Approach | FEEDBACK for Wang Yuyang

Wang Yuyang's "Chaosmosis" is a transdisciplinary field that defies definition, yet manifesting a future for media art that is being shaped precisely within such intersections of immense potentiality. In response, this archive, "Approach," brings together commentaries from scholars in the philosophy of technology, media theory, and cultural studies to interrogate Wang’s grand narrative of the “Planetary” . Moving beyond a singular art-historical viewpoint, they engage with the speculative core of "Chaosmosis" through multiple theoretical pathways. This dynamic deduction, unfolding through the body of works, offers a set of radically distinct perspectives  —  allowing us to glimpse the future of art and prefigure how interdisciplinary thinking reshapes our understanding of technology, art, and the world we live in.

The sixth piece in this series by art historian Caroline A. Jones is originally published in WANG Yuyang: Chaosmosis (Mousse Publishing, Spring 2025) under the editorship of Zhang Ga.

We often anticipate that art will provide answers. Yet, when "control" and "intent" are suspended; when brushes give way to sensors; and when the canvas transforms into a real-time algorithmic field—can we still deem this process "creation"? Or has art subtly morphed into a "feedback system" fostering ongoing dialogue among humans, machines, and the environment? In an era when artificial intelligence is increasingly glorified as the "new author," Wang Yuyang embarks on a profound exploration of this transformation. His works do not merely question whether "the artificial can be intelligent"; they delve deeper, challenging the very essence of artistic creation. If the focus of creativity shifts from "expression" to "response," from "shaping" to "interaction," then who or what emerges as the true creative subject? Is it us, the algorithms, the circuitry, or the ever-evolving relationships that constitute this cycle? In light of these inquiries, we invite you to navigate the cybernetic landscape illustrated by Jones. She will lead us through a century-long evolution oriented around the notion of feedback, culminating in the uncertain "technophanie" scene envisioned by Wang Yuyang. Join us as we explore these thought-provoking dynamics that challenge our understanding of art and authorship in the age of intelligence.

Caroline A. Jones

Feedback, in everyday English (and maybe also Chinese), is used colloquially to mean advice given from one human to another.  But its origins are electronic. When the word appeared in the English lexicon in 1920, “feed+back” meant pushing (feeding) part of an output signal back into a machine circuit, as input.[1]  Such electronic loops changed conceptions of technology in the twentieth century, layering onto earlier ideas such as 18th  century “systems” (emulating clockwork) and “dampening” (from the time of steam).[2]  A scant decade after “feedback” was coined, electronics were continuing to offer new notions for cultural uptake, such as the “push- pull” concepts that moved from mechanical engineering to describe the excitation and dampening of neurons, in British scientist Charles S. Sherrington’s work on The Brain and its Mechanisms (1933). Those “push-pull” electrical impulses flickering across the brain in Sherrington’s theories then came to inform artists such as Hans Hofmann, who was pushing intensely colored pigment onto canvas, even as they colored cultural uptakes of computation in the 1931“differential analyzer” by Vannevar Bush, its calculations running on the push of gears and the pull of pistons. By the time Bush wrote about his computers for the popular press, he could describe them as an “enlarged intimate supplement” to human memory.[3] Their contribution to feedback theories was immediate, becoming our own cognitive prosthetic.[4]

Feedback was implicitly part of the “push-pull” theories useful to the painter Hofmann, distilling how visual phenomena exerted forces on the perceptual system of trichromatic humans. Decades later and on a different continent, Wang Yuyang made notions of feedback exceedingly strange by foiling artistic choice and intuition regarding painterly hue in a 2019 series on the Moon.  For Hofmann, saturated hues in the “hot” range appeared to vie for control, pushing to the foreground of a pictorial surface, even as “cool” blues and greens receded demurely into the background.[5]   (Fig. #1) Wang had no idea about these “inputs,” since he blocked color from his eyes by wearing various kinds of goggles that would remove all color information from his view.

Feedback is intuitively present in all aesthetic relations that involve making something and then evaluating it. Eye-hand coordination, at minimum, is the artist’s most basic form of body feedback when generating hand-made images, manipulating clay, carving wood, or tweaking algorithms. A touch is made delivering a pigment or trace or bit of code; it has an effect. That gets eyeballed as a change in the visual field, and adjusted with the next touch. Painterly prostheses extend the intuition to the end of a pencil, the tip of a loaded brush, or the click of a mouse as feedback migrates from paper or pigment to screen-based design choices in endless iterations. Wang, insisting on introducing color to the actually monochrome surface of the lunar satellite, nonetheless allowed the algorithms filtering color from his vision to rule.  Although sensitive to the tonal range of what was on the end of his brush, he essentially applied pigment “blind” to its chromatic hue. The paintings are beautiful by chance. [Fig. #2]

Fig. #3 -- Wang Yuyang, I Don’t Know, 2024 (Fermenters, Microorganisms, Transparent screens, Computers and Cameras). Shown in two of a theoretically infinite number of phases.  Image source: https://www.cafa.com.cn/en/news/details/8332452

