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Art in the Information Age:Technology and Conceptual Art

Edward A. Shanken

In the mid-1960s, Marshall McLuhan prophesiedthat electronic media were creating an increasingly intercon-nected global village. Such pronouncements popularized theidea that the era of machine-age technology was drawing to aclose, ushering in a new era of information technology. Sens-ing this shift, Pontus Hultn organized a simultaneously nos-talgic and futuristic exhibition on art and mechanicaltechnology at the Museum of Modern Art in New York(MOMA) in 1968. The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Me-chanical Ageincluded work ranging from Leonardo da Vincis16th-century drawings of flying machines to contemporaryartist-engineer collaborations selected through a competition

organized by Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. (E.A.T.).E.A.T. had emerged out of the enthusiasm generated bynine

evenings: theatre and engineering, a festival of technologically en-hanced performances that artist Robert Rauschenberg andengineer Billy Klver organized in New York in October 1966.E.A.T. also lent its expertise to engineering a multimedia ex-travaganza designed for the Pepsi Pavilion at the Osaka WorldsFair in 1970. Simultaneously, the American Pavilion at Osakaincluded an exhibition of collaborative projects between artistsand industry that were produced under the aegis of the Artand Technology (A&T) Program at the Los Angeles CountyMuseum of Art.

Ambitious as they were, few of the celebrated artist-engineercollaborations of this period focused on the artistic use of in-

formation technologies, such as computers and telecommu-nications. Taking an important step in that direction, CyberneticSerendipity, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in1968, was thematically centered on the relationship betweencomputers and creativity. This show, however, remained fo-cused on the materiality of technological apparatuses and theirproducts, such as robotic devices and computer graphics.

Art critic Jack Burnham pushed the exploration of the rela-tionship between art and information technology to an un-precedented point. In 1970, he curated the exhibition Software,Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, at the Jewish Mu-seum in New York. This show was the first major U.S. art-and-technology exhibition that attempted to utilize computers ina museum context. Softwares technological ambitions werematched by Burnhams conceptually sophisticated vision, forthe show drew parallels between the ephemeral programs and

protocols of computer software andthe increasingly dematerializedforms of experimental art, whichthe critic interpreted, metaphori-cally, as functioning like informa-tion processing systems. Softwareincluded works by conceptual artistssuch as Les Levine, Hans Haackeand Joseph Kosuth, whose art waspresented beside displays of tech-nology including the first public ex-hibition of hypertext (Labyrinth, an

electronic exhibition catalog de-signed by Ned Woodman and TedNelson) and a model of intelligentarchitecture (SEEK, a reconfig-urable environment for gerbils designed by Nicholas Negro-ponte and the Architecture Machine Group at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) [1].

Regardless of these points of intersection and the fact thatconceptual art emerged during a moment of intensive artis-tic experimentation with technology, few scholars have ex-plored the relationship between technology and conceptualart. Indeed, art-historical literature traditionally has drawnrigid categorical distinctions between conceptual art and art-and-technology. The following reexamination, however, chal-

lenges the disciplinary boundaries that obscure significantparallels between these practices. The first part describes Burn-hams curatorial premises for the Softwareexhibition and in-terprets works in the show by Levine, Haacke and Kosuth. Thesecond part proposes several possible reasons why conceptualart and art-and-technology became fixed as distinct, if not anti-thetical, categories. The conclusion suggests that the corre-spondences shared by these two artistic tendencies offergrounds for rethinking the relationship between them as con-stituents of larger social transformations from the machineage of industrial society to the so-called information age ofpost-industrial society.

Before proceeding, some working definitions will clarify theterminology of conceptual art and art-and-technology in orderto open up a discussion of their relatedness beyond the nar-row confines of extant discourses. Resisting the arch formal-ism that had become institutionalized by the 1960s, conceptualart has sought to analyze the ideas underlying the creation andreception of art, rather than to elaborate another stylistic con-

vention in the historical succession of modernist avant-gardemovements. Investigations by conceptual artists into networksof signification and structures of knowledge (which enable artto have meaning) have frequently employed text as a strate-gic device to examine the interstice between visual and verbal

2002 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 433438, 2002 433

A B S T R A C T

Art historians have generallydrawn sharp distinctions be-

tween conceptual art and art-

and-technology. This essay

reexamines the interrelationshipof these tendencies as they

developed in the 1960s, focus-

ing on the art criticism of Jack

Burnham and the artists in-

cluded in the Software exhibition

that he curated. The historiciza-

tion of these practices as

distinct artistic categories is

examined. By interpreting

conceptual art and art-and-

technology as reflections and

constituents of broad cultural

transformations during the

information age, the author

concludes that the two tenden-

cies share important similarities,

and that this common ground

offers useful insights intolate20th-century art.

