The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  Figure 7.19.Logic diagram of a female robot. µ is the female drive variable and is a limit on the variable µ; each of µ, dµ, and µ is a different increment; MA is memory for orange (up or down vertical position); MB is memory for puce (up or down vertical position); F is a reinforcement variable, F = 1 or 0, evaluated by the male; t is a fixed delay. Source: G. Pask, "A Comment, a Case History and a Plan," in J. Reichardt (ed.), Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphics Society, 1971), 92, fig. 35.

  In an October 1968 appendix to the same essay, Pask (1971, 98) recorded that this prediction concerning human involvement had proved to be "quite accurate, though entrainment is not nearly so effective with even moderate ambient illumination level." In other words, interaction with the Colloquy was best achieved in the dark. According to John Frazer (personal communication, 30 September 2004), people used womens' makeup mirrors to redirect the robots' light beams. One visitor to the exhibition recalled, "Some of the visitors stayed for several hours conversing with the mobiles" (Zeidner et al. 2001, 984).

  _ _ _ _ _

  What can we say about the Colloquy as ontological theater? Evidently it was in the same space as Musicolour, staging open-ended performative encounters between its participants, now multiple concurrent dances of agency among the five robots. In this instance, however, the participants in these dances were all machines, putting the Colloquy in the same space as the mirror and mating dances of Walter's tortoises and Ashby's multihomeostat setups. Like Walter and Ashby's machines, the Colloquy did not evolve in a fully open-ended fashion—the robots had a finite range of behaviors and fixed goals—but the introduction of human participants modified the picture, making possible a more fully open-ended range of possible performances by the human- Colloquy assemblage. As Pask noted in above quotation, the humans could engage with the robots at "a higher level of discourse," finding their own goals for the behavior of the system, just like a Musicolour performer but in cooperation with a different opto-electro-mechanical setup. It is also worth noting that the Colloquy foregrounded the role of language, communication, and signaling more sharply than the tortoise or the homeostat. One can indeed speak of signaling in connection with the tortoises, say: they responded to the presence or absence of light, and also to thresholds in light intensity. But the combination of different lights and sounds in the Colloquy (and the limited possibilities for robotic movement) brought this signaling aspect to the fore. Once more, then, we can say that the Colloquy was a piece of epistemological as well as ontological theater, and again I want to note that its epistemological aspects were geared straight into the ontological ones. The various modes of signaling in the Colloquy both were precipitated by the robots' performances and served to structure them, rather than to construct self-contained representations of the world. As usual, the Colloquy also staged a vision of a performative epistemology.43

  The Social Basis Again

  We can return to the question of the social locus of cybernetics, and the story bifurcates here. On the one hand, Cybernetic Serendipitywas socially serendipitous for Pask. At the exhibition he met an American, Joseph Zeidner, then on the staff of the U.S. Office of Naval Research, later of the U.S. Army Research Institute. And the upshot of this meeting was that the U.S. military was among the sponsors of Pask's work on decision making and adaptive training systems over the next fifteen years. This takes us back to the lineage of training and teaching machines discussed earlier, and I will not explore the technicalities of that work further. We should bear in mind, however, that these machines were the bread and butter of Pask's life for many years. And we can also note that here we have another example of the typically nomadic pattern of propagation and evolution of cybernetics: from Musicolour and entertainment to typing trainers via the meeting with Christopher Bailey at the Inventors and Patentees Exhibition, to the Colloquy and thence to research on decision making for the U.S. military via the ICA.44 In this section, however, I want to stay with the art world.

