CHArt Nineteenth Annual Conference

Jennifer Way, University of North Texas, USA
Cybernetics, Cybernation, and Cyborgification in John McHale’s Telemaths of the 1950s

Art has engaged concepts associated with computer technologies for far longer than we think. During the early 1950s, theorizing about and bringing the form and social and cultural effects of the technologies to bear in art established what would later be known as postmodernism.

Cybernetics, the study of how machine, social, and biological systems behave, offered British artist John McHale definitions for feedback along with examples of applications in science, especially computing. Subsequently, McHale used cybernetics to analyze how an American consumer economy was generating subjectivities that gave forth forms and meanings to wield a productive effect at large. American mass media and popular culture, which he encountered while studying at Yale University, provided proof of cybernation, computer-automated machines controlling much in regard to self, information, communication, and society. In a series of collage paintings called Telemaths, McHale treated mass-produced culture as raw material with which to figure emerging ideas about cybernation and cyborgs. In addition, he fashioned each Telemath to emulate cybernetic processes, especially image and tactile-based networks motivated by output and feedback. Today, McHale’s Telemaths should oblige us to revisit the gap C P Snow then identified between the sciences and humanities, a gap, Snow argued disingenuously, that precluded constructive dialogue.

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