Formats
Anthologies
105
Audio
310
Catalogues
410
Clothing
23
Editions
31
Ephemera
68
Literary
39
Monographs
179
Posters
269
Video
39
Zines
142

Shop > Artists' Books

Out of Stock
#11904

Systems: Documents of Contemporary Art

Date
2015
Publisher
MIT Press
Format
Artists' Books
Size
5.8 × 8.3 inches
Length
240 pages
Genre
Essays, New Media, Theory
Description

In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer 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 Artforum essay “Systems Aesthetics” and his 1970 “Software” exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century.

Systems traces this radical shift in aesthetics from its roots in mid twentieth-century general systems theory, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence to the cutting-edge science of the present. The collected texts examine the connections between advanced technological systems, our bodies and minds; the relation of musical to spatial and architectural structures; and the ways in which systems-based art projects can create self-generating entities and networks, alter our experience of time, change the configurations of social relations, cross cultural borders, and interact with threatened ecosystems.

Artists surveyed include:
Roy Ascott, Driessens and Verstappen, David Dunn, Brian Eno, Frank Gillette,Michael Joaquin Grey, Hans Haacke, Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison, Joan Littlewood, Richard Paul Lohse, Laurent Mignonneau, Manfred Mohr, Nam June Paik, Cedric Price, Casey Reas, Ken Rinaldo, Tomás Saraceno, Sonia Sheridan, Christa Sommerer, Ubermorgen, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Peter Weibel, Mitchell Whitelaw, John Whitney, James Whitney, Stephen Willats, Iannis Xenakis

Writers include:
Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson, Pierre Bourdieu, R. Buckminster Fuller, Jack Burnham, Fritjof Capra, Geoff Cox, James P. Crutchfield, Boris Groys, Francis Halsall, Usman Haque, N. Katherine Hayles, Caroline Jones, Stephen Jones, Christian Katti, Bruno Latour, Mary Louise Lobsinger, James Lovelock, Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Maturana, Donella H. Meadows, William J. Mitchell, Gordon Pask, Nick Prior, Francisco Varela, Heinz von Foerster, Michael Weinstock, Norbert Wiener

  1. Systems
 

Related Items

  1. The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds
  2. Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business
  3. Ron Silliman: Revelator
  4. David Bradford: Ecstatic Essays No. 01: Nell Zink Is Damn Free
  5. Raqs Media Collective: Casebook
  6. Stephen Wetzel: Occasional Performances and Wayward Writings
  7. Jenine Marsh: Ecstatic Essays No. 04: The Mastication of Alina Szapocznikow
  8. Colm Lally and Sissu Tarka: PROOF-READING
  9. Neue Slowenische Kunst: NSK from Kapital to Capital
  10. Micah Lexier: A Number of Things
  11. Michael Snow: October 114
  12. October 145: Summer 2013
  13. OCTOBER 146 - Fall 2013
  14. OCTOBER 147 - Winter 2014
  15. Kodwo Eshun: Dan Graham: Rock My Religion
  16. October 148
  17. Anna Dezeuze: Thomas Hirschhorn: Deleuze Monument (Hardcover)
  18. October Magazine Issue 149
  19. October Magazine Issue 151
  20. October Magazine Issue 152
  21. Breaking the Codex
  22. October Magazine Issue 153
  23. October Magazine Issue 154
  24. Amanda Boetzkes: Plastic Capitalism
  25. Jonas Staal: Propaganda Art in the 21st Century
  26. Trophy Human
  27. Susan Schuppli: Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence
  28. Sarah Cook: Information
  29. Gwen Allen: The Magazine
  30. Natasha Degen: The Market
  31. Claire Bishop: Participation
  32. Stefanie Hessler: Prospecting Ocean
  33.  Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams: Screen Ecologies
  34. On Whiteness: The Racial Imaginary Institute
  35. Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded: Essays on Space and Science
  36. Douglas Gordon
  37. On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972