Reimagining Energy in the Information Age: Juan Downey’s Electronic Sculptures

In the late 1960s, Chilean media artist Juan Downey constructed a series of electronic sculptures that aimed to render their invisible electromagnetic environment perceptible for spectators. Designed to transform radar waves or cosmic background radiation into light, sound, and mechanical vibration through sensors and transmitters, these sculptures allow us to rethink the relation between energy and the dematerializing logic of the cybernetic paradigm that has come to dominate the existing scholarship on conceptual and media arts. The existing scholarship of Downey’s electronic sculptures frames them as realizing contemporary theories of cybernetic communication and feedback: facilitating participation among bodies and technologies to generate an informational assemblage. This article, however, asserts that the deployment of the cybernetic paradigm of information in this art historical scholarship inadvertently reproduces cybernetics’ historical de-emphasis of material and energetic specificity, and thus fails to account for those insights that emerge from Downey’s unique attention to the concrete reality of electromagnetism and its interactions with human perceptual experience and technical media. In this article I argue that the electronic sculptures invoke specific frequencies of the electromagnetic field, not to dematerialize them into flows of information, but to foreground their challenging materiality and reveal the limits of our organic and technological modes of access to a vast and elusive yet animating energetic environment. My objective is to open up Downey’s early practice to new concerns outside the cybernetic frame, with a special focus on his contributions to the link between art history and the energy humanities.