  Nothing comes from nowhere, and we can certainly equip Pask's Colloquy with a pedigree. There is a whole history of automaton construction and machine art more generally (in which Jacques de Vaucanson's famous duck usually figures prominently) into which the Colloquy can be inserted. The Colloquy was a moment in the evolution of that tradition, distinguished (like many cybernetic artifacts) by its open-ended liveliness and interactivity. But the point I want to focus on now is that this pedigree is hardly a distinguished one and lurks, instead and as usual, in the margins of social awareness, "marginalised by both Art History and the histories of Engineering and Computer Science" (Penny 2008).45 No doubt there are many reasons which could be adduced for this, but here we should pay attention to the oddity of machine art when seen against the backdrop of the cultural mainstream. As I stressed earlier concerning Gysin's Dream Machine and Pask's Musicolour, works like the Colloquy are odd objects that are refractory to the classifications, practices, and institutions of the modern art world. They are strange and nonmodern in just this sense. They are machines and thus, for the past couple of centuries, associated more readily with the grimy world of industry than with the lofty realms of high art; they lack the static and quasi-eternal quality of paintings and sculptures, foregrounding processes of becoming and emergence instead; as discussed before, interactive artworks tend to dissolve the primacy of the artist, thematizing real-time interplay between artwork and "user" (rather than "viewer"); they also threaten the social demarcation between artists and engineers; and, of course, they need more and different forms of curatorial attention: a sculpture just stands there, but machine art requires technological servicing to keep it going.46

  In this sense, the marginality of machine art, including cybernetic art, is just the other side of the hegemony of modernity, and what calls for more thought is the move toward cultural centrality of works like the Colloquy. But this is no great puzzle. In earlier chapters we have seen many examples of crossovers fostered by an ontological resonance between cybernetics and the sixties counterculture, and that the Colloquy briefly positioned Pask in a sort of countercultural artistic vanguard can, I think, be similarly understood. Strange art hung together with novel forms of life in many ways.47 The other side of this connection is that, as I said earlier, cybernetic art went down with the countercultural ship and very quickly lost its presence in the art world. "Cybernetic Serendipity might be considered the apogee of computer-aided art, considered as a mainstream art form. . . . [But] the late 1960s were both the apogee and the beginning of the end for . . . the widespread application of Cybernetics in contemporary art. . . . Cybernetic and computer art was [after the sixties], rightly or wrongly, regarded as marginal in relation to both the traditional art establishment or to avant-garde art practice" (Gere 2002, 102–3).48

  _ _ _ _ _

  After the sixties, then, "Kinetic, robotic, cybernetic and computer art practices were largely marginalized and ignored. With the odd exception . . . no major art gallery in Britain or the United States held a show of such art for the last 30 years of the twentieth century."49 "But this does mean that . . . other kinds of art involving technology did not continue to be practised," even if they no longer commanded the heights of the art world (Gere 2002, 109,110). Much of the contemporary art discussed in chapter 6 under the heading of hylozoism—by Garnet Hertz, Eduardo Kac, Andy Gracie—is robot art, though I focused on the biological element before. Simon Penny's work is at the Paskian engineering end of the spectrum.50 And these names are simply a random sample, examples that I have happened upon and been struck by.51 Beyond these individual efforts, however, we can note that some sort of institutional social basis for this sort of art has also been emerging. Charlie Gere (2002, 110) mentions the Ars Electronica Centre and annual festival held in Linz, Austria, since 1979 as a key point of condensation and propagation of such work, and also that having directed the Linz festival from 1986 to 1995, Peter Weibel moved to direct the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in
Karlsruhe, Germany, itself a "highly funded research centre and museum dedicated to new media arts."52 As in previous chapters, here we find traces of the emergence of a new social basis for cybernetics and its descendants, now in the sphere of art, not within mainstream institutions but in a parallel social universe (echoing the ambitions of Trocchi's sigma project).

  And to round off this line of thought, it is instructive to think of the career of the British artist Roy Ascott, whom we encountered in the previous chapter as the man who first introduced the musician Brian Eno to cybernetics. Ascott was the leader in Britain in introducing cybernetics into art, having first encountered the field in 1961, reading the works of Ross Ashby, Norbert Wiener, and Frank George (Shanken 2003, 10). As head of foundation at Ealing College of Art, he introduced the Ground Course (1961–63), focused on cybernetics and behaviorism, which "fundamentally affected the work of those who taught it and of their students" (Stephens and Stout 2004, 31, 41).53 Despite his influence on British art in the 1960s, Ascott has been "largely ignored by the British art establishment. The Tate Gallery . . . does not own any of his work. He has, however, achieved international recognition for his interactive work, and his teaching" (Gere 2002, 94). Indeed, in 2003 Ascott became the founding director of a novel pedagogical institution called the Planetary Collegium, "a world-wide transdisciplinary research community whose innovative structure involves collaborative work and supervision both in cyberspace and at regular meetings around the world." Those altered states and technologies of the nonmodern self we have been discussing also loom large in the collegium's self-description:

