GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 361

signaling in the Colloquy both were precipitated by the robots' performances
and served to structure them, rather than to construct self-contained repre-
sentations of the world. As usual, the Colloquy also staged a vision of a perfor-
mative epistemology. 43
The social Basis again
We can return to the question of the social locus of cybernetics, and the story
bifurcates here. On the one hand, Cybernetic Serendipity was socially serendip-
itous for Pask. At the exhibition he met an American, Joseph Zeidner, then on
the staff of the U.S. Office of Naval Research, later of the U.S. Army Research
Institute. And the upshot of this meeting was that the U.S. military was among
the sponsors of Pask's work on decision making and adaptive training systems
over the next fifteen years. This takes us back to the lineage of training and
teaching machines discussed earlier, and I will not explore the technicalities
of that work further. We should bear in mind, however, that these machines
were the bread and butter of Pask's life for many years. And we can also note
that here we have another example of the typically nomadic pattern of propa-
gation and evolution of cybernetics: from Musicolour and entertainment to
typing trainers via the meeting with Christopher Bailey at the Inventors and
Patentees Exhibition, to the Colloquy and thence to research on decision
making for the U.S. military via the ICA. 44 In this section, however, I want to
stay with the art world.
Nothing comes from nowhere, and we can certainly equip Pask's Collo-
quy with a pedigree. There is a whole history of automaton construction and
machine art more generally (in which Jacques de Vaucanson's famous duck
usually figures prominently) into which the Colloquy can be inserted. The
Colloquy was a moment in the evolution of that tradition, distinguished (like
many cybernetic artifacts) by its open-ended liveliness and interactivity. But
the point I want to focus on now is that this pedigree is hardly a distinguished
one and lurks, instead and as usual, in the margins of social awareness, “mar-
ginalised by both Art History and the histories of Engineering and Computer
Science” (Penny 2008). 45 No doubt there are many reasons which could be
adduced for this, but here we should pay attention to the oddity of machine art
when seen against the backdrop of the cultural mainstream. As I stressed ear-
lier concerning Gysin's Dream Machine and Pask's Musicolour, works like the
Colloquy are odd objects that are refractory to the classifications, practices,
and institutions of the modern art world. They are strange and nonmodern in
just this sense. They are machines and thus, for the past couple of centuries,