Able to run on consumer grade computers, the programs used are primarily “diffusion” models (such as stable diffusion) used for generating still or video imagery. This type of machine learning takes up random fields of pixels that are then “denoised” in a progressive process guided by comparisons with existing images, discerning “latent” images within the pixelated flow. I Don’t Know reflects a state of unknowing in both the artist and the algorithm. The pleasure of stable diffusion (and some other AI tools) is not having a clue what details will show up to any given prompt, since we are in machine-vision-AI early days.  The glitchy results of diffusion models (and, for that matter, all the generative programs in use at this time) are closest to the century-old art movement of Surrealism, whose results are often mis-named “hallucinations” generated by the processing of the machine learning protocols.[14]

I Don’t Know’s pulsations are dazzling. Bombarding viewers with an image flow that just as quickly stills to a darkness (which allows us to see the stirring fermenter within) is a virtuoso performance of feedback. Yet while we see that there is a system in action, its feedback mechanisms remain mysterious. Its operations are internalized, even “self-absorbed” (granting the composite entity with its inside and outside could be figured as a “self”). It has no awareness of its viewers, and its feedback loops are only in dialogue with yeast, temperature, image flow, and algorithms. Both inside and outside of the box are “noisy” in terms of information, yet each is configured to submit its noise to cleaning up---by more-than-human mechanical and microbial processes that some call intelligent.

Cybernetics embraces such a paradoxical relationship to agency. A program is given to a machine, to iterate routines based on its own outputs reconfigured as inputs. By the rules of cybernetics, Wang’s I Don’t Know is utilizing concepts of “first order” machine learning; it stays within the machinic circuit and does not yet take account of an observer (“second order”) that might alter the routine.  Why does cybernetics remain a useful concept for thinking about Wang’s art? Claims of “immersion” that have become frequent in artworld discourse are analytically available to cybernetic questioning: what systems are we immersed in? Can we alter the response of the system, are we part of the system? These are tools of critical thinking made available by second-order cybernetics, alive and well in philosophies of aesthetics today.

Entering culture with a promise to tackle feedback in animals, machines, and “men” (human beings), cybernetics’ post-WW2 mythography began with its name, which Wiener coined from the Greek word for steersman --- Κυβερν?τη? or  kubernétés---a masculine figure channeling power, knowledge, and instinct at the helm of a ship. Predicting the arrogance of the emerging computational science, this mythography built on a metaphor in which others provide the labor (galley slaves or maybe fungus), allowing the steersman to program where the boat will go with a light touch on the rudder. As taken up by Norbert Wiener[15] and applied to machine feedback systems, “cybernetics” already smuggled in this idea of a “man-in-charge,” somewhere within the system and presumably the prime mover setting it all in motion. “Cyber” was already linked to modern English through the Latin that had converted Greek kuber to guber—the root of “gubernatorial” and “governor,” the name chosen by British inventor James Watt in 1788 to describe his device for controlling a runaway steam engine. [fig. #4]

This first order of cybernetics was electromagnetic (circuits were soldered onto breadboards), but its programs yielded the dance we recognize today between hardware and software. Such dancing runs on feedback loops in which repeating routines take up their own outputs as new inputs. With machine learning in play, as the output changes it will constitute a different input that triggers a change in the preset program, yielding a different output, and so on.

The machine evolves with environmental shifts as it learns to write new code to adapt to changing inputs. Emulating human cognition by naming layered sub-routines “neural nets,” computer science structures programs to learn by producing their own algorithms. Yet these can only respond to a training set taken from the past. In machine vision, this means old material, now equipped with weighted priors that sift noise to find signal.

The idea of a second-order cybernetics emerged in the 1960s as cyberneticians began to  understand that the observer of any system had impacts on that system, provoking the need for a “cybernetics of cybernetics,” as Margaret Mead put it. In the words of crucial cybernetician Heinz von Foerster, second-order cybernetics could also be described as “the cybernetics of observing systems” in which any observer is herself being observed, becoming a part of the feedback that alters the system going forward.[16]

Wang Yuyang makes contemporary art that is rich in reference to these feedback complexities. I Don’t Know will presumably never be the same twice. The extended agency of the artist includes the installation crew and preparators at the museum who must feed the yeast and ensure there is enough oxygen in the tank and electricity to run the bioreactor effectively. In that sense, humans tending the yeast are no longer mere outside observers but causal agents of what is being observed. Yet the set-up does not perform this potentially second-order complexity by including us observers in its data gathering; it appears to be only talking to itself.

