Historical overview of cybernetics and its artistic diffusion (1948‑1968)

from kuber- to guber—the root of “gubernatorial” and “governor,” another term for masculine control, deployed by James Watt to describe his 19th-century device for modulating a runaway steam engine. Cybernetics thus took ideas that had long analogized people and devices and generalized them to an applied science by adding that “-ics.” Wiener’s three c’s (command, control, communication) drew on the mathematics of probability to formalize systems (whether biological or mechanical) theorized as a set of inputs of information achieving outputs of actions in an environment—a muscular, fleshy agenda often minimized in genealogies of AI. But the etymology does little to capture the excitement felt by participants, as mathematics joined theoretical biology (Arturo Rosenblueth) and information theory (Claude Shannon, Walter Pitts, Warren McCulloch) to produce a barrage of interdisciplinary research and publications viewed as changing not just the way science was done but the way future humans would engage with the technosphere. As Wiener put it, “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist.”48 The pressing question is: How are we modifying ourselves? Are we going in the right direction or have we lost our way, becoming the tools of our tools? Revisiting the early history of humanist/artists’ contribution to cybernetics may help direct us toward a less perilous, more ethical future. The year 1968 was a high-water mark of the cultural diffusion and artistic uptake of the term. In that year, the Howard Wise gallery opened its show of Wen-Ying Tsai’s “Cybernetic Sculpture” in midtown Manhattan, and Polish émigré Jasia Reichardt opened her exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at London’s ICA. (The “Cybernetic” in her title was intended to evoke “made by or with computers,” even though most of the artworks on view had no computers, as such, in their responsive circuits.) The two decades between 1948 and 1968 had seen both the fanning out of cybernetic concepts into a broader culture and the spread of computation machines themselves in a slow migration from proprietary military equipment, through the multinational corporation, to the academic lab, where access began to be granted to artists. The availability of cybernetic components—“sensor organs” (electronic eyes, motion sensors, microphones) and “effector organs” (electronic “breadboards,” switches, hydraulics, pneumatics)—on the home hobbyist front rendered the computer less an “electronic brain” than an adjunct organ in a kit of parts. There was not yet a ruling metaphor of “artificial intelligence.” So artists were bricoleurs of electronic bodies, interested in actions rather than calculation or cognition. There were inklings of “computer” as calculator in the drive toward Homo rationalis, but more in aspiration than achievement. In light of today’s digital convergence in art/science imaging tools, Reichardt’s show was prophetic in its insistence on confusing the boundaries between art and what we might dub “creative applied science.” According to the catalog, “no visitor to the exhibition, unless he reads all the notes relating to all the works, will know whether he is looking at something made by an artist, engineer, mathematician, or architect.” So the comically dysfunctional robot by Nam June Paik, Robot K-456 (1964), featured on the catalog’s cover and described as “a female robot known for her disturbing and idiosyncratic behavior,” would face off against a balletic Colloquy of Mobiles (1968) from second-order cybernetician Gordon Pask. Pask worked with a London theater 48 The Human Use of Human Beings (1954 edition), p. 46. 175 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016978