The Cybernetic Brain - Andrew Pickering

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THE CYBERNETIC BRAINS - ANDREW PICKERING
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it is an acting machine; it gets information and then it does something about it.

Adaption

The cybernetic brain was not representational but performative, as I shall say, and its role in performance was adaption

servomechanism - sometimes shortened to servo, is an automatic device that uses error-sensing negative feedback to correct the performance of a mechanism and is defined by its function. It usually includes a built-in encoder.

cybernetic devices, in contrast, explicity aimed to be sensitive and responsive to changes in the world around them, and this endowed them with a disconcerting, quasi-magical, disturbingly lifelike quality

Laings psychiatry took seriously, as Wlaters and Ashbys did not, the idea that we are all adaptive systems, psychiatrists and schizophrenics alike.

(Beers experiments with Daphnia) and ponds and Pask’s with electrochemical “threads”

Team syntegrity - It is a form of non-hierarchical problem solving that can be used in a small team of 10 to 42 people.

Musicolour machine – Gordon pask - As the performer or group played, Musicolour responded with lights and movement to the music would change, creating a sort of hypnotic effect for those who played with it. But if the performer became too repetitive and did not engage the machine enough, Musicolour would grow bored and stop responding—the first cybernetic art system to do so.

cybernetics is better seen as a form of life

4 personen aan het begin – 2 van psychiatry en 2 biologists

book: brain of the firm

cybernetics wandered around as it evolved

undisciplined wandering of its subject matter

book: naked lunch

book: the living room

Pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine, the first stirring of hideous insect life