The Cybernetisation of the Exhibition. From Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) to lumbung (2022)

This paper will examine what I have called the 'cybernetisation of the exhibition’, namely the process through which the exhibition came to be conceived as an informational and communicational medium. Focusing on the seminal exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity curated by Jasia Reichardt at the ICA in London in 1968, I will reconstruct and situate the event within a critical historical trajectory shaped by institutional and informational infrastructures, characteristic of cybernetisation, which one could see as an agent and symptom of ‘system shifts’ around the 1970s. Firstly, I will retrace how cybernetic formulations – which redefine all entities, living and non-living, as information processing systems according to dynamics of regulation and feedback – informed the artworks and ‘cybernetic artefacts’ on display, paying particular attention to cyberneticist Gordon Pask’s environment the Colloquy of Mobiles. Secondly, the exhibition as a whole will be discussed against the backdrop of its host institution, the ICA, which to some extent offered a case of a cyberneticised gallery and institution characteristic of the new European post-war social, political and technological formation. Finally, I wish to expand and open up this analysis to recent examples of cyberneticised exhibition-making by discussing documenta15 and the concept of lumbung in relation to ‘second order cybernetics’.