Technological progress – in particular as represented in the new media of

information and communication technologies - was hailed by the art
community as well. A brief “art and technology movement” (1968-1971)
captured many an artist to experiment with alternative media like video, laser,
computer, holography, and so on. The technological experiment paralleled the
dissatisfaction with, and functioned as an alternative to, the commercial art
system. The technologically based work replaced the art object for the
temporary ephemeral installation. Earth art, land art, conceptual art, body art
and performances belong to the same stream of events, in trying to change
traditional modes of production. Basically, the visual arts followed the patterns
of the social and political upheavals of the sixties.
However, it remains to be seen whether the “crossing of the boundaries of art”
toward the inclusion of the environment at large has changed the position of
the art system that much. In general, the seventies autonomous artist working
with natural materials or new technologies principally did so as an act of
personal self-realization.

The most important distinction that was offered by the Art and Technology
Movement was its goal to search for collaborative opportunities between artist,
technologists / engineers and scientists. The willingness to work collaborative
instead of alone in the studio, to share and exchange ideas that would filter into
the final project is what distinguishes the future media artist from his/her
colleagues. In a sense, systems theory, promoting interdisciplinary
collaboration among different scientific disciplines and the interdisciplinary
oriented cybernetic technology, come together in the engineer or scientist
working together with the artist. May be there was no choice. An artist who
wanted to have access to the new expensive technological products – i.e. obtain
the required knowledge – had to find a way to raise interests with the ‘other
side’, so to speak. Billy Kluver, engineer at the famous Bell Laboratories, and
Robert Rauschenberg pioneered in founding “Experiments in Art and
Technology” (E.A.T, New York 1966) an organization that set out to promote
and facilitate collaborative projects between the disciplines.

With a similar intention Gyorgy Kepes founded the Center for Advanced
Visual Studies (C.A.V.S.) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(Cambridge, MA, 1967). In Europe there were similar interdisciplinary
initiatives, like the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (G.R.A.V.) and Zero.
Whereas the programme of E.A.T. aimed at practical cooperation between
artists and engineers, was Kepes guided by more idealist motives. Kepes had in
mind not only a mutual practical support between artist and scientist, but rather
the exchange of ideas and mutual inspiration.
In addition, he was convinced that artists had to take more responsibility in
society, both in urban and natural environments. In 1970, this concept of a
civic art stood in sharp contrast to the traditional production of monumental art
works. There was yet another point which would be of utmost consequences
for future development of art in nature: although agreeing in principle with the
technical and scientific progress, Kepes was well aware of the possible dangers
for the environment. Today’s vantage point places him in the vicinity of the
environmental and ecological movements, which at least the United States
have found themselves in a rather conflicting position with new technologies,
however never rejected them altogether. (Gyorgy Kepes, “Toward Civic Art,”
Leonardo, 1971)

For Kepes, the main task of a civic art involved the restoration of a natural
harmony, as he called it, between man and nature. However, one has to say that
he was not quite clear how this harmony should be envisaged. Most works of
that resulted from the various projects at the C.A.V.S. under Kepes’s
directorship belonged to the genres of kinetic, computer, concept or video art.
Only a smaller number of the Fellows were consciously guided by ecological
and socio-critical motives, like Alan Sonfist.

That the Art and Technology Movement soon lost its attraction was not only
due to the rise of the anti-nuclear protests, the Vietnam War and its use of
biological and chemical weapons, and the emerging ecological movement. For
various reasons the collaboration between artists and scientists or technologists
very often ended with the project that brought them together. In the end most
artists returned to the studio. Nevertheless the Movement can be seen as a
caesura in that it made artists become aware of interdisciplinary opportunities
to connect with and make use of when needed or intended.

The time-lapse between scientific discovery and application has decreased

immensely recently. New technology has become increasingly faster available
to a larger public. Distrust on the side of the engineers has lessened as well.
Taking all developments together, it is obviously easier for artists to connect
with engineers and specialists in various disciplines.

While Bell Telephone Laboratories, the IBM Watson Research Center, or Jet
Propulsion Laboratory have allowed artists onto their terrain for their bringing
unexpected insights into problem solving areas early on, interestingly it seems
to have become fairly normal by now for American companies to create artist-
in-residencies in their research and development departments. Also universities
have set up programmes for artists where they can use research facilities and
work with other disciplines, such as the Media Laboratory at M.I.T. (It served
as an example for the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe,
Germany.)

As regards artists who turned to ‘nature’ at the end of the sixties, or worked
with natural phenomena, such as growth, life-cycles, annual cosmic
phenomena (solstice, equinox), initially we do not find much research or
collaboration with fields outside the arts. Nature and landscape did become
became the subject of art projects, but the predominant issue revolved around
art itself; how to find a more social role for art, how to lessen the
marginalization of the artist within society.
Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria went to places far away
from ‘civilisation’ to create the excavations and markings in the desert
landscape that became known world-wide as earthworks. The Europeans
Richard Long and Hamish Fulton generally stayed closer to home and made
long walks during which they restricted their activities to a rearrangement of
stones, or sticks, of which subsequent photographs remained as the only
evidence. Fulton even just photographed what crossed his path. In Europe,
there was very little digging into the earth, and the proportions of the works
remained very small compared to those of the American colleagues.

The search for new bonding with nature, almost lost, found its expression in
the action and performance art of these years. Its motives were taken from an
interpretation of the planet as “Goddess” or images of nursing mother earth,
ancient. The revival of and new identification with traditional cults and ancient
fertility rituals is related to this research into the ‘nature’ of woman. The rising
feminism which wanted a redefinition of the role of woman in society came
into play as well. The majority of these works is anthropological in character
and dealt with the exploration of old myths and rituals. References to
“primitive” and archaic civilizations abound, such as the old American-Indian
tribal cultures or the Australian aborigines, who regard the earth as a living
organism and animals as beings that should to be treated like us. The earth as
part of an organismic concept of the universe, was revived within this concept
of art, to gain significance in society as well. For, in the late seventies a
“holistic” model was developed in the sciences, which was popularized quite
quickly, as we will see below.
Ana Mendieta has for instance pointed to the connection between the
“violated”, “raped” earth or nature and woman in a number of ritualistic
performance works. This also applies to Joseph Beuys whose natural
philosophy sought to re-harmonize mankind with nature. It represented the
focal point for his “erweiterter Kunstbegriff” / “extended view of art”, and
“soziale Plastik” / “social Plastic”.

In science the concept of Gaia was developed by James Lovelock, which stood
in opposition to the empirical-determinist model, i.e. the generally accepted
Cartesian mechanist universe. Lovelock’s concept saw the universe as “self-
organized”, and called it “Gaia Hypothesis”. Another theory (of
morphogenetic fields) in this direction was developed by Rupert Sheldrake.
However marginal these models might seem within the scientific industrial
establishment, they present a world view which has lived a shadow existence
since the Renaissance, in trying to replace the view of nature as inert or
inanimate with that of a living earth. A “qualitative” science protests against a
science based on quantity and directed at the “mechanization of the world”,
which philosophy is the control of nature in order to justify, said simply,
industrial exploitation and ecological devastation.

The predominant view of the ecological movement – that Western

industrialization was thrown nature off-balance - has meanwhile led to a
scientification of the social criticism as put to the fore by organizations like
Greenpeace. A comparable professionalization can be observed in environment
related forms of art. The ecological art activities of the early seventies have
changed into art projects based on scientific research and available new
technologies.
In the United Slates artists started projects restoring natural environments,
devastated by surface mining for instance. Earthworks: Land Reclamation as
Sculpture (Seattle, 1979) – one of the first initiative of this kind – gave artists
an occasion to develop ideas in respect of particular zones designated as
problem areas needing restoration. Robert Morris’s Johnson Pit #30 and
Herbert Bayer’s Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks were chosen for
implementation.
At this point we need to refer to some earlier concepts concerning the recovery
of wasted land of Robert Smithson. (1971) Smithson made some proposals to
mining companies to do a reclamation project. Yet Smithson’s intention was
not so much the restoration of the landscape into a natural nature, and his
proposals never saw the light of day. In 1979, the interests of Morris and Bayer
had moved towards recreating the landscape in an aesthetically beautiful
environment, and one accessible to the use of a larger public.
Smithson’s scientific interests were in particular the fields of geology,
crystallography, and thermodynamics. Entropy constituted a key element
connecting these sciences. To him it was not only applicable to nature but to
the visual arts and art theory as well. Entropy is the red line throughout his
oeuvre. It was also a major reason why he preferred industrial fallows and
wasted land: here one saw entropy at work best. Robert Smithson seemed to
have been aware of the ecological movement. Yet he never participated in what
he considered a kind of mother earth hysteria. To him collaboration with the
industry brought the advantages he envisioned for artists to get involved in new
tasks.

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison were among first artists who gave
to their work with natural processes the character of inquiry, and began to
collaborate with specialists in the field for that purpose. The early exploration
of self-generative life cycles, such as those on the Sri-Lankan crab together
with the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, has meanwhile extended into expansive
and interdisciplinary landscape restoration proposals. They involve the
collaboration with biologists, ecologists, climatologists, city planners,
community politicians, and so forth. Beyond the mere collection of data, their
inquiries comprise the exchange of ideas and discussions. It even constitutes a
major part of the work, and the artists call it “conversational drift”. These ideas
are subsequently reflected in drawings and drafts, upon which apart from the
functional and scientific aspects always comes an overlay of metaphoric and
symbolic meaning in the form of a narrative.
In Europe, the Harrisons have participated in presenting concepts for the brown
coal fallows left by surface mining in the Leipzig / Bitterfeld region. The four
types of endangered meadows on the roof of the Kunsthalle in Bonn were in a
second phase, transplanted to the Rhine meadowland or ‘Auenlandschaft’.
Central to their multifaceted concerns is the wish to make a contribution to the
existence of this planet Earth.
Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscapes are based on climate and biological
examinations of earlier types of vegetation of a region. Its recovery, taking into
account the changes in climate, geology of biology, as well as current cultural
and social conditions, is the aim of these projects. Nancy Holt, who started her
artistic career as a photographer, and has made one major desert earthwork,
decided to work in the field of public art solely, and has by now designed
complete parks, mostly in connection with city rehabilitation projects working
together with landscape architects, environmental planners, astronomers
(always) and other specialists necessary. The ecological component of Sky
Mound - a web of mounds, paths and steel posts aligned to the sunrise and
sunset of the equinox in spring and autumn at the site - is the construction of a
methane gas system which supplies the community with energy gained from
the organic waste dump upon Sky Mound is located.

These developments would not have been possible without the infrastructure of
municipal and state-run art commissions and the system of public and private
support in the United States. Until recently, large interdisciplinary projects
have been very difficult for artist to get implemented in Germany. For
Documenta 7 at Kassel (1982), Joseph Beuys had to establish the financial
concept and organization to find sponsors for the planting of his 7,000 Oaks all
by himself. In 1982, the existence of an art commission such as the one in
Hamburg was still an exception. Even so, Beuys’ Gesamtkunstwerk Freie und
Hansestadt Hamburg (1983/84) for which he intended the planting of trees and
shrubs on the Altenwerder Spülfelder to detoxify the soils, was never realised
because of political intervention.

The new art in public places unlike the traditional infamous art-at-buildings
programmes, is truly an art of public spaces. It does not suffice to situate a
sculpture in a park or on museum grounds any longer. The object standing by
itself as monument or decorate the space is not wanted any more. The new art
in public places is defined by its relationship to the site. It takes into
consideration multiple aspects of this site. As a consequence, inquiries into the
conditions of the future location of a work may involve looking into the social
and urban components, cultural aspects, ecological and biological
requirements, existing urban planning, discussions with the community and
politicians, budgeting, and so on have become a logical part of the planning
beforehand, before any design and production can be thought of.
Interdisciplinary collaboration with (landscape-) architects, city planners,
industrial-designers is a matter of fact.
Today, most cultivation and reclamation projects have a ‘green’ ecological
component. Artists are expected to be informed about the state of scientific
knowledge regarding biodiversity or ecology, and if not, are expected to seek
the cooperation of a specialist in the field. Agnes Denes’ North Waterfront
Park (Berkeley, California) and Patricia Johanson’s Endangered Garden (San
Francisco, California) are large interdisciplinary projects for which the re-
naturalization of whole areas with ecosystems of a multifarious plant and
animal world are planned. Reiko Goto’s and Tim Collins’ projects presume a
through investigation of the urban ecosystem together with environmentalists
and town planners.

Sometimes this inquiry makes an essential contribution to science, but

naturally the artists do not intend just to create clean and functional solutions to
problems. For Beuys, the planting of the trees in Kassel, and the planting of
shrubs and other kinds of fauna to detoxify the Altenwerder Spülfelder in
Hamburg were a means to an end: his underlying motive was the signal effect
which should go hand in hand with transformation of social and political
conditions. Certainly – in harmony with his “extended concept of art” – Beuys
used the aesthetic and conceptual options which were at disposal in order to
make his contribution to the improvement of the quality of life on earth.