Edward A. Shanken (art historian), Information Science Studies (ISIS), 17 John HopeFranklin Center, Box 90400, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, U.S.A. E-mail:.

Based on a paper originally presented at SIGGRAPH 2001 in Los Angeles, California, 1217August 2001. The paper was presented in the art gallery theater as part of the Art andCulture Papers component of N-Space, the SIGGRAPH 2001 Art Gallery. An earlier, shorterversion of this essay was published inSIGGRAPH 2001 Electronic Art and Animation Catalog(New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, 2001) pp. 815. Reprinted courtesy ACM SIGGRAPH.

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languages as semiotic systems. In this re-gard, conceptual art is a meta-critical andself-reflexive art process. It is engaged intheorizing the possibilities of significa-tion in arts multiple contexts (includingits history and criticism, exhibitions andmarkets). In interrogating the relation-ship between ideas and art, conceptualart de-emphasizes the value traditionallyaccorded to the materiality of art objects.It focuses, rather, on examining the pre-

conditions for how meaning emerges inart, seen as a semiotic system.Art-and-technology has focused its in-

quiry on the materials and/or conceptsof technology and science, which it rec-ognizes artists have historically incorpo-rated in their work. Its investigationsinclude: (1) the aesthetic examination ofthe visual forms of science and technol-ogy, (2) the application of science andtechnology in order to create visual formsand (3) the use of scientific concepts andtechnological media both to questiontheir prescribed applications and to cre-ate new aesthetic models. In this thirdcase, art-and-technology, like conceptualart, is also a meta-critical process. It chal-lenges the systems of knowledge (and thetechnologically mediated modes ofknowing) that structure scientific meth-ods and conventional aesthetic values.Further, it examines the social and aes-thetic implications of technologicalmedia that define, package and distrib-ute information.

ART AS SOFTWARE: BURNHAM,LEVINE, HAACKE, KOSUTH

The title for the Softwareexhibition wassuggested to Burnham by artist LesLevine. Burnham himself had interacteddirectly with software as a fellow at theCenter for Advanced Visual Studies(CAVS) at MIT during the 19681969 ac-ademic year. He reported on that expe-rience in a public lecture organized bycurator Edward Fry at the GuggenheimMuseum in 1969, later published as The

Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems. Burn-ham expressed his interest in how a di-alogue evolvesbetween the participantsthe computer program and the human

subjectso that both move beyond theiroriginal state [2]. He further theorizedthis bi-directional exchange as a model forthe eventual two-way communicationthat he anticipated emerging in art [3].Karl Katz, director of the Jewish Museum,heard the talk and invited Burnham tocurate an exhibition.

Following up the ideas he outlined inThe Aesthetics of Intelligent Systemsand in related essays, including Systems

Esthetics (1968) and Real TimeSystems (1969) [4], Burnham designedSoftwareto function as a testing groundfor public interaction with informationsystems and their devices. Many of thedisplays were indeed interactive andbased on two-way communication be-tween the viewer and the exhibit. Software

was predicated, moreover, on the ideas ofsoftware and information technologyas metaphors for art. Burnham conceived

of software as parallel to the aestheticprinciples, concepts or programs that un-derlie the formal embodiment of actualart objects, which in turn parallel hard-

ware. In this regard, he interpreted con-temporary experimental art practices,including conceptual art, as predomi-nantly concerned with the software aspectof aesthetic production.

In his 1970 essay Alices Head, Burn-ham suggested that, like the grin with-out the cat in Lewis Carrolls Alice inWonderland, conceptual art was all but de-

void of the conventional materiality as-sociated with art objects. He subsequentlyexplained Softwarein similar terms, as anattempt to produce aesthetic sensations

without the intervening object [5].Burnham theorized this artistic shift asparalleling larger social transformationsbased in cybernetics and systems theory.Here, the interactive feedback of infor-mation amongst systems and their com-ponents in global fields eradicated anyseparation between the mind of the per-ceiver and the environment [6].

In the late 1960s, Les Levine was at theforefront of artistic experimentationusing the interactive feedback of infor-

mation systems to interrogate the bound-aries between viewer and environment.He was represented in Softwareby threepieces, including Systems Burn-Off X Resid-ual Software(1969). The original instal-lation at the Phyllis Kind Gallery inChicago comprised 1,000 copies of 31photographs taken by Levine at theMarch 1969 opening of the highly pub-licizedEarth Worksexhibition in Ithaca,New York. Numerous New York criticsand journalists had been bused upstatefor the event. Levine explained that mostof the 31,000 photographs, which docu-

mented the media spectacle, were ran-domly distributed on the floor andcovered with jello; some were stuck to the

wall with chewing gum; the rest were forsale [7].

