The Systems Group Founded

Inspired by Constructivism, Jeffrey Steele, a former Op Art painter, founded the Systems group, which included artists such as John Ernest, Gillian Wise and Malcolm Hughes. Their work, which was anchored in postwar mathematics and cybernetics, investigated the increasing scale and complexity of systems, raising concerns about the visibility of underlying systems in the finished artwork. As technology improved, artists such as Steele and John Ernest adopted a materialist and generative art technique that celebrated chance and disturbed systems. The group’s goal was to investigate the productive capacities of systems other than humans, arguing for self-sufficient systems. Questions though developed about the potential alienation of systems from the artist, sparking arguments about the role of predefined and changing systems in artistic expression. In 1973, Malcolm Hughes would go on to found the Computer and Experimental Department at the University College London’s Slade School of Art, an important UK computer art hub. Artists such as Paul Brown, Stephen Bell, Stephen Scrivener and Dominic Boreham.