I Was Sitting in a Room: Cybernetic Aesthetics and Victor Burgin’s Projection Loops

I was Sitting in a Room: Cybernetic Aesthetics and Victor Burgin's Projection Loops The chapter examines the loops that structure Victor Burgin's projection pieces in relation to works by US composer Alvin Lucier to suggest that a form of cybernetic and post-digital aesthetics is operative in each, resulting in similar ethical and political agendas regarding agency, space and attentiveness. Burgin's discussion of his digitally-modified panoramas addresses the 'zero degree' of perspective that he crafts in them, suggesting that technological systems of information-gathering and perception simultaneously provide the conditions for a perceiving and understanding subject while removing the subject from the picture through the performance of its subject matter: 'the disembodied point of view'. The desire of the zero degree renders an aesthetics and politics that speak neatly to cybernetic formulations. The chapter argues that the seemingly anti-humanist qualities of cybernetic aesthetics and Burgin's decidedly humanist aesthetic steer actually lead to the same ethical and political agenda regarding agency, space and attentiveness.