cybernetic serendipity

Four years after the first computer art exhibitions, Generative Computergrafik, in Stuttgart and Computer-Generated Picture in New York (1965) in 1968 the show Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts took place in London: “ 130 contributors, of whom 43 were composers, artists and poets, and 87 … engineers, doctors, computer scientists and philosophers.” While the 1960 mark the advent of computer art here at the same time another era ends – an era that started in military research during the 1940s and whose other offspring (next to computer art) was “the net.”

The seminar sheds light onto the roots of Cybernetics in science and technology, presents the beginnings of computer art and the internet and discusses paranoid conspiracy theories.