GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 323

machines or humans and machines) was, in fact, the defining topic of all of
Pask's work.
Having introduced these general aesthetic considerations, the to the essay
then devoted itself to descriptions of the two machines—Musicolour and the
Colloquy of Mobiles—that Pask had built that “go some way towards explicitly
satisfying the requirements of d .” We have already discussed Musicolour, and
we can look at the Colloquy later. Here I want to follow an important detour
in Pask's exposition. Pask remarks that (77) “ any competent work of art is
an aesthetically potent environment. . . . Condition d is satisfied implicitly
and often in a complex fashion that depends upon the sensory modality used
by the work. Thus, a painting does not move. But our interaction with it is
dynamic for we scan it with our eyes, we attend to it selectively and our per-
ceptual processes build up images of parts of it. . . . Of course, a painting does
not respond to us either. But our internal representation of the picture, our
active perception of it, does respond and does engage in an internal 'conversa-
tion' with the part of our mind responsible for immediate awareness.” This
observation takes us back to the theme of ontology in action: what differ-
ence does ontology make? It seems that Pask has gone through this cybernetic
analysis of aesthetics only to conclude that it makes no difference at all. Any
“competent” art object, like a conventional painting, can satisfy his cybernetic
criterion d . So why bother? Fortunately, Pask found what I take to be the right
answer. It is not the case that cybernetics requires us to do art in a different
way. The analysis is not a condemnation of studio painting or whatever. But
cybernetics does suggest a new strategy, a novel way of going on, in the cre-
ation of art objects. We could try to construct objects which foreground Pask's
requirement d , which explicitly “engage a man in conversation,” which “ex-
ternalize this discourse” as Pask also put it—rather than effacing or conceal-
ing the engagement, as conventional art objects do. Cybernetics thus invites
(rather than requires) a certain stance or strategy in the world of the arts that
conventional aesthetics does not, and it is, of course, precisely this stance, as
taken up across all sorts of forms of life, that interests me.
Beyond the mere possibility of this cybernetic stance, the proof of the pud-
ding is obviously in the eating, though Pask does find a way of recommending
it, which has more to do with the “consumption” of art than its production:
“The chief merit of externalization . . . seems to be that external discourse
correlates with an ambiguity of role. If I look at a picture, I am biased to be a
viewer, though in a sense I can and do repaint my internal representation. If
I play with a reactive and adaptive environment, I can alternate the roles of
painter and viewer at will. Whether there is virtue in this, I do not know. But