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and in avant-garde art, new technologies and methods were being used experi-
mentally to encourage serendipity. The exhibition included artists associated
with the Fluxus group: John Cage, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles and Nam
June Paik. Fluxus members were specifically interesting in making work that
was dependent on the audience to complete it, and which occupied the inter-
stices between different media–intermedia (Higgins 2002: 25; 91–9). Daston also
mentions the efforts of postwar corporations and research institutes to plan
serendipity by encouraging scientists and scholars to have fun, experiment and
fraternize with people from very different disciplines (2004a: 31). This principle
was put to work in Cybernetic Serendipity. The exhibition involved experimen-
tation and collaboration on the part of artists, scientists and engineers. Objects
conceived as art objects were deliberately made indistinguishable from those
conceived as scientific experimentation (Reichardt 1968; MacGregor 2002).
Cybernetics usually refers to human–machine communication and is associ-
ated with efficient and managed interaction, through controlled feedback
systems. Nevertheless by the mid-60s cybernetics had become associated with
interdisciplinary projects and serendipitous careers that disregarded the bound-
aries between the arts and sciences. For instance, included in Cybernetic
Serendipity was Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, which consisted of robots
that emitted and responded to beams of light, and which the audience could
interrupt and confuse with hand-held mirrors. Pask had originally worked
in theatre, and developed technological devices that produced deliberately
unpredictable and open-ended responses to the actors’ performances (Pickering
2002: 426–9). Other British figures involved in cybernetics included the architect
Cedric Price, known for his use of new technologies and his radical ideas for
responsive, interactive buildings, as well as the theatre director Joan Littlewood,
who collaborated with Price on an unrealized project, the Fun Palace, in the
early 60s (Design Museum 2005).
Yet parallel with these collaborative scientific, artistic and industrial efforts
to put new technologies to creative use were efforts to use the cybernetic tech-
nologies and theories to regulate human behaviour. Cybernetics was adopted
for the Taylorist purposes of analysing and reorganizing human action along
efficient, machine-like lines. Behaviourist educational approaches took the
notion of an interactive feedback system and used it for training people and
animals. B.F. Skinner (mentioned earlier in this chapter) developed techniques
of ‘reinforcement’ to reward and encourage correct responses. Translated into
the exhibition’s pedagogic relationship with its audience, serendipity and
behaviourism spell two emergent models of interactivity: one where the audi-
ence’s interaction with the exhibit produce unforeseen consequences and a
range of possible kinds of knowledge (the audience as creative participant) and
the other where the audience makes choices that produce certain ‘reinforcing’