Arts of Control (Cultural Production and Systems Thinking During the Cold War)

How systems thinking underpinned some of the most significant cultural activity between the mid-1960s and early 1980s in the Americas and Europe.

Arts of Control argues that much of the new artistic, critical, and curatorial activity between the mid-1960s and early 1980s was propelled by a fascination with the Cold War sciences of control. Christopher Williams-Wynn reveals the breadth, depth, and variation of cultural encounters with the sciences of control—shorthand for the related disciplines of cybernetics, systems theory, and information theory—that underwrote a widespread turn to systems thinking across institutions and disciplines, from biology to economics. Defining the arts of control as those forms of practice that internalized the metaphors, methods, and models of systems thinking, this book shows that the central problem was the very way in which connections themselves were framed and understood.

Drawing on original archival research conducted in six countries, the book is structured around four key concepts from systems theory—boundaries, environments, relations, and elements—and focuses on Argentina, East Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Williams-Wynn closely examines work by Jack Burnham, Stephen Willats, Luis Benedit, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, and others. Working at different scales, each chapter reveals how these artists and critics mobilized systems thinking to reflect on political, technological, and social shifts via a range of media, from prints and sculptures to participatory projects and mail art.