Tribute: Oswald Wiener and Cybernetics
Bryony Jean Dawson
Reading Performance
Tribute is a reading series in which participants are invited to select and perform a text of any kind, as long as it was written by someone else, and corresponds to the chosen theme.
Initiated by artist and writer Bryony Dawson, Tribute proposes the live reading as a site of encounter between voices and different forms and registers of language. Rather than centering originality or authorship, it foregrounds the relationship between a reader and the words of another, acknowledging that our thinking, speaking, and writing are always shaped by countless external voices. The series invites participants to experiment with how they ‘pay tribute’ to these influences, whether they are grounded in admiration, identification, nostalgia, critique, or intellectual friction.
This edition of Tribute conceived by Bryony Dawson and Caro Feistritzer will invite readers to choose texts in response to the work and legacy of Oswald Wiener, an Austrian avant-garde writer, artist, philosopher and later computer scientist. Wiener’s work connected literature, artificial intelligence, and theories of consciousness, but later turned toward cybernetics, mathematics, and computer science after concluding that art alone could not explain thinking. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan Turing, Wiener developed an interdisciplinary “theory of thinking” centered on introspection and the idea that thought exists before language. He anticipated modern debates about virtual reality and AI through concepts such as the “Bio-Adapter”, a machine-generated artificial reality, and argued that AI systems may imitate human behavior through statistical pattern recognition, but lack genuine understanding, consciousness, and subjective experience. His work ultimately critiques purely behaviorist models of intelligence, insisting that human thinking is embodied, self-reflective, and cannot be fully reduced to algorithms or data processing.
Artists
Participating artists
Bryony Dawson
is a writer, curator, and sometimes-artist. She admits that the various readings, screenings and events she organises are essentially a ploy to get people she loves and admires to gather in one place at a time of her choosing. Her creative and critical writing has been featured in PW Magazine, Plus Magazine, Frieze, émergent magazine, Motor Dance Journal, Corridor8, and on Montez Press Radio.
June Drevet
is an editor, critic, author, and curator who focuses on the role of contemporary photography and video art in a present-day world shaped by technology and humanitarian crises. Since 2024, she has been working as an editor for Camera Austria International. Her research interests at the intersection of media history and critical theory focus on (post-)digital visual cultures and publishing as an artistic practice. Her writings have appeared in various print and online magazines as well as in artist catalogs. Her first book will be published by DISTANZ Berlin in the fall of 2026.
Beatrice Forchini
is junior curator at steirischer herbst.
She has been working at the intersection of curatorial and educational practices within institutional contexts such as TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Belvedere, Vienna; Iuav University of Venice; the Venice Biennale, and independent art spaces. Forchini is interested in curatorial and artistic approaches that develop through a performative component and practices that address conditions in which knowledge is produced, mediated, and activated. At TBA21, she was assistant curator for the exhibitions Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation (Ocean Space, Venice, 2020 – 21); Walid Raad: Cotton Under My Feet (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 2021); Abundant Futures, and Remedios (C3A, Córdoba, 2022 – 23) and contributed to catalogs and publications. She lives in Graz and Vienna.
Rose-Anne Gush
is a writer, art historian and assistant professor at the IZK — Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology. Her research interests include political aesthetics and theories of ‘global art’, including transnational surrealism, the spatial politics of capitalism, artistic form and geographies of extraction, as well as theories of Marxism, gender, trauma and memory. Her recent articles have been published in Berlin Review, FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, Camera Austria, Brand-New-Life Magazine, Third Text, Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft, and Performance Research. Her first monograph Artistic Labor of the Body is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series published by Brill and Haymarket.
Zlata Zhidkova
is a sound artist, musician, performer and composer. She works with multichannel systems, complex textures and feedback instruments, and experiments with tangible sounding materials, exploring “unexpressed/able” that exists in between the mediums and perception levels. With a background in classical flute and philology, she is now finishing her Master of Arts in Computermusic and Sound Art at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) at KunstUni Graz.