  The Planetary Collegium is concerned with advanced inquiry in the transdisciplinary space between the arts, technology, and the sciences, with consciousness research an integral component of its work. It sees its influence extending to new forms of creativity and learning in a variety of cultural settings. Far from eschewing the study of esoteric or spiritual disciplines, it seeks to relate ancient, exotic, even archaic knowledge and practices to radically new ideas emerging at the forward edge of scientific research and speculation, and thereby to new forms of art and cultural expression. It seeks dynamic alternatives to the standard form of doctoral and post doctoral research while producing, if not exceeding, outcomes of comparable rigour, innovation and depth.54

  The Fun Palace

  THE HIGH POINT OF FUNCTIONALISM IS THE CONCEPT OF A HOUSE AS A "MACHINE FOR LIVING IN." BUT THE BIAS IS TOWARDS A MACHINE THAT ACTS AS A TOOL SERVING THE INHABITANT. THIS NOTION WILL, I BELIEVE, BE REFINED INTO THE CONCEPT OF AN ENVIRONMENT WITH WHICH THE INHABITANT COOPERATES AND IN WHICH HE CAN EXTERNALIZE HIS MENTAL PROCESSES.

  GORDON PASK,"THE ARCHITECTURAL RELEVANCE OF CYBERNETICS"

  (1969A, 496)

  If the sixties were the decade of interactive art, they were also the decade of interactive and adaptive architecture. In Britain, the Archigram group of architects built almost nothing, but the designs featured in Archigram magazine were iconic for this movement. Ron Herron's fanciful Walking City (fig. 7.20) in 1964 caught the mood, adaptive in the sense that if the city found itself somehow misfitted to its current environment, well, it could just walk off to find somewhere more congenial. Peter Cook's concept of the Plug-In City was a bit more realistic: the city as a mesh of support services for otherwise mobile units including housing—the city that could continually reconfigure itself in relation to the shifting needs and desires of its inhabitants.55

  Figure 7.20.The Walking City, 1964. Source: Sadler 2005, 39, fig. 1.32.

  At a relatively mundane level, the interest in adaptive architecture could be seen as a reaction to the failure of postwar urban planning for the future of London (Landau 1968). If the planners could not foresee how London would develop, then perhaps the city should become a self-organizing system able to reconfigure itself in real time in relation to its own emerging situation. This idea, of course, takes us straight back to Ross Ashby's ideas of evolutionary design and, in another register, to Beer's and Pask's biological and chemical computers that evolved and adapted instead of having to be designed in detail: the city itself as a lively and adaptive fabric for living.

  At a more exalted and typically sixties level was an image of the city as a technology of the nonmodern self, a place where people could invent new ways to be, where new kinds of people could emerge. Metonymically, Archigram's Living City installation at the ICA in 1963 included a flicker machine (taking us back to Grey Walter and Bryan Gysin; fig. 7.21), Much of the inspiration for this conception of the built environment came from the tiny but enormously influential Situationist International group centered on Guy Debord in Paris, which had come into existence in the 1950s. As a founding document from 1953 put it, "The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants. . . . The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization. . . . On the basis of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to mythic synthesis."56

