Why Are They Fighting?

● Artists have always been early adopters of technology. Even when they don't invent it they try to figure out what to do with it.

The activity of gathering plant and mineral materials to make into painting media is no less difficult than designing and building electronic circuits to control kinetic sculptures. The fact that painting materials are now available in tubes may actually detract from the significance of that particular media.

Mechanical ducks and giant clockworks gave praise to God long before practical uses for the steam engine were found. Blacksmiths were both scientists and artists: The geeks of their time.

Modern to Post

● The Modern era began with the Industrial Revolution and ended with the detonation of the first Atom Bomb.

Man could control nature -- all we needed were a few little adjustments. Faith became Science and Positivism ruled. The Futurist worship of Trains Running on Time is the quintessential Modernist movement. The Bomb blew all this away.

● Taking a cue from Tinguely's 1960 Homage to New York, Post Modern Punk Aesthetic machines that destroy each other became popular.

Starting in the late 1970's, these Machine Performances sent a mixed message on many levels. There is both an attraction to, and a fear of, the power embodied in the machines. Ironically, they are always remote controlled by their human masters.

● There are many reasons for this stagnation of imagination: practical, psychological, and sociological.

Flight-or-flight is the lowest level of evolution but it titillates the masses nonetheless. Just getting something to move is an achievement, bits are probably still being welded onto the performer on the day of the show. If you can't make a real contribution you can always just destroy more that anyone else has before. And audiences respond to anything that moves so why bother to make it more complex.

A Different Thread Falters

● Cybernetic processes were incorporated into artistic production almost as they were being developed in the scientific community.

In 1943 the field of Cybernetics was founded by a neurophysiologist, a mathematician, and an engineer. From 1950 to 1970 collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists -- with willing corporate support -- produced some major artistic and musical developments. Unfortunately the ROI for the sponsors was not in line with expectations.

● Circa 1970 a sea-change occurred in both the arts and sciences of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence research shifted from cybernetic bottom-up to symbolic top-down approaches. At the same time Art and Technology was distracted by the synthesis and control of traditional media. It became Media Art and MTV. However, this Illusion of Control over audio-visual product did not lead to any significant change of aesthetic perspective.

My P-Squared Agenda

● Now that the Cold War is over and irony is indistinguishable from contemporary reality, perhaps we can rediscover the art-machine's cybernetic roots.

Post-Modern machines are slaves, stuck in the circus being mistreated by their handlers. It's time for emancipation. Let's move on with a program of giving our art-machines their independence.

● Cognitive and creative Artificial Intelligences are beyond our capabilities at this time, but lower level behaviors are not that far-fetched.

Higher level function is difficult to create but simple social activities, like flocking and dancing, are within our grasp. If we can give up the Control Illusion, we can elicit interesting behaviors from otherwise simple systems.

● We have the capability to create machines with lives of their own. Can we afford to leave it to the military technologists?

The interesting thing about systems is not what they look like but how they behave. This holds for both natural and artificial -- human constructed -- systems. The really interesting behaviors are neither random nor regular, but rather something in-between. The Complex.