Who or what were the Deadends? What is the meaning behind the signature forms analysts have chosen to name them after?
The Deadends are the shadow of the closed signalling loop of cybernetics and take succour from the system paintings of A. R. Penck. They marry the binary autonomy of technology to the pre-personal choice of automatic drawing. In Summa Technologiae Stanislaw Lem speculates that cybernetic technologies will become “too powerful for us to be able to cope with their autonomy”. He warns of the Pyrrhic victories of science over nature, which “instead of developing strategy, it [civilisation] ends up just practicing tactics”.
I speculate that the Deadends are the osmosis of art attempting to correct an imbalance.
I further conject that they (the Deadends) embody ordinary affect, “what Roland Barthes calls the third meaning, they are immanent, obtuse, and erratic, in contrast to the obvious meaning of semantic message and symbolic signification.” Kathleen Stewart
Mikey B. Georgeson
