In exploring death, contemporary art highlights and fuses themes from existentialism and cybernetics

What is it about?

What links existentialism and cybernetics? And what links both of these disciplinary fields to contemporary art and performance? I argue that the ideas, themes and philosophical perspectives from both existentialism and cybernetics are becoming increasingly important and prevalent in contemporary arts and performance. The two disciplinary fields share much in common: both advocate openness, interactivity, autonomy, unpredictability, adaptation, evolution, experimentation, boundary crossing, synthesis, and extreme forms of action and embodiment. Such themes converge potently in the work of the artists and performers analyzed: Anish Kapoor, Marina Abramović, Damien Hirst, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Michael Landy, Marc Quinn, Douglas Gordon and Urich Lau. The article particularly focuses on how these artists explore cybernetic ideas such as synthesis and “systems” approaches, and how they highlight the important existentialist notion of our consciousness of our impending death (called Being-towards-death) in startling and visceral ways.

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Why is it important?

The article adopts a new methodological and theoretical approach. It fuses the perspectives and philosophies of both existentialism and cybernetics to provide an entirely new critical lens with which to consider, critique and deconstruct artworks and arts practices. It presents an original and unique argument, and proposes a fresh new theory. Very few academics have undertaken in-depth arts critiques using the specific lenses of either cybernetics or existentialism, and to my knowledge no-one has ever brought them together and proposed that a synthesis of their ideas can provide a new analytical paradigm, critical discourse or deconstructive/interpretive ‘tool.’ In doing so, the case study analyses of artists provide perspectives, readings and interpretations that are original, unusual and illuminating. The article also emphasizes that many of these (often extreme) cybernetic-existentialist themes are increasingly relevant to our times and the future direction of art.