Cibernetik 5.3

Cibernetik 5.3 is an audacious exploration of computer-generated animation, combining live-action cinematography with early forms of artificial intelligence. Produced between 1960 and 1965 on an IBM 7094 computer at UCLA and Santa Monica College, the film emerged from Stehura’s personal investigations into cybernetic systems, biological modeling, and narrative cinema. His goal was to make an animation system that would allow anyone to create a film as easily as writing a story—a vision of automated creativity that anticipated decades of generative art to come.

The film juxtaposes neon-bright geometric forms—crescents, tetrahedrons, expanding coils, and whirling skeletal structures—with fisheye-distorted footage of the artist’s friends at UCLA’s Botanical Gardens. Stehura’s programming incorporated primitive genetic models and complex stochastic processes, producing emergent behaviours that were unpredictable to work with, yet often visually compelling. As he explains: “In writing the program I defined a ‘field’ as a point in space having a certain effect on anything entering its area … Once all the rules in the program were specified, I simply turned it on to see what would happen. If I liked the results, I’d leave it.”

Stehura wrote his code with Fortran and developed a bespoke “metalanguage” he called Model Eight, designed specifically for modeling computer music and graphics systems. Rather than relying on conventional computer languages for graphical simulation, he emphasized direct visual input through optical scanning and light-pen drawing, allowing the computer to manipulate representational forms in ways that traditional coding couldn’t achieve. Scored by the composer and sound designer Tod Dockstader’s ominous 1964 Quatermass suite, Cibernetik 5.3 achieves an uncanny synergy of kinetic animation and virtual aesthetics, with forms evolving, exploding, and dissolving unpredictably against cosmic backgrounds.

Acquired from the Center for Visual Music