Levines artists statement in the Soft-wareexhibition catalog also outlined hisconcept of software and its relationshipto art. He argued that the proliferationof mass media was changing knowledgeinto a second-hand mental experience of

simulations and representationsi.e.softwareas opposed to first-hand, di-rect, corporeal experiences of actual ob-

jects, places and events, i.e. hardware.

All activities which have no connectionwith object or material mass are the re-sult of software. Images themselves arehardware. Information about these im-ages is software. . . . The experience ofseeing something first hand is no longerof value in a software controlled society,as anything seen through the media car-

ries just as much energy as first hand ex-perience. . . . In the same way, most of theart that is produced today ends up as in-formation about art [8].

Levine conceived of the 31,000 indi-vidual photos as the residual effects orburn-off of the information system hecreatedas the material manifestationof software. In other words, Systems Burn-Offwas an artwork that produced infor-mation (software) about the informationproduced and disseminated by the media(software) about art (hardware). It of-fered a critique of the systematic processthrough which art objects(hardware) be-come transformed by the media into in-

formation about art objects (software).Whereas Levine stated that most artends up as information about art, Sys-tems Burn-Offwas art as information aboutinformation about art, adding a level ofcomplexity and reflexivity onto that cycleof transformations in media culture.

Systems Burn-Off can be related toLevines interactive video installations,such as Iris(1968) and Contact: A Cyber-netic Sculpture (1969). In these works,

video cameras captured various imagesof the viewer(s), which were fed back,

often with time delays or other distor-tions, onto a bank of monitors. As Levinenoted, Iris . . . turns the viewer into in-formation . . . Contact is a system thatsynthesizes man with his technology . . .the people are the software [9]. Al-though these works demanded the di-rect, corporeal experience of theparticipant, it was the experience of see-ing oneself as informationas trans-formed into softwarethat was ofprimary concern to the artist. In this re-gard, Levine provocatively has notedthat, Simulation is more real than real-

ity. Reality is an over-rated hierarchy[10]. For many artists working at the in-tersection of conceptual art and art-and-technology, the particular visualmanifestation of the artwork as an object

was secondary to the expression of an ideathat becomes reality by simulating it.

Conceptual artist Hans Haacke alsoutilized technology and mass media inthe production of art. Perhaps bestknown for his politically charged cri-

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tiques of art institutions and industry, hiswork in the early 1960s evolved from ki-netic sculpture and was included in anumber of key Nouvelle Tendence exhi-bitions. These early works were predi-cated on the dynamism of naturalsystems, an idea that was integral to di-

verse strains of process and conceptualart, as well as to art-and-technology.Haacke considered himself a sort of jun-ior partner of the German-based Zero

group [11], renowned for their sky andlight works of the late 1950s. The HowardWise Galler y, the premier commercialvenue for the presentation of art-and-technology, gave Haacke solo exhibitionsin 1966, 1968 and 1969.

A close friend of Burnham since 1962,Haacke contributed two pieces to theSoftwareexhibition:Newsand Visitors Pro-

file. These works were part of the artistsReal Time Systemsseries, inspired in partby conversations with Burnham, who in-troduced Haacke to the idea of open bi-ological systems developed by Ludwig

Von Bertalanffy and to Norbert Wienerstheories of cybernetics. Burnhams arti-cle Real Time Systems dif ferentiatedbetween ideal time and real time withrespect to art, a distinction that Haackeapplied to his work. In ideal time, the aes-thetic contemplation of beauty occurs intheoretical isolation from the temporalcontingencies of value; while in real time,

value accrues on the basis of an immedi-ate, interactive, and necessarily contin-gent exchange of information.

News(1969) incorporated several Tele-type machines that delivered a perpetualflow of information about local, national

and international events, printed out oncontinuous rolls of paper in real time.The computerized Visitors Profileplannedfor Software was more technologicallysophisticated than the manual versioninstalled at the Information exhibitionthe same year. The computer was pro-grammed to instantaneously cross-tabulatedemographic information about the mu-seum audience (age, sex, education andso on) with their opinions on a varietyof provocative subjects, ranging fromShould the use of marijuana be legal-ized, lightly or severely punished? to As-

suming you were Indochinese, would yousympathize with the present Saigonregime? [12] Whereas the statistical datafrom the other versions ofVisitors Profile

were tabulated on a daily basis, the Soft-wareversion was designed to performthese calculations in real time. As Haackenoted in his artists statement:

The processing speed of the computermakes it possible that at any given timethe statistical evaluation of all answers is

up to date and available. The constantlychanging data is projected onto a largescreen, so that it is accessible to a greatnumber of people. Based on their owninformation a statistical profile of the ex-hibitions visitors emerges [13].

Like Levine, Haacke did not use tech-nology as an end in itself, but rather putit in the service of the ideas that were cen-tral to his artistic practice. As in earliertechnologically enhanced works by

Haacke, such as Photo-Electric Viewer-Programmed Coordinate System(19661968),technology was employed as a means toenable art to become a responsive, real-time system that merges with the envi-ronment in a relationship that is betterunderstood as a system of interdepen-dent processes [14]. Similarly, in theSoftwareversion ofVisitors Profile, a com-puter received, processed and distributedinformation instantaneously so that thepiece could interact with participants inreal time by responsively gathering andevaluating information about the sys-tematic relationship between art and so-ciety. In this regard, Haackes work sharescommon concerns with the conceptualgoals underlying the work of many artistsassociated with art-and-technology, in-cluding Nicolas Schffers CYSPseries ofcybernetic sculptures of the mid-1950s,

James Seawrights interactive roboticsculptures beginning in the mid-1960s,Sonia Sheridans founding of the Gen-erative Systems program at the School ofthe Art Institute of Chicago in 1970,Myron Kreugers artificial reality envi-ronments beginning in the early 1970sand the veritable explosion of art com-

bining computers and telecommunica-tions since 1980.

Like Levine and Haacke, Joseph Ko-suth also has utilized mass media as acomponent in his work. However, unlikethose artists, Kosuth has not made ex-plicit use of technology such as video,computers or telecommunications.Nonetheless, the technological meta-phor of information processing offers aninsightful model for interpreting his

work. His contribution to Software, theSeventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea)Proposition One(1970), included the same

printed text in various international con-texts: a billboard in English and Chinesein the Chinatown neighborhood of lowerManhattan, an advertisement in The DailyWorldand a banner in Turin. The textcomprised a set of six propositions:

(1) to assume a mental set voluntarily(2) to shift voluntarily from one aspect

of the situation to another(3) to keep in mind simultaneously

various aspects

(4) to grasp the essential of a givenwhole; to break up a given whole intoparts and to isolate them voluntarily

(5) to generalize; to abstract commonproperties; to plan ahead ideationally; toassume an attitude toward the mere pos-sible and to think or perform symboli-cally

(6) to detach our ego from the outerworld

Kosuths statement in the Softwarecata-

log emphasized his intention that thework not be reducible to a mental image,but that it exist as information free of anyiconography: The art consists of my ac-tion of placing this activity (investigation)in an art context (i.e. art as idea as idea)[15].

According to the software metaphorunderlying Burnhams exhibition, the artin Kosuths work was not the billboard orthe other structural elements (hard-

ware), but was manifested rather in theidea of contextualizing philosophicalquestions (software) within the contextof visual art and simultaneously decon-textualizing them in various public, non-art media. In this way, his workinvestigated the relationship between artand non-art ideas, the vehicles by whichthey are expressed, and the semiotic net-

works that enable and delimit theirmeanings in multiple contexts.

Applying the parallel Burnham drewbetween how computer software controlsthe hardware that runs it and how infor-mation directs the activity of the humanmindto Kosuths work, one can inter-pret the artists propositions as operatinglike instructions in the mind of the

viewer. But whereas computer softwarehas an instrumental relationship withhardware, coordinating its operation, theartists propositions function as meta-analyses of the phenomenological andlinguistic components of meaning. Inother words, they demand that the viewerexamine the process of processing infor-mation, while in the process of doing so.

Although Kosuth did not explicitlydraw on computer models of informa-tion processing, his investigations followsimilar modes of logic, while at the sametime demanding a self-reflexivity that ex-

ceeds computational systems. By posingpropositions that required viewers to in-vestigate the cognitive functioning oftheir own minds with respect to the pro-cessing of information and the creationof meaning, Kosuths Seventh Investigationsought to interrogate how and why whathe called the language game of artfunctioned in a larger cultural frame-

work. This critical project reflects theshift from an industrial to a post-

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industrial economic base, characteristicof the information age. Here meaningand value are not embedded in objects,institutions, or individuals so much asthey are abstracted in the production,manipulation and distribution of signsand information.

RESISTANCE TO PARALLELSBETWEEN CONCEPTUAL ARTAND ART-AND-TECHNOLOGYIn Art into Ideas, Robert C. Morgan cred-ited Burnhams Systems Esthetics withhaving clarified the feeling that art hadtraversed from the object to the idea, froma material definition of art to that of a sys-tem of thought. Morgan then describedconceptual art as a significant and inno-

vative method or type (not a style) of artis-tic practice on the eve of the Informational

Age and noted a parallel socioeconomicphenomenon . . . the penumbra betweenindustry and postindustry [16].

Burnham had already drawn a similarparallel in Systems Esthetics, which re-ferred to the shift in industry from thecontrol of production to the control ofinformation that John Kenneth Gal-braith described in The New IndustrialState. However, in Systems Esthetics healso drew explicit parallels between con-ceptual art and developments in systemstheory and computer information pro-cessing. For Burnham, these scientificand technological advances were insepa-rable from the sweeping economic andsocial changes that Galbraith and others

were identifying and forecasting.Morgans alliance with Burnham

ceases precisely at the point of drawingan explicit parallel between conceptualart and information technology. No arthistorian since Burnham has made thatconnection so emphatically; and nearlyall have sought to dismiss it. However, itis unclear how the relationship that Mor-gan recognizes between conceptual art,the information age and post-industrialsociety can be explained without re-course to the specific technologies thatemerged with them. If those relation-ships are going to be drawn (and I arguefor doing so), then it will be necessary to

address, as Burnham did, the scientificand technological advances that con-tributed to broader cultural and socialchanges.

Nonetheless, it is understandable whyconceptual art and art-and-technologyhave been identified as distinct categoriesof artistic practice. Art-and-technology,

which had offered a useful path of aes-thetic experimentation throughout the1950s and 1960s, no longer appeared to

be a viable direction for many artists inthe 1970s. Critics opined that it was dom-inated by the materiality and spectacle ofmechanical apparatus, which was anath-ema to the conceptual project. Techni-cal failures of art and technologyexhibitions, like Software(which, ironi-cally, was plagued with software prob-lems), contributed to waning publicinterest, just at the moment that a suc-cession of large, successful exhibitions of

conceptual art were mounted. Wide-spread skepticism towards the military-industrial complex after May 1968 andamidst the Vietnam War, the Cold Warand mounting ecological concerns allcontributed to problematizing the artisticuse of technologyand the productionof aesthetic objects in generalwithinthe context of commodity capitalism[17]. Conceptual art, on the other hand,

with its assault on the modernist object,became increasingly influential to a vari-ety ofau courantartistic discourses, in-cluding photography, performance andinstallation. It stands to reason thatartists, critics, dealers, curators and col-lectors invested in internationally presti-gious conceptual art would want todistance themselves from associations

with art-and-technology, which appearedincreasingly peripheral to contemporaryartistic concerns, if not simplypass.

These factors all contributed to exac-erbating distinctions between the artistictendencies, rather than revealing the flu-idity and continuity between them. It

would be a mistake, however, to under-estimate the commonalities between con-ceptual artists and artists like Schffer,

Seawright, Sheridan, Krueger and nu-merous others, who, like other mid- andlate20th-century artists associated withart-and-technology, were concerned withprocess, real-time interaction and dy-namic systems. Moreover, artists who ap-plied a conceptual approach to exploringtechnological ideas did not easily fit ei-ther category. The example of Roy Ascottpowerfully demonstrates the significantintersections between conceptual art andart-and-technology, exploding the con-

ventional autonomy of these art-historical categories.

Ascott, the British artist most closely as-sociated with cybernetic art in England,was not included in Cybernetic Serendipitybecause his use of cybernetics was pri-marily conceptual and did not explicitlyutilize technology [18]. Conversely, al-though his essay on the application of cy-bernetics to art and art pedagogy, TheConstruction of Change (1964), wasquoted on the dedication page (to SolLewitt) of Lucy Lippards seminal Six

Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Objectfrom 1966 to 1972[19], Ascotts anticipa-tion of and contribution to the formationof conceptual art in Britain has receivedscant recognition, perhaps (and ironi-cally) because his work was too closely al-lied with art-and-technology. In thisregard, Ascotts use of the thesaurus in1963 drew an explicit parallel betweenthe taxonomic qualities of verbal and vi-sual languages, a concept that would be

taken up in Joseph Kosuths Second In-vestigation, Proposition 1 (1968) and MelRamsdensElements of an Incomplete Map(1968).

Sol Lewitts influential essay Para-graphs of Conceptual Art (1967) furtherexemplifies the complications and con-flicts at the intersection of conceptual artand art-and-technology. In the secondparagraph he described conceptual artas a quasi-mechanical process: In con-ceptual art the idea of concept is the mostimportant aspect of the work . . . [t]heidea becomes a machine that makes theart. Several paragraphs later, however,he warned that new materials are one ofthe great afflictions of contemporaryart. . . . The danger is, I think, in makingthe physicality of the materials so impor-tant that it becomes the idea of the work(another kind of expressionism) [20].

Although the idea of unifying art andtechnology held substantial cultural cur-rency for much of the 20th centur y, manyartists, critics and historians came to per-ceive the junction as weighted down by(in Lewitts words) the physicality of thematerials, which dominated the idea ofthe work. In her introduction to Con-

ceptual Art, Ursula Meyer appropriated atechnological metaphor and wrote,Conceptual Art is diametrically opposedto hardware art [21].

This sentiment was held perhaps morestrongly in conceptual art circles, wherethe battle against the formalism of mod-ernist objects (and their complicity ascommodities in reinforcing capitalist ide-ology) was being waged most fervently.From this anti-formalist perspective, thebells and whistles of art-and-technologyappeared to be gaudy, expressionisticand commercial excesses that were ex-

traneous and antithetical to the aestheticinvestigation of superstructural ideas andquestions of semiosis that defined keyagendas of conceptual art.

The writing of art historian and criticCharles Harrison, a member of Art &Language (A&L) since 1969, demandsclose and careful analysis in this regardbecause of its centrality to the discoursesof conceptual art. Harrison has written,The rapprochement of art and tech-


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nology . . . tended to suffer from a trivialequation of modernity with scientificand mechanical development. It tendedalso to be co-opted by the very represen-tational technologies it set out to exploit[22]. He also stated that during this timeof E.A.T. . . . and ofCybernetic Serendip-i t y . . . it seemed to some as if fascination

with design and technology might be sig-nificantly injected into artistic mod-ernism. The boot was on the other foot,

however [23]. Paraphrasing A&L co-founder Michael Baldwin, Harrisonwrote that the legacies of Pop-Art-and-technology were never part of the Art &Language agenda, [24] and furtherclaimed that they never furnished muchbetter than chronic distractions from themore interesting and intractable prob-lems of modern art [25].

Although Pop art and art-and-technology intersected at certain points,they also represent two very differentlegacies. By collapsing them together,Baldwin and Harrison reduce the uniquequalities and goals of each to their leastcommon denominator, namely the useof technology as a formal element

wielded in the interest of appealing tothe masses. Indeed, Baldwin had in mindthe art-democratised-as-light-shows-or-cyberneticised-life-style machine eventsof the UK group Fine Artz, with whom

A&L co-founder David Bainbridge was af-filiated [26]. Burnham also denigratedthe chic superficiality that sur-rounded . . . many of the kinetic per-formances and light events, which heequated with the sensation of the up-town discotheque [27]. However, Burn-

ham, being much more interested in andknowledgeable about art-and-technology,also recognized that its more theoreti-cally sophisticated aspectsi.e. its con-cern with process and systems, therelationship between technological andaesthetic structures of knowledge, and aninteractive, two-way exchange ofinformationwere closely related to cen-tral features of conceptual art.

Despite his indifference to art-and-technology, Harrison acknowledged theinterest in technology shared by A&Lfounding members Harold Hurrell and

David Bainbridge. He described the for-mers Cybernetic Artwork that Nobody Broke(1969) [28] and the latters Lecher System(19691970) [29] as flailing aboutproducts of the search for practical andintellectual tools which had not alreadybeen compromised and rendered eu-phemistic in Modernist use [30]. Butthere is much more to these works thanthat. I suggest that they, as well as Terry

Atkinson and Baldwins 22 Sentences: The

French Army(1967) [31], exemplify criti-cal concerns at the heart of art-and-technology.

Hurrells spurious computer programfor interactively generating color refusedto allow the user to interact beyond therigid banality of binary input. If the userinput a number other than 0 or 1, the pro-gram proffered the message: YOU HAVENOTHING, OBEY INSTRUCTIONS! Ifthe user input a non-number, Cybernetic

Art Worktold him or her that there was anERROR AT STEP 3.2. Lecher Systemjux-taposed a sculptural morphology andan electromagnetic morphology. Theperceptual experience of interacting withthe sculptural aspect of the system was in-tended to result in knowledge about theelectromagnetic aspect of the system that,in turn, would create knowledge aboutthe sculptural aspects. 22 Sentences in-cluded a key to abbreviations for theFrench Army (FA), the Collection of Menand Machines (CMM), and the Group ofRegiments (GR), then described theinter-relationships between them:

The FA is regarded as the same CMM asthe GR and the GR is the same CMM as(e.g.) a new order FA (e.g. Morpho-logically a member of another class ofobjects): by transitivity the FA is thesame CMM as the New Shape/Orderone.

This ironic passage reduced to ab-surdity the sort of systematic relation-ships between individuals, groups, andinstitutions characteristic of cybernetics(it is surprisingly similar to the ana-grammatic rhetoric of Ascotts cyber-netic art matrix [32]). Although not

explicitly stated in the work, the artisticavant-gardeis also morphologically con-nected to the French military, from

which the term comes. So the relationsarticulated in the work must also bemapped onto art relations. It is worthnoting, moreover, that the French Armyis decimated, in eight of the 22 sen-tences, hardly a coincidence, given the

war then being waged in the formerFrench colony of Viet Nam.

Because these works by A&L memberswere infused with irony, their techno-logical or pseudo-technological compo-

nents must be interpreted as parodies ofscientific structures of knowledge andtheir uncritical application in art andsociety in general. In challenging thesystems of knowledge (and the techno-logically mediated modes of knowing)that structure scientific methods andconventional aesthetic values, these workshave much in common with the objec-tives of art-and-technology. Indeed, thecritical questioning of the implications of

technology characterizes a wide varietyof artistic inquiries in the domain of art-and-technology since the 1950s. Keymonuments include Gustav Metzgerstheory of auto-destructive art (1959),Tinguelys Homage to New York(1960),Nam June Paik and Shuya Abes RobotK-456(1964) and Oyvind FahlstromsKisses Sweeter than Wine(1966). The workof Stelarc, Lynn Hershman, Survival Re-search Laboratories, Julia Scher, Jodi.org

and others continue this tradition ofart-and-technology in a manner thatchallenges modernist aesthetics andtechnocracy.

Equating art-and-technology with ma-chine aesthetics, kinetic gadgets, andother spectacles that feed on and sustainmodernist discourses rather than inter-rogate them, Harrison and other criticsof conceptual art were unaware of, unim-pressed by, or disinterested in this criti-cal aspect of artists use of technology.

Yet, Harrisons early-1980s description ofArt & Languages Index 01 (1972) [33]explicitly referred to the fields of artifi-cial intelligence and what has come to beknown as neurophilosophy, with strongovertones of cybernetics and systems the-ory. In this regard, his discussion of thesystematic approaches of conceptual artis remarkably similar to Burnhams the-ories on the systematic relationship be-tween technology and conceptual art asexemplified in Software[34]. A&Ls Index,moreover, can be thought of as a kind ofmanual hypertext system that allows forthe interactive associative linking ofideas. As mentioned above, the first pub-lic exhibition of hypertext took place in

Burnhams exhibition. In these ways,both the practice and criticism of con-ceptual art and art-and-technology aremuch more closely related than the his-toricization of these artistic tendencies asdistinct categories would lead one to be-lieve.

Harrisons accounts of Art & Languagetend to focus on identifying the philo-sophical and political foundations of thegroups challenges to the aesthetic dis-courses of modernism. But by limiting itsfoil to pre-war notions of materiality andproduction and formalist aesthetic issues,

his history of A&L (like the art criticismof conceptual art in general) is unneces-sarily narrow in its implications becauseit fails to address the relationship oflate20th-century experimental art to theinformation age of post-industrial soci-ety. In addition to the relevant philo-sophical, political and aesthetic issues, amore comprehensive account ofpostWorld War II art must also take intoconsideration the specific scientific and

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technological theories and developmentsthat contributed to larger social forma-tions that impacted all aspects of mate-rial culture.

CONCLUSIONThe continuities between art-and-technology and conceptual art are morereadily apparent from a historical dis-tance of three decades, removed from

the aesthetico-political debates of thattime. Advances in electronics, comput-ing and telecommunicationsand espe-cially the advent of the Internethaveprovided tools that enable artists to in-terrogate the conventional materialityand semiotic complexity of art objects in

ways that were not available 30 years ago.Such developments also bring into reliefthe failure of critical discourses to rec-oncile how the work of an artist could beallied simultaneously with both art-and-technology and conceptual art. Haacke,for example, exhibited at the Howard

Wise Gallery, and his work features promi-nently in key monographs on kinetic artand art-and-technology. Nonetheless, his

work has been canonized primarilywithin the context of Conceptual Art.Other artists, such as Ascott, remainedsimultaneously visible and invisible toeach camp throughout the 1960s and1970s, because of his close affinities toboth. The critical reception and histori-cization of Haacke and Ascott says lessabout their work than it does about theinstitutional mechanisms that have cre-ated and reinforced categorical distinc-tions between art-and-technology and

conceptual art at the expense of identi-fying continuities between them.

By respecting the differences betweenthese artistic tendencies, while at thesame time understanding some of thecommon theoretical threads that theyhave shared, a more comprehensive ac-count of art since the mid-20th centurycan be formulated. Such a history will ac-knowledge cybernetics, information the-ory and systems theory as foundationalintellectual models that, in combination

with the advent of digital computing andtelecommunications, played a significant

role in shaping culture. As Burnhamwrote in 1970,

Information processing technology in-fluences our notions about creativity,perception and the limits of art. . . . It . . .is probably not the province of comput-ers and other telecommunication de-

vices to produce works of art as we knowit; but they will, in fact, be instrumentalin redefining the entire area of estheticawareness [35].

