The Institute of Contemporary Art in London revives the historical exhibition “Cyber Serendipity”, organized in 1968, one of the first institutional exhibition to relate the computers’ potential and the emerging ‘cybernetics’ with art, music and poetry, with a conference that will look back at the exhibition in order to look forward to better understand today’s technological progress at the cross of disciplines.
Jasia Reichardt, curator of the exhibition, will deliver a keynote lecture fifty-six years on, entitled Before and After Cybernetic Serendipity. Talks, performances, readings, and panels will feature the most active intellectuals and artists worldwide. Speakers and performers include Jasia Reichardt, William Latham, Christiane Paul, Sougwen Chung, Marianna Simnett, K Allado-McDowell, Alex Estorick, Daniel Felstead, 0xSalon , Rachel O’ Dwyer, Lawrence Lek, Joey Holder, Connie Bakshi, Luba Elliott, tarotgpt.xyz and more.
Cybernetic Serendipity. Towards AI, conferenza all’ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 24.02.2024
This event is co-curated with DAZED features editor and internet folklorist Günseli Yalcinkaya and technology researcher, curator and writer Bronac Ferran.
Image courtesy Jasia Reichardt, The Computer Technique Group (1968) and VISIO
Speakers:
K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, and Air Age Blueprint and are co-editor of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors and recorded and released music under the name Qenric. K established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.
Connie Bakshi is an artist based in Los Angeles, trained as a classical pianist and engineer. Working predominantly with artificial intelligence, she probes the language, ritual, and lore that emerge in the coincidence of the synthetic and organic, material and immaterial, the human and nonhuman.
Sougwen愫君Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher considered a pioneer in human-machine collaboration – exploring the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding systems. Chung’s work MEMORY is part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and is the first AI Model to be collected by a major institution. Recently, Chung was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Dr Bronaċ Ferran is a writer focussing on postwar poetics and contemporary digital practices. She’s a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. Recent commissions include catalogue essays on Stephen Willats (2023) and Waldemar Cordeiro (2024). She has served on Ars Electronica and Transmediale juries and regularly contributes to Studio International.
Luba Elliott is a curator and researcher specialising in AI art since 2016. She has worked with The Serpentine Galleries, arebyte, ZKM, Impakt Festival and CogX. Her projects include the Unit London exhibition The Perfect Error and the ART-AI Festival in Leicester. She founded the NeurIPS Creativity and Design Workshop and curated the online galleries aiartonline.com and computervisionart.com.
Alex Estorick is a writer, editor, and curator who seeks to develop socially progressive approaches to new technologies. As Editor-in-Chief at Right Click Save, he aims to drive critical conversation about blockchain, NFTs, and Web3. He is also Contributing Editor for Art and Technology at Flash Art. He was lead author of the first aesthetics of crypto art and is an International Selector for The Lumen Prize.
Daniel Felstead is an academic and content producer whose practice focuses on the relationship between fashion, technology, and culture. He is the course leader of MA Fashion Media & Communication at the London College of Fashion (UA) and has presented work internationally.
William Latham is well known for his evolutionary art created at IBM in the late eighties. After a twelve year period as Creative Director in Rave Music and Computer Games, he became a Professor at Goldsmiths. His work is in the Centre Pompidou and V&A Collections and many other collections. His VR and generative work has been shown widely internationally, in particular in Japan and China during the past few years.
Lawrence Lek is a London-based artist, filmmaker, and musician known for his ongoing series of virtual worlds set within a Sinofuturist cinematic universe. Often featuring interlocking narratives and the recurring figure of the wanderer, his work explores the myth of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence and social change.
Rachel O’Dwyer is a lecturer in Digital Cultures at the National College of Art and Design. She is the author of Tokens, the Future of Money in the Age of the Platform (Verso, 2023), Longlisted for the FT Book of the year Award.
Christiane Paul is Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor Emerita at The New School. She is the recipient of 2023 MediaArtHistories International Award and the Thoma Foundation’s 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her latest book is Digital Art (4th ed., 2023).
JASIA REICHARDT is a writer on art and an exhibition organiser. She was born in Poland, educated in England, and has always been interested in the relationship of art and technology. She worked at the ICA 1963–1971, where one of the exhibitions she organised was Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968.
Marianna Simnett is an artist living and working in Berlin. Simnett uses vivid and visceral means to explore the body as a site of transformation. In psychologically charged works that challenge both herself and the viewer, Simnett imagines radical new worlds filled with untamed thoughts, strange tales and desires.
Nicola Tirabasso, also known as VISIO, is a visual artist and musician based in London. In both music and visuals, his output investigates and explores the arcane tangents between reality and the unexplainable. Much like a modern antiquarian, he draws inspiration from a wide range of fictional imageries, repurposing them in intricate, deconstructed, and melancholically haunted landscapes.
Günseli Yalcinkaya is a writer, researcher and internet folklorist based in London. She is Dazed’s Features Editor and the host of Logged On, a podcast that puts trends under the mircroscope. She’s written extensively about AI, mysticism and psychedelia, and as an artist studies the relationship between ecology, magic and inhuman narratives.
