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Walter's tortoise, five decades on. From the other, a lively biological agent
replaces the precisely designed electronic circuitry of the tortoise's brain,
exemplifying nicely the sense of “biological computing.” 17 Figure 6.10 shows
another biorobot, this one built by Eduardo Kac as part of his installation The
Eighth Day . This time, the robot is controlled by a slime mold. These machines
have no functional purpose. They are artworks, staging for the viewer a cy-
bernetic ontology of entrained lively nonhuman agency. We can return to the
topic of cybernetic art at the end of this chapter. For now, we might note that
back in the 1950s and early 1960s Beer and Pask were aiming at something
much more ambitious than Hertz and Kac, to latch onto the adaptive proper-
ties of biological systems, rather than their basic tropic tendencies. 18
Figure 6.9. Cockroach-controlled robot. (Photograph by Garnet Hertz. Used by per-
mission.)
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