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Description of  Systems (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)

Writings survey system-based art, from its origins in works from the 1950s to the 1970s to its twenty-first century resurgence in works that draw on cutting-edge science. In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as Roy Ascott, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and Stephen Willats were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer's role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham's 1968 Read more