Not Your Daddy's Servo

Abstract

Forty years ago this fall the Institute for Contemporary Art in London hosted a groundbreaking exhibition of computer-aided creative works. Three years in the planning, Cybernetic Serendipity marked a high point both in early conjunctions between technology and the arts and in the early configurations by its young curator, Jasia Reichardt, of what would come to be called new media. Cybernetic Serendipity opened less than three months after the upheavals of May 1968 and as the conflict in Vietnam, to which the language of command, control, and communication had been so integral, was covertly escalating under the flag of “peace with honor.” The fate of Reichardt's ambitious presentation of creative and sophisticated technical collaboration is instructive on many levels: the show itself was received alternately as mass entertainment or as failed high art, while many of the works themselves proved too fragile to survive transportation to other venues.