schöffer, nicolas - die kybernetische stadt - 1970

Original edition = French edition

"Nicolas Schöffer (Hungarian: Schöffer Miklós; 6 September 1912 — 8 January 1992) was a Hungarian-born French cybernetic artist. Schöffer was born in Kalocsa, Hungary and lived in France from 1936 until his death in Montmartre, Paris in 1992.

He built his artworks on cybernetic theories of control and feedback primarily based on the ideas of Norbert Wiener. Wiener’s work suggested to Schöffer an artistic process in terms of the circular causality of feedback loops that he used in a wide range of art genres. His career spanned painting, sculpture, architecture, urbanism, film, theatre, television and music. The quest for dematerialisation of the artwork and the pursuit of movement and dynamics became central themes of his work. He worked with the immaterial media space, time, light, sound and climate that he called the five topologies.

He liberated art genres from their spatial and temporal constraints by creating never-ending sound structures that can be heard all over the cybernetic city of the future, and by designing SCAM1, an automobile sculpture.

Schöffer declared the socialization of art as an important goal. According to his ideas, art should be available as a cultural asset equally to everyone without limitations. The playful and spectacular aspects of his works served the goal of gaining the attention of the audience and involving the viewer through participation in the creative processes. To make art universally available, he explored the possibilities of serial production" (source: wiki)