TALK: Re:assembling Cybernetic Serendipity (Richard Stamp) (part of doing together 25)

TALK: Re:assembling Cybernetic Serendipity8th April 2025In this talk-workshop, participants explored the untold story of how five students from Bath Academy of Art at Corsham – the precursor to Bath Spa University's Schools of Design and Art, Film & Media – spent the summer of 1968 assisting Franciszka Themerson in the design and installation of one of the first public exhibitions of computer arts and robotics, Cybernetic Serendipity, at the ICA, London.Writing in 1968, Jasia Reichardt, its creator and curator, insisted that Cybernetic Serendipity dealt with ‘possibilities rather than achievements, and in this sense, it is prematurely optimistic’, since computers had not ‘revolutionised’ art, music or literature in the way they had revolutionised science. Over half a century later, her qualified optimism still speaks to our unsettled relations with pervasive digital media and generative AI. Working with reproductions of exhibition materials and contemporary accounts, participants mapped out some of these possible histories of our present moment.doing together 25doing together is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by the Art Research Centre (Bath School of Art, Film and Media) in collaboration with Bath School of Design and the Centre of Cultural and Creative Industries.doing together is a platform to connect staff, students, and the community through making, collaboration and experimentation.Workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools.Throughout the symposium, facilitators – alongside participants – test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.