“Variations V” was an audio-visual performance. Billy Klüver set up a sound system of photocells, reacting to the movements of the dancers. When the dancers cut the light beams with their movements, and the sounds were controlled. And on the background of the stage, film footage by Stan Vanderbeek and television images by Nam Jum Paik were projected.
John Cage created the system of interactivity that combined the movements with sounds, and visual images through movements(messages). In his essay “Cybernetics in History”, Norbert Wiener explained “entropy” . As communicating and interpreting information through messages, there would be “degrading of the organized” and “destroying the meaningful”.
I think the entropy made a new interactive experience in this performance. The point where the information was destroyed was the gap where the audiences could intervene in the artworks and make their own experience. I think there were two ways of intervention in his performance; One was between the elements of the performance, dance, sounds, and visual images. Another was between the whole performance and audiences.
“ In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase”
“Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. ”
-“Cybernetics in History”, Norbert Wiener
John Cage, Variations V, 1965, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqXM-EU1ncw
John Cage’s performance created an interactive experience. The performance demanded audiences to organize their own experience with the elements of the performance. The meaning of the performance depended on audiences, as Roy Ascott mentioned in his essay “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetics Vision”
“While the general context of the art-experience is set by the artist, its evolution in any specific sense is unpredictable and dependent on the total involvement of the spectator.”
“He will continue, instead, to provide a matrix for ideas and feelings from which the participants in his work may construct for themselves new experiences and unfamiliar patterns of behavior.”
-“Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetics Vision”, Roy Ascott