Notes on Cybernetics, Merleau-Ponty and the Emergent Arts
My dissertation approaches the production and analysis of interactive art from a cybernetic (particularly 2nd-order cybernetic) perspective combined with an existentialist phenomenological lens based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue that there is a natural resonance between the two. Examples of this resonance include:
- a concern with the subjectivity of human experience and its role in the processes of conducting scientific research and of coming to know
- taking into into account the observer’s actions in the process of observing
- a concern with interacting with systems (as opposed to detached God’s-eye view) as a form of observation and knowing
- the circularity (“reversibility” to use Merleau-Ponty’s term), interdependence and autonomy of the relationship between the observer and the observed
- a dynamic of mutual co-specification between a system/a body and an environment and how such systems specify their autonomy and bring forth a world for themselves via these co-emergent interactions
- an ontology that does not separate people and things
In working with Biopoiesis (and to a certain extent Protocol), my experience always seems to lead me back to cybernetic concepts of circularity, self-reference and autopoiesis. The interactive art experience (and particularly the experience of what I call the emergent arts) are self-producing and reproducing processes, based upon action-grounded conversations in the sense exemplified by Gordon Pask in his Conversation Theory (Pask 1976). This model stresses the circular, interpretive process of individuals in the construction of meaning: you say something I interpret what I think you mean, I tell you what I think I mean and so on until there is some agreement This is a radically constructivist approach, stressing that knowledge does not exist independent of a knower or community of knowers. More specifically, interactive artworks (or at least those that I refer to as within the realm of emergent arts), like cybernetic systems, become complete artworks not through their construction or installation, but through the circular relations that emerge between the technical systems and contributions of interacting observers. Between the exchanges of both a given piece’s technical system and a given interactor’s embodied and cognitive systems, circular relationships of conversation may be established and autonomy may thus be achieved. Such an experience, I argue cannot but have a co-evolutionary element to its experience. As art (and interactive art in particular) is about experience, examining cybernetic concepts such as recursion, boundary, autonomy, adaptability and conversation — and how they are manifested in interactive artworks — through a phenomenological lens seems like a novel and productive approach.
While still at an embryonic and speculative stage, I believe that I can harness cybernetics concepts and analyze them phenomenologically to help explicate the symbiogenic framework. Here are a couple of things I am looking at right now:
- Analyze 2nd-order cybernetic concepts — which happen in time and over time — through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s notions of time and time consciousness
- While my dissertation isn’t directly concerned with theories of interaction or aesthetics of interaction, I think that the symbiogenic framework, as it is based upon interactions between humans and technology, needs to recast or expand ideas of interactivity to include behavior and experiences that escape immediate consciousness and are outside immediately phenomenological reflection. Thus some “interaction” is not deliberate or even conscious but nevertheless can over time, lead to shifts in perception. This is what I call co-evolutionary in cybernetic-phenomenological sense (e.g. autopoietic mutual specification, Merleau-Pontian notions of shifting perceptual relations with objects)
- Make connections to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ambiguity (I will have another post on this coming up soon)
Clear as a bell?