User:Emily/Thematic Project/Trimester 03/08

Dreaming Machines - The performantive brain

(Subjective/introvert media objects)

Description

This is an on-going study on a small group of man-made machines and its interrelationship with themselves, human and surroundings under the theme of "encyclopaedia of media object".  

Let me give a quick example, I start with The Dreamachine, a flicker as we can understand it in a broaden category, in its basic setup, the brain (may not only humans') is pin down in a simple feedback circuit with (a linear relation to) the machine. It arise a altered state, which can be simplified as bio-feedback. However as Andrew Pickering put forward "We could say that the brain explored the performative potential of the material technology, while the technology explored the space of brain performance." (cybernetic brain, 88), I will explore the performativity in both realistic and speculative way. Those machines within my category are being named as dreaming machine. For one hand the name emphasis its performativity not in a conventional way, for the other hand it is in a way bring the same consideration to the machines as to human.

Dreams: Technology is an expression of man's dreams (Ted Nelson)

Machines: are loaded with dreams

items of dreaming machine category

The Tortoise

Flicker --> is a long-standing term of art in experimental psychology, referring to visual effects induced by flickering lights (Geiger 2003, 12–15)

William Grey Walter became interested in flicker and incorporated it into his EEG research in 1945, when he came across a new piece of technology that had become available during the war, an electronic stroboscope.

biofeedback/EEG machine, nicknamed the Augmentor from The Lathe of Heaven

William Burroughs--> “consciousness expanding experience has been produced by flicker.”

Allen Ginsberg --> It was like watching my own inner organism. There was no distinction between inner and outer. Suddenly I got this uncanny sense that I was really no different than all of this mechanical machinery all around me. (Geiger 2003, 47)

Brion Gysin & Ian Sommerville --> Dream Machine (or Dreamachine); Gysin --> a drug-free point of access to transcendental states, and had plans to develop it as a com- mercial proposition, something to replace the television in people’s living rooms, but all his efforts in that direction failed

a technology of the nonmodern self--> The technology did something—flickered—and the brain did something in response—exhibited epileptic symptoms. (Cybernetic Brain, 77) (nonvoluntary, nonmodern fashion)

a technology of the self, a material technology for the production of altered states (Cybernetic Brain)

The Homeostat

electromechanical device

it was a real ultrastable machine of the kind that Ashby had only imagined back in 1941.

homeostat instead searched its inner being, running through the possibili- ties of its inner circuitry until it found a configuration that could come into dynamic equilibrium with its environment.

that relations between homeostats were entirely noncognitive and nonrepresentational.

Biological computing

a cockroach-controlled robot by Garnet Hertz

Musicolor

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other:

TV

“the systems dynamics of the interaction between government and people in the light of newly available technology such as TV and discoveries in the realm of psycho-cybernetics” (Beer 1981, 278)

Robot Arm --> "capture something in the real world, consume it into a digital environment, and push it back out in the physical world, it is interruptive circle"

1956 Joseph Engelberger & George Devol -->Unimation (1959)

1973 Kuka --> Famulus (1898)

2006 ETH Zurich --> combined the robot arm produced by Kuka with digital information --> ProgrammedWall

2011 SCI-Arc stablished Robot House --> Staubli(Unimation)

2013 Bot&Dolly --> Box

physical - digital - physical / physicalrender

Artificial Intelligence

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution couldn't compete, and would be superseded - Stephen Hawking

1. The World Inside a pillow（玉枕from枕中计）

characters: blue, porcelain pillow; opening on each end;

narrative it brings/effects on people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside_a_Pillow

2. （庄周梦蝶）is it a machine? or i can turn it to a machine

symmetric ontological spectacle - unsymmetric ontological spectacle - symmetric ontological spectacle