** Originally published in Natural Reality, Artistic Positions between Nature

and Culture, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen 1999, pp.76-85
Slightly revised version.
Copyright © Marga Bijvoet
 2

Gyorgy Kepes

Toward Civic Art

Individual artistic imagination is neither self-generated nor self-contained; it

belongs to the larger environmental field of nature and society. Its role and its
strength constantly change, for the artist’s responses are in a certain constant
relation to the changing human conditions that generate them. The imaginative
power of the artist, in its luckiest moments, creates models of sensibility and
feeling that will enable all of us to live the fuller, richer life possible at this
time in an ever changing world. Today, artists, like the rest of us, face a
profound crisis brought about by the increasingly dynamic complexity of our
social fabric. Meeting its challenge requires their fundamental reorientation in
order to probe, scan, discover, absorb, change and re-edify their surroundings.
This imperative refers not only to the exploration of new tools and media –
creating new idioms – but also to the exploration of new ways in which the
work of art and the public can come together.
This necessary process, I believe, is now taking place. Art is
outgrowing its traditional limitations. The artistic forms have increased in size.
The isolated, sheltered, limited space of a room at home or in the galleries or
museums has proven claustrophobic for many dynamic, explosive
explorations. Today, the strain is no longer limited to the physical, spatial
dimension but includes the conceptual realm as well. Thus, exhibition, the
traditional medium used to create communication between the work of art and
the public has had to be questioned. It has been questioned in all its
implication. An exhibition, as an anthology of individual work and personal
achievements, no longer seems to me a force in the new sense of life that
motivates creative expression.
Artists, even more than other men, have been displaced persons in this
convulsively changing modern world. Their images, ideas, and confidence
have been attuned to an older world, smaller, slower, quieter – a world they
could deal with directly and endow with meaning and quality. Few have been
able to deal with the new world that has burst upon them.
Artists’ links with their own past, with other men, and with their
environment – the very source and basis of their art – have eroded as the
proliferating scientific, technical and urban world transformed society, the
physical environment that housed it and the web of folkways, customs, thought
and feeling that gave it shape and structure.
It is hard to make contact with this apparently uncontrollable new-scale
world, so big, strange and explosive. Some artists with courage made an
attempt to do so but few could so much as establish a foothold. The extended
world revealed by science exhibited unfamiliar vistas of phenomena and
concepts: things too big to be seen, too small, too hidden; ideas too evasive to
grasp – sub-nuclear particles, the indeterminacy principle, computers and
transistors, lasers, pulsars, DNA and inorganic crystals that could change into
organic viruses and back again. Few of these were accessible to the ordinary
human senses or were capable being related to the human bodies that men use
to find their bearings.
The wildly proliferating man-made environment shrank living space,
polluted air and water, dimmed light, bleached color and relentlessly expanded
mass, dirt, noise, speed and complexity. The changing society exploded with
problems on an immense scale: ecological disasters, social tragedies, eroded
individuality, confused and impoverished human relationships. The expanding
vulgar realm of mass communication and commercial entertainment deadened
sensibilities and was as inane in meaning as it was sophisticated in technology
and aggressive in its destruction of privacy and leisure. Life and art were
separated from each other; and both seemed torn loose from their common
social foundations.
Aldous Huxley’s comment that by mistreating nature we are
eliminating half of the basis of English poetry is an understatement. The world
around us – the luminous, mobile wonders of the sky, the infinite wealth of
colors and shapes, of animals and flowers – is the core of all our languages and
is basic to our sensing of quality and meaning in life.
It is symbolic of our situation that in the 1968 meetings of the United
Nations the subject discussed with the deepest concern was the devastation
produced in our precious earth, sea and air by reckless manipulation of
technological power.
Some artists were like distant early warning systems of the human
condition today. They read the signs of coming ecological and social disasters
early and with full grasp. They saw the illusion and the degradation at the
height of complacency in the last century over what was believed to be the best
of all possible worlds. Their confident understanding of the sensed qualities of
living structure would not permit them to accept the nineteenth-century
mechanical models of scientific analysis as an adequate framework for the
breadth, freedom and self-variation of life and art. We were not unwarned
about the lethal consequences of the wholesale devastation of the natural
landscape. With the first blows of industrialization in the opening years of the
nineteenth century and the appearance of belching chimneys and mountains of
slag, the poet Blake cried out against the ‘dark Satanic mills’ that had defiled
‘England’s mountains green’ and ‘pleasant pastures’. He was joined by fellow
artists and poets in a chorus of angry protest but light in the industrial
landscape continued to gray with soot and rivers to turn brown with sewage.
William Morris summed it up over a century ago by writing: ‘It is only
a very few men who have begun to think about a remedy for it in its widest
range, even in its narrower aspect, in the defacements of our big towns by all
that commerce brings with it, who heeds it? Who tries to control their squalor
and hideousness? … Cut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull down
ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of
London dirt will fetch; blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with
smoke and worse, and it’s nobody’s business to see it or mend it: that is all that
modern commerce, the counting-house forgetful of the workshop, will do for
us herein … Yet there are matters which I should have thought easy for her;
say for example teaching Manchester how to consume its own smoke, Or
Leeds how to get rid of its superfluous black dye without turning it into the
river, which would be as much worth her attention as the production of the
heaviest of heavy black silks, or the biggest of useless guns’(1. The Collected
Works of William Morris (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966) Vol. 12, p.
24)
Yet only now, what may well be the very last moment, have we begun
to turn our minds toward solutions. There are more tragic and more hurtful
aspects still. Who with clear eyes and honest mind can deny the urgency of
resolution of the inhuman blight of our contemporary cities? Some of us hardly
dare to walk with our heads up, knowing and seeing how men mistreat men.
Many of us are tortured by our impotence to act to counteract the destruction
of what is best in man. The aborting of the quality and sometimes the very
basis of lives because of narrowness, prejudice and vested interests is the
shame of all of us. Though people in increasing numbers recognize the
urgency of finding means to redirect our collective suicidal life, for the time
being we are carried along by the momentum of our destination. We continue
to develop ever more powerful tools and equipment without having the sense
of values that tell us how to use them.
The problems of our time compel us to question all basic assumptions
of the previous generation. Current history calls upon us to adjust ourselves to
change faster than men have ever needed to in the past. Each new phase of
development, each new bit of knowledge, each new technological power has
intensified the continuing struggle between the old inherited guiding concepts,
feelings and attitudes, and the new requirements of reality. Dickens began his
tale of the French Revolution with the following sentence: ‘It was the best of
time; it was the worst of times.’ This comment fits no better time than our
own. Every age, no doubt, has an option between a good and a bad life. Every
age has a spectrum that ranges from suffering to fulfilment but none has
presented these options with so sharp a contrast as our own. Like the men of
every age, we have alternative potential futures. But today these alternative
futures range from a concrete promise of richness, quality and security of life
that men could never have dreamed of before to the menace of a destruction
that could wipe out everything mankind had accumulated, everything that it
values.
We seek equilibrium, the optimum condition possible in our
circumstances. Individually and collectively men are self-regulating systems.
In order to achieve our goals we must learn to proportion our efforts or flow of
efforts to the flow of return information. In order to achieve these goals, we
need an understanding of the reality of the goals and must allow our sensors or
abilities to scan life’s circumstances and to gather the data required by our
recognized tasks. An engineer who designs a self-regulating system must learn
to synchronize error and correction in order to avoid ‘hunting’ – excessive
oscillation about his target point. Every purposive movement is composed of
two processes, not one; their symmetry in action is the measure of the success
of the process. Central to a self-regulating system is the notion of feedback, or
to express it more generally, interdependence. We have not found the right
method of self-regulation. The good life, the maximum realization of the
intensity, quality and gross potential of individual lives to which all of us
aspire, is achieved when we find a balance with minimum hunting – a
minimum of human suffering and wasted energy of helpful relevance for all of
us. For this we need an acute awareness of interdependence. In other words,
we need a social standard based upon full cooperation between man and man,
and between man and nature.
 The most eloquent display of our frantic search for a resolution may be
found in the antics of twentieth-century artists. The vehement, erratic,
continuous transformation of artistic idioms, the changing morphological
dimension, the continuous shifting of the rules of the game in expressive
artistic form-making, are characteristic of the contemporary arts. What is most
significant is that the artist’s search is not only characterized by the repeated
redefinition of artistic idioms but also involves basic changes in the artist’s
frame of reference, his existential stance and his basic assumption concerning
the meaning, the role and the purpose of art. After thirty or forty years of soul-
searching concerning the language of art, the artists of today are questioning
more than the means by which to express themselves. Today there are not only
art isms, there is also a basic confrontation between art and anti-art or no art.
But the forces that are rending art and society are, I believe, not less
than the forces that are bringing them together. Artists are key men in a
reorientation that seems to be taking place; they seem to be regaining their
long lost role of cultural leadership. Paradoxically, the displaced persons of
yesterday are beginning to look like Moses figures who will lead us into a
Promised Land. After a long period of ‘hunting’, their homeostatic processes
of automatic regulation have shifted to relationships in which they are
beginning to regulate; the artists will indeed find solutions to their problems
provided they base their rich responses firmly on an uncompromising sense of
life as a whole – a passionate solidarity with humanity and with the natural and
man-made environment.
During the past two decades, some of the more speculative minds
among scientists have focused fresh attention upon the old idea that biological
and social evolution are closely linked, with intercommunication playing the
same role in social evolution that interbreeding once played in biological
evolution.
Today we are in a critical stage of the human phase of evolution.
Evolution is becoming self-conscious and we have begun to understand that
through social communication it is within our intellectual and emotional power
to come to better grips with our existential reality. Our future, good or bad,
depends upon how clearly we understand and how well we control the self-
regulating dynamic pattern of our common existence as it moves into the
future.
To coordinate our efforts it is necessary to agree on objectives. To agree
on objectives it is necessary to reach a better common understanding of
‘reality’.
What I call reality here is neither absolute nor final. Rather, it is itself an
evolutionary process, as Charles Sanders Peirce had recognized some seventy
years ago: ‘What anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to
be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends upon the
ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is only by virtue of
its addressing a future thought, which is in its value a thought identical with it,
though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on
what is to be hereafter; so that it only has potential existence, dependent on the
future thought of the community’(2. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce, ed. C. Hawthorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1931-1935))
 Awareness of the dynamics of evolutionary continuity and our capacity
for self- transformation by inter-thinking has opened up rich wide new
perspectives. Our potent new tools, both conceptual and physical, contain
within themselves an important aspect of these perspectives. For, the more
powerful devices we develop through our scientific technology, the more we
are interconnected, interacting, interwoven with each other, with our machines,
with our environment and with our inner capacities. Each new tool of vision
that science and technology prepares for us opens up a new landscape that
compels us to see in its interconnectedness that the farther we can travel and
the faster we move, the more we see, understand and learn about other parts of
the world and other people’s lives. The more sensitive and embracing our
feelers of vision, hearing and thinking become through radio, television and
computer technology, the more we are compelled to sense the interaction of
man and his environment. Our new tools of transportation, communication and
control have brought a new scale of opportunities to inter-thinking and inter-
seeing; the condition of a truly embracing participatory democracy.
The ‘common’ realm, as we may name our shared body of thought and
feeling, is a generator of human creative powers. The vital arts of this moment
of time are converging upon this realm. They are guide by a growing new
sense of the structural principle of interdependence. They are beginning to
accept interdependence personally, professionally and ecologically - which is
to say, in a balance that modern man so urgently needs to establish with the
total of his environment. The artist’s current work - it is not too much to assert
in consequence – exhibits growing optimism, strength and authenticity. It
looks toward a future art scaled to the expanding scientific-industrial-urban
world and revealing it latent richness.
Artists are finding in our environmental landscape a new material of
plastic art, a potent source for creative objectives. Some of them dream of
moulding gigantic artistic structures carved from the earth, resting on the
ground, flying in the sky, floating in the ocean, that are themselves
environments.
Cutting through suffocating cultural isolation, many of them have
crossed disciplinary lines, and joined hands with scientists and engineers. This
collaboration has made available to them the creative tools for imposing
technical sophistication: computers, lasers, complex electronic devices and
also the tools for tasks of gigantic dimensions. A centuries-old discarded
framework for the artistic process has thus been revived in the newest
evolutionary step in the development of the artistic community. In becoming a
collaborative enterprise in which artists, scientists, urban planners and
engineers are interdependent, art clearly enters a new phase of orientation in
which it prime goal is the revitalization of the entire human environment – a
greatly-to-be-whished-for climax to the re-building of our present urban world.
This developing, embracing vision of artists, we may hope, is prophetic
of a new world outlook pervaded by a sense of continuity with the natural
environment and oneness with our social world. This oneness is something we
long for, a lost paradise of the human spirit. Some of us, at rare lucky
moments, have had the feeling that everything fits together and makes sense,
that the world is right and full of promise.
Contemporary anthropology, psychology and applied science all bring
us converging messages that the evolutionary key to the resolution of major
disturbances in our individual and common lives rests in achieving a
harmoniously functioning human ecology, a state in which we recapture on the
high level of today’s advanced cultures something of the union of man and his
surroundings achieved by earlier and more primitive cultures. We know that
the new unity to be sought between man and man, and between man and his
environment and to which we may hopefully look forward will need to be
fundamentally different from that of the Taoists, pre-classical Greeks and Hopi
Indians It may well be, however, that through correct reading of our current
situation we can make effective and realistic use of our scientific competence
to project the creative insights that will midwife a new human consciousness
and weld the converging fragments of a possible future into a satisfying and
enduring reality. That reality can take on the aspect of an ‘ecological climax’, a
dwelling for the human spirit not unlike the dimly remembered Garden of
Eden from which advancing knowledge once expelled us and to which
advancing knowledge now beckons us to return.
Anthropologists, in studying early cultures, have reawakened our
senses of ecological harmony. Early man, like a modern primitive, saw himself
as an inseparable part of his group or society and his society as an indivisible
aspect of all-embracing cosmic surroundings. Natural phenomena existed only
as directly perceivable human experiences that were, nevertheless, aspects of
natural cycles or cosmic events. Each sign coming from the outside had
meaning in human terms; and each human act was considered to be an
inevitable and irreversible consequence of the happenings or events in the
surrounding natural world. In this interwovenness, there was no consciously
discerned subject-object confrontation. For us the subject-object separation is
paramount; without it no scientific knowledge would be possible. It became
central to our thinking when the ancient Hebrews demoted the Sun, Moon and
forces of nature to mere ornaments of a transcendent God who had made
everything and was above everything.
The outside world appears to us in a hierarchy of organizations,
beginning with the higher animals and descending through plants to inanimate
physical, chemical, atomic and sub-nuclear processes. For primitive man there
was no break in the spectrum of life. Life was everywhere, in men, beasts,
plants, stones and water. For the Australian Bushman, the pearly iridescence of
seashells, the sparkling of a crystal, the phosphorescent glow of the sea at night
and the sunlight caught in droplets above a waterfall are all signs of an
embracing, living thing, the basic link seen as the great snake whose body
arches across the sky in the rainbow. Everything is permeated by life.
Everything seems in contact, interacting, interliving. In the simpler stages of
human existence, on the level of children and the primitive world, the
connection with the environment is almost as intimate as the unity of the body
itself.
The experimental evidence of modern psychology gives further support
to this view. Our relations to the environment are not those of independently
functioning discrete systems but of a total organism. Whenever outside forces
impinge upon our sensors, a relative equilibrium tends to be established
through the mobilization of our entire self, regardless of what sense organ is
immediately involved in receiving and registering the impacts from the
outside. There are no separate sense modalities; all levels of sensory function
are interdependent and blend together. They are furthermore in a fundamental
union with motor processes. A dynamic perception theory in which sensory
processes are apart from motor functions is not even conceivable in modern
psychology.
Applied science, too, provides us with thought models of dynamic
interconnectedness and basic complementarity of disparate processes and
systems, particularly in such fields as computer technology, electronics, and
communication networks. Such technologies seem almost to plead to be
integrated with life and to clarify ecological disorder. For this is the realm of
the new-scale tools by means of which the making of things is automated,
astronauts rendezvous precisely in the vast ocean of space, facsimile pictures
are sent over telephones, sound becomes light and light sound, and the cycles
of nature are reversed, the darkness of night becoming another day. The
capacity of this realm to guide us, mold us and transform us is beyond
calculation.
A report published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1967 hints
at the awesome symmetry of the promises and menaces inherent in our potent
technology. Contracts were awarded to some aerospace companies for studies
of the feasibility of orbiting a huge satellite to reflect light from the sun onto
the dark side of the earth. Among the possible uses listed for such a solar
mirror were to provide artificial lighting levels greater than full moonlight for
night-time illumination of search and rescue operations, recovery operations,
security areas and polar latitudes.
Critical reaction came immediately from astronomers concerned that
the lighting of any large area of the night sky to a brightness several times that
of full moonlight could jeopardize observational astronomy. Other scientists
pointed to the possible harmful affects on the daily and yearly rhythms of plant
and animal life.
The complementarity of technological and social awareness can be
fused into unity only if we face squarely our present urgent social needs to
combat ecological disasters, further develop consciousness of social
interdependence, and build the sense of living freely according to ways in
which everything fits together.
The artists are in a strategic position to help to bring all these issues
together in a living focus. There are signs that they are ready to take on this
important role. First, they have reached out to make effective us of the new-
scale tools. Second, they are ready to participate in new-scale tasks, to take
leave of the small, suffocating spaces of rooms and exhibition galleries and to
participate in a bigger environment on a bigger scale than before. Third, they
begin to open their eyes to the present ecological tragedies. A sensibility that
subsumes a highly developed ecological consciousness will find the way to
expression of ecological tragedy, just as the sensibility of a previous day could
engage itself with great human tragedies. In one and the same form, the
tragedy of the environment can be dramatized and means can be provided to
recycle unsightly waste and convert a scene of ecological regulation into a
stirring focus of civic art. The sense of beauty and the sense of purpose – the
Patrimony of the artists – can be conveyed to others who do not quite
understand these things but who do understand almost everything else. The
great-scale tasks to be performed with the new tools need urgently to
incorporate the deepest qualities of human consciousness. This can not be done
without artists.
No doubt, we are approaching an epic age in which the emphasis will be
placed on major common obligations. There is a need for those who have the
imaginative power to discern the essential common denominators of this
complex late twentieth-century life. There is a need for those whose loyalty is
undivided, who can devote their abilities to the epic tasks. But whatever
emphasis we wish to and must put on our common goals, in the final reckoning
both the beginning and the end of action lie in individual experience. We work,
we play, we cry and laugh, we sleep and dream, we fear and hate, we make
love and, on rare occasions, we feel the single climactic glow that comes when
the distilled essences of our experiences are amalgamated into a unified
understanding. This process can occur only within the individual. But great
things would emerge if the optimum of individual experience – the artist’s
poetic insights – would become an integral part of our common life. Only the
realization of a dynamic complementarity of the personal and civic can offer
the possibility of living up to our immense potentialities.

