Nicolas Schöffer

Who was Nicolas Schöffer?

Nicolas Schöffer was a Hungarian-born French artist. He can be considered as the father of cybernetic art. He was born in Kalocsa, Austria-Hungary and resided in Paris from 1936 till his death in his Montmartre atelier in 1992. His career touched on painting, kinetic sculpture, architecture, urbanism, film, TV, and music. Indeed he collaborated on music with Pierre Henry. All of the artistic actions of Schöffer were done in the pursuit of a dynamism in art.

This interest in artistic dynamism was originally initiated by the Cubo-Futurists and then intensified and solidified by the Russian Constructivism artists, such as Naum Gabo, Anton Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. All these artists were concerned with opening up the static three-dimensional sculptural form to a fourth dimension of time and motion. And this was the intention of Schöffer as well.

Schöffer however, coming well after, benefited from cybernetic theories in that they suggested to him artistic processes in terms of the organization of the system manifesting it. For Schöffer, this enabled cybernetics to elucidate complex artistic relationships from within the work itself.