HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016980.jpg

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 CybeRoberta 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

177

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016980