A Cybernetic Serendipity
I first came across that delicious word, serendipity, at the Cybernetic Serendipity Exhibition curated by Jascia Reichardt at the ICA in 1968. This exhibition is the stuff of legends: art and cybernetics, artists and cyberneticians, meeting together in a symbiotic feast. It marked both the high point and the beginning of the rapid descent of cybernetics in the arts, for almost from that date cybernetics began to be an almost unusable term, much of its thinking being appropriated by other subjects that had more attraction though, I could argue, less coherence and less honour. That particularly specific and limited cybernetic machine, the computer and its theoretical adjuncts artificial intelligence, cognitive science and artificial life, took over and the generous generality of cybernetics vanished from view. It was far from dead (as some claimed), but it went through an internal revolution and has still not managed to return itself to even a bit part on stage!
Roll on nearly 40 years and something strange is happening: Leviathan, it seems, is emerging from the deep. Over the past couple of years there has been a resurgence in interest in cybernetics by artists. Not, it must be admitted, cybernetics in its current state, but right back, where Cybernetic Serendipity marked its progress as that progress turned into almost freefall.
So how appropriate, how warming and how timely it is to see the exhibition Maverick Machines, on show in the Matthew Gallery in the Architecture School of Edinburgh University. This exhibition has been grown (sometimes literally) out of one of the seminal figures of cybernetics, Gordon Pask. Pask was an extraordinary and exceptional man who, although he liked to call himself a cybernetician, was active in many fields including drawing, writing lyrics, and the construction of performative art machines, many of which were so radically advanced that it is perhaps not surprising that his work is becoming current so long after he did it.
For the Cybernetic Serendipity Exhibition he constructed a collection of five large, fibre-glass robots that danced with each other and any member of the public who entered their space. Many years before that (1953), he constructed MusiColour, a light system to accompany the combos of the day. Unlike the light shows since, however, MusiColour joined the combo as if one of the players, modelling the performance of the others and joining in until it became bored and suggested variations of its own (which the musicians would respond to). In a later book (“Calculator Saturnalia”, written with Mike Robinson and myself, and published 1981) Pask wrote a fantasy story around a collection of games explicating cybernetic principles, illustrated with his fantastic drawings. He was responsible for the naming and defining of the Maverick Machine.
But the work of Pask’s that is most relevant, as far as the exhibition is concerned, comes from two sources. The first is his experimentation with chemical computers and with the way that you could grow computations as crystalline (dendritic) forms in solutions, influenced by varying electrical charges. This work is wonderfully presented in the exhibition, not only by means of the records of and commentaries on his own work, but also by newer work inspired by Pask, such as the truly elegant Electrochemical Glasses by Richard Brown (who designed and produced the exhibition, with John Bird as a supportive contributor) showing three glasses (Paskian chemical computers) powered by currents from electrodes that are wired together and so that the dendrites which appear in the crystalline solution compete for the available electrical resource. Andy Webster’s miniature but intensely sculptural growths of copper, Brown’s Axon Memory Device that can be influenced by the viewer and Jon Bird’s Diffusion Limited Aggregation Simulator are further dendritic computers on display. Amazingly, Axon Technologies has been developing Paskian chemical computational elements (for use as computer memory) at the nano scale, without, they say, having heard of Pask at all: a wonderful example of the serendipitous leakage of ideas through the community—and of how cybernetic work so often appears, unacknowledged, in other fields. At the end of the exhibition there is a last minute entry: Andy Webster and Richard Brown growing a Paskian ear that is driven by sound (as Pask’s original was): I harbour the hope that maybe the ear will be able to do more than record, that it might learn to listen!
The second source is demonstrated in more architectural work that derives from Pask’s notion of interactivity and of conversation as the archetypical vehicle of interaction. It is important to note, here, that Pask’s interaction was not the trivialised interaction made such a fuss of by the computer industry but involves the generation of novelty which moves the relationship of the participants to new areas, as happens in conversation. Pask’s main theoretical work was called “Conversation Theory” and developed around concepts of learning that are still advanced, today. Pask’s views of interaction are drivers behind the work of The Bartlett Interactive Workshop which has been developing its programme over the past 15 years under the direction of Stephen Gage, and Usman Haque, a former student and tutor with the Workshop.

The work by Usman Haque with Robert Davis, is a sample of a sound installation (Evolving Sonic Environment III) in which analogue oscillators interact not only with each other, but are affected in this interaction by the acoustics of the space they are in, and the presence and movement of people. It plays very consciously on the active participation of the observer in the performance, a central concept of the more recent form of cybernetics that developed following the Cybernetic Serendipity Exhibition, generally called second order cybernetics. The work of the Interactive Workshop is represented by two pieces of computational hardware and 7 short videos representing the group of students who graduated this summer from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, and shows a wide range of objects that respond to the presence of humans and a physical environment, often playfully, in a manner that helps change our understanding of what architecture might be: the Matthew Gallery is therefore an ideal site!
One aspect of this work is the quality of the craftsmanship in making the objects: these are polished and finished items, almost furniture, and they contrast nicely with many of the other exhibits that have about them the Heath Robinson aesthetic of space travel in the Edwardian era—itself appropriate given Pask’s personal style, often likened to an Edwardian Dandy’s. Of these exhibits, I personally specially like the time machine that switches on only in the presence of an observer (raising the sort of philosophical question about what exists when not observed that perhaps inspires Haque and even Pask, himself, in his colloquy of mobiles); and the Framed Static Machine, which flutters like butterflies and cascades upwards with flickering lights. Both these are works by Richard Brown.
I have not covered all, or even all my favourite exhibits: for the exhibition was advertised as “…informed and inspired by the maverick work and character of Gordon Pask” and so I have emphasised work with a clear link. But there remain two questions that need at least to be raised even if I cannot answer them.
The first is the familiar one of what exactly constitutes a piece of art? Since Duchamp exhibited his urinal as a “Fountain” we have been able to argue that something is art because someone who claims the title artist says so. This exhibition, like many others involved in the making of machines and computing environments, brings this question to the fore. How do these exhibits differ from the records a scientist might produce? And does this matter? Some will argue the job of art is to raise, time and again, the question as to whether this is art: that raising the question qualifies the work as art work. Isn’t this the basis of much work since cubism?
The second is, does this take us forward? Here I would like to write of cybernetics rather than art. With the supposed death of cybernetics shortly after the Cybernetic Serendipity Exhibition, it seems that cybernetics is caught in a timewarp. Even those who work in second order cybernetics are inclined to look backwards, eulogising the dead old men (including Pask—and all made wonderful contributions) rather than seeking the workers creating new understandings. There is a danger in an exhibition such as this that it becomes nostalgic: indeed, some of the nicest pieces hark back in their form, and sometimes their mechanism and technologies, to earlier times. This is a serious matter, but fortunately, in this exhibition, there is as well as the nostalgia a sense of extension that moves the thinking, at least at the junction of cybernetics and art, onwards. In this respect, the show is indeed a cybernetic serendipity and serendipitously cybernetic.
I have one suggestion for the curators. Above the panels there are responsive lights that turn on when someone moves, within range. How wonderful it would be if these could be reconfigured to stop being a simple responsive mechanism, and took on a role in playing with the audience in the gallery, a la MusiColour.

Maverick Machines is open 10am-4pm, Monday-Friday, 24th July - 10th August in the Matthew Gallery, Edinburgh School of Architecture, Minto House, Chambers Street; opposite the Royal Museum.

Ranulph Glanville

ranulph@glanville.co.uk