“Lively Artifacts: BCL Engineers and Self-Organizing Machines”
Cybernetic research in the 1960s faced a dilemma: On the one hand, there was a growing awareness that human beings share specific organizational principles with nonhuman (biological and technological) systems and that the boundaries between them had started to blur. On the other hand, cyberneticians such as Heinz von Foerster and the members of his Biological Computer Laboratory worried about a future society in which automated technologies could threaten individual liberty and constrain human creativity. As von Foerster famously put it: “If we don‘t act ourselves, we shall be acted upon.” In my talk I will discuss both the abstract models and the material prototypes that members of the BCL designed to address this dilemma. For instance, Ross Ashby intended devices such as the ”Grandfather Clock” to model principles, such as ”self-organization” or ”nontrivialization,” and organizational processes thought to explain certain characteristics of autonomous behavior. Rather than doing repetitive mechanical work, these machines were expected to act creatively and unpredictably. I will argue that we can read these “lively artifacts” as part of a design strategy to reconcile the idea of the free subject with cybernetic research.