ABSTRACT

Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance offers a unique discourse and an original aesthetic theory. It argues that fusing perspectives from the philosophy of Existentialism with insights from the ‘universal science’ of cybernetics provides a new analytical lens and deconstructive methodology to critique art.  

In this study, Steve Dixon examines how a range of artists’ works reveal the ideas of Existentialist philosophers including Kierkegaard, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre on freedom, being and nothingness, eternal recurrence, the absurd, and being-for-others. Simultaneously, these artworks are shown to engage in complex explorations of concepts proposed by cyberneticians including Wiener, Shannon, and Bateson on information theory and ‘noise’, feedback loops, circularity, adaptive ecosystems, autopoiesis, and emergence.

Dixon’s groundbreaking book demonstrates how fusing insights and knowledge from these two fields can throw new light on pressing issues within contemporary arts and culture, including authenticity, angst and alienation, homeostasis, radical politics, and the human as system.

chapter 1|33 pages

Introduction

Cybernetics and Existentialism in arts and popular culture

chapter 2|34 pages

Visual art

The aesthetics of systems and being-towards-death

chapter 3|39 pages

Interactive art

Communicating, controlling, and being-for-others

chapter 4|42 pages

Participatory art

Autopoiesis with strangers

chapter 5|29 pages

Theater art

Staging cybernetics, dread, and the existential crisis

chapter 6|25 pages

Performance art

Actualizing science fiction and invoking transcendence

chapter 7|26 pages

Identity art

The adaptive system of the authentic self

chapter 8|28 pages

Uncanny art

Existential absurdity within cybernetic environments

chapter 9|23 pages

Conclusion

The eternal return and being-in-new-systems