Art as Organism

What if modernism had been characterised by evolving, interconnected and multi-sensory images - rather than by the monolithic objects often described by its artists and theorists? In this groundbreaking book, Charissa Terranova unearths a forgotten narrative of modernism, which charts the influence that biology, General Systems Theory and cybernetics had on art in the twentieth century. From kinetic and interactive art to early computer art and installations spanning an entire city, she shows that the digital image was a rich and expansive artistic medium of modernism.

Charissa N. Terranova is Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies and Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA. She researches the relationship between culture and science, focusing on the history of evolutionary theory and biology in art and architecture. She is author of Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (2016) and Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (2016), and the Biotechne series with Meredith Tromble.

Preface
Introduction - The Haptic Unconscious: László Moholy-Nagy's Organismic Aesthetics
Chapter 1 - Bauhaus Biology: The Beginnings of Biofunctionalism
Chapter 2 - Gyorgy Kepes and the Light image as Bio-Image: Pop Art-and-Science, Integration, and Distribution
Chapter 3 - The Distributed Image of the City: The Collaboration between Gyorgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch
Chapter 4 - Wet Perception: Op Art and New Tendencies, between the Gestalt and Ecological Psychology
Chapter 5 - The Digital Image in Art: The Generative Turn, Computational and Biological