The crucial distinction between first and second order cybernetics is muddied by the term “neural nets,” used by programmers to designate machine learning layers that (cybernetically) take outputs as inputs to guide further outputs. Polemically: The electromagnetic switching inside computer processing is not remotely like neurons, which function in some (not all) animal bodies through chemical and electrical processes, deeply engaged with a planetary environment in which nervous systems evolved in bodies --- continuing to inform cognition daily, in concert with their symbionts.[17]  The “gut brain” is linked deeply to cognition and mood; gut symbionts produce brain chemistry for animal neurons every day – a completely alien concept to computer science.[18] “AI” and “neural net” mislead us about how intelligence works. They each pretend that computers are human brains, and suggest falsely that the cranium is the only site of cognition. Wang Yuyang deploys both a gut brain (the fermenter) and the machine circuitry (computer, camera, stirrers, and more) in I Don’t Know. The very title confesses that the “I” of the artist is not in charge. But neither is the computer. Silicon, Yeast, Internet, Electricity --- all are agents in making the art into a lively object of our gaze.

Wang’s work allows us to put aside fetishes of the neuron to consider broader systems such as bacterial “quorum sensing,” microbial responses to changes in the environment (a fundament of “cognition” per se) that are robust and entangled. Yeast can’t tell the plasma screen what to flash at us unless these creatures’ water and nutrients (usually some kind of glucose) are allowing its reproduction and thriving. Thus, even the “closed” system of such a cybernetic artwork needs dosing and feeding from a much wider world.  Out in the wild, fungal entities related to yeast are terraforming the planet. Invisible to humans, fungal spores partner with algae to create lichens, taking down mountains and digesting wood lignin all over the world. Fungal hyphae of numerous species link trees in old-growth forests through feedback systems that nurture the health of the forest as a whole, rather than favoring a specific tree or specific species. Think of it---during leaf season on the Pacific Northwest Coast, certain kinds of deciduous smaller trees (aspen, alder) will yield nutrients through the mycorrhizal (fungal) network to feed the evergreens (fir, pine) --- a hydrostatic relationship that reverses once leaves have fallen, at which point the myco-net reverses and nutrients flow to the leafless ones from the trees that never drop their small photosynthesizing needles.[1] All of these separate species are linked in ecologies of thriving, functioning as a symbiotic “holobiont”---the entity of interlinked species that maximize chances of survival for all of them, the metagenome (fungus, trees, and other soil makers) evolving together.

Wang Yuyang’s A Suspicion Caused by an Entangled Plant (2013-14) [Fig. #5 ] cuts a planar section out of such symbioses in the wild state, to produce a quasi- “still life” of these ongoing processes for our aesthetic and analytic contemplation. It’s unclear what the “suspicion” of the title might mean (sometimes translated as “Dubious”).  Multiple Chinese words engage this concept, ranging from a belief that something might be true, to a feeling that someone or something has committed a crime. [怀疑; 嫌疑][20]

Fig. #5 -- Symbiosis and mineral metabolism in Wang Yuyang, A Suspicion Caused by Entangled Plant (2013–24)

Perhaps the crime is the artist’s wanton neglect of the original sculpture! For A Suspicion to happen, the sculpture first has to be forgotten, left unloved and abandoned behind the studio, somewhere on the ruderal edge of Beijing. Then, the wilding begins, as vines, grass, fungus, sprouting tree seeds, and insects begin to utilize the metal (itself oxidizing in a mineral “metabolism”). The originally artistic structure becomes mere support for organic processes of growth: twining to reach the sun, collecting dew dripping from condensation on metal surfaces, metabolizing rust to extract food value, catching smaller insects in webs stretched between members of the structure.  In the Shenzhen art museum, this assembly is constrained by a metal square, positioned under the dramatic lighting and darkened space of the museum. Surely most of these life processes are on their way to dormancy if not death, isolated from the circadian rhythms of their ecosystem.  Yet even after transport and installation, the sprouts and tendrils and spiders are attempting to continue their metabolic interactions, evincing the tenacity of life. Genetic sequencing of the artwork would yield a “holobiont” of the no doubt symbiotic entanglement.

Wang Yuyang’s Golem (2022) [Fig. #6] would also yield a metagenome of its holobiont were we to sequence the crustal materials falling off its dusty surface. But that would only acknowledge the organic dreams buried in this anthropomorph, its title alluding to the legendary system of magical animation via “code”--- although in medieval telling, it was the divine code of all the different names of a monotheistic G*d that provided the animating force to a man made of clay. If the original “golem” strode out of Jewish folklore, supposedly stomping through Prague as a protector brought to life by divine alphanumeric powers, Wang’s Golem performs itself as utterly dead.  Once again, algorithms that sift the artist’s biometric data are revealed as spectacularly inept in understanding the relation of those alphanumeric bits to the human body. The software yields a 3-D file for sculpting a surprisingly primordial lump of matter, looking more like the proud assemblage of a dung beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae) than the noble animal placed at the pinnacle of evolution’s Great Chain of Being.

Fig. #6 – Challenges to divine animation in Wang Yuyang, Golem, 2022 (detail).

