ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Mediated Orientation in Space and Expanded Artistic Practices in the 1960s

• In Event: Scales of the Earth: Space, Science and the Specters of Planetary History 01

English Abstract

In the 1960s, systems science was increasingly implemented in the engineering of manned spaceflight projects to achieve automated control for spacecraft. Alongside the scientific preoccupation with control, the exploration of outer space also constituted a key reference point for the diffusion of systems theory in artistic practices to produce an increasingly open and relational aesthetics. Inspired by Albert Einstein’s infamous quote ‘there is no fixed point in space’, modern choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) integrated the lack of gravitational orientation in outer space into his choreographic methods. Fluxus artists from Nam June Paik (1932–2006) to John Cage (1912–1992) experimented with telecommunications technologies to pursue an expanded understanding of acoustic and visual spaces. And media artist Aldo Tambellini’s (1930–2020) ‘Black Spiral’ (1969) took the blackness of outer space as a heuristic anchor for intermedial performances.
This paper examines the way performance and media art scenes in the 1960s drew on explorations of outer space and its underlying systems management to critically attend to spatiality and environment as the locus of artistic creation. On the one hand, it queries how system-oriented approaches to outer space and space technologies contributed to an ontological shift in artistic value from objects to processes. On the other hand, the paper traces how media and performance artists challenged ocular-centric representations of outer space and its atomized, punctuated and programmable structures by resorting to chance operations in electric and acoustic media, thus producing a speculative intervention into the control principle of systems science.

Author

• Haitian Ma, University of Amsterdam