**Originally published in Leonardo, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1971), pp. 69-73

Copyright © IASRT. Reprinted by permission.
 3

Jack Burnham

Notes on art and information processing

selected items

Software is not specifically a demonstration of engineering know-

how, nor for that matter an art exhibition. Rather in a limited sense
it demonstrates the effects of contemporary control and
communication techniques in the hands of artists. Most importantly
it provides the means by which the public can personally respond to
programmatic situations structured by artists. Software makes no
distinctions between art and non-art; the need to make such
decisions is left to each visitor. Hence the goal of Software is to
focus our sensibilities on the fastest growing area in this culture:
information processing systems and their devices.
In just the past few years, the movement away from art objects
has been precipitated by concerns with natural and man-made systems,
processes, ecological relationships, and the philosophical-linguistic
involvement of Conceptual Art. All of these interests deal with art
which is transactional; they deal with underlying structures of
communication or energy exchange instead of abstract appearances.
For this reason most of Software is aniconic; its images are usually
secondary of instructional while its information often takes the form of
printed materials. In such forms information processing technology
influences our notions about creativity, perception, and the limits of art.
Thus it may not be, and probably is not, the province of computers and
other telecommunication devices to produce art as we know it; but they
will, in fact, be instrumental in redefining the entire area of esthetic
awareness. …

“The concept of cybernetics now represents a kind of historical

snapshot, the germ of an insight expanded and modified far beyond
its origins.”…

At a basic level, Cybernetics refers to “the set of problems centred

about communication, control and statistical mechanics, whether in
the machine or in living tissue.”(1 Wiener, Norbert (1948)
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine (The M.I.T. Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2nd edition,
1961), p. 11) Wiener’s subsequent research, along with that of
many other scientists, led to a working concept that the behavior of
all organisms, machines, and other physical systems is controlled
by their communication structures both within themselves and with
their environments. Research and development in the last twenty
years has led to so many new ideas that the concept of cybernetics
now represents a kind of historical snapshot, the germ of an insight
expanded and modified far beyond its origins. In a sense, the
original purpose of Cybernetics was to produce a unified theory of
the control levels and types of messages used by men and machines
and processes in normal operation. Thus the history of computer
technology may be interpreted as progess in making
communication between men and machines more natural and
complete. This remains an ideal definition however, because quite
often in industry human beings have been adapted to inhuman
machine schedules, rather than the other way around. What is less
realized is that most businesses of any size have had to adapt
themselves, more or less traumatically, to radically different
patterns of administration and organization as the result of
information structures made possible by computer systems. So in
part Software addresses itself to the personal and social sensibilities
altered by this revolution. …

“Our bodies are hardware,

our behavior software”…

For computers, hardware components include processors,

memories, display devices, communication equipment and other
tangible computer subsystems. Software, or stored programs, has
equal value, and perhaps with future refinement of computer
systems it will be considered more important than hardware. The
concept of software includes general and special purpose computer
languages, programs such as instructional procedures, dictionaries,
and so forth. In addition to stored information, software has come
to mean for some engineers the process of systems-design itself;
thus systems procedures, from flow programming to putting
computer systems in working order, all fall under the heading of
software. Thinking in systems terms, hardware and software
interact, determining each other’s structure for a given problem.
Consequently the tendency is to think of both in unified terms….

Used in the art format, any notion of software leads one to

reconsider our historical notions of art. Normally the context of art
is painting, sculpture, or perhaps a gallery environment. Contexts
lend meaning to art works or art ideas: the “frame” the work, so to
speak. All works of art function as signs; that is they signify in
some form or other how they are operative within the art context.
Moreover, it is becoming evident that the material presences of
frames or even gallery spaces are no longer necessary for placing
signs in the art context. For sophisticated viewers, contexts are
implicitly carried over from previous art experiences. Thus many
of the exhibits in Software deal with conceptual and process
relationships which on the surface seem to be totally devoid of the
usual art trappings….

The machines in Software should not be regarded as art objects;

instead they are merely transducers, that is, means of relaying
information which may or may not have relevance to art. Visitors
to Software should have the opportunity to interact in varying
degrees with the systems at hand. In all case such “interaction”
falls short of the level of richness found in ordinary human
conversation. Yet another goal of Software is to make it clear that
art itself is a form of intermittent dialogue. We are trying to make
that sense of dialogue a conscious event….

In a very real sense the structure of a computerized society comes

in direct conflict with the Art Ideal. As Warren Brody and Nilo
Lindgren have written, using computers in a society dominated by
traditional knowledge structures is an invitation to chaos. The
writers observe that information is always defined by a point of
view, whether a favored theory, an available technology, or a social
condition. But in a world rapidly being forced to separate
information from habitual procedures, “it is not even possible to
gauge how deeply our classical concepts are rooted, until after we
have adopted the evolutionary viewpoint that regards information
as continuously being evolved from the unknown, metabolized into
meaning, and finally reconstructed into noise … Man survives as a
creature who continuously changes and evolves, a creature who
feeds on novelty, who reorganizes himself as he reorganizes his
physical world and maintains stability by this process of change.”
(³ Brody, Warren and Lindgren, Nilo (September 1967) „Human
Enhancement through Evolutionary Technology” in: IEEE
Spectrum p. 91)…

As a popular interpreter of technology Marshall McLuhan has

commented on the same evolutionary values. In The Gutenberg
Galaxy McLuhan defines machines of the nineteenth century, the
effects of mass production, and the technology of the printed book
as “homogeneous segmentation”, or the proliferation of experience
through duplication. This, according to McLuhan, is “the method
of the fixed or specialist point of view that insists on repetition as
the criterion of truth and practicality,” (4 McLuhan, Marshall
(1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy (Signet Books: New York, 1st
edition, 1969) p. 327) …

Software is McLuhan’s idea of the present environment which

cannot be art because it is not yet behind us and conceptually
codified. For many visitors there will be no “art” in the motion
pictures, conceptual displays, television monitors, computer-based
readers, and time-sharing terminals of the exhibition – mainly
because few art authorities have ever been convinced that these
could contain an art experience. These activities, however, possess
the sensory consistency of the oral tradition in pre-literate society.
Where modifications and differences lie is still uncertain, but
McLuhan has this to say about their effect upon experienced
reality: “Thus the technique of suspended judgment, the great
discovery of the twentieth century in art and physics alike, is a
recoil and transformation of the impersonal assembly-line of
nineteenth century art and science. And to speak of the stream of
consciousness as unlike the rational world is merely to insist upon
visual sequence as the rational norm, handing art over to the
unconscious quite gratuitously. For what is meant by the irrational
and non-logical in much modern discussion is merely the
rediscovery of the ordinary transactions between self and the
world, or between subject and object. Such transactions had
seemed to end with the effects of phonetic literacy in the Greek
world.” (6. McLuhan, Marshall (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy
(Signet Books: New York, 1st edition, 1969) p. 329)…

As our information storage problems expand in magnitude (along

with our statistics needs and resource management problems in
society) we are forced to confront the computer as one of the few
practical solutions. This produces a very real paradox: it appears
that we cannot survive without technologies potentially just as
dangerous as the dilemmas they are designed to solve. We might
ask ourselves if future generations of information systems will be
used with any more sensitivity than radio and television have been
up to now. Apparently once esthetics is removed from the tidy
confines of the Art World, it becomes infused with ethical,
political, and biological implications that are overwhelming but
nevertheless critical….

Against Software is not technological art; rather it points to the

information technologies as a pervasive environment badly in need
of the sensitivity traditionally associated with art. Since people will
continue to make poems and paintings without computers,
Software focuses on modes of creativity and creative assistance
which are more or less unique to the electronic age. Remembering
the Latin derivation of art, the term ars in the Middle Ages was
less theoretical than scientia: it dealt with the manual skills related
to a craft or technique. But present distinctions between the fine,
applied, and scientific arts have grown out of all proportion to the
original schism precipitated by the Industrial Revolution. Thus
Software makes none of the usual qualitative distinctions between
the artistic and technical subcultures. At a time when esthetic
insight must become a part of technological decision-making, does
such a division still make sense?

June 1970

Selected quotes from: Software, The Jewish Museum, New York,

1970, pp. 10-14
Copyright ©Jewish Museum and Jack Burnham
 4
Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare
By Paul Ryan

To fight a hundred times and win a hundred times is not

the blessing of blessings. The blessing of blessings is to
beat the other man's army without getting into the fight
yourself.
The Art of War—Sun Tzu,

Part I

Guerrilla Strategy and Cybernetic Theory

Traditional guerrilla activity such as bombings, snipings, and kidnappings

complete with printed manifestos seems like so many ecologically risky short-
change feedback devices compared with the real possibilities of portable video,
maverick data banks, acid meta-programming, cable TV, satellites, cybernetic
craft industries, and alternate life-styles. Yet the guerrilla tradition is highly
relevant in the current information environment. Guerrilla warfare is by nature
irregular and non-repetitive. Like information theory, it recognizes that
redundancy can easily become reactionary and result in entropy and defeat.
The juxtaposition of cybernetics and guerrilla strategy suggests a way of
moving that is a genuine alternative to the film scenario of New York City
urban guerrilla warfare, “Ice”. Using machine guns to round up people in an
apartment house for a revolutionary teach-in is not what the information
environment is about. All power does not proceed from the end of a gun.

We suffer the violence of the entropy of old forms—nuclear family,

educational institutions, supermarketing, cities, the oil slick complex, etc.
They are running us down, running down on us and with us. How do we get
out of the way? How do we develop new ways? This ship of state continues to
run away from its people and its planetary responsibilities, while efforts
continue to seduce us into boarding this sinking ship—educational loans,
fellowships, lowering the voting age. Where did Nixon come from anyway?
How did that leftover from the days of Elvis get to be captain of our ship,
master of our fate?

How many Americans, once horrified by thermonuclear war, are now thinking
the unthinkable in ecological terms with a certain spiteful glee of relief at the
prospect of a white hell for all?

Psychedelic my ass: Children of A-Bomb — Bob Lenox

Nobody with any wisdom is looking for a straight-out fight. We have come to
understand that in fighting you too easily become what you behold. Yet there
is no way on this planet to get out of the way. Strategy and tactics need be
developed so the establishment in its entropy does not use up our budgets of
flexibility. The efforts to enlist the young in the traditional political parties by
‘72 will be gross. Relative to the establishment and its cultural automatons, we
need to move from pure Wiener wise Augustinian cybernetics into the realm of
war game theory and practice in the information environment.

The most elegant piece of earth technology remains the human biocomputer;
the most important data banks are in our brain cells. Inherent in cybernetic
guerrilla warfare is the absolute necessity of having the people participate as
fully as possible. This can be done in an information environment by insisting
on ways of feeding back for human enhancement rather than feeding off people
for the sake of concentration of power through capital, pseudo-mythologies, or
withheld information. The information economy that begins in a guerrilla
mode accepts, cultivates, and depends on living, thinking flesh for its success.
People are not information coolies rickshawing around the perceptions of the
privileged, the well-paid, or the past. People can and do process information
according to the uniqueness of their perceptual systems. Uniqueness is
premium in a noospheric culture that thrives on high variety. Information is
here understood as a difference that makes a difference. The difficulties of a
negentropic or information culture are in the transformations: how do we
manage transformation of differences without exploitation, jam, or corruption
that sucks power from people?

