This autumn the ICA will revisit one of its most important past exhibitions to discover how artists in the pre-digital era engaged with technology and what they foretold of our future.
London’s Institute of Contemporary Art plans to go back to the future this Autumn – back to 1968 to be exact, the year that it hosted curator Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity. Reichardt’s landmark event was the first international exhibition in the UK to explore the relationship between the creative arts and technology, covering the work of composers, engineers, artists, mathematicians and poets and avoiding hard distinction between disciplines. The central focus of the show was to demonstrate where and how these various practitioners work interacted with science and technology, particularly with relevance to random systems and cybernetic devices.
2014’s retrospective will take place in the ICA’s Fox Reading Room and will include documents, installation photographs, press reviews, invitation cards and publications related to the original exhibition. 1968 was, of course, an era before the paradigmatic changes created by personal computing had taken effect, and one of the chief interests of this show is to compare the speculations of the past with the realities of the present. Cybernetic Serendipity is sure to have the same broad appeal as it did five decades ago, with a report in the Evening Standard at the time proffering it as the answer to the question: ‘Where in London could you take a hippy, a computer programmer, a ten-year-old schoolboy and guarantee that each would be perfectly happy for an hour without you having to lift a finger to entertain them?’
Cybernetic Serendipity
ICA, London
14 October – 30 November, 2014
ica.org.uk