Sending and Receiving
Sending and Receiving
Thanks to the enormous growth of our means of communication, cybernetics is basking in all the interest it is receiving. According to this theory developed in the 1940s, the only communications that have information value are those that allow interaction. The rest is worthless. Art will also have to abide by this rule.For a long time, cybernetics were a 20th-century legend, a tale of a group of genius mathematicians and half-baked engineers who discovered a means of replacing humans with fully automatic, self-steering technical systems. The association was dusky science fiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or peeping, laser-beaming kinetic art, à la Nicolas Schöffer’s cybernetic towers of the 1950s, the technological art of the 1960s and 1970s, or 1980s cyberpunk.Still, cybernetics can be referred to as the founding myth of the new age. It was the Cybernetics Group (including Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Gregory Bateson and a number of gestalt psychologists) who, more than all the twentieth-century philosophers rolled together, produced the ideas that shaped the world in which we now live. The ideas and theories that the cyberneticists invented and developed led to the invention of the digital computer, the Internet, mobile telephone networks and the supply chain management that have made the globalized economy possible – and led to far more that has since become so taken for granted that it is inconceivable that a time ever existed when words such as information and communication were unknown, when computers were actual young ladies who spent day in, day out, making arithmetic calculations, and the notion that processes in nature and human society organize themselves via a circular causality could only be found amongst paranoid idiots.The cyberneticists are and will continue to be criticized because of the practical effects of their pioneering research in post-liberal neo-capitalism, but when we read their original texts, they prove to be veritable gold mines, and this also applies to the art discourse. At the time, what was it that these men – and a single woman – were actually talking about?
A Message
In 1942, the then 47-year-old mathematician, Norbert Wiener, wrote a report for the American National Defence Research Committee in which he described how the guidance systems of anti-aircraft guns could be improved for striking ultra-high-speed aircraft. His article was immediately classified as an official state secret. In this fundamental text on communication theory, a document whose yellow cover caused it to go down in history as the ‘Yellow Peril’, Wiener was the first to define communication as a process in which a message is sent from a sender to a receiver by way of a communications channel, and he simultaneously developed statistical methods of reconstituting the message on the receiving end, by stripping it of the noise it had acquired en route.Wiener defined a message in utterly neutral terms as an ‘array of measurable quantities distributed in time’. This broad definition made it possible for him to see messages as more than ‘a conscious human effort for transmission of ideas’. Indeed, the signal with which one could steer an electrical motor is a message, and every mechanical or electrical control apparatus also ‘belongs to the field of communication engineering’.1 Moreover, wrote Wiener, every communication activity that is carried out with an electrical, mechanical, or other means is also carried out with a ‘computing machine’. He imagined his computing machine that was taking over these control functions as a calculator, not a digital computer, because the latter would only be built for the first time a year later. Other than that, it was all exactly as Wiener had reckoned it would be. The 1940s were Wiener’s years of genius. First, he had the idea of a message being comprised of a statistical factor that he called ‘information’. Then he saw that processes can not only be controlled from a different location, but they can also control and direct themselves, by means of ‘feedback’, and thirdly, that the computer, as an expanded calculating machine, could not only assume control of external processes, but also organize itself, just as our nervous systems and our brains do. What was unique about Wiener’s theory of information was that every message, every object and every process, wherever it may occur in the world, was perceived as the coming about of a single possibility out of a much wider virtual space of potential developments. Everything can always be something different, but the fact that this one form of event occurs means that a selection has been made from the wide-ranging space of possibilities.