I am not talking about cultivation of perceptual systems at the expense of

emotional cadences. Faster is not always better. Doing it all ways sometimes
means slowing down. Internal syncing of all facets is critical to the
maintenance of a flexibility and avoidance of non-cybernetic “hang-up” and

The bulk of the work done on cybernetics, from Wiener’s guided missiles
through the work at IBM and Bell Labs along with the various academic spin-
offs, has been big-budget, establishment-supported, and conditioned by the
relation of those intellectuals to the powers that be distinctly non-cybernetic
and unresponsive to people. The concept of entropy itself may be so
conditioned. Witness the parallel between Wiener’s theoretical statements
about enclaves and the enclave theory of withdrawal from Vietnam. One of the
grossest results of this situation is the preoccupation of the phone company and
others with making “foolproof terminals” since many potential users are
assumed to be fools who can only give the most dumb-dumb responses. So
fools are created.
The Japanese, the people we dropped the A-bomb on in 1945, introduced the
portable video system to this country in 1967, at a price low enough so that
independent and semi-independent users could get their hands on it and begin
to experiment. This experimentation, this experience, carries within it the logic
of cybernetic guerrilla warfare.

Warfare… because having total control over the processing of video puts you
in direct conflict with that system of perceptual imperialism called broadcast
television that puts a terminal in your home and thereby controls your access to
information. This situation of conflict also exists as a matter of fact between
people using portable video for feedback and in situations such as schools that
operate through withholding and controlling the flow of information.
Guerrilla warfare… because the portable video tool only enables you to fight
on a small scale in an irregular way at this time. Running to the networks with
portable video material seems rear-view mirror at best, reactionary at worst.
What is critical is to develop an infrastructure to cable in situations where
feedback and relevant access routes can be set up as part of the process.

Cybernetic guerrilla warfare… because the tool of portable video is a

cybernetic extension of man and because cybernetics is the only language of
intelligence and power that is ecologically viable. Guerrilla warfare as the
Weathermen have been engaging in up to now, and revolution as they have
articulated it, is simply play-acting on the stage of history in an a-historic
context. Guerrilla theatre, doing it for the hell of it on their stage, doesn’t make
it either. We need to develop biologically viable information structures on a
planetary scale. Nothing short of that will work. We move now in this present
information environment in a phase that finds its best analogue in those stages
of human struggle called guerrilla warfare.

Yet this is not China in the 1930’s. Though there is much to learn from Mao
and traditional guerrilla warfare, this is not the same. Critically, for instance,
in an economy that operates on the transformation of differences, a hundred
flowers must bloom from the beginning. In order to “win” in cybernetic
guerrilla warfare, differences must be cherished, not temporarily suppressed for
the sake of “victory.” A la McLuhan, war is education. Conflict defines
differences. We need to know what not to be enough to internally calculate our
own process of becoming earth-alive noosphere. The more we are able to
internally process differences among us, the more we will be able to process
“spoils” of conflict with the entropic establishment—i.e., understanding the
significant differences between us and them in such a way as to avoid
processing what is dangerous and death-producing. Learn what you can from
the Egyptians; the exodus is cybernetic.

Traditional guerrilla warfare is concerned with climate and weather. We must

concern ourselves with decoding the information contours of the culture. How
does power function here? How is this system of communications and control
maintained? What information is habitually withheld and how? Ought it to be
jammed? How do we jam it? How do we keep the action small enough so it is
relevant to real people? How do we build up an indigenous data base? Where
do we rove and strike next?

Traditional guerrilla warfare is concerned with knowing the terrain. We must

expand this to a full understanding of the ecological thresholds within which
we move. We must know ourselves in a cybernetic way, and know the ecology
so that we can take and take care of the planet intact.

The traditional concern is for good generals. What’s desirable for us is ad hoc
heterarchies of power which have their logistics down. Cybernetics
understands that power is distributed throughout the system. Relevant
pathways shift and change with the conditions. The navy has developed war
plans where the command in a fleet moves from ship to ship every fifteen
minutes. It is near impossible to knock out the command vessel.

The traditional tricks of guerrilla warfare are remarkably suited for

cybernetic action in an information environment. To scan briefly:

•Mixing “straight” moves with “freak” moves. Using straight

moves to engage the enemy, freak moves to beat him and not let
the enemy know which is which.

•Running away when it’s too heavy. Leave the enemy’s strong
places and seek the weak. Go where you can make a difference.

•Shaping the enemy’s forces and keeping our own unshaped,

thereby beating the many with the few.

•Faking the enemy out. Surprise attacks.

The business of deception in guerilla warfare is a turn off for most people in
this relatively open culture. This is simply an area that need be better
understood, if we are to be successful. People feel that concealing is unethical
publicity. Yet overexposure means underdevelopment. Many projects die of
too much publicity. There is a sense in which we are information junkies
feeding off each others unlived hope. The media repeatedly stuns the growth of
an alternate culture in this country through saturation coverage. It is hard for an
American to just keep his mouth shut and get something cooking. You are what
you reveal. The star system renders impotent by overexposure and keeps others
impotent through no exposure. Seeming different is more important than
making a difference. Deception in guerilla tactics is an active way of avoiding
control by an alien, alienating intelligence. When a policeman takes your name,
he takes over. I know a guy who is inventing another identity for the computer.
There is a virtue of mistrust and wisdom in knowing significantly more about
yourself than you reveal.

Love Thy label as thyself.

We retreat in space, but we advance in time -- Mao

•Count the cost. We need to develop an information accounting

system, a cultural calculus.

•Use the enemy’s supply. With portable video one can take the
American mythology right off the air and use it as part of a new
perceptual collage.

•Be flexible. In cybernetics, flexibility, the maintenance of a good

guessing way, is critical.

•Patience. Cybernetics is inherently concerned with timing and

time design. It is a protracted war.
 Do not repeat a tactic which has gained you victory, but shape your
actions to an infinite variety. Water sets its flow according to the
ground below; set your victories according to the enemy against
you. War has no constant aspect as water has no constant shape.
—Sun Tzu

P a r t II

Attempting a Calculus of Intention

Calculus of intention was a concept developed over many years by the

cybernetic wizard Warren McCulloch. He was in the business of brain circuits.
McCulloch felt that dialogue breakdowns occurred largely because we lacked a
logic that could handle triadic relationships. Here is his description of the
problem of the calculus of intention.

The relations we need are triadic, not diadic. Once you give me triadic
relations, I can make N-adic relations; but out of diadic relations, I
can't go anywhere. I can build strings and I can build circles, and
there it ends.
The great problem of the nervous system is the one concerning its core,
the so-called reticular formation…This reticular core is the thing that
decides whether you’d better run or whether you’d better fight, whether
you should wait, whether you should sleep, whether you should make
love. That’s its business and it has never relinquished that business. It
is a structure incredibly simple when you look at it…but the problem
that I’m up against is the problem of organization of many components,
each of which is a living thing, each of which, in some sense, senses the
world, each of which tells others what it has sensed, and somehow a
couple of million of these cells get themselves organized enough to
commit the whole organism. We do not have any theory yet that is
capable of handling such a structure. Communication: Theory and
Research, ed. Thayer Lee, 1967. McCulloch’s commentary on “Logical

I have not made a thorough study of McCulloch. That would take years. I do
not know if what follows satisfies that criterion he established for such a
calculus. I have maintained a certain organization of ignorance relative to
formal cybernetics and formal topology. In fact, what follows would not, it
seems, satisfy the kind of discreteness, one-two-three that McCulloch seemed
to want. However, such discreteness may not be necessary.

My approach stems from work with McLuhan that preoccupied me with the
problem of how to maintain congruence between our intentions and our
extensions. McLuhan talked of orchestration of media and sense ratios.
Neither cut it. Orchestras just aren’t around, and sense ratios, or sensus
communis, is a medieval model, essentially a simile of meta-touch. Gibson’s
book on the senses considered as perceptual systems is richer in description of
the process. It includes McLuhan’s personal probing ability as an active part of
the perceptual system.

While the following formulations may not in fact work as a calculus of

intention, I put them forth both because they have been exciting and useful for
me and because the calculus itself seems a critical problem in terms of
cybernetic guerrilla warfare. Dialogue degenerates and moves to conflict
without an understanding of mutual intent and non-intent. While it does not
seem that we can work out such a common language of intent with the people
pursuing the established entropic way of increasingly dedifferentiated ways of
eating bullshit, it is critical we develop such a language with each other. The
high variety of self-organizing social systems we are working toward will be
unable to co-cybernate re each other re the ecology without such a calculus of
intent.

This calculus of intention is done in mathematical topology. Topology is a

non-metric elastic geometry. It is concerned with transformations of
shapes and properties such as nearness, inside, and outside. Topologists
have been able to describe the birth of a baby in terms of topological necessity.
There is a feeling among some topologists that while math has failed to
describe the world quantitatively, it may be able to describe the world
qualitatively. Work is being done on topological description of verbs that seem
common to all languages. Piaget felt that topology was close to the core of the
way children think. Truck drivers have been found to be the people who are
most able to learn new jobs. While driving a truck for Ballantine one summer,
it became apparent to me why. Hand an experienced driver a stack of delivery
tickets, and he could route in five minutes what would take you an hour. It was
a recurring problem of mapping topologically how to get through this network
in the shortest amount of time given one-way streets, etc.

I should say that my own topological explorations have a lot to do with a

personal perceptive system that never learned phonetics, can’t spell or sing,
and took to topology the way many people seem to take to music. The
strongest explicit experience with topology I’ve had came via a painter friend,
Claude Ponsot, whose handling of complex topological patterns on canvas
convinced me that a nonverbal coherent graphic think was possible. The
following transformations on the Klein bottle—Klein forms, if you will—I
invented in the context of working with Warren Brodey on soft control systems
using plastic membranes. Behind that are three years of experience infolding
videotape. I checked these formulations with a Ph.D. topologist. He had not
seen them before, questioned whether they were strictly topological. As far as
I know, they are original (See Fig.1-6).

There are three immediate areas where I think this topological calculus of
intention can be of use: acid metaprogramming, a grammar of video infolding
and perceptual sharing, and in soft control structures using plastic membranes.

Relative to acid metaprogramming, I am not recommending LSD-25 to anyone,

nor am I endorsing Leary’s approach. I am simply looking at some of the work
that John Lilly has done and suggesting this calculus might be useful in that
context. Both in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human
Biocomputer and in Mind of the Dolphin, Lilly uses the notion of interlock to
describe communication between people and between species. In
Programming and Metaprogramming he describes a personal experience with
acid that in some way undercuts the metaphor of interlock, and to me suggests
that the klein worms might be a better way to describe the process he calls
“interlock.” Here is Lily's description of that experience, which he titles “the

Mathematical transformations were next tried in the approach to the

locked rooms. The concept of the key fitting into the lock and the
necessity of finding the key were abandoned and the rooms were
approached as “topological puzzles.” In the multidimensional
cognitional and visual space, the rooms were now manipulated without
the necessity of the key in the lock.
Using the transitional concept that the lock is a hole in the door
through which one can exert an effort for a topological transformation,
one could turn the room into another topological form other than a
closed box. The room in effect was turned inside out through the hole,
through the lock leaving the contents outside and the room now a
collapsed balloon placed farther from the self-metaprogrammer. Room
after room was thus defined as turned inside out with the contents
spewed forth for use by the self-metaprogrammer. Once this control
“key” worked, it continued automatically to its own limits.

With this sort of an “intellectual crutch,” as it were, entire new areas

of basic beliefs were entered upon. Most of the rooms which before had
appeared as strong rooms with big powerful walls, doors, and locks
now ended up as empty balloons. The greatly defended contents of the
rooms in many cases turned out to be relatively trivial programs and
episodes from childhood which had been over-generalized and
overvalued by this particular human computer. The devaluation of the
general purpose properties of the human biocomputer was one such
room. In childhood the many episodes which led to the self-
programmer not remaining general purpose but becoming more and
more limited and “specialized,” were entered upon. Several levels of
the supra-self-metaprograms laid down in childhood were opened up.

The mathematical operation which took place in the computer was the
movement of energies and masses of data from the supra-self-
metaprogram down to the self-metaprogrammatic level and below. At
the same time there was the knowledge that programmatic materials
had been moved from the “supra-self position” to the “under self-
control position” at the programmatic level. These operations were all
filed in metaprogram storage under the title “the key is no key”.
Programming and MetaProgramming. Lily, pp.42-43

Relative to video infolding, it is nearly impossible to describe in words, even

using klein worm graphs, what I’m talking about. The following will mean
little to anyone except those who have had some experience of taping
themselves at different levels.
 •Taping something new with yourself is a part uncontained.

•To replay the tape for yourself is to contain it in your perceptual

system.

•Taping yourself playing with the replay is to contain both on a new

tape.

•To replay for oneself tape of self with tape of self is to contain that
process in a new dimension.

•Parts left out of that process are parts uncontained.

•All of this is mappable on computer graphic terminals.

•At one level that of reality that is left off the tape is the part
uncontained.

•Raw tape replayed is part contained in the head.

•If it is somebody else’s tape you are watching, you can to an extent
share in this live perceptual system via the tape he took.

•To watch another’s edited tape is to share in the way he thinks

about the relation between his various perceptions in a real-time
mode. This enters the realm of his intention.

•If you are editing some of your tape along with tape somebody else
shot and he is doing the same thing using some of your tape, then
it is possible to see how one’s perceptions relate to another’s
intention and vice versa.

Relative to sharing perceptual systems, it is somewhat easier to talk about,

since there are parallels with photography and film.

The most explicit experience of this mode of perceptual sharing came in the
early days of Raindance when Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, Michael
Shamberg, and I shot twelve rolls of tape on Earth Day. Both in replay that
evening (we laughed our heads off digging each other’s tape while the old
perceptual imperialist Walter Cronkite explained Earth Day for us) and in the
edits that followed, each of us got a good idea of how each saw and thought
about the events vis-a-vis the others.

Relative to soft control systems using plastic membranes, I am thinking mostly

of the soft cybernetic work being done by Warren Brody, Avery Johnson, and
Bill Carrigan. The sense of the sacred and the transcendental that surrounds
some of the inflatable subculture is to me a kind of pseudo-mythology.
Consciousness might be better invested in designing self-referencing structures
where awareness is immanent in the structure and its relation to the users; not
by being invested in a religious way to a “special” structure that does not relate
intelligently to the users.

A Klein Worm couch is a suggestion of a possible way of moving in that

direction. It could be built of strong polyurethane, filled with air, perhaps by a
constant flow from a pump. People might interrelate kinetically through the
changes in the air pressure. Design of the actual couch could be arrived at
experimentally by combinations and transformations of the structure described
above.

**Originally published in: Radical Software, No. 3, 1971. Republished with

the kind permission of Paul Ryan, and Ira Schneider.
http://www.radicalsoftware.org/
Copyright © Paul Ryan
 5

Nam June Paik

Selected Citations (c.1965-1975)

1.
* Cybernetics, the science of pure relations, or relationship itself, has its origin
in karma. Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “Media is message” was
formulated by Norbert Wiener in 1948 as “The signal, where the message is
sent, plays equally important role as the signal, where the message is not sent.”

* As the happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the

exploitation of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences.

**From an essay written in 1965, and published by the Something Else Press,
Spring 1966.

2.
Another parallel between the two thinkers is the simulation or comparison of
electronics and physiology. Wiener’s main them was “control and
communication in animal AND machine” (note: animal comes first), which he
put as the subtitle of his main work, “Cybernetics”. He reached to the
automatic control of the anti-aircraft gun, an earliest model of today’s huge
computer, through the study of feedbacks in animals’ nerve system. Also the
binary code of today’s computer has its origin in the “all or nothing” character
of our Neuron synapses, which are either simply “ON” or “OFF”. …

Indeterminism, a core in the thought of the twentieth century from Heisenberg

via Sartre to cage, reflected also in Wiener and McLuhan. For Wiener
indeterminism was entropy, a classical terminology of statistics, and for
McLuhan indeterminism was the “cool media with low definition”. …

It is illuminating to seek the common denominator running through these

parallels. (Mix-media.. the study of media per se.. simulation of electronics and
human nerve system.. indeterminism..). Wiener used these characteristics as
the micro-form to construct the technical interior of the electronic age, whereas
McLuhan used them as the micro-form to interpret the psychological and
sociological exterior of the electronic age.

**From: Nam June Paik, Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan, Institute of
Contemporary Arts Bulletin, London 1967

3.
The real issue implied in ‚Art and Technology’ is not to make another
scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium,
which is progressing rapidly – too rapidly. Progress has already outstripped
ability to program. I would suggest ‘Silent TV Station’. ….. SILENT TV
Station will simply be ‚there,’ not intruding on other activities … and being
looked at exactly like a landscape … or beautiful bathing nude of Renoir, and
in that case, everybody enjoys the ‘original’ … and not a reproduction….

**From: Statement for TV Bra for a Living Sculpture - Nam June Paik and
Charlotte Moorman,
TV as a Creative Medium, Howard Wise Gallery, 1969

4.
World peace and survival of earth is Public Interest Number I and, needless to
say, Public Interest Number I must be Interest Number I of Public Television.
What we need now is a champion of free trade, who will form a Video
Common Market modelled after the European Common Market in its spirit and
procedure; this would strip the hieratic monism of TV culture and promote the
free flow of video information through an inexpensive barter system or
convenient free market. …

Therefore, if we could assemble a weekly television festival comprised of

music and dance from every nation and disseminate it freely via the proposed
Video Common Market to the world, its effects on education and entertainment
would be phenomenal. …

Back in 1938 Buckminster Fuller defined the word “ecology” as follows: “…

very word ‘economic’ springs etymologically from ‘ecology’ meaning the
body of knowledge developed out of the house. We stress not housing but
essentially comprehensive research and design …. The question of survival,
and the answer, which is unit, lies in the progressive sum-totalling of man’s
evolving knowledge, Individual survival is identifiable with the whole as
extension or extinction.” (Nine Chains to the Moon,1938).”

**From: Nam June Paik, Global Groove and Video Common Market, printed
in the WNET-TV Lab News, Issue #2, 1973 (written February 1970)

5.
Research into the boundary regions between various fields, and complex
problems of interfacing these different media and elements, such as music and
visual art, hardware and software, electronics and humanities in the classical
sense … this has been my major task since 1958, when I joined the electronic
music studio at West German Radio in Cologne, headed by K. Stockhausen.
For the past one year, as an artist-in-residence at WNET-TV Lab in New York
City, I have pursued this familiar and furtile terrain. Again and again Norbert
Wiener’s prophesy has proven to be valid even today. …

Computers and video are the two most powerful tools of today, said gene
Youngblood. Yet the full-fledged digital computer has not been used in any of
the video synthesizers existing today (even the one at Computer Image
Corporation). Therefore if we succeed in the fruitful interfacing of a digital
computer and video synthesizer, its effect will be phenomenal. …

Digital computer video will open up a fresh new terrain with powerful
programs which will awaken the latent desire for video art into the concrete
and conscious level, and eventually increase the jobs for video artists,
engineers and businessmen. Our research will fire a chain reaction, which will
let many other video artist-engineers move into this field, as the successful
launching of the Paik-Abe video synthesizers.

**Excerpts from: New Projects, 1972/1973, reprinted for: Nam June Paik:
Videa ‘n’ Videology 1959-1973, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
1974

6.
Heute wichtige Problemkomplexe, wie Energie, Ökologie, Ausgleich der
Zahlungsbilanz, Bevölkerungszahlen und multinationale Geschäftspraktiken
sind wesentlich globale Probleme, die globales Denken und auch eine solche
Behandlung verlangen. Das gleiche gilt für unser jahrhundertealtes Gebet um
Frieden auf Erden. Sogar vor dem Zeitalter der Kommunikation über Satellit
war das Fernsehen ein potentiell wichtiges Werkzeug für internationale
Verständigung. Es ist ein Super-Esperanto, das über Sprachbarrieren mithilfe
von metasprachlichem Ausdruck hinweggehen kann. Wieviel Gebrauch haben
wir von diesem Medium für das Werk des Friedens während der vergangenen

Bildtelefon, Tele-Faksimile, Zweiweg-Interaktionsfernsehen (für Einkäufe,

Bibliographieren, Meinungsforschung, Gesundheitsberatung, Bio-
Kommunikation, Datenübermittlung zwischen Büros und viele andere
Varianten mehr) wird den Fernsehapparat zum >expanded-media<-
Telefonsystem für 1001 neue Anwendungsbereiche machen, nicht nur für die
täglichen Bedürfnisse, sondern auch für die Bereicherung des Lebens selbst. …
Diese Mini- und Midi-Fernsehen (um Professor René Bergers Ausdruck zu
benutzen) wird sich mit vielen andern papierlosen Informationsformen
zusammentun, wie Audiokassetten, Telex, Datenübermittlung, kontinentale
Satelliten, Micro-fiches, private Mikrowellen und eventuell die optische Laser-
Trägerfrequenz. Alle zusammen werden sie die neue nukleare Energie für
Information und den Aufbau der Gesellschaft bilden. …

Die Reise-Frequenz wird zurückgehen, wenn das Bedürfnis zu reisen

zurückgeht. Was wir brauchen ist eine Ersatz-Technologie für das Reisen, und
Breitband-Telekommunikation ist der stärkste Kandidat dafür. Der Londoner
Economist, ein nicht gerade für leichsinnigen Enthusiasmus bekanntes Blatt,
machte im Januar 1974 folgende Feststellung: >Vor allem eilt jetzt die größte
der drei Transport-Revolutionen seit 1770 auf uns zu. Sie wird ganz klar die
Revolution der Verbrennungsmaschine und ebenso dramatisch die
Dampfmaschine ersetzen, und dabei ist sie außerordentlich energiesparend.
Diese große neue Transport-Revolution ist Tele-Kommunikation. Denn das
wesentliche zukünftige Werkzeug des Geschäftsmanns, der Computer, spricht
zu anderen Computern via Telekommunikation, anstatt einen Spaziergang zu
machen; ein großer Teil der heutigen Geschäftsreisen und persönlicher Reisen
zur Arbeit werden in den Hauptwachstumsberufen nachindustrieller
Gesellschaften überflüssig. Sogar schon in den 70er Jahren wird ein teil der
Reiserei ersetzt werden durch zunehmende Telex-Nachrichtenübermittlung,
Faksimile-Übermittlung durch Telekommunikation, Bildtelefon, usw. Weil es
keinen Grund dafür gibt, dass die Kosten für Telekommunikation je nach
Entfernung differieren sollten, wird gegen Ende der 80er Jahren eine ganze
Menge von Leuten täglich telekommunizieren, mit ihrem Londoner Büro,
während sie – wenn es ihnen beliebt – auf einer Insel im Pazifik leben können;
und die zeitweise Preiserhöhung für Reisen mit Ölenergie in den frühen 70er
Jahren wird ein paar dieser neuen Lebensformen jetzt voranbringen. …

Nach Professor Bell wird das Hauptgeschäft der Industriegesellschaft mit

>Produktionsgütern< in der postindustriellen Gesellschaft ersetzt werden durch
DIENSTLEISTUNG. ENERGIE, die wichtigste Industrie im Industriezeitalter
wird im postindustriellen Zeitalter INFORMATION hervorbringen. Darüber
hinaus werden SPIELE ZWISCHEN PERSONEN wichtigste nachindustrielle
Gesellschaftsformen werden – und unsere WELTANSCHAUUNG wird nicht
länger WIRTSCHAFTLICHES WACHSTUM heißen. Sondern
ZENTRALISIERUNG UND KODIFIZIERUNG THEORETISCHEN
WISSENS: Professor Bell zitiert die folgenden Kriterien weitere Züge des
nachindustriellen Zeitalters: Gesundheit, Bildung, Forschung, abstrakte
Regierungstheorie, Modelle, Systemanalysen, Orientierung an der Zukunft und
Zukunftsplanung usw.
Was ist der größte gemeinsame Nenner für alle diese Kriterien? Wieder nichts
als ein Gehirn-Amalgam von Medien, Kommunikation, Wissen und
Information, das als Substanz wirken will, Schmiermittel, Impressario und
kybernetische Wechselbeziehungen in der zukünftigen Gesellschaft herstellen
will.

**From: Nam June Paik –Medienplanung für das nachindustrielle Zeitalter

(1974
Bis zum 21. Jahrhundert sind es nur noch 26 Jahre, Kölnischer Kunstverein,
Köln/ Cologne, 1974
Copyright © Nam June Paik
 6

Bill Viola

Selected Citations

As Bill Viola’s writings and statements are generally accessible I have chosen
to put together a small series of citations serving the purpose of this internet
project, to foster further reading.
This selection predominantly states Viola’s interests in the developments of
new technologies as they are valid for his work in video, and relate to the larger
context of scientific and philosophical connotations that have inspired his work
throughout.

1.
“The spectrum of electromagnetic energy vibration that makes up the universe
at large far exceeds the narrow bandwidth, or “window” which our sensory
receptors open up to us. As philosophers through the ages have stated, the
human senses can therefore be looked on as limiters to the total amount of
energy bombarding our beings, preventing the individual from being
overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information existing at each and every
instant, Imagination is our key to the doorway of perception. The television
medium, when coupled with the human mind, can offer us sight beyond the
range of our everyday consciousness, but only if it is our desire, both as
viewers and as creators, to want to do so.”

**From: Statement, 1979

2.
“When I had my first experience with computer videotape editing in 1976, one
demand this new way of working impressed upon me has remained significant.
It is the idea of holism. I saw then that my piece was actually finished and in
existence before it was executed on the VTRs. Digital computers and software
technologies are holistic; they think in terms of whole structures. Word
processors allow one to write out, correct, and rearrange the whole letter before
typing it. Data space is fluid and temporal, hardcopy is for real – an object is
born and becomes fixed in time. Chiseling in stone may be the ultimate
hardcopy.”

“Like the figure/ground shifts described in Gestalt psychology, we are in the

process of a shift away from the temporal, piece by piece approach of
constructing a program (symbolized by the camera and its monocular, narrow,
tunnel-of-vision, single point of view), and towards a spatial, tonal-field
approach of carving out potentially multiple programs (symbolized by the
computer and its holistic software models, data spaces, and infinite points of
view). We are proceeding from models of the eye and ear to models of thought
processes and conceptual structures in the brain. “Conceptual art” will take on

“As a start, we can propose new diagrams, such as the “Matrix” structures.
This would be a non-linear array of information. The viewer could enter in at
any point, move in any direction, at any speed, pop in and out at any place. All
directions are equal. Viewing becomes exploring a territory, travelling through
a data space.”….
….”Finally, we can envision other diagrams / models emerging as artists go
deeper into the psychological and neurological depths in search of expressions
for various thought processes and manifestations of consciousness.”

**From: Will there be Condominiums in Data Space? Video 80 Magazine, Fall

1982, pp. 36- 41

3.
“My ideas about the visual have been affected by this (i.e. the understanding of
sound as material thing….) in terms of something I call “field perception”, as
opposed to our more common mode of object perception. In many of my
videotapes, I have used the camera according to perceptual or cognitive models
based on sound rather than light. I think of all the senses as being unified. I do
not consider sound as separate from image. We usually think of the camera as
an “eye” and the microphone as an “ear”, but all of the sensory modalities exist
simultaneously in our bodies, interwoven into one system which includes
sensory data, neural processing, memory, imagination, and all of the mental
events of the moment. This all adds together to create the larger phenomenon
we simply call experience. This is the real raw material, the medium with
which I work. Science has decided that it is desirable to isolate the senses in
order to stud<y them, but much of my work has been aimed at their
reunification. “Field perception” is the awareness or sensing or an entire space
at once. It is based on a passive, receptive position, as in the way we perceive
sound, rather than an aggressive fragmented one, as in the way our eye works
through the narrowing function of focused attention. It is linked more to an
extended awareness than to momentary attention.”

**From: Statement, 1983

4.
“Consciously or unconsciously, most people assume the existence of some sort
of space when discussing mental functioning. Concepts and terms for the
manipulation of solid objects are constantly used to describe thoughts, as in
“the back of my mind,” “grasp and idea,” “over my head,” “cling to beliefs, “a
mental block,” and so on. This mental space is directly analogous to the “data
space” in our first brain child, the computer, being the field in which
calculations occur and where the virtual objects of digital graphics are created,
manipulated and destroyed.”

“The science of acoustics is the study of sound in space. It assumes strong

architectural associations, because although it can be described as simply the
study of the behaviour of sound waves, sound, like light without a surface to
fall on, manifests itself at its most complex and interesting when bouncing off
solid forms, most noticeably those of man-made interior spaces. It is doubtful
that the awesome reverberations inside the cathedral had ever been heard
before by the members of the clergy. A partial list of some of the most basic
physical phenomena studied by the acousticians reads like a set of mystical
visions of nature.”

“In technology, the current shift from analog’s sequential waves to digital’s
recumbent codes further accelerates the diffusion of the point of view. Like the
transformation of matter, there is a movement from the solid and liquid states
into the gaseous. There is less coherency, but previously solid barriers become
porous and the perspective is that of the whole space, the point of view of the
air. Space without a container is the mental world of thoughts and images.
Many of the techniques of the shaman rely on gaining a masterful uncanny
control over one’s “point of view,” a realization that point of view is not
necessarily synonimous with physical position.”

**From: The Sound of One Line Scanning,

1986 National Video Festival, American Film Institute, Los Angeles 1986, pp.
40-44

5.
„It is not the point to try, and „resolve“ these apparent collisions as much as it
is to realize that they are the direct and predictable expression of a new and
unfamiliar set of conditions now in place. These conditions are not geographic,
climatic, conventional or traditional. The real ordering forces at work today
under the surface that create these seemingly jarring juxtapositions are
alphanumeric; they are informational and economic, and ultimately political.
Their ground is trans-cultural and multinational. It is only because we are still
viewing the landscape at the surface level, and don’t see that what pops up and
meets the eye in seemingly random or unrelated patterns from below is really
integrally bound together, connected and coherent, just beneath the surface. To
see the unseen is an essential skill to be developed at the close of the 20th
century.”

“We must revise our old ways of thinking that perpetuate the separation of
mind and body. These attitudes negate much of world culture’s response to the
questions of mind and being and self and, for example, deny the validity of
such things as the 2,500 year old disciplines of meditation throughout the
world, Without this approach of understanding and controlling the mind
through the body, we find that ironically one of the major problems in the West
today arises from a lack of a focused developed mind, neglected by an
overemphasis on the body as a cosmetic self-defining image detached from any
deeper function.”

“First of all, I think it important that it is no longer acceptable to scrutinize

things solely from the perspective of our local, regional, or even “Western” or
“Eastern” cultural viewpoints. We share a privileged position at the end of the
20th century in possessing of unprecedented, vast, readily available intellectual
resources gathered from around the world and from diverse histories by the
intensive labour of scholars and translators in many disciplines. Any
contemporary comprehensive assessment and analysis of a set of ideas has to
be based on its place in world culture.” … “Several millennia of Buddhist
sutras, texts and philosophical science on the nature of mind greatly exceeds
the Psychoanalytical Society archive in Vienna. Ancient Hindu texts and
speculations on theories of representation outnumber the writings of
contemporary French intellectuals on the same subject. There is no excuse to
ignore the larger picture anymore, in science, philosophy, or art history.”

“I relate to the role of the mystic in the sense of following a “Via Negativa” –
of feeling the basis of my work to be in unknowing, in doubt, in being lost, in
questions and not answers – and that recognizing that personally the most
important work I have done has come from not knowing what I was doing at
the time I was doing it. This is the power of the time when you just jump off
the cliff into the water and don’t worry if there are rocks just below the

**From: Jörg Zutter, “Interview with Bill Viola”. In: Bill Viola: Unseen
Images, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf 1992, pp. 99-104 (English
translation)

Copyright © Bill Viola

 7

David Dunn and Woody Vasulka

Digital Space:
A Research Proposal

Introduction

The concept of interactivity in computer science has generally referred to

issues concerning user interface in the sense of those parameters of system
control over which the user can exert influence. It is the intention of this
proposal to expand upon this concept of interactivity to address its broader
implications from a philosophical perspective with regard to the intrinsic
properties of what we refer to as digital space and with specific interest in how
such ideas impact the evolution of art through the existence of a new
technologically derived perceptual environment for humanity at large.
Additionally we hope to outline a preliminary research plan for the exploration
of this perceptual environment which emphasizes the articulation and design of
syntactical principles essential to this exploration. While our primary focus is
upon the creation of works of art which would concretize these principles in
the form of aesthetic research, it is our hope that the articulation of such
syntactical principles will also be influential beyond the artistic domain and
have direct application in such fields as scientific visualization and artificial
reality research.
The design team that we have assembled is uniquely qualified to investigate the
technical and intellectual questions surrounding this research. Steina and
Woody Vasulka have pursued aesthetic research into the application of
electronic technology to visual and audio art for the past 25 years. Their work
has not only been seminal to the creation of video as an art genre but they have
also substantially contributed to the development of digital image generation
and electronic music from an interdisciplinary perspective. Likewise, David
Dunn has pursued a related interdisciplinary investigation which links together
research into the domain of music, bioacoustics, linguistics and systems theory.
As a composer his work has focused upon the use of electronic and computer
technology to explore the cognitive behavior of living systems in a manner
which deeply emphasizes issues of interactivity. Media critic Gene
Youngblood has long been associated with the experimental arts as a visionary
philosopher of the new genre of technological arts. Lizbeth Rymland is a poet
and performance artist whose imaginary worlds articulate non-linear
spatiotemporal perceptions suggestive of new social vistas for communication
technology. Well known European media artist, educator and promoter Peter
Weibel is currently Professor of Media at the Städelsche Kunst Hochschule in
Frankfurt, Germany. Together they form a compelling research group capable
of articulating the issues herein outlined and in creating substantial works of art
which instantiate those issues.
Interactivity and the Arts

While concepts of computer interactivity have been fuelled and influenced by

the creativity and philosophical visions of artists in the form of science fiction,
actual developments have been dominated by the scientific assumptions of
artificial intelligence research. While the ideal has been to optimally approach
some sort of autonomous coupling between human and machine through the
simulation of human intelligence and behavioral complexity within the
technology, instances of this goal have not been particularly numerous. Actual
implementation has often only addressed the expansion of user options within
the confines of traditional concepts of system control. It is our contention that
artists need to participate at the most fundamental level of system’s design
before a further advance in the concept of computer interactivity can unfold.
Our rationale for this assertion stems from a recognition that the computer
signifies a new perceptual environment (which we refer to a digital space) in
the sense of a domain for the unfolding sensory, linguistic and social
communication with new characteristics which impact our cognitive evolution,
and that the exploration of this environment cannot substantially progress
without human aesthetic fulfilment. While the issue of whether of not
intelligence can be successfully simulated through the specification of systemic
complexity within the machine remains an interesting and important research
question for computer science, it cannot be the determinant of what constitutes
the essential criteria of exploration and humanization of digital space. To this
end we assert that artists must help to shape what is quickly unfolding as a
fundamentally new perceptual environment which is ushering forth profound
epistemological changes.
Our interest and insight into this new perceptual environment results from our
many years of creative use of digital technology as an aesthetic tool that has
often brought us to a direct confrontation with traditional ways of composing
images and sounds. This conflict has not only been initiated by our interest in
new forms in general but specifically by the profound implications of
organizing our materials through a numerical code. What becomes apparent
from the structural demands of this technology is that there is an ability and
even an affinity for discrete genre to interact through the binary code in ways
which transcend linear cause and effect relationships, revealing new
compositional concepts with regard to space, perspective and morphology.
The experience of cinema informs us that the compositional decisions of
editing are constrained by a syntactic set which results in a concept of narrative
negotiable with an audience on the terms of the author. While this process
seems fully justified for the pursuit of aesthetic communion within the confines
of its medium, the intrinsic processes germane to the potential for interactivity
in digital space demand other alternatives. The abandonment of a traditional
syntactic set is essential within digital space since its organization is no longer
the exclusive domain of the author. Since the narrative vectors can be
organized by the biases of an other, new syntactic criteria not only become
necessary but unavoidable. These new criteria shift the role of the author away
from merely describing a world for aesthetic contemplation towards the design
of worlds for dynamic exploration. Additionally this necessitates a redefinition
of audience away from the time sharing of experience characteristic of cinema
and performance to that of an individual who can exert greater freewill in the
exploration of an elastic perceptual environment.
While the use of computers within the arts has long recognized and taken for
granted many of these characteristics, most computer art and music has not
addressed them. There has been a general tendency to use the computer as a
tool to emulate traditional art genre or extend formal principles of organization
and structure. Many of these limitations have been structurally imposed in the
sense that hardware limitations have dictated what is possible. With regard to
the concept of interactivity this has resulted at the most primitive level in
providing the user / perceiver with a sense of choice and / or participatory role
in the unfolding of a narrative or structural change. With the dramatic
evolution in circuit design, computational speed and memory expansion which
have occurred in recent years, new strategies for interactivity have posed the
possibility of artists creating worlds of sufficient richness to provide the user /
perceiver with a sense of exploring an environment of new sensory
relationships rather than a mere description of such a world. It is precisely this
creative possibility and what it implies for the perceptual environment of
digital space which is of primary significance. Thus the concept of computer
interactivity can be understood to not only include the interface to a user /
perceiver and the redefinition of authorship which that implies but more
fundamentally to include the potential for deep structural interaction between
the different sensory modes of human perception. The significance of a serious
aesthetic exploration of these aspects of digital space extends beyond the
domain of art to proffer an expansion of human imagination through the
merger of artistic perception and scientific process.

Aspects of Digital Space

In contemplating the important aspects of digital space as a perceptual

environment for aesthetic exploration, a number of essential characteristics
become evident. From our perspective as artists the most obvious possibility of
the computer as a creative tool is its ability to generate entirely new and unique
constructs of sound and image. However this possibility must be understood in
the larger context of the more profound reality of the structural biases and
potentials of digital space as a perceptual environment.
Perhaps of principal importance are the dual aspects of random access to stored
data and the fact that this data can be comprised of information corresponding
to different sensory modes of human perception reduced to a common structure
in the form of numerical code. This later attribute is especially significant in
the sense that our usual experience of the electromagnetic spectrum as divided
into discreet domains of sensory perception (i.e. sight and sound) can be
coerced into an interactive space. The aesthetic and experiential possibilities
which emerge from these characteristics of digital space are those of the non-
linear specification of events in the sense of a poly-chronic and poly-topic
narrative of image and sound, a non-linear interpenetration between human
sensory modes (i.e. sound controlling image and vice versa), and the ability to
specify and control (either by the author or the user / perceiver) the
characteristics of change between these various behaviors.
What becomes evident is that a kind of digital synaesthesia could emerge from
this perceptual environment which can provide an experience of the concept of
non-linear complexity which has become so profoundly significant to the
sciences at large. It is precisely the perceptual issues and problems which arise
in attempting to comprehend this alien domain which we desire to explore.
Since it is these same issues which face the scientific community from a
different perspective, we understand that such an exploration could have
profound consequences as tools for the perception of non-linear complexity in
science and education. In fact, our interest is in formulating compositional and
syntactical principles which might hybridize concerns and issues relevant to a
variety of research fields in the context of the necessity for artists to participate,
at the most intrinsic creative level, in the development of these technologies for
the sake of cultural evolution and preservation.
As already discussed, the characteristics of digital space which imply new
structural possibilities for art are those of random access, interaction between
sensory modes within the numerical code, and a redefinition of the author’s
role towards the specification of a world for potential exploration. Because of
the radical nature of these qualities they demand the articulation intrinsic
organizational principles which do not simply borrow from old forms. Since
such principles could constitute what we have referred to as a syntactical set
for digital space in the sense that tonality constituted a deep structural principle
for 18th century music or perspective for Renaissance painting, it could be
argued that the emergence of such principles might be better left to the self-
organizing capacities of individual creative necessity. It is not our intention to
specify dogmatic rules for the manipulation of digital space but rather to help
set an exploration in motion which will undoubtedly be transcended by
subsequent explorers.

Proposal for Research

While it is apparent that the evolution and exploration of this perceptual

environment, and its implications for the art of the future, does not depend
upon any specific technology (or integration of technologies), since it is the
revolutionary event of the digital code as an infinitely malleable domain of
possibilities which is of primary significance, we have chosen to focus upon
CD ROM and its future progeny as the most currently viable technological
environment in which to address the aesthetic exploration of the non-linear and
sensorily interactive attributes of digital space. Hopefully the results of this
investigation will extend to future incarnations of hardware.
We plan to implement an ongoing research project comprised of a design team
and work stations appropriate to create works of art which can be distributed as
CD ROM media. While our general goal is to create works of art which will
substantially contribute to the evolution of these technologies as authentic art
genre, our specific approach is to create these works through understanding and
articulating the fundamental structural properties germane to digital space as
our primary compositional criteria. Towards this end we have begun to
formulate tentative research questions. For example:

1. Are there non-linear processes germane to random access which might

constitute syntactical principles for the organization of digital space?
2. Is there an aesthetic of “emergent properties” which arise from the
redefinition of authorship possible in an interactive art environment?
3. Are there functional equivalents to the cinematic techniques of edits or
dissolves in a non-linear simulation of 4-dimensional space / time?
4. Is there a “grammar” of transformation to be discovered for the deep
structural interactions between human sensory modes possible within
 digital space (i.e. how might image dynamically modulate sound or
text?)
5. Are there strategies of transition to be specified for movement between
different artificial worlds?

