Five Screens with Computer by Gustav Metzger

Hearing the words “five screens with computer” today, our minds automatically think of a laptop or desktop computer’s “screen” or digital display. As such screens did not exist in 1965, this piece’s “five screens” were actually “made of stainless steel, about thirty feet high, forty feet long and three feet deep,” according to Gustav Metzger himself in the Cybernetic Serendipity catalog. In this unrealized project, a computer would eject the screens’ elements one by one until the site was empty, a process that would take ten years. This “auto-destructive” art was a critique of the “rationalism” of computers and technology and backlash to their militaristic roots.