  Closely associated with Archigram and sharing its enthusiasm for adaptive architecture while maintaining an "avuncular" relation to it, was the architect Cedric Price, mentioned earlier as a fellow undergraduate of Pask's at Cambridge (Sadler 2005, 44), and Price was Pask's link to architecture. Around 1960, Joan Littlewood "turned . . . to a childhood dream of a people's palace, a university of the streets, re-inventing Vauxhall Gardens, the eighteenthcentury Thames-side entertainment promenade, with music, lectures, plays, restaurants under an all-weather-dome" (Ezard 2002). This Fun Palace, as it was known, is one of the major unbuilt landmarks of postwar British architecture (fig. 7.22). Cedric Price was appointed as the architect for the project, and "I thought of Gordon [Pask] and Joan did too. He immediately accepted the post—unpaid as I remember—as cybernetician to the Fun Palace Trust. It was his first contact with architects and he was extremely patient. He immediately formed a cybernetic working party and attracted those he wanted to join it too. The meetings became notorious—and Trust Members attended" (Price 1993, 165). "Pask agreed to join the Fun Palace team and organised the Fun Palace Cybernetics Subcommittee, and along with Littlewood and Price, he became the third major personality behind the Fun Palace" (Mathews 2007, 75).57

  Figure 7.21.Flicker machine at the Living City, ICA, 1963. Source: Sadler 2005, 57, fig. 2.6.

  What was the Fun Palace? Like Archigram's designs, but at a much more practical level, the Fun Palace was intended as a reconfigurable adaptive space that could support an enormous variety of activities that changed over time (Landau 1968, 76):

  The activities which the Fun Palace offered would be short-term and frequently updated, and a sample suggested by Joan Littlewood included a fun arcade, containing some of the mechanical tests and games which psychologists and engineers usually play; a music area, with instruments on loan, recordings for anyone, jam sessions, popular dancing (either formal or spontaneous); a science playground, with lecture/demonstrations, teaching films, closed-circuit T.V.; an acting area for drama therapy (burlesque the boss!); a plastic area for modeling and making things (useful and useless). For those not wishing to take part, there would be quiet zones and also screens showing films or closedcircuit television of local and national happenings.

  This program called for an architecture which was informal, flexible, unenclosed, and impermanent; the architecture did not need to be simply a response to the program, but also a means of encouraging its ideas to grow and to develop further. With an open ground-level deck and with multiple ramps, moving walkways, moving walls, floors, and ceilings, hanging auditoriums, and an overall moving gantry crane, the physical volumes of the spaces could be changed as different usages were adopted. The kit of parts for these operations included charged static vapor barriers, optical barriers, warm air curtains, a fog dispersal plant, and horizontal and vertical lightwe
ight blinds. In the Fun Palace, no part of the fabric would be designed to last for more than ten years, and parts of it for possibly only ten days.

  A large number of people worked on the design of the Fun Palace, and it is impossible to spell out in detail Pask's individual contributions. At the level of content, the Cybernetics Subcommittee suggested dividing the Fun Palace into six organizational zones, and "Zone one was dedicated to the various types of teaching machines that Pask and his Systems Research had already developed." Stanley Mathews describes the Littlewood-Pask cybernetic theater as part of the overall conception of the Fun Palace (Mathews 2007, 114, 116).58 Like the flicker machine at the Living City, the machines and the theater can be seen as metonyms for the entire building.59 More broadly, Pask's contribution appears to have been to see the Fun Palace on the model of Musicolour—as an aesthetically potent environment that in its inner reconfigurations both reacts to emergent patterns of use and fosters new ones.60 Hence, I think, Roy Landau's reference to the Fun Palace as "encouraging . . . ideas to grow and to develop further." In a 1969 essay, Pask argued that cybernetic architecture would "elicit [the inhabitant's] interest as well as simply answering his queries" (Pask 1969a, 496), citing Musicolour and the Colloquy of Mobiles as examples of what he had in mind. Figure 7.23 reproduces Pask's 1965 logic diagram of the "cybernetic control system" for the Fun Palace, which features "unmodified people" as input and "modified people" as output—echoing the Situationist analysis of adaptive architecture as a transformative technology of the self.61 Alexander Trocchi and his sigma project (chap. 5) made the connection, since he was allied with the Situationists in Paris and friends with both Price and Littlewood in London (with whom he met regularly in 1964) (Mathews 2007, 112–14).