In contemplating such questions we have begun to emphasize terminology

which focuses upon the non-linear spatio-temporal qualities transformation
rather than concepts which reinforce the linear attributes associated with
traditional film syntax or montage. It has seemed appropriate to speak of
interpenetration between worlds rather than edits, or to imagine morphological
modulations between sensory modes rather than dissolves.
Ultimately we desire to implement an environment of knowledge and tools
which would not only seek to answer the preceding questions but also make
possible this pursuit in the context of a variety of concrete research scenarios as
illustrated by the following hypothetical example:
A real world event has been simultaneously documented in a variety of media
(sound, video and text description, etc.). These different descriptions would be
digitized for storage on disk as parallel event streams to be accessed in a
specific non-linear fashion designed by the artist. This access program would
also be stored on disk along with the necessary algorithms for a variety of
strategies for interaction between the user / perceiver and the sensory data in
addition to transformational interactions between the diverse media
descriptions of the same event. Because of the random access capability of this
technology, the total data which comprises the parallel event descriptions could
be regarded as a four-dimensional “phase space” from which a read-out would
be made. By programming a “chaotic attractor” to move through the data phase
space, not only could a temporally non-linear sequencing of the described
event be achieved but also a constant non-linear change in the form of
description. In other words, the user / perceiver’s experience of the event could
consist of a normal temporal perception and a constant interactive modulation
between sensory modes themselves. Text would transform into speech into
image into environmental sound in a highly fluid, co-synchronous and syn-
aesthetic fashion without regard to a linear experience of time. The following
illustration is a highly abstract representation of this scenario. The arrows
represent the linear time line of the parallel event streams while the chaotic
attractor represents the actual non-linear read-out of the data in the form of
perceived sound and image. This example should not be as an art work but
simply as an example of one particular research experiment.

**This article was originally published by ARS ELECTRONICA 1990,

Virtuelle Welten, Band II, Linz, pp.268-275.
It can be re-published here with the kind permission of David Dunn and
Woody Vasulka. http://www.vasulka.org/
Copyright © David Dunn / Woody Vasulka
 8

Robert Morris

“keynote address”

It has always seemed to me that when an artist is asked to speak about his
work, that one of two assumptions is being made: one, that because he has
made something, he has anything to say about it, or two, if he does, he would
want to. Questionable assumptions, in my opinion. But in my case, I was not
asked, I was told. It was part of my contract and I couldn't get it changed. In
any case one should not forget Claes Oldenberg's remark that anyone who
listens to an artist talk should have his eyes examined. Now the work I came
out here to do is not even started, so it seems premature for me to discuss it or
attempt a dialogue with you who've not yet experienced it. Some 20 minutes of
restful silence might be the most positive contribution I could make here, but it
would, I'm afraid, be misinterpreted. So treading the edge of silence, I will
speak in the most general terms.
I would like to address the question: what is public art? But the very question
suggests further questions rather than answers. For example, if there is such a
thing as public art, what then is private art? I think we would agree that
whatever else it might or might not be, the term public art has come to
designate works not found in galleries or museums (which are public spaces),
but frequently in association with public buildings, and funded with public
monies.
For about a decade now, there have been works produced which are found
neither in galleries nor museums, nor in association with architecture. This is
the type of public art I want to address here. Such work is invariably
manifested outside and is generally of a large scale. Other than those two
characteristics, it has been fairly varied. Some has focused on the earth itself,
some veers toward architecture, some involves both construction and
rearranging of the landscape. Such work has been termed earthworks and site-
works. Much of it has been impermanent - in some cases, set up only for the
sake of documentation. Such work exists then as a photograph and reverts back
to being housed in a gallery, or in the media. It would not be accurate to
designate privately funded early works of Smithson or Heizer or De Maria in
remote parts of the desert as public art. The only public access to such works is
photographic.
However, since the early 70's, a number of large scale works, both permanent
and impermanent, situated outside, have been accessible to the public, and to a
greater or lesser extent, have been made possible by public funds. So to some
extent, large outside projects, earthworks or otherwise, have moved from the
private domain (that is, private in the sense of private funding and physical
remoteness) to that of the public.
Of course, it is a question as to whether we have in such works, leaving aside
their financing and use of alternative spaces, anything in significantly structural
ways different from works found in art galleries. In my opinion, there is a
certain amount of earthwork and site-work that has been done, or is being
done, that brings new structural assumptions to art-making. Of course, any
attempt to class these works as more in the public domain,
more accessible, more directed to a public use, is in one way rather comical in
the face of the literal busloads of people prowling the museums and galleries of
New York City, and that neo-Paxtonian disco-delirious culture palace of
Beaubourg in Paris. The public is breaking the doors down to get at it in these
two cities. Perhaps here, the U.S. government has observed this fact, and their
current populist. middle-brow policies of bringing the mediocre to the many is
perceived by them as an emergency measure designed to diffuse concentrated
culture. Perhaps they fear cultural riots.
In any case, whether it be Soho or Seattle, art has come to be perceived as fun,
as accessible, as entertainment rated G. Many have sighed with relief and taken
the popularity of the arts as convincing evidence that there is no longer an
hermetic and recalcitrant avant-garde. I'll return to this notion in connection
with modernism and its demise.
In attempting to assess the notion of public art, it might be useful to examine
the history of the genre. If we turn to examine 19th Century public art, we are
addressing the monument. Clearly, the antecedents to the work we are
discussing is sculpture and not architecture or even mural painting. I think that
it is important to bear in mind that all of the people who've made advanced
work in the mode of earthworks and site-works or even certain quasi-
architectural ones have been sculptors. And it is only out of historical
pressures, and formal exhaustions of sculpture, that the present large-scale,
outside works could have come. The 19th Century abounds in forgotten neo-
classical monuments to larger-than-life events and people. The crisis and
gradual retreat from the possibility of sculpture as monument come with Rodin.
His figurative group, The Burghers of Calais, was barely accepted after great
difficulty. The later Balzac was never installed in the intended site, and the
Gate of Hell was never finished. The two major works of Rodin, the Balzac
and the Gate, both conceived as monuments, were failures in those terms. As
Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, it is at this point in the crisis and failure of the
outside monument that sculpture comes indoors to thrive in the homeless, non-
sited modernism. Historicizing at the generally-accepted reckless pace, one
could say that from the generalizing volume of the Balzac, Brancusi
fragmented and volumized further to put sculpture firmly on the road to the
independent object, finding its apotheosis in the minimalism of the early
1960's, from which point it turned toward the door and finally made it outside
again. This is one narrative which features not only Rodin and Brancusi, but
Judd, LeWitt, Andre, Smithson, Serra, Oppenheim, Morris, and others.
One could trace another, chronicling the movement as independent object and
see an unbroken chain of burdensome marble, bronze and steel adorning
architectural plazas, courtyards, sculpture gardens and fountains, and featuring
Carpeau, Pevsner, Smith, Caro, De Suvero, Oldenberg, and others. No doubt,
this goes to show that one person's historicizing is another's fiction.
In any case, the work we are discussing not only does not adorn architectural
spaces, but in most cases has a dialectical relationship to the site it occupies.
Another characteristic of the work under discussion and one inherited from
minimalism is the co-existence of its space with that of the viewer. The
emergence of this characteristic in the 60's also signalled, more than any other
formal one, the termination of indoor sculptural efforts as modernist for it
purified the work as a sculptural object and drove it toward architecture,
toward temporal rather than instantaneous perception. The pressures for
increased scale in the lateral dimension, by extending and articulating a space,
which included the viewer, pushed such work out of the confines of the gallery.
Hence, it is no surprise that the first large-scale exterior earthworks and site
constructions of Smithson, Heizer, Serra, Morris and others exhibit strong
gestalt forms, extended into space, as a heritage from minimalist form. But I
think it is fair to say that by the mid-60’s, there was mare than just formal
pressures forcing sculpture to move outside. Part of the impetus was the raging
commodity use to which gallery art was being put. Such were the times, when
a collector like Robert Scull could say to another collector, "I just bought ten
works by X." To which the other collector replied, "I never heard of him; he’s
a nobody." To which Scull replied, "After I bought ten of them, he's
somebody.''
The fact that the first large-scale works were privately funded, some by Mr.
Scull himself, indentured the artist, perhaps more than any gallery sale.
There was a feeling, however misguided that the artist was operating outside
the crassness of the marketplace, that he had left off producing saleable objects,
that he was somehow specially privileged by this patron relationship, that he
was acting more in the real world.
I think these attitudes were illusions, but at the time they were prevalent.
In passing, it is worth making a distinction here between modernism and avant-
garde. During the early 60's the two coincided momentarily, but the formal
lines of painting and sculpture were maintained. In the late 60's this was not the
case. Formats were dismantled and forms proliferated. In my opinion, this
proliferation has not engendered a pluralistic kind of liberal tolerance which
has diffused critical art issues. I believe there are still avant-garde art issues of
a structural and critical nature. Such issues do not happen to be identified
exclusively with particular, ongoing forms, but they are avant-garde in the
sense of being at the leading edge of critical thought and art moves - moves
which, needless to say, are not self-critical in the old fashioned modernist
sense.
Some of the ostensible formal elements involved - space, scale and time - are
not simply expanded, made larger in site-works of extended size. Such
elements become quite different to deal with in an exterior context. Perception
of large spaces and distances is of a different order from the relatively
undemanding instantaneous order for objects in closed interior spaces.
Priorities can shift within the handling of these formal elements. What may
have been latent and un-emphasized in interior work may come to the fore in
an outside situation in quite different ways. Take the element of time, for
example. It is not much emphasized in previous object sculpture. In fact, it was
generally assumed not to be a formal parameter at all, as objects are pretty
much apprehended all, as objects are pretty much apprehended all at once. But,
as I indicated, as a space expanded in certain minimalist work, time began to
emerge as a necessary condition under which the work is perceived. Complex
and extended works which assumed the viewer's presence from within, so to
speak, locked time into space itself. Outside works expand and articulate this
much further, and because site-works are inseparable from their places, an
element like time or space is not bound entirely as a formal element within the
object properties of the work. Such elements must be acknowledged as
existential properties of the complex of work and site together, and can't be
separated from such features as changes of topography, of light, of
temperature, of the seasons. Those works which respond as well to historical,
economic, social or political features of a place are then reaching beyond even
these transmuted formal properties in shaping a work.
An awareness of the myriad existential functions of the particular place, be this
desert or town, hillside or swamp, gravel pit or vacant lot, demands a range of
responsiveness and opportunities for change not implied for the most part in
the gallery or museum context.
When the better work is examined, it seems evident that the encounter with the
existential conditions of place has been formative. Reactions to particular
features of that place, be they temporal, geological, topographical, social,
spatial, historical, economic, etc., have moved the arts significantly off a purely
formal axis. Making the work more locally relevant has not made it more
parochial, in my opinion, but more inextricably a part of the time and place in
which it exists.
Sophisticated formal concerns are not so much weakened here as they have
come to be assumed as a necessary requirement, but perhaps now not the
central motivating concern.
I would argue that the formative uses of these transmuted formal and trans-
formal, locally relevant conditions of place have added a significant structural
new element to the art-making. Such usages derive from the context of place,
and form the art with what can once again be called a theme. It will be
remembered that both Rodin's and Brancusi's works are informed by what can
be described as themes. Fairly general and romantic in Rodin's case, jejune and
mystical, perhaps, in Brancusi's.
If the thematic in the new work represents in some sense a return or
reconnection to 19th Century art, this is, in itself, a new art issue. But the
redefinitions involved in the formal and thematic, and as we shall see, the uses
to which the art is put, also raise new issues.
The incorporation of a new motive and internal structure, that is, the thematic
as a contextual response, constitutes more than a variation. Here we are not
talking about mere empirical differences between past indoor sculptures and
site-works, but about a shift in the basis for proceeding to make the work. Such
different assumptions, motives, responses and results also do more than raise
aesthetic issues as to what art can be. They raise moral questions, as well, as to
where art should be, and who should own it, and how it should be used.
In terms of broad thematic differences between various site-works which now
exist, one general grouping can be made - of those who have chosen to work in
inaccessible parts of the great Southwest to pursue various themes of
Emersonian transcendentalism truly reminiscent of 19th Century attitudes, a
kind of re-living of the pioneer spirit, of subduing the West in artistic terms.
There can perhaps be found the last rugged individualist, toiling with a
bulldozer rather than Conestoga wagons to construct quasi-religious sites for
meditation.
Those working closer to urban sites and in less overwhelmingly romantic
landscapes have produced work more often informed by social, economic,
political, and historical awareness, as well as by concretely physical ones
relevant to the site.
My intention here is not to give a critique, either in formal or thematic terms,
of existing siteworks but, as I said at the beginning, to tread near that
treacherous, crumbling edge of the general, where broad differences come into
view. But examples abound of the distinctions I am making. Those less public
works done in the desert are fairly well-known. Less known perhaps are works
of such artists as Trakas, Miss, Aycock, Singer, Acconci, Fleischner, Irwin,
Holt, and others, all of whom have worked frequently in non spectacular and
sometimes dense urban sites with extremely varied formal and thematic
approaches. Such work, in my opinion, presents a sharper critical edge than
that which is more pastoral and remote. It is also more public in the literal,
aesthetic, and social senses.
It should be apparent that in using the term “thematic” in relation to the new
work I am using the term in l) a very general way, and 2) a very different sense
from how it is relevant to 19th-century work. The thematic in the work I have
mentioned is not commemorative of great events or people; neither is it
narrative in the illustrative sense. Rather, it is commemorative of one or
another of the various aspects of the site itself. I am using the term to designate
this referential aspect, the many things about the work which do not exhaust
themselves in purely formal terms.
In spite of sharp thematic and formal differences between the types of work,
there is, not surprisingly, little sense of an internal dialogue between various
works. Unlike the modernist enterprise of redefinition of sculpture that was
going on in the 60's, there is no comparable discourse cast in terms of formal
moves from one outside work to another. While such work has inherited many
formal and perceptual assumptions worked out by minimalist sculpture, it
seems to be work of quire a different order, primarily because, as I have
argued, it is structured by thematic responses to its context of site. Formal
innovations have not been generally the focus of this work. If some of the first
earthworks now seem a little romantically overblown, no doubt their spectacle
aspect has had something to do with their popular appeal.
It might be worthwhile to discuss the notion of public access, how it is
achieved, and what it might mean. It seems every effort is being made to
amplify these Seattle projects in the media. The cynical might say that such an
effort masks an anxiety to justify the money spent on the projects. For as we
have witnessed, intense media coverage, even if it is controversial, tends to be
a form of legitimization in this country. The popular media is not always in a
position to evenly assess events so much as it is to promote them to the realm
of the super-real, the mythical, and ultimately, if there is enough repetition, the
historical.
But I think other assumptions lie beyond the media push surrounding these
projects-namely, the assumption that there is something especially relevant to
and open for the public in these projects, that they defend an aggressive, non-
elitist, an even anti-museum stance, while at the same time counting as
advanced art. Again, a cynic might reply that it is the spectacle aspect of much
outside site and earthworks which is responsible for their popular appeal. Now,
I don't have anything against spectacle. In the 60's I was one of the early ones
to perform nude in a work called Waterman Switch. The effort elicited sneers
from some of my colleagues and a certain amount of media attention. But the
attention was addressed to the spectacle nature of the work and offered no
informed critical response. It has been the fate of much site work to be
addressed by the media for its sensational aspect: art's answer to Disneyland.
Come on out and risk your life crawling through tunnels and teetering on
ladders! Or better still, if you're man enough, I should say person enough,
make a risky pilgrimage to the inaccessible desert wilderness where, if one can
avoid the sidewinders and the cryptic remarks of the taciturn artist, one can
return sunburned, but definitely enriched, or at least thrilled, and with a stack
of Kodachrome slides.
John Ford, eat your heart out!
Still, site-works will never approach certain forms of more popular art in
eliciting the highest forms of sensationalist response. Pauline Kael described
the sounds of Maria Schneider's panties being ripped off by Marlon Brando in
The Last Tango in Paris as comparable to the first four notes of Beethoven's
Fifth. Now, it is a sad but true fact that no lowly plastic artist could ever attain
such heights or depths, as the case may be. I don't want to imply that the
spectacle-oriented responses are illegitimate. Art doesn't legislate responses,
but, in my opinion, art that is interesting is interesting by virtue of its internal
structures, notwithstanding whatever external spectacle it might present.
Rather, it is art in which there is an importance in how things are put together
by the human mind, those inventive, perceptual, ordering achievements which
make art fascinating and deep from the inside, as it were.
What is frequently and popularly termed great art, usually in relation to long
dead artists, often involves nostalgia, often a nostalgia even for long-lost
spectacle hero worship or some comforting sense of the familiar. Why else
would major museums want lavish shows on third-rate, but solid gold King Tut
artifacts, or why else would the Museum of Modern Art follow the Cezanne
show, an unnecessary non-modern but by now thoroughly familiar set of
images, with a museum-wide exhibition of Picassos, again as familiar as
calendar images. Such popular judgments are made from the outside, or else in
the interest of attendance.
But the assessment of internal structure demands a certain informed response,
at least that level that is available in interest in art. It's available in much site-
work, which is not to say it denies any spectacle or popular appeal the work
might have.
I only want to indicate here in general terms the ways in which recent site and
earthworks are different from previous sculpture, by virtue of their internal
structures, and to raise some discussions as to how such work qualifies for the
designation public art.
In doing so, I want to draw attention to its continuity with the past tradition of
modernism in 19th Century work, as well as its break from those traditions. If
it represents a new direction, it can equally be seen as a return via certain
redefinitions to a justification for monumental work which had been cast aside
at the birth of modernism and now appears once again on the dual grave sites
of modernism and abandoned industrial landscapes.
In contrast, nothing now seems deader than large-scale outside object
sculpture, that other tradition I mentioned. Attempting to live in symbiosis with
architecture, insofar as it retained its autonomy as an object, it forfeits any
structural or thematic relation to its context.
I'd go even farther in the cases of those artists still producing the sort of work
which achieved identity and recognition in the 60's as modernist and include
modes of work derived from Cubist antecedents as well as the minimal. The
continued production of such works placed outside, or even inside for that
matter, seems more than suspect at this time. It is true that artists must live for
the most part by the production of saleable objects. But that does not justify art
that reduces its ambition to the tiny focus of mere variation of past modes for
the sake of sales. It reduces art to a craft function, and blackens its image as an
ambitious undertaking concerned, as any ambitious discipline, to go forward by
risking attempts at internal structural discovery. In short, much like
manufacturing, masquerading as art today, large-scale object sculpture has
abdicated the objective of art, which is the ambition for new structure in the
most extended sense. Such an aim lies on the other side of either superficial
newness for its own sake, or the permutation of desiccated modernist ideas.
Generalizing further, I would say that the weakened position of much art of the
70's is endemic, and can be linked to a lack of significant intellectual dissent in
the country at the present time. But this is the subject for another discussion. Of
course, so long as mindless city planning prevails, and bureaucratic
architecture yearns for decor, there will be dumb sculpture burdening plazas,
and greenswards and site-works will have to find dumps, swamps, gravel pits,
and other industrially ravaged pieces of the landscape, if they are to be located
near urban centers. Personally, I prefer such wasted areas to those numbing
plazas and absurd sculpture gardens. In regard to the present situation here in
Seattle, we have an alternative to art as urban decor in the form of art as land
reclamation.
In closing, I want to take this opportunity to thank the King County Arts
Commission for sponsoring these present projects. To my knowledge, this is
the first time that art has functioned as land reclamation. The idea of cleaning
up the landscape that has been wasted by industry is not, of course, new. I have
previously had discussions with coal mining interests in West Virginia, and I
know Robert Smithson was negotiating some time ago with coal miners in the
West. But a few things have not been discussed, to my knowledge, about art as
land reclamation.
The first thing seems rather bizarre to me. That is, that the selling point was, is,
that the art was going to cost less than restoring the site to its “natural
condition.” What are the implications of that kind of thinking ... that art should
be cheaper than nature? Or that site-works can be supported and seen as
relevant by a community only if they fulfil a kind of sanitation service?
The most significant implication of art as land reclamation is that art can and
should be used to wipe away technological guilt. Do those sites scarred by
mining or poisoned by chemicals now seem less like the entropic liabilities of
ravenous and short-sighted industry and more like long-awaited aesthetic
possibilities? Will It be a little easier in the future to rip up the landscape for
one last shovelful of non-renewable energy source if an artist can be found
(cheap, mind you) to transform the devastation into an inspiring and modern
work of art? Or anyway, into a fun place to be? Well, at the very least, into a
tidy, mugger-free park.
It would seem that artists participating in art as land reclamation will be forced
to make moral as well as aesthetic choices. There may be more choices
available than either a cooperative or critical stance for those who participate.
But it would perhaps be a misguided assumption to suppose that artists hired to
work in industrially blasted landscapes would necessarily and invariably
choose to convert such sites into idyllic and reassuring places, thereby socially
redeeming those who wasted the landscape in the first place.

