Art as Organism

Art as Organism shows that the digital image was a rich and expansive artistic medium of modernism. Linking its emergence to the dispersion of biocentric aesthetic philosophies developed by Bauhaus pedagogue Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, from 1920s Berlin to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, Charissa Terranova uncovers seminal but overlooked references to biology, the organism, feedback loops, emotions, and the Gestalt, along with an intricate genealogy of related thinkers across disciplines. Unearthing a forgotten narrative of modernism, one which charts the influence that biology, General Systems Theory, and cybernetics had on modern art, Terranova interprets new major art movements such as the Bauhaus, Op Art, and Experiments in Art and Technology by referencing contemporary insights from architects, embryologists, electrical engineers, and computer scientists. From kinetic and interactive art to early computer art and installations spanning an entire city, this book charts complex connections between visual culture, science and technology that comprise the deep history of 20th-century art.

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 1. Bauhaus Biology: The Beginnings of Biofunctionalism 2. Gyorgy Kepes and the Light image as Bio-Image: Pop Art-and-Science, Integration, and Distribution 3. The Distributed Image of the City: The Collaboration between Gyorgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch 4. Wet Perception: Op Art and New Tendencies, between the Gestalt and Ecological Psychology 5. The Digital Image in Art: The Generative Turn, Computational and Biological