Sarah Kanouse | My Electric Genealogy
November 16
Nearly seven decades ago, British cybernetician Gordon Pask (1928-1996) envisioned a world in which machines engaged humans in conversation. Pask, who gained international fame in the 1950s for his innovative adaptive teaching machines, created cybernetic devices and environments that not only adapted to humans, but challenged them. Assuming that humans find it pleasurable to continuously develop new mental models of the behavior of their environment, Pask developed devices that attempted to keep their human counterparts in a state of uncertainty.
Gordon Pask’s visionary concepts and projects were unique within cybernetics not least because of his close involvement with the arts. Not universities or research institutes, but theaters and music halls were the experimental laboratory for Pask’s first cybernetic machines. By introducing key projects such as Musicolour (1953-1957), the “moody” light organ, the Colloquy of Mobiles (1968), as well as his cybernetic contributions to the Fun Palace (1964), the visionary architectural project by Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, this talk situates Pask’s work in the context of the historical moment when the relationships of humans and machines in industrial societies began to change in light of the sudden availability of learning, sensor-equipped devices. It shows how the cybernetician, within the 1950s and 1960s, oscillated between his artistic passions, the need to respond to the individual and social challenges of automation, the new role of humans as sources of error in civilian and military machine systems, and his work on a new epistemological concept, later called Conversation Theory. This talk aims to put up for discussion how we might relate to Pask’s early vision of a world of machines that behave in difficult or to some degree unpredictable ways, that is to say to conversational machines that we may bore, but which would always shield us from boredom.
About Margit Rosen:
Margit Rosen studied art history, political science, philosophy and media arts at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), and the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne).
In 2016 she was appointed Head of Collections, Archives & Research at ZKM.
Margit Rosen taught at HfG | University of art And Design Karlsruhe, at CAFA Beijing and is a faculty member of the Master’s program MediaArtHistories at the Danube University Krems. In 2011 and 2013, she was a visiting professor at the Art Academy Münster. Her research, publication activities as well as curatorial work is dedicated to the art of the 20th and 21st century, especially the history and aesthetics of electronic arts.
Part of the Fall 2023 Lecture Series.
