This work, dedicated to the anthropologist, cyberneticist and environmental pioneer Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), presents a solar-powered neon text of Bateson’s famous phrase ‘the pattern that connects’ in the desert night.

In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979) Bateson put forward his concept of ‘ecology of mind,’ which points to a communicative interconnection between all living organisms. Bateson’s concept of the ‘cybernetic mind’ describes an immanent, self-organising informational ‘pattern that connects’ everything to everything else. He seeks to explain the relationship between mind and nature, describing mental processes as a sequence of interactions between things. The radical ideas that Bateson put forward had – and still have – wide implications, not only for science but also for culture and for the development of an ecological aesthetics with interconnections and relationships to the natural world. As Peter Harris-Jones explains in a recent article on the aesthetic implications of Bateson’s ideas:

Bateson’s ecological aesthetics is participatory.… concerned with habitat, and habitat change. Its focus lies in how people perceive change in an ever-transforming ecology. Beyond this, human perception of nature is linked to human conception of nature and thus, by implication, to human survival. (Peter Harris-Jones, ‘Gregory Bateson and Ecological Aesthetics: An Introduction’)

My installation seeks to connect to Bateson’s ideas by creating a work that draws attention to its functioning – through the interconnections of its components – and to the central role of the viewer in their engagement with the work, its purpose and its relationship to the location. I see the entire installation as a kind of cybernetic system that includes the viewer and their relationship to the functioning and meaning of the work.