Gordon Pask

There can be few other words in the English language that inspire such scepticism as “interactivity.” However, this article starts from a qualitatively different perspective reasserting interactivity as a useful concept with specific respect to video games. This article addresses the question: What is interactivity for? The analysis of interactivity, when seen as a means to an end, must consider the forms of that end. Put simply: what is gained through modes of interactivity is content in a vast variety of forms. The authors move onto an analysis of interactivity in terms of the following definition: interactivity is a conceptualising facility that mediates between environments and content and users enabling generation. A key development in the analysis of interactivity is the examination of the significance of environment in relation to content including the use of virtual environments within the interactive scope of video games. This environmental characteristic was examined in a series of investigations into cybernetics by Gordon Pask in the 1970s and 1980s. This was an early attempt to devise a human/computer system that was both mutual in its relations and supportive of creativity. We assert that it is time for Pask’s work to be recognised as of fundamental importance for the examination of interactivity and the constitution of dynamic, creative environments including video games. Pask offers a description of a “Cyberarchitecture” for the sharing and making of content. This formulation is complementary to Espen Aarseth’s concept of cybertext. The authors explore examples in video games through the lens of Cyberarchitecture with particular reference to Pask and Curran’s framework of concept sharing, concept making, privacy and balance. The article concludes with a call for further application of this framework to video games and beyond. 

Keywords: Interactivity, Cybernetics, Cyberarchitecture, Concept Sharing, Concept Making, Privacy, Balance

In the early 1960s, a number of anarchist writers showed an interest in cybernetics, in which they saw the tools for better articulating radical forms of self-organisation. Discussions on the connections between anarchism and cybernetics did not advance very far, however, and by the 1970s the topic seems to have fallen off the anarchist radar. With an increase in interest in cybernetics over the last few years, this paper picks up where these debates left off and highlights some key points of contact between cybernetics and anarchism that have the potential to advance radical accounts of self-organisation. Based on a theoretical appraisal of the core texts and arguments in the debate around anarchism and cybernetics, the paper shows that the way in which hierarchy is formulated in cybernetic thought has a crucial impact on anarchist theory and practice and aids both academic approaches to social movements and, importantly, anarchist and radical left praxis. In addition, it provides a response to the critique of cybernetics in critical management studies that stands as a barrier to taking cybernetics seriously as a contribution to radical understandings of organisation.

This PhD research project builds on thirteen years of enquiries as an academic practitioner, developing/critiquing interactive audio-visuals. This approach interweaves theory and practice so that both build on each other. It responds to the need for principles that inter-relate people, digital technologies and environments. The concept of “responsive environments” (RE) is offered as a starting point for the development of principles focusing on people within these environments. A responsive environment is “responsive” in the sense that some form of computer technologies are present and sensing/recording/reacting to people, and an “environment” in the sense that these activities are located in a place and that that place matters in terms of setting the scene, housing the technology and providing a context for the users/visitors. Common themes were extracted from the literature review to draw together previous and, for the most part, separate attempts at theory/practice relating to RE. These themes were complemented by research into contemporaneous activities in the areas of Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality and Locative Media to provided enhancements to the development of three practice projects. These enhancements together with the incorporation of Moore and Anderson’s concepts of “patient”, “actor”, “reciprocator” and “referee” as roles available to those encountering REs led to specific research questions regarding roles, positions, opportunities for repurposing content, learning experiences, the use of sound, visuals and presence, and the assessment of values represented in and through a responsive environment. In each case these questions shift the emphasis of the research towards the experiencing of REs and what they enable rather than the technologies used only. The use of Schwartz and Halegoua’s concept of the “spatial self” further focuses attention of the value in connecting digital expression with real spaces through an RE. This has led to a proposed conceptual framework and principles of practice that can be applied in the area of study of RE to nurture opportunities for participants and protagonists. The latter term is proposed as a means of acknowledging opportunities to make content/concepts in an RE as well as obtain and use them by participation. These opportunities are supported by both synchronous and asynchronous interactions through digital layers using online social media platforms. These platforms enable the archiving of content in a digital layer and/or possibilities for continued social interaction through a digital social layer in relation to the responsive environment. The incorporation of synchronous and asynchronous interactions through digital layers is a major contribution to the concept of REs. A further contribution is the use of the pioneering work of Gordon Pask in both the practice and theory of cybernetics as informing the concept of REs. Pask provided a formulation that expressed how content/concepts could be produced through relationships between people, computers and environments. This approach has been mirrored in other disciplines thus giving additional credence to its value. This discovery provides the impetus for further research, by academic practitioners and others, in this developing area of study.

Early uses of computers as artistic means and ends date back to the fifties and sixties. For the pioneers of computer art cybernetics, as the were founded in the forties by Norbert Wiener and Clude Elwood Shannon, were a source of inspiration. Simultaneously to the evolution of kinetic art integrating moving parts into the art object a 'cybernetic art'  arose. Its protagonists developed works reacting to input data and interacting with the environment. "Material models" (N. Wiener) of cybernetics were the forerunners of cybernetic sulptures (Nicolas Schöffer) and responsive environments (Gordon Pask). The cybernetic term information and information aesthetics (Max Bense, Abraham Moles) inspired artists to program computer graphics (Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, Herbert Werner Franke).

This PhD research project builds on thirteen years of enquiries as an academic practitioner, developing/critiquing interactive audio-visuals. This approach interweaves theory and practice so that both build on each other. It responds to the need for principles that inter-relate people, digital technologies and environments. The concept of “responsive environments” (RE) is offered as a starting point for the development of principles focusing on people within these environments. A responsive environment is “responsive” in the sense that some form of computer technologies are present and sensing/recording/reacting to people, and an “environment” in the sense that these activities are located in a place and that that place matters in terms of setting the scene, housing the technology and providing a context for the users/visitors. Common themes were extracted from the literature review to draw together previous and, for the most part, separate attempts at theory/practice relating to RE...

