Library Event
Cybernetic Serendipity
The 1968 ICA London exhibition that introduced cybernetic, computer, and electronic art to a mass audience.
Cybernetic Serendipity ran at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts from 2 August to 20 October 1968, organized by critic and ICA assistant director Jasia Reichardt as the first large exhibition to present cybernetics, computing, and the arts to a general public. Roughly 350 contributors — some 43 artists, composers, and poets alongside 87 engineers, computer scientists, and philosophers — showed computer-generated graphics, poetry, and film, algorithmic music systems, and cybernetic sculptures and robots, including Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, Nam June Paik’s Robot K-456, Edward Ihnatowicz’s Sound Activated Mobile, and interactive electronic-music equipment supplied by Peter Zinovieff, alongside contributions from Iannis Xenakis and John Cage. Attended by tens of thousands of visitors in London, the exhibition subsequently toured to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (1969) and the Exploratorium in San Francisco (1969), establishing itself as a founding public event for what became computer and cybernetic art.