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This panel explores territory consistently overlooked and unaddressed in the current revival of “systems aesthetics.” The term was already laden with tension when, in 1968, Jack Burnham deployed it to address the need for “precise socio-technical models” of analysis in an increasingly technocratic world. He argued that in the hands of artists, systems theory could be put to different, even unruly, ends. Drawing on the open systems of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, he foregrounded the human element, social systems, and ecology. Indeed systems thinking became an empirical description and heuristic model for process-oriented, multi-sensory, collaborative, performative works that not only engaged, but infiltrated social and political contexts, including works by Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, Julio Le Parc, Graciela Carnevale, Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, On Kawara, Cildo Meireles, Marcel Broodthaers, Trisha Brown, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Betsy Damon, and Robert Smithson.

In emphasizing the social aspect of systems aesthetics we aim to displace the presumptive source of agency from a cybernetic control to networks of participants encountered along diverging systemic pathways. We seek papers that de-center the techno-centric narrative so as to ask whether or how such a methodology was productively—or even disruptively—applied in marginalized arts communities and in other cultures.

Possible topics for discussion include:

• The parallel history of systems aesthetics in South America
• Use of systems aesthetics in de-centering gendered norms
• Systems analysis of labor, maintenance, de-skilling, and communication in art
• Art as disruption and/or subversion of political systems.
• Eco art as remedy for industrial degradation