Golem presents the inadequacy of machinic notions of creation; the result of what the artist thinks of as a “dismal” processing of his own biometric data through design software that inevitably, stochastically, “fails to animate” anything that even resembles a muddy humanoid form. What look like ribs or gill-like structures in the surface of Golem poke out of a large dusty sphere, as if all the metallic shine we associate with a robot had oxidized into dung. Cybernetically speaking, it is the opposite of what Weiner warned us about in his 1965 God & Golem, Inc., where “the machine which learns” and the “machine that reproduces itself” prompted that theorizer of cybernetics to warn about matters metaphysical and religious.

Wang Yuyang’s broad interests in these kinds of questions motivate artworks that are sometimes animated and sometimes not.  The studio enters a wide variety of collaborations, experimenting with plants (A Suspicion Caused by an Entangled Plant), with algorithms and yeast (I Don’t Know), and still to be discussed, with robots (Dream) and synbio-generated fungal pigment makers (Biological Klein Blue, 2022).  What is newly evident from an art historical perspective, assessed during this first quarter century of a new millennium, is how every one of these complex orders (computational, vegetal, microbial) can be artistic, offering new chance operations and sources of random variation that are tenuously programmable for art. This distinguishes Wang’s moment from that of artists at an earlier cybernetic moment. They were exclusively focused on electronics and machines --- a contrast that becomes vivid when comparing Wang’s work to that of earlier generations.

Those earlier generations matured in an optimistic, technophilic post-war moment, three decades before Wang Yuyang was born. Certainly, China was undergoing a time of great turmoil and political change, even as the US witnessed an intense marrying of art and technology. War time surplus flowed into the hands of peace time artists and gave rise to artists who claimed systems and cybernetics as guides for their art in the 1960s, some of whom were East Asian, others European – all finding a haven in New York.  Part of what the technology made possible was to plunge viewers into the midst of cybernetic systems of feedback, exemplified by German-born American artist Hans Haacke’s photo-electric immersion set up in a New York gallery in 1968, and Tsai Wen-Ying’s responsive cybernetic environments triggered by visitors, that very same year. (Fig. #7)

Haacke himself assiduously held off the term cybernetics in his meditations on feedback, insisting on the name “systems art” for what he was doing (partially influenced by his friend and interlocutor Jack Burnham, who published “A Systems Esthetics” in Artforum that same portentious year, 1968).[21] Yet if Haacke would stick with systems, at the very same moment (and in the same New York gallery) the Chinese-born artist Tsai Wen-Ying would proclaim his work to be “cybernetic sculptures,” later even dubbing his entire oeuvre “Tsaibernetics.” Soon, Tsai would show with others in the London ICA blockbuster Cybernetic Serendipity (1968). Artists in this rapidly expanding art-technology circle were embracing responsive, mechanical- sensing technology in search of new capacities to plunge humans into the experience of a fully technosocial, electronic-infrastructural surround. As observed by the curator and distinguished Professor Zhang Ga in his assessment of Tsai from our own time:

Today we are in a completely technological era, in a social environment of technological time and space. Technology is everywhere and permeates our lives all the time. Many of our thoughts and lifestyles are constructed by technology, which is constructing our behavior patterns and ways of thinking. How do we face such a historical moment? How do artists respond in such a situation?[22]

The work of Wang Yuyang inherits this “situation,” but much further along the technologizing path, where machine learning, cybernetics, and the non-cranial cognition by fungal, bacterial, and plant forms of “intelligence” are now all part of the system.

It is historically interesting that prior to notions of feedback in the early 1920s, the idea of machine intelligence might have taken the form of automata, wind-up or water-driven animated machines, with a fixed program that merely repeated itself. This was definitively replaced by cybernetic systems thinking, and the centuries of cultural history behind automata (found throughout all technologically tinkering cultures including China, Japan, the Islamic Middle East, and early modern Europe) configured these linear machines as producers: writing, shitting, playing chess, making music, serving food and drink. Significantly, sensing was not a priority in these mostly 18th century machines, a limitation surpassed in the 20th  century with cybernetic “organicism.”[23] Wiener, for example, learned from animal physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth about how creaturely homeostasis works, crucially based on sensing a wider environment. Thus cybernetics began to shift engineering to sensing devices such as photoelectric cells, pressure pads on the floor, audio-triggered servomechanisms, and of course the lowly, temperature-sensing thermostat. All such feedback sensitivities began informing the new field of cybernetics, distinguishing it from the old, early modern amusements of repetitive performing machines.

Wang Yuyang’s painting robot (Dream, 2016–24) brings in both automata theory and its cybernetic critique. On the one hand, the industrial robot inside the transparent box is pre-programmed like an automaton; its limbs can only move in certain directions defined at the industrial plant that built it. On the other, within the constraints of the arm’s movements, the machine can be programmed in real time. Wang links himself like a cyborg (cybernetic organism) to the robot’s servomechanism, recording his dream state in medical EEGs (electroencephalograms) and streaming that data in order to shape the robot’s mesmerizing mechanical dance between brush, paint can, wall, and ceiling. The painting robot then “feeds back” images to Wang and us visitors – images floating on the transparent walls and ceiling of the robot’s confined space -- a set of colorful, brushy abstractions that certainly do not convey anything of the actual imagery of Wang’s dreams.

