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Circular Currents: Feedback, Intelligence, Emergent Systems

Join us for a two day forum with Charissa N. Terranova, Ken Rinaldo, and Joost Rekveld

Saturday, April 26, 10:00-11:45 AM EDT
Sunday, April 27, 10:00-11:30 AM EDT

FREE REGISTRATION

Join us for a two-day virtual event where three guest speakers, art historian Charissa N. Terranova, and media artists Ken Rinaldo, and Joost Rekveld, present their work at the intersection of art, media, and cybernetics (Saturday, April 26, 2025) and expand conversations into topics of circularity, feedback, feedforward, hybrid ecologies, and material agency in a panel discussion (Sunday, April 27, 2025).

Charissa N. Terranova‘s talk will explore how the terms “feedback” and “feedforward” are interwoven with the logics of circular causality by tracing the evolution from organicism to cybernetics and their impact on 20th century artscience.

Ken Rinaldo will then expand the influence of hybrid ecologies into his artistic practices encompassing human and nonhuman and how these artworks examine the coexistence of artificial and biological systems symbiotically.

Joost Rekveld will talk about his recent artistic projects through the lens of two core concepts “lightning empiricism” and “Darwinian machinery,” which offers variant perspectives on the heuristic potential of physical devices and how media art can be a collaborative tool with forms of material agency.

Charissa N. Terranova

Feedback to Feedforward: Organicism and Cybernetics in 20th-century Artscience

The terms “feedback” and “feedforward” have shared significance in biology, engineering, and artscience. Feedback propels data rearward into systems, as feedforward propels it ahead, foreseeing outcomes. One is an indicator of positive or negative information flows, disequilibrium, and equilibrium, the other a tool for future-oriented solutions. This talk explores the two related logics of circular causality within whole-making organicism and ever-granulating cybernetics in twentieth-century artscience. It scrutinizes feedback in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and its influence on British scientists, such as Dorothy Needham, Joseph Needham, and Conrad Waddington. The talk follows the logical morphogenesis of feedback from organicism to cybernetics by way of epigenetics, 1920s-1970s. The talk reveals how cybernetic feedback is the dynamic arrow connecting early twentieth-century organicism to the mid-century science of epigenetics to contemporary materialist-feminist frameworks and worldings.

Ken Rinaldo

Exploring Emergent Ecologies, Where Artificial Intelligence meets living systems

Art exploring hybrid ecologies between humans, machines, plants, and animals redefines interspecies relationships, emphasizing trans-species communication, animal agency, and emergent intelligence. Ken Rinaldo’s Autopoiesis exemplifies robotic ecosystems that evolve based on human interaction, illustrating self-organizing artificial intelligence. Augmented Fish Reality empowers fish to control robotic vehicles, highlighting agency and intelligence beyond human cognition. Enteric Consciousness investigates gut microbiota as an intelligent system, drawing parallels between microbial networks and machine learning. Face Music transforms facial expressions into sound, showcasing non-verbal, cross-species communication with soft robotics, through biometric data. These works collectively question hierarchical boundaries, proposing a future where artificial and biological systems coalesce into symbiotic networks. Through interactive installations, Rinaldo pioneers a vision where machines, animals, and humans co-create dynamic, evolving environments of mutual influence and coexistence.

Joost Rekveld

Listening to machines: Lightning Empiricism and Darwinian devices

Joost will discuss his recent and current artistic projects through the lens of two concepts that relate to the history of cybernetics. The term “Lightning Empiricism” was coined in the late 1940s in a context that was almost completely separate from early cybernetics, but it refers to a specific mode of exploratory human-machine interaction that is deeply cybernetic. The term “Darwinian Machinery” mostly refers to William Ross Ashby’s Homeostat and his later concept of the “Intelligence Amplifier.” These devices inspired some of the early work of Gordon Pask and Stafford Beer, and were later taken up by researchers interested in evolvable hardware. In Joost’s practice, these two concepts serve as models for different approaches to the heuristic potential of physical devices and to thinking about media art as collaborating with different forms of material agency.

Participants Bios

Charissa N. Terranova is an environmental humanist reframing art and architectural history in the age of the Anthropocene. She is Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas where she teaches courses on past and present avant-gardes, modernism, and contemporary bio-, interspecies, and feminist eco-art. She has published several books about the interconnec-tions between art, design, nature, biology, and biotechnology in the past and present.

Ken Rinaldo is internationally recognized for interactive robotic and bio-art installations. His work explores hybrid ecologies between animals, machines, plants, and bacteria, focusing on trans-species communication, animal agency, and emergent intelligence. His installations, animations and prints have been exhibited in major exhibitions, museums and galleries including Ars Electronica, The Hermitage, Transmediale, CAFA Museum, Nuit Blanche, Kiasma, B3 Biennale, Te Papa, V2 DEAF, ARCO, and the Vancouver Olympics. Rinaldo has received awards such as the Ars Electronica Award of Distinction, Vida 3.0 First Prize, and the United Nations Green Leaf Award. His work has been featured in Wired, Antennae, CNET, BBC, CNN, and a Discovery Channel special. His projects appear in books like Art and Electronic Media and Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age. Exhibiting in over 35 countries, Rinaldo pushes the boundaries of art, science, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Joost Rekveld is an artist and researcher who wonders what humans can learn from a dialogue with the ma- chines they have constructed. In a form of media archeology he investigates modes of material engagement with devices and concepts found in the history of science and technology. The outcomes of these investigations often take the shape of abstract animated films that function like alien phenomenologies. Rekveld’s work has been shown world-wide in a wide range of venues and he has a history of collaborative projects with composers, theatre groups and laboratories, artistic as well as scientific. Since 1996, he has been teaching interdisciplinary art on the intersection with the exact sciences. Since 2017 he has been affiliated with the School of Arts Ghent (KASK) as an artistic researcher, where he was recently appointed as coordinator of the “Disobedient Practices” research cluster.

Papers/Links

Charissa N. Terranova

Ken Rinaldo

Joost Rekveld

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