**Originally published in Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture,

Seattle Art Museum, Washington, 1979, pp. 11-16
Republished with the kind permission of Robert Morris and Artists Rights
Society, New York.
Copyright © 2005 Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
 9

Art for the Third Millennium – Creating a New World View

Lecture by Agnes Denes

Introduction

The following is an excerpt with updates from an essay I wrote for the
scientific Journal Leonardo.

I believe that the new role of the artist is to create an art that questions
the status quo and the direction life has taken, the endless contradictions
we accept and approve, offering intelligent alternatives.

My work ranges between individual creation and social consciousness.

It addresses the challenges of global survival and is often monumental
in scale.

I plant forests on abused land to be kept alive for centuries and fields of
grain in the heart of megacities. This work goes beyond just planting a
field or a forest, or creating long-range masterplans for large territories
in need of restructuring. It is benign problem solving and shaping,
structuring the future: an ego-less art form that calls attention to social
concerns and involves people from all walks of life. It builds pride and
self esteem in people and benefits future generations with a meaningful
legacy.

This new art form goes beyond the self and the ego without being
selfless. It assumes the difficult task of maintaining a delicate balance
between thinking globally and acting independently, for the ego must
remain intact to allow the self to act fearlessly, with the certainty and
confidence necessary for true creation, while the ego must be
relinquished in order to think universally, and for the good of others.

In a time when meaningful global communication and intelligent

restructuring of our environment is imperative, art can assume an
important role. It can offer skillful and benign problem solving and
communicate expressions of human values through its metaphors.

Designing space is complicated. We can go inward into inner space and

out into the universe. The distance is about the same. In order to
understand the space around us both of these journeys are necessary.
Some of my work deals with this inner space, visualizing invisible
processes such as time, mathematics, logic, thinking processes,
evolution, and so on. Sometimes the philosophy involved in these
works is complex, not allowing us to discuss them at length in a single
presentation.

Other works are dealing with very large spaces, large by necessity in
order to rebuild our environment and make a difference. As difficult as
it is to realize these works, I think it is absolutely necessary to make
them happen all over the world as examples of what needs to be done to
restore landfills, or destroyed, barren land where resource extraction has
taken its toll, and on deforested soil to stop erosion, purify the air,
protect fresh ground water and provide home for wildlife. And to create
them in the nervous tension of cities, to give people a chance to stay in
touch with nature, allowing it to speak its own special language
articulated through human intelligence.

I believe that artistic vision, image and metaphor are powerful tools of
communication that can become expressions of human values to have
profound impact on our consciousness and collective destiny.

I find it interesting that although my work is deeply rooted in science,

technology and philosophy, I am often called a mystic. Perhaps art and
the combination of these three that create the mysticism.

***

The first work in the public art series is Rice/Tree/Burial, my first

environmental work. It dealt with our relationship to the earth and was
first realized in 1968 on a summer camping vacation with my family. It
was a symbolic "event" that announced my commitment to
environmental issues and human concerns. It is considered the first
ecological artwork that started the environmental art movement.

I planted rice to represent life, initiation and growth, chained trees to

indicate interference with life and natural processes, and buried my
Haiku poetry to symbolize the idea or concept, human intellectual
powers and communication with the future. This created the thesis,
antithesis and synthesis of the argument. I kept no copies of my poetry,
thereby relinquishing, "giving up to the soil," something personal and
precious—an act that also symbolized the self-denial and discipline
required by this new analytical art form.

Later I was asked to re-enact the work— this ritual on a full scale at
Artpark in Lewiston, New York at the Canadian border.

I planted a half-acre rice field 150 feet above the Niagara gorge. The
site marked the birthplace of Niagara Falls between Canada and the
U.S., twelve thousand years ago. The rice grew up mutant, an
unforeseen consequence of the soil having been contaminated by the
accident at Love Canal and Artpark previously being a dump-site
nearby.

I chained a sacred Indian forest at Artpark, where Indians had been

buried after a massacre, and put a time capsule in the ground to be
opened a thousand years from now. We were warned that the forest was
cursed. During the chaining of the forest we saw Indians dancing in the
trees above us. I took photos of them, but of course they were just the
limbs of trees moving in the wind, but we knew they were the Indians
buried in the forest looking over us. The phenomenon stopped as soon
as we finished chaining. But then you see we were also run over by
hundreds of red spiders that came from nowhere, were never listed in
any books as we later discovered, and disappeared as quickly as they
had come.
When we dug down to bury the time capsule, the post digger started
clattering violently. We had come upon objects from another time
capsule laid down by the Indians. I put my time capsule on top of it and
closed the ground.

Then I went out to the edge of Niagara Falls and lived there for 7 days
and nights, a foot from the torrent spilling over the edge. It was in this
tiny space that I had one of the most dynamic and also spiritual
experiences coming face to face with the power of nature. The slippery
ground shook violently having been dynamited to control the retreat of
the Falls. I had to sign documents for both the U.S. and the Canadian
governments that if I fell in and died I would not sue them. The
incredible power and violence of the water next to me, the ground
shaking beneath me, the white vapor and white foam below and the
noise that made me deaf was an experience of the magnitude of nature
and our insignificance that took my breath away. And all the while, for
7 days and nights I kept writing and photographing, taking refuge in my
art from the scary experience.

This was the force of nature, the fourth element added to my dialectics,
also affirming that my art functioned on the edge in a delicate balance
between universals and the self, and was not afraid to assume the risks
such art must take.

Copyright © Agnes Denes, 2005

Short texts for Tree Mountain and Wheatfield—A Confrontation:

Wheatfield—A Confrontation © Agnes Denes 1982

2 acres of wheat planted & harvested, Battery Park landfill, Manhattan

summer l982

After months of preparations, in May l982, a 2-acre wheat field was

planted on a landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street
and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty. Two hundred
truckloads of dirt were brought in and 285 furrows were dug by hand
cleared of rocks and garbage. The seeds were sown by hand and the
furrows covered with soil. The field was maintained for four months,
cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilized and sprayed against mildew
fungus, and an irrigation system set up. The crop was harvested on
August 16 and yielded over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat.

Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion

created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal
concept, it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade,
economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and
ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities. The
harvested grain traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an
exhibition called 'The International Art Show for the End of World
Hunger", organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (l987-90). The
seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of
the globe.

P.S. The above text written in 1982 has now added poignancy and
relevance after 9/11/01.

Copyright © Agnes Denes

Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule—11,000 People, 11,000

Trees, 400 Years
1992-1996, Ylöjärvi, Finland © Agnes Denes

A huge manmade mountain measuring 420 meters long, 270 meters

wide, 28 meters high and elliptical in shape was planted with eleven
thousand trees by eleven thousand people from all over the world at the
Pinziö gravel pits near Ylöjärvi, Finland, as part of a massive earthwork
and land reclamation project by environmental artist Agnes Denes. The
project was officially announced by the Finnish government at the
Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on Earth Environment Day, June 5,
l992, as Finland's contribution to help alleviate the world's ecological
stress. Sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program and the
Finnish Ministry of the Environment, Tree Mountain is protected land
to be maintained for four centuries, eventually creating a virgin forest.
The trees are planted in an intricate mathematical pattern derived from a
combination of the golden section and the pineapple/sunflower system
designed by the artist. Even though infinitely more complex, it is
reminiscent of ancient earth patterns.
Tree Mountain is the largest monument on earth that is international in
scope, unparalleled in duration, and not dedicated to the human ego, but
to benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy. People who
planted the trees received certificates acknowledging them as
custodians of the trees. The certificate is an inheritable document valid
for twenty or more generations in the future. The project is innovative
nationally and worldwide—the first such undertaking in human history.
This is the very first time in Finland and among the first ones in the
world when an artist restores environmental damage with ecological art
planned for this and future generations.

Tree Mountain, conceived in 1982, affirms humanity's commitment to

the future well being of ecological, social and cultural life on the planet.
It is designed to unite the human intellect with the majesty of nature.
Tree Mountain was dedicated in June, 1996 by the President of Finland,
other heads of state, and people from everywhere.

Aira Kalela, Ministry of Environment. Finland

Copyright © Agnes Denes

agnesdenes@earthlink.net