The essence of cybernetics is nothing cybernetic: Manuel Felguérez and the aesthetic machine

Mexican painter Manuel Felguérez (1928–2020) devoted much of the 1970s to exploring cybernetic theory and collaborating with mathematicians and engineers to create an ‘aesthetic machine’, that is, a machine or programme capable of generating ‘balanced’ composition in the abstract style that characterised his painting. In this essay I discuss Felguérez’s project in relation to the techno-scientific epistemologies that permeated Cold War artistic creation, in particular cybernetics. Likewise, I explore the kinds of future(s) at stake in Felguérez’s temporal imagination, and the visions of technics and modernity that he forged through his art. My conceptualisation of Felguérez’s machine as both an ‘open machine’ (Simondon) and an ‘open artwork’ (Eco) emphasises the importance that the artist gave to feedback, evolution, chance, and indeterminacy in his project. This, in turn, allows us to understand his approach to abstraction as coextensive with his involvement in avant-garde performance in the 1960s (in collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky).