Description
Book SynopsisCybernetic-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 knowled
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Cybernetics and Existentialism in Arts and Popular Culture; 2. Visual Art: The Aesthetics of Systems; 3. Interactive Art: Communicating, Controlling and Being-for-Others; 4. Participatory Art: Autopoiesis with Strangers; 5. Theater Art: Staging Cybernetics, Dread, and the Existential Crisis; 6. Performance art: actualizing science fiction and invoking transcendence; 7. Identity Art: The Adaptive System of the Authentic Self; 8. Uncanny Art: Existential Absurdity within Cybernetic Environments; 9. Conclusion: the eternal return and being-in-new-systems
