reading 2

Cybernetics
N. Katherine Hayles

• System theory focus more on the structure of systems and their models, whereas cybernetics has focuses more on how system function, how they control their actions, how they communicate with other systems or with their own components
• The social, cultural, and theoretical impact of cybernetics has been associated with its tendency ro reconfigure boundaries.
• first, boundary separating biological organisms and machines, no observer
• second, boundary included the observer and system (autopoietic)
• third, redraw boundary again locate both observer and system with complex, networked, adaptive, and coevolving environments through which information and data are pervasively flowing.
• Media can be understood through four principal levels of analysis
• materiality - a medium is in its physical composition 
•  technology - specifies how material object works and functions
• semiotics - addresses the basic function of media, facilitation of communication
• social context - the way people use computers also the corporations that produce hardware and software. 
• cybernetics in relation to media, three general contributions; the idea of the feed back look joined with a quantitative definition of information; the idea of a theoretical framework capable of analyzing control and communication in animals, humans, and machines; and artifacts instantiating these ideas;

New Ontologies
Andrew Pickering

• Comparing two painters's work, a de kooning painting is somehow irrevocably a joint product of the human and the nonhuman. A decentered production of which de kooning was at once the author and discoverer, both active and passive in turn. 
• Second contrast has to do with temporality. Mondrian's paintings do not thematize time, almost timeless Platonic image, an image can hold clearly in one's mind and unleash in the world when ever one is so disposed. 
• Author thinks Kooning's ontology is the true ontology that reminds us of how being in the world always has been and always will be. 
• Science is itself caught up in the flow of becoming; the contents of science change emergently.
• Scientific knowledge helps to conceal becoming from us. It portrays and draws our attention to a timeless and constant world.
• Cybernetic showed that bringing to consciousness a decentered and temporized ontology can make a big difference in the world, restructuring and reconfiguring great swathes of culture and practice- it was a nomad science. 

Don't give up! Media art as an endless conversational process
Graziele Lautenschläger, Anja Pratschke

• Interactive artworks are only complete when circular relations between technical systems and contributions by interacting observers are taken into account.  
• the production of aesthetically powerful environments requires the following qualities:
   -the environment needs to offer enough variety to promote the “potentially controllable novelty” by the subject; 
  -it must contain forms that the subject may interpret, or learn to play at various abstraction levels;    -it needs to provide clues or instructions implicitly declared to guide the learning and abstractive processes; 
  -it can additionally respond to the subject, involving it in a conversation and adapting its characteristics to the dominant mode of discourse (Pask, 1971, p. 76). 
• the analysis of conversation and autopoietic aspects within the interactive installation is pivotal.
• communication is understood as a recursive and self-regulatory autopoietic system among other systems, whose operation depends on each part’s behavior.