Tsai, six decades earlier, had also been interested in translating between organic body data and machine movements, also in real time---but his interface would need to be strictly analogue. Sounds made by a visitor would set undulating rods in motion, triggering the movements of quivering machinic fronds, described as “vegetal” or “oceanic” by observers at the time. At that same moment, Korean-born Paik Nam June wanted feedback to come from radio-control joysticks operated by a human, leaving his robot in the gendered tradition of automata, commanded by the man in charge. [Fig. #8] In contrast, both Tsai and Wang explore, through technology, our symbiotic relations with the planet and with our prostheses (biology and technology being functionally different in what we fantasize we can control.)

Paik wanted a cybernetic art based on analog movements that had more to do with instinctive drives and postwar sexual politics than chance or dreaming. Paik and Abe’s robot, for example, was given a penis in Japan and then fitted out with breasts in London – a malleable entity modeling relations with what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called the “machinic phylum.”

Wang Yuyang’s wandering fluorescent bulb and the dreaming/ painting robot might be  distant cousins of Paik’s outrageously gender-fluid robot. But what Wang reminds us is that we have now passed into the fully immersive space in which technology is not confined to a single machine (Fig. #9), but is a natureculture interweaving that crisscrosses the planet.

Meandering, unlike Dream, is informed by data internal to the system. The program generates an uncanny stuttering across the floor, the slender, luminous tube performing its solitude in a cavernous, dark gallery (at Shenzhen Art Museum the space was vast). Humans entering the gallery are irrelevant to the wan light’s distracted dragging. Suspended by a wire just long enough to allow it some slack as it is pulled along the ground, the fluorescent tube’s peregrinations are governed by a magnetic carriage motor that holds the wire and traverses the two axes of movement with mechanical deliberateness (while presumably also “feeding” the fluorescent lightbulb with the stable electricity needed to fuel its glowing phosphors). The speed and angle of movement are generated by algorithms that are never explained, nonetheless generating affect (as the ‘60s artist Dan Flavin first experienced when experimenting with his diagonal installations of fluorescent light, describing the first as a “diagonal of personal ecstasy”).[24]

Each of Wang’s works can be grasped as first order cybernetics, meaning that there is no accounting for the observer in the system (although the observer ofthe art certainly reacts). There is no autonomous learning by machines from environmental sensory cues, whatever they    might be.  Yet in the constant provision of feedback from biological systems (whether the artist’s dreaming, his body biometrics, or yeast’s unpredictable reproduction cycles) there is a strong link to the organicism that Yuk Hui discerns in cybernetic thinking, a neo-vitalism current to our present moment.[25]

In the rapidly-developing art-technology interface in which cybernetics had its first explicit impact on art, Polish-born emigre Jasia Reichardt’s amazing 1968 extravaganza in London, Cybernetic Serendipity, stood out. In addition to Tsai, the show included Paik’s robot, a suspended dance of “male” and “female” mobiles that signaled each other, crafted by theater designer Yolanda Sonnabend and cybernetician Gordon Pask, along with many other hybrid creatures at London’s ICA. These art world assemblies put “sensor organs” (electronic eyes, motion sensors, microphones) together with “effector organs” (electronic “breadboards,” switches, lights, hydraulics, pneumatics). No sort of “electronic brain” or “thinking machine” was present in the art--- but immersive, responsive technological entities were everywhere.[26]

Tsai’s sculptures, like Wang’s Wandering, evoked behaviors indicative of life. In Tsai’s flocks of responsive frond-like entities, emergent behaviors were often classed as “vegetal” or “aquatic” by observers. Not surprisingly, theorizer of the vampire squid, Vilem Flusser, was very keen on these works and their gentle, unpredictable behaviors. Flusser explicitly called out the sense of “play” and identified the sculptures as “botanical.” As Gyorgy Kepes would muse: “To see [Tsai’s] work in an ‘exhibition,’ one discovers soon enough that the term ‘exhibition’ does not fit anymore. [They] transform the space and make you a part of it.”[27]

Tsai’s sculptures are on pedestals that hide their motors. They are self-contained and do not surround us. But period descriptions need to be taken seriously: the works put the human inside an environment that is saturated by the techno-responsive, affective behaviors of machines. As one early commentator on Tsai put it, “The ecology of these ‘organisms’ demands not only electric power but also the presence in their environment of a different species – the human participant [...].”[28] Ambitious for both humans and machines to become agents, Tsai worked for almost a year to produce a public art project in Hong Kong, Living Fountain, in which the structure of the flow would alter in response to ambient sound in the public plaza.[29] Such cybernetic interfaces imperceptibly inaugurated what philosopher Gilbert Simondon terms technophanie. Echoing “theophany,” the ecstatic becoming-visible of the deity, this neologism technophany describes the fulgent manifestation of the technological-human relation (in implicitly positive, even beatific form).[30] Notably, there is nothing computational in this interface, and nothing needs to be “thinking.” Technophany acknowledges distributed, collective forms of cognition that are more like the planet than the bot.  For Tsai, these planetary interactions were strictly limited to humans and simulated organic movements. For Wang Yuyang, the palette of possible materials includes living organisms at the microbial scale. [Fig. #10 ]

Fig. #10 -- in the foreground, Wang Yuyang, Biological Klein Blue (2022-24), Microorganisms, H 5 x L 699 x W 527 cm.

