Dave Young Graduation Project Proposal Final version 05.12.2012 2012

Tentative Title

Some titles for works, some never to be realised:

Untitled (The Noun of Noun in the Noun of Adjective Noun)
Micropalypse
A City in a Constant State of Collapse
A New Economics of Community and the Land
Yet Another Collaborative Editor (Y.A.C.E.)

General Introduction

My past research centered on exploring how cybernetics became a dominant ideology in the United States during the Cold War. Occupied with control and managing the flows of information, cyberneticians applied their theory to a wide range of applications - from military planning in South East Asia, to democratic social systems in the communes. Despite the diversity of purpose, they all shared a basis in viewing animal behaviour as information that could be controlled, managed, and supposedly even predicted.

My current work takes cybernetics as a grounds for exploring hierarchies within socio-political systems. I have been exploring how these theories have been used to mediate social discourse in order to maintain some sort of non-hierarchical democratic ideal. Simultanesouly, I am interested in the idea that a social system is "entropic", and despite our attempts at creating rules and standards (obvious examples being language, laws, government systems) to maintain stability, it will inevitably increase its level of disorganisation. Thus, my main interest is in understanding the complex circumstances that amount to a process of failure within a social system.

I plan to explore this idea predominantly through the creation of networked interfaces designed to explore how people work within a group. I am interested in developing applications that operate between the functionalities of a “tool” and a “game”, offering to be a rich source for productive collaboration but can simultaneously be exploited by one or more individuals in order to completely halt the system's functioning.

Relation to previous practice

In my past practice, I was examining the relationship between cybernetic theory and cold war computer technologies, and their resulting impact on popular culture. I was particularly interested in how computer technologies were represented in the science-fiction cinema, often as a propaganda device that illustrated the technological prowess of the United States over the rest of the world. Last year I had also investigated how cybernetic theory was reappropriated by the counterculture, removing it from its military/corporate background and using it to create non-hierarchical social systems within the communes in the early 1970s. My current interest is a development of these ideas: firstly, that cybernetics had a large social impact through its representation in cinema and print media during the Cold War, and also to explore the reasons it might be used to influence the behaviour of a group of people.

Relation to a larger context

In a very general sense, my current interests fit in with a long history of sociological discourse engaged with attaining an ideal civil environment through the adherence to a political system. More specifically, my work fits in with the legacy of Cold War cybernetics, and how it is used as a method to manage and control the information within human behaviour.

In terms of other relevant sources, I am interested in systems art from the 1960s/1970s. Works from this period reflect the hype around "open works", cybernetics, and the emergence of the information-based society.

One particularly relevant piece is "Seek", by Nicholas Negroponte with Architecture Machine Group M.I.T. The work was shown at Software (1970) at the Jewish Museum in New York, curated by the eminent systems-art theorist Jack Burnham. Physically, the work is a closed environment, inhabited by a population of gerbils and an arrangement of loose blocks. As the gerbils navigate the environment, they disturb the positions of the blocks. A robotic arm monitors the positions of the blocks and arranges them according to their "correct" architecture pre-programmed by Architecture Machine Group. The piece creates a 'closed system' - an entropic environment that is dismantled through the movements of the gerbils who inhabit it. It is a feedback loop: the gerbils knock down the blocks, and the robotic arm repairs the structure to some ideal pre-programmed by the Architecture Machine Group (AMG).

Practical steps

I have decided to focus on the development of an online collaborative writing tool that explores the emergence of productivity and hierarchy in an unstable and dynamic social system. The tool enables multiple authors to contribute to a text simultaneously in their browser. Once an author submits a new addition to the text, no other authors can input anything until all connected authors have anonymously voted whether the addition should be kept or not. If they all vote yes, the addition is permanently stored. If one author votes no, the addition is removed, and the process repeats itself.

The interface plays with the idea of hierarchy, presenting the authors with a potentially useful democratic system where all online peers must vote on the most recent addition to the text before they can contribute another addition. The implementation of a binary voting system means that the tool can be used as a productive distributed writing platform, or readily exploited and used subversively by one author to control the others and completely halt productivity. There is no secondary chat system that would enable mediation and discussion surrounding each decision, so a form of consensus would have to emerge out of the group in order for it to remain productive.

- Discuss work's context*: workshop/booksprint style rather than open web interface*

References

Books

Bateson, Gregory Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (2000) University of Chicago Press, United States.
Carey, John The Faber Book of Utopias (1999) Faber and Faber, London.
Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996) MIT Press, United States.
Poster, Mark and Savat, David (Editors) - Deleuze and New Technology (2009) Edinburgh University Press, UK.
Rand, Ayn The Fountainhead (2007) Penguin, England.
Vossoughian, Nader Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis (2008) NAI Publishers, The Netherlands