July 31, 2010
Nicolas Schöffer
(1912-1992)
If one discounts the existence of László Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus Light Space Modulator (1923-30) (rebuilt in 1970 and now in the collection of Harvard University's Busch-Reisinger Museum) – a visionary multimedia artwork that helped inaugurate the artistic dialogue between machines, light, shadow and motion - there is something to the claim that the Hungarian-born French artist Nicolas Schöffer (1912-1992) is 'the Father of Cybernetic Art'. At the very least this premise may now be entertained while viewing actual work (mostly mobile sculpture under theatrical lighting effects) and an incredible amount of documentation now on view in Paris at the museum of the French electricity company Espace EDF Electra.
What is immediately evident in this exceptional historic presentation is that Schöffer’s career touched on painting, kinetic sculpture, architecture, urbanism, film, TV, and even music (he collaborated with Pierre Henry) – all in the pursuit of a dynamism in art which was originally initiated by the Cubo-Futurists and then intensified and solidified by the Russian Constructivists such as Naum Gabo, Anton Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. All were concerned with opening up the static three-dimensional sculptural form to a fourth dimension of time and motion, and this was Schöffer’s intention as well. Schöffer however, coming well after, benefited pleasingly from cybernetic theories (theories of feedback systems (interactivity) primarily based on the ideas of Norbert Wiener (1894-1964)) in that they suggested to him artistic processes in terms of the organization of the system manifesting it (e.g., the circular causality of feedback-loops). For Schöffer, this enabled cybernetics to elucidate complex artistic relationships from within the work itself.
His CYSP 1, from 1956 (top), is considered the first cybernetic sculpture in art history in that it made use of electronic computations as developed by the Philips Company. The sculpture is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. The plates are operated by small motors located under their axis. Photo-electric cells and a microphone built into the sculpture catch all the variations in the fields of color, light intensity and sound intensity. All these changes occasion reactions on the part of the sculpture.
Joseph Nechvatal
