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Like Senster, the apparatus stimulated (and simulated) an affective rather than
rational interaction. Humans felt they were encountering behaviors indicative of
responsive life; Tsai’s entities were often classed as “vegetal” or “aquatic.” Such
environmental and kinetic ambitions were widespread in the international art world of the
time. Beyond the stable at Howard Wise, there were the émigrés forming the collective
GRAV in Paris, the “cybernetic architectures” of Nicolas Schöffer, the light and plastic
gyrations of the German Zero Gruppe, and so on—all defining and informing the genre
of installation art to come.

The artistic use of cybernetic beings in the late sixties made no investment in
“intelligence.” Knowing machines were dumb and incapable of emotion, these creators
were confident in staging frank simulations. What interested them were machinic
motions evoking drives, instincts, and affects; they mimicked sexual and animal
behaviors, as if below the threshold of consciousness. Such artists were uninterested in
the manipulation of data or information (although Hans Haacke would move in that
direction by 1972 with his “Real-Time Systems” works). The cybernetic culture that
artists and scientists were putting in place on two continents embedded the human in the
technosphere and seduced perception with the graceful and responsive behaviors of the
machinic phylum. “Artificial” and “natural” intertwined in this early cybernetic
aesthetic.

But it wouldn’t end here. Crucial to the expansion of this uncritical, largely
masculine set of cybernetic environments would be a radical, critical cohort of
astonishing women artists emerging in the 1990s, fully aware of their predecessors in art
and technology but perhaps more inspired by the feminist founders of the 1970 journal
Radical Software and the cultural blast of Donna Haraway’s inspiring 1984 polemic, “A
Cyborg Manifesto.” The creaky gender theater of Paik and Pask, the innocent creatures
of Ihnatowicz and Tsai, were mobilized as savvy, performative, and postmodern, as in
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Dollie Clone Series (1995-98) consisting of the interactive
assemblages CyberRoberta and Tillie, the Telerobotic Doll, who worked the
technosphere with the professionalism of burlesque, winking and folding us viewers into
an explicit consciousness of our voyeuristic position as both seeing subjects and objects-
to-be-looked-at.

The “innocent” technosphere established by male cybernetic sculptors of the
1960s was, by the 1990s, identified by feminist artists as an entirely suffusive condition
demanding our critical attention. At the same time, feminists tackled the question of
whose “intelligence” AI was attempting to simulate. For an artist such as Hershman
Leeson, responding to the technical “triumph” of cloning Dolly the sheep, it was crucial
to draw the connection between meat production and “meat machines.” Hershman
Leeson produced “dolls” as clones, offering a critical framing of the way contemporary
individuation had become part of an ideological, replicative, plastic realm.

While the technofeminists of the 1990s and into the 2000s weren’t all cyber all
the time, their works nonetheless complicated the dominant machinic and kinetic
qualities of male artists’ previous techno-environments. The androgynous tele-cyborg in
Judith Barry’s Imagination, Dead Imagine (1991), for example, had no moving parts:
He/she was comprised of pure signals, flickering projections on flat surfaces. In her
setup, Barry commented on the alienating effects of late-20th-century technology. The
image of an androgynous head fills an enormous cube made of ten-foot-square screens on

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