Agency
Information is, as Norbert Wiener realized, neither matter nor energy, but a relationship between a probable choice and an unexpected combination. Wiener’s thinking was far broader than that of Claude Shannon, who mathematically worked out the concept of information in the original text on information theory: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948). Shannon did, however, formulate it very precisely. ‘The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point, either exactly or approximately, a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just for the one which will actually be chosen, since this is unknown at the time of design.’2 For Shannon, technically, the content and design of a message did not matter. Information is the measure of the number of choices that are taken in generating a given message. Mathematically speaking, the smallest possible choice is between zero and one, and Shannon made that the basic entity of information: the binary digit or bit. By comparing the number of bits of the message being sent with that of the received signal, it is possible to measure how much information has been lost en route and how much has been added in the form of noise. Shannon’s information is a measure of the precision of the reproduction of a message in a technical medium, be it a telephone, a film, a written article, the Internet, a painting or a contemporary work of art.Because Claude Shannon took 0 to 1 as the measure for information, it became possible not only to use numbers (built of zeros and ones) to describe facts or processes as amounts or mathematical formulas, but numbers could henceforth also do something: software is made up of actively operating ciphers that change things in the world (driven by electricity and hardware). Information, reproduced as binary numbers, creates the power to take action or the possibility of digital computers taking action, or as it is referred to today: agency.
‘I am my machine’
Norbert Wiener viewed information as a measure for organization in a system (either man-made or natural). A gnarled tree trunk contains countless kilobytes of more information than a smooth tree trunk – a reason why minimalists prefer to look at a silver birch than an old oak. But how does such a tree push itself up out of the ground? This happens because of the other central idea of cybernetic thinking: feedback. Ever since Aristotle, processes have been understood as sequences of cause and effect, or as Norbert Wiener called it, a linear logic and organization of time with ‘effectors’ and ‘compensators’. In his famous Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), Wiener gives a technical description of the workings of the human body as a chain of circular feedback, instead of a linear, cause-and-effect sequence. ‘We thus see that for effective action on the outer world, it is not only essential that we possess good effectors, but that the performance of these effectors be properly monitored back to the central nervous system, and that the reading of these monitors be properly combined with the other information coming in from the sense organs to produce a properly proportioned output to the effectors.’3Imagine that the effector is our free will, which has decided to walk towards a certain door. We then use our perceptions to assess the course that our body will take and the location of the door, in order to see if we are on the right track, and if that is not the case (if our path and position is not correct), then we redirect ourselves back to the envisioned or expected path – something that Wiener referred to as negative feedback. Given that we take most of our decisions unconsciously, we allow the organs of perception and motion in our body to carry out the feedback that keeps us on course, without our having to think about it. Heinz von Foerster summarized this automation of our own bodies as ‘I am my machine’.4According to Wiener, feedback is the ultimate means by which natural and most mechanical processes can keep themselves functioning and on track. Feedback is the key to the self-organizing potential of forms and processes. Life is the active production of information, against the inherent tendency of all living systems to spontaneously fall apart. In the feedback process, living things extract information from the outside world and use it to construct themselves, in just the same way that they absorb matter and energy from their environment. Information is the third building block of the universe, the world and life on Earth.The consequences of this insight are dazzling. Unlike what the natural sciences and enlightened reason have been claiming for centuries, the world does not only consist of matter and energy, but also of order and organization. That order is created by means of the circular logic of feedback, in which the results of a process are used as input for that same process, whereby the process can be either slowed down or reinforced, with no external element required to direct it. The circular logic of feedback makes it possible not only for living beings, but also mechanical and electronic machines, to demonstrate goal-oriented behaviour – yet another taboo in the rigid natural sciences that Wiener succeeded in breaking. Nowadays, 60 years on, feedback is accepted as one amongst the many processes that make the self-organization of matter and life possible. These processes are collectively referred to as ‘interaction’.
Art with a Future
It is a general rule that those who initially discover a new field of research are able to see it in its entirety and make one original statement about it after the other. Later generations have to plough their way through the whole field in order to discover and/or invent its finer points. Since the dismantling of the Cybernetics Group in the early 1950s, there have been many who have been doing just that, and even today, the surprises are not to be scoffed at. Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon and all the other greater and lesser geniuses of early cybernetics succeeded in putting the combination of communications, information and interaction on everyone’s agenda. Anything that does not allow for interaction cannot access or transfer information: ‘meaning = agency’. This rule applies not simply to computerized systems up to and including the Internet, but also to art, to the painting or the photograph, the installation and the performance. A great deal of art – indeed of our entire visual culture – does not allow interaction and, according to cybernetic thinking, can be set aside as meaningless. If we can discover which art allows interaction, and what that interaction is, that will be the art of the future.Arjen Mulder is an essayist and media theorist, Amsterdam
Arjen Mulder