Acknowledgment

Dedicated to Judy Fishman, for nurturing my love ofart.

References and Notes

1.Judith Benjamin Burnham, ed., Software, Informa-tion Technology: Its New Meaning for Art(New York: TheJewish Museum, 1971).

2. Jack Burnham, The Aesthetics of IntelligentSystems, in On the Future of Art(New York: Viking,1970) p. 119.

3.Jack Burnham, Notes on Ar t and InformationProcessing, in Burnham [1] p. 10.

4. Jack Burnham, Systems Esthetics, Artforum7,No. 1, 3035 (September 1968); Jack Burnham,Real Time Systems Artforum8, No 1, 4955 (Sep-tember 1969).

5.Jack Burnham, correspondence with the author,23 April 1998.

6.Jack Burnham, Alices Head, Artforum8, No. 6(February 1970), reprinted in Jack Burnham, GreatWestern Salt Works(New York: George Braziller, 1974)p. 47.

7. Burnham [1] p. 60.

8. Les Levine, artists statement, in Burnham [1] p. 61.

9. Levine quoted in Gene Youngblood,Expanded Cin-ema(New York: Dutton, 1970) p. 340.

10. Les Levine, telephone interview with the author,21 January 1999. Curiously, this recent statement em-ploys rhetoric that belies Levines anticipation of Bau-drillards theory of simulacra.

11. Hans Haacke, interview with the author, 2 Janu-ary 1999.

12. Haacke [11] explained that the Softwareques-tionnaire was almost identical to the version he pro-posed for his solo exhibition at the GuggenheimMuseum in 1971, which the museum canceled. Seealso Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke: Unfinished Busi-ness(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) pp. 8287.

13. Hans Haacke, artists statement in Burnham [1]p. 34.

14. Hans Haacke, artists statement in Hans Haacke,exh. cat. (New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1968);quoted in Burnham Systems Esthetics [4] p. 35.

15.Joseph Kosuth, artists statement, in Burnham[1] p. 68.

16. Robert C. Morgan, Art into Ideas(New York: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 1996) pp. 23.

17. Edward A. Shanken, Gemini Rising, Moon inApollo: Attitudes Towards Art and Technology in theUS, 19661971, in ISEA97(Proceedings of Inter-national Society for Electronic Art) (Chicago:ISEA97, 1998); reprinted on-line in Leonardo Elec-tronic Almanac6, No. 12 (January 1999), .

18.Jasia Reichardt, interview with the author, 30 July1998, London.

19. Lucy R. Lippard ed., Six Years: The Dematerializa-tion of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York:Praeger, 1973).

20. Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, inStiles and Selz, Theories and Documents of ContemporaryArt(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)p. 825.

21. Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art(New York: Dutton,1972) p. xvi.

22. Charles Harrison,Essays on Art & Language(Lon-don: Basil Blackwell, 1991; Cambridge, Mass: MITPress, 2001) p. 17.

23. Harrison [22] p. 260, n. 25.

24. Harrison [22] p. 261, n. 30.

25. Charles Harrison, The Late Sixties in Londonand Elsewhere, in Hillary Gresty, ed., 19651972When Attitudes Became Form, (Cambridge, U.K.: Ket-tles Yard Gallery, 1984) pp. 1011.

26. Michael Baldwin, e-mail correspondence with theauthor, 9 April 2002.

27.Jack Burnham, Steps in the Formulation of Real-Time Political Art, in Kaspar Koenig, ed., HansHaacke: Framing and Being Framed, 7 Works 19701975(Halifax, Canada: The Press of the Nova Scotia Col-lege of Art and Design, 1975) pp. 128129.

28. Illustrated in Harrison [22] p. 58.

29. Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Bald-win, and Harold Hurrell, Lecher System,Studio In-ternational 180, No. 924 (JulyAugust 1970);reprinted in Meyer [21] pp. 2225.

30. Harrison [22] p. 56.

31. Detail illustrated in Harrison [22] p. 52. Full texton the CD-ROM in Art & Language, Too Dark to Read:Motifs Rtrospectifs 20021965(Lille, France: Muse

dart moderne Lille Mtropole, Villeneuve dAscq.,2002).

32. Roy Ascott, Behaviourist Art and the CyberneticVision, Cybernetica10 (1967) pp. 2556.

33. Harrison [22] p. 72.

34. Compare, for example, Harrison [22] pp. 7273with Burnham [3] p. 12.

35. Burnham [3] p. 11.

Edward Shanken is Executive Director of the In-formation Science Information Studies pro-gram (ISIS) at Duke University. He is editor ofa collection of essays by Roy Ascott entitledTelematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of

Art, Technology, and Consciousness,forth-coming from the University of California Press.


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