Powers of Projection: Contemporary Art & Cybernetics - IEEE SSIT 21CW2021

Norbert Wiener’s characterization of communication as both a feedback loop and a self-governing machine greatly informed the technological experimentation of artists in the 1960s, rethinking everything from sculpture to performance.

As digital and networked devices became more accessible throughout the 1970s and 80s, many artists strove to incorporate a new identity in the making of their work—the user. Subsequently, contemporary art increasingly came to typify the participatory and self-reflexive principles of second-wave cybernetics as theorized by Margaret Mead and Donna Haraway, among others.

These ‘seriously circular’ cybernetic tendencies continue to surface today in the creation of dynamic networked narratives and explicitly recursive imagery. In particular, digital projection technologies have given artists a means to explore telepresence—the extension of self across time-spaces—and new modes of embodiment based on the confluence of material and immaterial systems for representation.