ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the debates about biological form and new technologies that preceded and informed the development of the Basic Design movement, outlining how the same ideas were incorporated into the art and design curriculum at King’s College. It examines the manifestations of biological form-as-process in late British abstract art to the development of interactivity in the work of Roy Ascott and his contemporaries. The chapter seeks out the various points of intersection between biology, engineering and art pedagogy that drove students towards experiments in increasingly systematized and interactive abstract art. In the centre of this Change Painting, a black zigzag line and three black dots are divided by a series of red horizontal lines, bringing to mind fertilization. Communication technologies certainly warp our conceptions of time; messages in the form of disembodied information can be transmitted instantly, transformed into other kinds of data, fed from human to machine and back again.
