Exhibitionary Feedback. On 'Cybernetic Serendipity'

Taking place in 1968 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) – a major node in the network of innovative art institutions emerging in Europe at the time – the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity brought together forty-three composers, artists, and poets alongside eighty-seven engineers, doctors, computer systems designers, and philosophers. By exhibiting the work of artists and scientists together, without distinguishing them from one another, curator Jasia Reichardt sought to interrogate the nature of works of art and of cybernetic artefacts. Cybernetic Serendipity was conceptualized less as a traditional exhibition than as an “exploration and demonstration of connexions between creativity and technology (and cybernetics in particular),” as Reichardt wrote a few years after the show. She added that it was intended to investigate “the links between scientific or mathematical approaches, intuitions, and the more irrational and oblique urges associated with the making of music, art and poetry.”