Visible in the background, Wang Yuyang, Plant, 2023 Acetate, H 560 x L1135 x W 1cm

This leaps forward to what distributed creaturely cognition looks like in 2024. Although its responsiveness to humans might initially seem obscure, works such as Wang’s Biological Klein Blue are indeed living entities in a feedback loop that takes up the more-than-human spores of bacteria entering the gallery, some of which drifts off our bodies with every movement we make. (This is then a “response” to human presence, slowly growing though it may be.) What we see in the gallery is a horizontal mat of deeply saturated indigo, the result of a synthetic biological process in which E. coli bacteria have been given extraneous genetic material through the CRISPR9 technology that has revolutionized biology.[31] Bio-engineers in this case introduced genes that produce “outputs” of botanical indigo-type chemicals, in this case indigoidine. Traditional botanical indigo is found in several plants through many precursors; the usual precursor of “indican” needs to ferment with a strong base or alkali to form the prized blue color that Newton put between blue and violet (although “indirubin” is a red isomer of the molecule that is the major active ingredient).[32] Synthetic indigo is a prized industrial target, motivated for some by the deep colonial shame of the Euro-American indigo trade that relied on enslaved laborers to do the smelly work of fermenting the indigo plants in animal urine. Further drivers are to replace toxic chemical processes based on fossil fuels (aniline synthetics) by using rapidly proliferating bacteria (almost always E.coli) to generate this beloved hue.[33]

Wang Yuyang’s “Klein” blue is not an exact substitute for the 1960s color of French artist Yves Klein, since the latter claimed a specific ultramarine color (from pigment he purchased in bulk and blended with a synthetic resin binder). Klein claimed to have patented this hue, but what he innovated was a binder that yielded his specific aesthetic: the deep matte surface of a velvety, seemingly infinite ultramarine.[34] Differently, Wang’s saturated blue is indeed a kind of indigo – inherently associated with dyes and transparency rather than absorptive depth. In keeping with 21st century methods, Wang experiments not with paint chemicals but with the Shanghai firm Abiochem. These “bio-intelligent” manufacturers use “rational protein design and directed evolution methods” to grow the synbio indigo in a broth that the E.coli wants to eat; as it multiplies, the altered strain of bacteria produces the chemical precursor (indigoidine), which is then fermented to produce the indigo itself, over time.[35]  [Fig. #11 ]

Fig. #11 -- The chemical production of synthetic indigo from indigoidine by the Shanghai firm Abiochem, 2024

Following fermentation, the bio-synth blue dye is then separated from the bacteria, and added (for the artistic installation) to a massive expanse of agar (an algae “soup” common in all biology labs) that is poured into a shallow tray on the gallery floor. But now, in the supposedly antiseptic  environs ofthe artworld, (the “white cube”), we are far from the synbio cleanroom. In the living biotope of the museum, the vividly blue agar gets going, hosting and feeding “various microorganisms in the environment in a living and dynamic process, ultimately forming the artwork,” in the artist’s description.[36] Not only do our own bodies “vent” microbiotic entities that might become patches of fuzzy growth on the artwork’s surface, the spores that the artist has applied in washes of color to the nearby walls of the gallery must surely play a part, wreaking havoc on the white cube and the horizontal field of blue as they grow.

Wang’s work has been good to think with, allowing us to trace more than a century of feedback notions into the technophanies of today. As feedback blossomed from electronics to cybernetics, it stretched to include biological homeostasis and sensing as ways of calibrating life within environments. These organicist complexities, increasingly performed by the art of Wang Yuyang, are needed to confront today’s breathless claims for AI. Even as the artworks can be contrasted to the shy machines and brassy robots of an earlier cybernetic age, Wang Yuyang embraces more-than-human collaborators and releases artistic agency to other forces, acknowledging our planetary condition of entanglement, and symbiontic co-dependent arising.[37] Sporulating fungus, nutritious algae, bacterial quorum sensing, and emergent machinic behaviors—these offer evidence of the feedback loops in Wang Yuyang, entangled with his machinic and organic phyla. In appreciating this art, let us look not to “artificial” intelligence but to our own, in symbiosis with the planet---producing critically engaging art, technoscience, prosthetics, and natureculture with all the Anthropogenic urgency we can muster.

Notes：

[1] “Feedback,” Online Etymology Dictionary: “ 1920, in the electronics sense, "the return of a fraction of an output   signal to the input of an earlier stage," from verbal phrase, from feed (v.) + back (adv.). By 1955 “feedback” was in use in broader parlance, as “information about the results of a process.” https://www.etymonline.com/word/feedback

[2]  étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des Sistémes (1749) reflects the clockwork universe, whereas James Watt’s patent of the “Governor” mechanism (1788) ushered in a relationship to the steam-powered universe.

