The Blind Spot in the Labyrinth:
Art and Cybernetics (a 5 minute Primer)
There are no primary sensory modalities.
If you want to see, learn how to act.
-H.V.F.
[slide one: arte y cibernetica ]
We have three distinguished panelists today. My job is to help establish this session within the context of artistic practice.
[Benedit]
Good Morning -- The images that parallel my talk will help me articulate this 5 minute primer on second-order cybernetics. I will rely on a latin american group of artists that emerged in the 70s, the group of thirteen and within this system of artists look at some of the work of a particular artist Luis Benedit.
[slide two: arte de sistemas]
CYBERNETICS, the seed of our talk, concerns regulatory systems in general, from computers to hearts. Emerging in the 1940's from new methods in neurophysiology and ethology, it calls for a focus on dynamics and processes rather than parts. Phenomena is contingent, behavior is probabilistic, and control is acquired by the regulation of information - models of the organism's neurologic system came to be used as models of engineered systems in general, and vice versa.
[slide three: constructive systems]
In the 60s, second-order cybernetics, having reflected on questions of motor control, moves to questions of perception and asks, what about regulation systems that regulate themselves, where there is no governing control mechanism or where the rules of control are created along the way? If we can design that, then we have a design for a brain. In particular, how do we model a self-organizing machine and with it, a newly constructed reality. Now we ask, what is life and consciousness? And if we can't define it, how do we at least learn to build things based on that question?
[McCulloch and Pitts conceive of neural nets and researchers like Rosenblatt conceive of a perceptron -- a unit of neurological computing, or H.D. Crane's neuristors, units which when combined allow an emergence of regulatory control.]
[Autopoesis]
One of the leaders of this quest is Humberto Maturana, a Chilean theoretical biologist studying frog perception, who develops, with his student Francisco Varela, the notion of autopoiesis, literally self-production: a network of processes that continuously generates itself. And these two use autopoiesis is to define an autonomous minimal living system. With this theory of life-itself, identity is redefined as a bootstrapped matrix of relationships.
[Autopoiesis II: a network of processes that continuously generate themselves]
This finds form also in structural family therapy, which seeks to intervene at the level of family and not of the individual.
Autopoietic systems can combine through structural coupling to form larger autopoietic systems. Here we have a diagram of Luis Benedit's Biotrón, shown at the Venice Bienale in 1970,
a system of 4000 bees are observed 'pollinating' a system of artificial flowers. Glucose is delivered to the artificial flowers via a computerized system.
Bees are shown to "prefer" the artificial to the natural. And everyone watches.
[Operational Closure I]
And here is the fitotrón, engineered by the artist in 1972, a hydroponic plant system. It demonstrates another important aspect of second-order cybernetics which is operational closure of living systems.
Not closed in the sense of non-responsive, but rather closed in the sense of autonomous and self-producing, and containing all the requisite variety to adapt to its environment.
Today we call this operational closure plasticity.
[South America]
In these cases,the scientific realities are constructed by the artist. This constructive epistemology of course had, in Latin America especially, an older sister form in constructivist art. They share the idea of a universal language of life,
[Universal Constructivism]
where symbols and reason are distilled into an almost mathematical truth, the offering of a bare reality, a sheer life force, a raw and real system of social responsibility.
[Architecture Slides]
The bedrock for artists to take on the challenge of cognitive systems and their abstract recursive nature -- The relationship of individuals to societies and knowledge through their practice -- this bedrock was built in Latin America by the constructivists, both in painting, kinetic works, and architecture.
[arte de sistemas]
In Buenos Aires, In the midst of this constructivist atmosphere, was born The Group of Thirteen out of a desire to build a laboratory for art. [Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre]. Their first show, arte de sistemas, opened in 1972.
[laboratorios / laberintos]
Jorge Glusberg, voice of the group, writes
"Leveraging the scientific method, with its allowance of abstraction and modeling, it's possible to deepen creative experiences, studying their results as variable functions within society, as operations rather than simple and explicit elements . . . " -
As we have seen Luis Benedit, a founding member of the group, constructs laboratory's of behavior, labyrinths of observation -- or, in Heinz von Foersters words, observing systems (we observe systems in the process of observing their own realities).
Benedit's laboratories for plants, ants, rats are labyrinths of meaning and relationships, entanglements of art, science and nature.
As the writer Marcel Pacheco puts it "[Benedit rebuilds events, describes processes, elaborates memories, realizes acts, suspects relationships, collects evidence and exposes the results of his search . . . ]there is no truth, just truthfulness, no representation just construction."
Even a plant can observe and find its way through the labyrinth of meaning. So why can't we?
We ask: in Benedit's work, does a scientific truthfulness emerge from a biologists attempt to create art? or does a biological event emerge from an artist's attempt at scientific method? or does a creative act emerge from a scientist's attempt to regulate biology? What system of observation are we observing exactly?
This last possible reality, where an creative act that emerges from science's approach of nature, resonates the most with me. For what better place for an artist to position herself than as a mediator, judge, or referee between the natural order and the laboratory that strives to understand it. The artist serves as a wedge between our conceptual model of a cat -- which we call it physics -- and the real cat itself. The artist is always right there in the middle.
[I'll close this crash course on second-order cybernetics with a quote from Robert Rosen, a brilliant theoretical biologist, who writes in his text Life Itself -- "Biology … is not simply the study of whatever organisms happen to appear in the external world of the biologist; it could be, and in fact is, much more than that. Biology becomes in fact a creative endeavor; to fabricate any realization of the essential relational organization . . . is to create a new organism. Seen in this light, we can see the beginnings of a technology that comes along with theoretical biology, a technology of fabrication." (Life Itself, p245)]