Abstract
Systems that have been taken for granted within the post-WWII world are suddenly exposed as subject to contestation, not least the pre-eminence of universities and academic research. Meanwhile ecosystems are collapsing under expanding human demand for energy, food, and water. In the late 1960s Jack Burnham, building off the development of cybernetics, proposed that some artists were engaged in ‘systems aesthetics’ projects. This study is underdeveloped, albeit occasionally picked up in exhibitions concerned with technology, hinting at a significant potential heuristic. Developing from a chapter in ‘Thinking with the Harrisons’, the 2024 monograph on the pioneering ecological artists co-authored with Anne Douglas, this paper demonstrates a range of ways in which a poetics for systems assists in understanding underlying patterns in relational (ecological and social) arts practices. Drawing on systems literatures (Bateson 1972, 1979; Meadows 2008; Maturana and Varela 1980; Capra 1997; Haraway 2008, 2016; Tsing 2017, 2021) as well as contemporary aesthetic theorists concerned with these issues (Skrebowski 2006, 2016; Shaviro 2015; Brain 2018), a range of primarily ecological arts projects will be considered to understand how concepts such as boundary, metaphor (paradigm), and improvisation (autopoiesis) can shed light on the ways artists engage with systems understood as human created and necessary predicaments we find ourselves within. The development of a coherent articulation of artists engaging systems has the potential to strengthen the position of creative practices in environmental research and management as well as to further surface aesthetic ways of knowing as significant.
Presenters
Chris FremantleResearch Fellow and Lecturer, Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Modeling Life Systems: Art, Algorithms, Ecologies
KEYWORDS
Systems, Cybernetics, Predicaments, Boundaries, Metaphors, Improvisation, Artists, Practice, Poetics, Aesthetics