[3] Vannevar Bush received U.S. Patent No. 2,032,253 for the differential analyzer he completed in 1931 while working at MIT. The quotation comes from his now prophetic essay, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1945, written when Bush was Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development.

[4] David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins, 2004).

[5] For the impact of Sherrington on neuroscience, and other mechanical engineering concepts from science impacting engineer-turned-artist Hans Hoffmann’s “push-pull” aesthetic theories, see my Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 180 and n. 83 p. 466.

[6] Notes from Ashby’s talk as taken by Trenchard More are reprinted in Grace Solomonoff, “Ray Solomonoff and the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence, 1956,” undated pdf, page 11.  Online at https://raysolomonoff.com/dartmouth/dartray.pdf.

[7] These restored videos were utilized by Wang Yuyang in his 2019 moon series.  See NASA posting of the July 1969 footage, restored in 2009, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9HdPi9Ikhk.

[8] “…as well as him potentially having to accept the assertive Norbert Wiener as guru or having to argue with him.” Grace Solomonoff, https://raysolomonoff.com/dartmouth/dartray.pdf

[9] Using the Wade-Giles romanization that the artist himself used in his international career (Tsai Wen-Ying). I am grateful for research assistance and inspiring conversation with Lun-Yi London Tsai of the Tsai Foundation.

[10] I am neither linguistically nor philosophically competent to question Yuk Hui’s somewhat exceptionalist description of China’s technological path --- but I welcome his efforts to bring 5,000 years of this history into global techno-philosophical conversations! See Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2017); Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019). For a useful dialogue exploring Dr. Hui’s positions, see Geert Lovink, “Cybernetics for the Twenty-First Century,” an interview with Yuk Hui, issue #102 September 2019; https://www.e-flux.com/journal/102/282271/cybernetics-for- the-twenty-first-century-an-interview-with-philosopher-yuk-hui/.

[11] Eponyms are by Zhang Ga, “Chaosmosis and the Return of the Grand Narrative,” written to accompany Wang Yuyang’s exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai, in 2015. On the dominance of the authorname in the artworld, see Caroline A. Jones, Error! Main Document Only.“The ‘Artist Function’ and Posthumous Art History,” Art Journal, 76: 1 (Spring) 2017.

[12] The “artist-as-producer” intentionally echoes Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” an address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, 27 April, 1934; translated by Edmund Jephcott in Benjamin, Reflections (Harcourt Brace, 1978).

[13] Explanation provided to the author by Wang Yuyang and his studio, via email May 13, 2024: “The Images on the monitor are generated by open source AI for images on the web, controlled by text and words corresponding to binary codes converted by the data of bioreactor.”

[14] Jones, Caroline A., Huma Gupta, and Matthew Ritchie. 2024. “Visual Artists, Technological Shock, and Generative AI.” An MIT Exploration of Generative AI, August. https://doi.org/10.21428/e4baedd9.b4f754fd. Online at https://mit-genai.pubpub.org/pub/l62ipwcb/release/1

[15] The French physicist André-Marie Ampère used the word cybernétique in 1834, plumping for a science of government. This earlier usage of the concept emerged in English only after Wiener made it famous. Wiener’s own account is that the concept came out of his collaborations with leading Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth in the summer of 1947. See Andrew Pickering, “The Birth of Cybernetics,” Foundational Papers in Complexity Science  (Santa Fe Institute 2024): 115–127. DOI: 10.37911/9781947864528.06

[16] Foerster, Heinz von, ed. Cybernetics of Cybernetics: Or, the Control of Control and the Communication of Communication. 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Future Systems, 1995).

[17] For a variant on this polemic, see Jones et al., Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere (Cambridge MA: MIT List Visual Art Center and MIT Press, 2023).

[18] For example, a cow’s rumen and its neurons will not develop until grass-born bacteria is ingested by the weaning baby calf. These new bacteria “cue” a process in the gut that folds tissue inward to form a rumen to house the bacteria in the developing stomach. It is the bacteria that digest grass and release its nutrients, further cuing neurons and blood vessels to supply the rumen’s needs. Without such symbionts, cows can’t eat grass.

[19]See the research of forestry scientise Suzanne Simard, replicated by thousands of studies of deep forest symbiosis. 

[20] Ideograms from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-simplified/suspicion

[21] Jones, Caroline A. Hans Haacke 1967 (Cambridge MA: MIT List Visual Art Center, 2011).

[22]Zhang Ga, in Pei-De Tsai and Lun-Yi London Tsai, eds., TSAI Wen-Ying, (Tsinghua University Press, Beijing, June 2024), 150.

[23] Yuk Hui usefully historicizes this organicist trend in philosophy, for which see Recursivity (2019).