Since its inception, digital and interactive art has been forced to negotiate the tension between the inherently spectacular nature of the technologies it uses and the desire of creators to embed relevant critical stances within the work. With the recent rise of 'maker' or DIY culture, this negotiation has become even more pronounced as the production of technologies becomes more accessible and (allegedly) more democratized. Additionally, our relationship with technology is becoming increasingly intimate. Whereas machines once could have been read as tools, through which we would enact our individualized wills, they now implicate themselves into our mental processes, our bodies, and (one could argue) our very being. Within this cyborgian construction we risk mindless acceptance and integration of the particular logical models technology and its producers bring to the merger. A tension arises between our need to understand/recognize the logic which drives our lives and the technology, which often seeks to obfuscate that logic. This paper, through the application of philosophy of technology to a specific maker subculture – as it has been adopted by a movement in Fine Art (Art and Technology) – situates making as a form of artistic practice at the intersection of these ideas. As a mode by which technologically-inclined artists can navigate the spectacular and the critical in their work, making allows these artists to enact criticality through revealing underlying technical (and social) logic in the systems (and objects) with which they engage. Thus, this paper will trace the philosophical foundations of this critical approach and finally analyse a series of works that reveal strategies through which 'making' as a mode of 'revealing' has been refined by artists as a critical approach to embedded technological systems.

In this thesis I have explored some of the ways in which the contexts of epistemology, ethics and designing architecture are each concerned with undecidable questions (that is, with those questions that have no right answers). Drawing on design research, second‐order cybernetics and radical constructivism, I have understood this undecidability to follow in each case from our being part of the situation in which we are acting. This idea is primarily epistemological (being part of the world we observe, we cannot verify the relationship between our understanding and the world beyond our experience as it is impossible to observe the latter) but can also be interpreted spatially and ethically. From this starting point I have developed connections between questions in architecture, epistemology and ethics in two parallel investigations. In the first, I have proposed a connection between design and ethics where design is understood as an activity in which ethical questioning is implicit. Rather than the usual application of ethical theory to practice, I have instead proposed that design can inform ethical thinking, both in the context of designing architecture and also more generally, through (1) the ways designers approach what Rittel (1972) called “wicked problems” (which, I argue, have the same structure as ethical dilemmas) and (2) the implicit consideration of others in design’s core methodology. In parallel to this I have explored the spatial sense of the idea that we are part of the world through a series of design investigations comprising projects set in everyday situations and other speculative drawings. Through these I have proposed reformulating the architectural theme of place, which is usually associated with phenomenology, in constructivist terms as the spatiality of observing our own observing and so as where the self‐reference of epistemology (that we cannot experience the world beyond our experience) becomes manifest.

The article reviews the international conference C:ADM | Cybernetics: Art, Design, Mathematics — A Meta-Disciplinary Conversation, held July 30 – August 02, 2010, with surrounding events: July 29-30 and August 03-05 at the EMPAC: Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA. The review focuses on the conversational principles that guided the conference.

In line with the thematic focus of this journal issue on the framing of shared worlds, the paper elaborates on questions relating to the activity of designing 'worlds' in which people live with others. The paper identifies an aesthetics grounded in the process of living-with-others as an ethical principle implicit in second-order cybernetics thought. It is an aesthetics that is radically open for the agency of others. Linking aesthetics and ethics, the paper's contributions will be of specific value for practitioners and theoreticians of design. Considering second-order cybernetics as a practice generally dealing with designing, it also contributes to the wider second-order cybernetics discourse.

The article introduces the problematics of the classical two-valued logic on which Western thought is generally based, outlining that under the conditions of its logical assumptions the subject I is situated in a world that it cannot address. In this context, the article outlines a short history of cybernetics and the shift from first- to second-order cybernetics. The basic principles of Gordon Pask’s 1976 Conversation Theory are introduced. It is argued that this second-order theory grants agency to others through a re-conception of living beings as You logically transcending the I. The key principles of Conversation Theory are set in relation to the poetic forms of discourse that played a key role in art as well as philosophical thinking in China in the past. Second-order thinking, the article argues, is essentially poetic. It foregoes prediction in favour of the potentiality of encountering tomorrow’s delights.

This article traces the history of cybernetics in the context of immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism. It develops a theory out of genetic architecture entitled epigenetic architecture in which the effects of architecture and built space on the matter of the brain is delineated. Epigenetic architecture is also related to the Statisticon which describes a future condition of  surveillance and control in which the brain and mind are linked and sculpted by and  to the internet of everything.

Since its inception, digital and interactive art has been forced to negotiate the tension between the inherently spectacular nature of the technologies it uses and the desire of creators to embed relevant critical stances within the work. With the recent rise of “maker” or DIY culture, this negotiation has become even more pronounced as the production of technologies becomes more accessible and (allegedly) more democratized. In addition, our relationship with technology is becoming increasingly intimate. Whereas machines once could have been read as tools, through which we would enact our individualized wills, they now implicate themselves into our mental processes, our bodies and (one could argue) our very being. Within this cyborgian construction we risk mindless acceptance and integration of the particular logical models technology and its producers bring to the merger. A tension arises between our need to understand or recognize the logic which drives our lives and the technolog...

"the distributed agential potential of self-organizing systems emerging from cybernetic attempts to bridge looped organic life forms with mechanic elements. By doing so, she advances an epistemology able to enhance encounters between seemingly distanced realms – one of life and one of technology – underscoring their logical synchrony as contemporary design potential." [pg.4, Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas]