Paul Pangaro: What is cybernetics?
"Cybernetics as a process operating in nature has been around for a long time ... as a concept in society has been around at least since Plato used it to refer to government.
In modern times, the term became widespread because Norbert Wiener wrote a book called 'Cybernetics' in 1948. His sub–title was 'control and communication in the animal and machine'. This was important because it connects control (a.k.a., actions taken in hope of achieving goals) with communication (a.k.a., connection and information flow between the actor and the environment). So, Wiener is pointing out that effective action requires communication.
Wiener's sub–title also states that both animals (biological systems) and machines (non–biological or 'artificial' systems) can operate according to cybernetic principles. This was an explicit recognition that both living and non–living systems can have purpose. A scary idea in 1948."
(Paul Pangaro)
CONTRIBUTOR
Liam BirtlesSHARE
Musical sense-making and the concept of affordance: an ecosemiotic and experiential approach
"Is music something 'out there', a kind of structure or artefact, that can be dealt with in a static way? Or does it rely on processes which call forth interactions with the sounds? Should we conceive of music users besides the music, and think about music as something which is perceived, conceptualised and enacted upon in order to be meaningful? Is music an ontological category, or a sounding phenomenon that calls forth epistemic interactions with the sounds? And can music be considered as a sonic environment and the music user as an organism that generates music knowledge as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world?
These questions revolve around the ecological concept of coping with the (sonic) world (Reybrouck, 2001a, 2005a, b). Musical sense–making, in this view, can be addressed in terms of interactions with the sounds, both at the level of perception, action and mental processing. It is a position that broadens the scope of music research, encompassing all kinds of music and sounds, and going beyond any kind of cultural and historical constraints. Music, in this broadened view, is to be defined as a collection of sound/time phenomena which have the potential of being structured, with the process of structuring being as important as the structure of the music. As such, it is possible to transcend a merely structural description of the music in favour of a process–like description of the ongoing process of maintaining epistemic contact with the music as a sounding environment. A central focus, in this approach, is on the role of musical experience and the way how listeners make sense of music as it sounds (see Blacking, 1955; Määttänen, 1993; Reybrouck, 2004; Westerlund, 2002)."
(Mark Reybrouck, 2012)
Reybrouck, M. (2012). "Musical sense–making and the concept of affordance: an ecosemiotic and experiential approach". Biosemiotics, 5 (3), 391–409.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Kara: an animated short film speculation about our domestic futures
"Quantic Dream released a short film following a character called Kara. The five–minute film is called Kara. She's a female android brought to life on an assembly line, and as her body is put together piece by piece she's asked to speak in English, German and French and sing in Japanese. After expressing emotion she's marked as defective and being to be disassembled, but before being permanently shut down she begs for her life. Her beating blue robotic heart tells how nervous she is, and the man assembling Kara allows her to continue off the manufacturing line"
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Senster: pioneering cybernetic sculpture
"The Senster, commissioned by the electronics giant, Philips, for their permanent showplace, the Evoluon, in Eindhoven, was a much bigger and more ambitious piece of work than SAM. In addition to responding to people's voices, the Senster also responded to their movements, which it detected by means of radar, and was (as far as I know) the first robotic sculpture to be controlled by a computer. It was unveiled in 1970 and remained on permanent show until 1974 when it was dismantled.
Its size – it was over 15 feet (4 m) long and could reach as high into the air – made the use of aluminium castings inappropriate, so it was welded out of steel tubing, with the castings employed only in the more intricate microphone positioning mechanism. Its behaviour, controlled by a computer, was much more subtle than SAM's but still fairly simple. The microphones would locate the direction of any predominant sound and home in on it, rather like SAM but much more efficiently, and the rest of the structure would follow them in stages if the sound persisted. Sudden movements or loud noises would make it shy away. The complicated acoustics of the hall and the completely unpredictable behaviour of the public made the Senster's movements seem a lot more sophisticated than they actually were. It soon became obvious that it was that behaviour and not anything in its appearance which was responsble for the impact which the Senster undoubtedly had on the audience."
(Aleksandar Zivanovic)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Radical Pedagogies in Architectural Education
"Pedagogical experiments played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, the key hypothesis of our Radical Pedagogy[1] research project is that these experiments can be understood as radical architectural practices in their own right. Radical in the literal meaning from the Latin radice, as something belonging or relating to the root, to its foundations. Radical pedagogies shake foundations, disturbing assumptions rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. This challenge to normative thinking was a major force in the postwar field of architecture, and has surprisingly been neglected in recent years. ...
Architectural pedagogy has become stale. Schools spin old wheels as if something is happening but so little is going on. Students wait for a sense of activist engagement with a rapidly evolving world but graduate before it happens. The fact that they wait for instruction is already the problem. Teachers likewise worry too much about their place in the institutional hierarchies. Curricular structures have hardly changed in recent decades, despite the major transformations that have taken place with the growth of globalisation, new technologies, and information culture. As schools appear to increasingly favour professionalisation, they seem to drown in self–imposed bureaucratic oversight, suffocating any possibility for the emergence of experimental practices and failures. There are a few attempts to wake things up here and there but it's all so timid in the end. There is no real innovation.
In response to the timidity of schools today, the Radical Pedagogy project returns to the educational experiments of the 1960s and '70s to remind us what can happen when pedagogy takes on risks. It's a provocation and a call to arms."
(Beatriz Colomina with Esther Choi, Ignacio Gonzalez Galan and Anna–Maria Meister, 28 September 2012, The Architectural Review)
1). Radical Pedagogy is an ongoing multi–year collaborative research project by a team of PhD candidates in the School of Architecture at Princeton University, led by Beatriz Colomina and involving seminars, interviews and guest lectures by protagonists and scholars. The project explores a remarkable set of pedagogical experiments of the 1960s and '70s that revolutionised thinking in the discipline. Each student is working on one of these experiments and collectively mapping the interconnections and effects of these experiments towards a major publication and exhibition.
Fig.1 Tournaments in the Course 'Culture of the Body', at the Valparaíso School, 1975. Courtesy of Archivo Histórico Jose Vial, Escuela Arquitectura y Diseño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
