Paper at the 6th Postgraduate International Conference, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 9 October 2024, 10.30-13.30.
This paper proposes to revisit the seemingly chaotic, if not deathly precipitation of artistic movements at the turn of the 1960s, through the prism of information theory and cybernetics. Both were introduced in 1948 by mathematicians Claude E. Shannon and Norbert Wiener, respectively, and had a major influence not only on sciences and engineering, but also the entire spectrum of humanities, including art. The first presented an ideal model to statistically quantify the transmission of a message, whatever its content (a work of art within this frame). The second worked closely with computer scientists and biologists to implement mechanisms capable of self-governing themselves, by analysing the self-regulating processes of living organisms, i.e., feedback loops. The latter can be of two diverging kinds. Negative feedback, also referred to as homeostasis, reduces contingent noise amassed in given channels, whether natural or technological, to maintain stable conditions favourable to either survival or the successful automatic rendering of a predetermined function. Positive feedback conversely augments its effects towards potentially devastating ends, as it is the case of the atomic bomb. In these terms, noise encompasses any agencies that aren’t meant to be part of the original message yet affect its communication.
While the second wave of cybernetics resulted in the emergence of a system aesthetics in the late 1960s (Jack Burnham, 1968), this notion of noise transpired many of the contemporary discourses at the time. Throughout the cold war, art and anti-art trends vehemently succeeded and opposed one another at a fulgurant pace (abstract expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, pop art, minimalism, the happening, video art, body art, and ultimately conceptualism). This paper thus intends to redefine their apparent polarisation in light of positive feedback and its generative power. It not only helps understanding the very condition of the crystallisation of avant-gardes as a drive against homeostasis and its reduction of noise, but also imposes the magnification of the latter as the one and only vital way to introduce contingency in the recursive processes of art making itself. Far from signifying death, positive feedback apprehended as such ensures the rejuvenation of art forms, on the basis of the following hypothesis: new art/message (output) = old art/signal (input) + noise (Boutet de Monvel, 2023). In this perspective, movements manifestly as contradictory as pop art and minimalism would no longer be antagonistic but the possible variations through added noise of abstract expressionism, on the common ground of serialism.