Cybernetic Serendipity - Week 3

During today's lecture, we discussed interactive art, with a specific focus on the 1968 exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity", which was the first major museum exhibition to focus on the intersection of art and technology.

According to Roy Ascott, the concept of interactive art can be described as a "permanent endless process." This idea may be comparable to mindlessly scrolling through social media without any particular purpose. Perhaps these never ending processes are a key to humans attention. It is easy for many to get mesmerised looking at satisfying looped videos, which can get up to millions of views on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.

We continued the lecture looking at a series of weird and wonderful activities people invented. One such example is Eric Anderson's innovation of blowing bubbles from an orchestra and slicing them with a samurai sword. I am not quite sure how satisfying it would feel to slice a bubble with a sword without any proper impact due to an immediate pop, but it must have been an interesting performance to watch. In 1961, George Brecht invented a simple yet intriguing act of turning on a radio and immediately switching it off upon hearing the first sound. While these activities may seem pointless at first glance, I personally find value in their simplicity and obscureness.

Before the lecture, we were asked to read a chapter from "Wasting Time on the Internet" by Kenneth Goldsmith. In his book, Goldsmith argues that the human experience is being reshaped by our digital life. In reality, when we "waste time", we are actually creating a culture of collaboration. We are reading and writing more - and quite differently.

After discussing our thoughts we all decided to try a particular segment from the book; “Next... I ask everyone to cue up one song on YouTube, then full-screen it. At the same moment, everyone hits play.” p. 43

The moment we all hit play, the room turned into a complete abomination of various sounds. Everyone attempted to catch different songs they might know from this mess, however, it proved to be almost impossible. As weird as this experience may sound (haha) we all absolutely loved it, at least I certainly did. It's the simple act of doing something out of ordinary that made me really fascinated about what was going on around me.