Signals in Time and Space: A Submerged Media Avant-gardist Attempt on Environmental Design

In the late 1960s, New York environmental psychologist, inventor and artist Serge Boutourline proposed a signal-oriented approach for describing the interdependencies and interactions between the individual and the environment. Key to his conceptual framework was the recognition of the changing character of natural and human-made environments and the consideration of such environments as a matrix of events in a four-dimensional time-space continuum. His fragmented and largely neglected theoretical and artistic sketches mark a radical departure from common theoretical positions related to the 1960s emerging discourse on Environmental Design. Boutourline's conceptual approach reverberated central ideas of Whitehead's process philosophy, Wiener's Cybernetics, Bertalanffy's General System Theory, and McLuhan's media theory. It emerged out of his ground-breaking 1962 research on audience behaviour in public spaces. It took inspiration from his professional practice and collaboration in artistic projects informed by Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy's concepts of modernist theatre, Alwin Nikolais’ late-modernist abstract dance performances, and the 1960s countercultural avant-gardist experiments with media technology and human-machine communication in artistic practice. However, despite Boutourline's acquaintance to key figures in the 1960s discourse on technological media, artistic practice, and the academic field of Environmental Psychology, there is hardly any reference to Boutourline in the critical discourse concerned with the development of art and media in the 1960s. This paper re-introduces Boutourline's signal oriented conceptual framework and technological device within the context of the 1960s countercultural avant- gardist experiments with human-machine communication. It further discusses the conceptual influence of theories and practices in dance and theatre developed at the Bauhaus on the emerging avant-gardist performative and interactive art scene during the1960s in New York.

Citation:
Muench, Wolfgang. ''Signals in Time and Space: A Submerged Media Avant-gardist Attempt on Environmental Design.'' Proceedings of Impact! From Bauhaus to IKEA, Sydney 9/2019, edited by Brejzek, Thea, et al, IKEA x UTS Future Living Lab, 2019.