[24]Artist Dan Flavin described one of his first diagonal placements of simple fluorescent fixtures, the Diagonal of May 25, 1963 as a “diagonal of personal ecstasy” describing its “forty-five degrees above horizontal” angle as being in “dynamic equilibrium.” See Dan Flavin, “‘ … in daylight or cool white.’ an autobiographical sketch,” Artforum 4 (December 1965): 20–24.

[25]Hui, Recursivity.

[26]Reichardt, Jasia: “Cybernetic Serendipity [deals] broadly with the demonstration of how man can use the computer and new technology to extend his creativity and inventiveness.” The three categories she set out in her curatorial vision of the exhibition were:

1) computer-generated graphics, films, music, poems, and texts

2) cybernetic devices as works of art, “cybernetic environments, remote-control robots and painting machines”

3) Machines “demonstrating the uses of computers and an environment dealing with the history of cybernetics”

Jasia Reichardt, ed. Cybernetic Serendipity: the computer and the arts (New York: Praeger, 1969; reprint of a 1968 Studio International special issue catalogue for the exhibition in 1968).

[27]Vilem Flusser, “Aspects and Prospects of Tsai's Work,” Art International 18:3 (March, 1974), 55–57. Gyorgy Kepes, “Introduction,” in Tsai: cybernetic sculpture environment, Galerie Denise René, New York, October 1972): n.p.

[28]Jonathan Benthall, “Cybernetic Sculpture of Tsai,” (1979) reprinted in Tsai Wen-Ying, Cybernetic sculptures: the World of Tsai Wen-Ying (New York: The Center Art and Science Foundation, 1997).

[29]The dates of Tsai Living Fountain encompass nearly a decade: 1980-88. See Living Fountain, https://www.wikiart.org/en/wen-ying-tsai/living-fountain-1988 See also Lin Qi, “Chinese-born Tsai's works on display at Tate Modern in 2016,” China Daily, 2015-04-07 08:27:55; online at https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/art/2015-04/07/content_20012718_3.htm .

[30]For a useful introduction to the cybernetic philosophies of Simondon, see Pascal Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation, trans. by Aliza Krefetz and Graeme Kirkpatrick of La philosophie de Simondon (London: Bloomsbury 2003).  For technophany specifically, see pp. 66-68.

[31]The CRISPR technology was derived from a palindromic genomic sequence found in archaeobacteria that helped  them defend themselves from viruses. Used in synthetic biology as a precision “knife” to excise desired genes from one bacterium to insert into another, the original function of these codons was immunitary; they produced a protein for the bacterium that cut DNA found in a viral phage, to destroy it. For a glossary of other technical tools in synthetic biology, see Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, Caroline A. Jones, Nathalie Bell, and Selby Nimrod, eds. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022).

[32]The firm collaborating with Wang actually aimed at indigoidine, which is chemically analogous to other precursor chemicals such as indican, indoxyl, indigotin, isatin, and indirubin, but has a different pathway to producing the blue pigment. Source: “Indigoidine Introduction,” document supplied to the author by the artist, May 13, 2024, authored by Abiochem.  Intriguingly, indirubin is connected to a traditional Chinese medicine named “Danggui  Longhui Wan,” perhaps an unintended allusion embedded in Wang’s Biological Klein Blue.

[33]Yin, Huifang et al., “Efficient Bioproduction of Indigo and Indirubin by Optimizing a Novel Terpenoid Cyclase XiaI in Escherichia coli,” ACS Omega 2021, 6, 31, 20569–20576.

[34]Yves Klein worked with the chemical manufacturer Rh?ne-Poulenc to produce a colorless polyvinyl acetate resin called Rhodopas M60A. Klein mixed this with alcohol and commercially available synthetic ultramarine pigment to produce the painterly surface he patented as IKB, International Klein Blue (patent no. 63471, registered in Paris on May 19, 1960).

[35]Abiochem, “Indigoidine” (2024). The glucoside indican, with the formula C14H17NO6, is the commonly found botanical precursor to indigo chemistry. Yin (2021) used tryptophan and hydroxyindole to feed their genetically altered E.coli to make indican and indirubin.

[36]Wang Yuyang, email communication May 13, 2024. 

[37]For an exploration of symbiontics in the context of Buddhism in the work of Japanese mycologist Minakata Kumugusu, see Caroline Jones, “The Labour of Symbiosis,” forthcoming in Bassam El Baroni and Matthew Poole,   Editors, The Edinburgh University Press Companion to Curatorial Futures (Spring 2025). I am indebted to the work of scholar Eiko Honda and artist Jenna Sutela in coming to an understanding of Minakata’s extraordinary, cosmic  biological research.

Approach |  Wang Yuyang’s Dream of Colour

Approach |  Rendering

Approach |  How We Became Post-Humanist

Approach | Readymades in Reverse

混成：王郁洋个展

Chaosmosis

A WANG Yuyang Exhibition

2025.11.9-2026.3.29

艺术家：王郁洋

策展人：张尕

出品：北京七九八文化科技有限公司

主办：798CUBE

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