Jasia Reichardt: Cybernetic Serendipity - A Walk Around the Exhibition

Studio Intl., 2023, Softcover, 168 pages, 22 × 14 cm

This publication is about the exhibition, Cybernetic Serendipity, how it began and what it looked like. The material presented here, words and images, was initially used in a lecture for ZKM, Karlsruhe, in 2005. It shows and describes a walk around the exhibition. The exhibition was designed by Franciszka Themerson with students of the Bath Academy of Art. The walk around it consists of images of the works displayed with short descriptive texts. However, we begin with the history of the project, scans of the first proposal for the exhibition to be considered by the ICA Management Committee, which consisted of Sir Roland Penrose, Dorothy Morland, John Bodley, Theo Crosby, and Desmond Morris, who had just become the ICA’s director. Judging by the number of people offering to be involved, implies that project had been worked on for some time before submission of the idea to the Management Committee. Work on the exhibition started in January 1966 and it opened in August 1968. The walk around the exhibition is followed by an article, ‘Cybernetic Serendipity – getting rid of preconceptions’, published in Studio International, November 1968.