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homeostat, DAMS, cellular automata, Musicolour can all function as ontologi-
cal icons—inscrutable Black Boxes in their performance, even though one can,
in fact, open these boxes and understand them at the level of parts. My argu-
ment was that if we look through the end of the telescope that picks out perfor-
mance, then these can all function as instructive examples of what the world in
general is like (though from the other end they look like modern science and
engineering and conjure up an ontology of knowability and control).
D E S I G N
A distinctive notion of design has surfaced from time to time on our journey:
Ashby on DAMS and the explorer who finds Lake Chad but no longer knows
where he is, Beer on biological computers and the entrainment rather than
deliberate reconfiguration of materials, Frazer and Pask building performa-
tively inscrutable cellular automata into their architectural design systems,
Eno and music. I have always thought of design along the lines of rational
planning—the formulation of a goal and then some sort of intellectual cal-
culation of how to achieve it. Cybernetics, in contrast, points us to a notion
of design in the thick of things, plunged into a lively world that we cannot
control and that will always surprise us (back to ontology). No doubt real de-
signers have always found themselves in medias res, continually coping with
the emergent exigencies of their projects. What interests me is that cybernet-
ics serves both to foreground these exigencies (rather than treating them as
unfortunate side effects) and to make a virtue of them, to enjoy them!). Ashby
came to see an evolutionary approach to design—continually taking stock
and exploring possibilities—as integral to the development of truly complex
systems like DAMS. Beer's idea was that there is completely another way to
the construction of performative computing elements: finding some mate-
rial with the appropriate liveliness rather than laboriously engineering dead
matter. Eno, Frazer, and Pask wanted to see where their uncontrollable CAs
would take them—what sort of a trip that would be. Throughout the topic I
have tried to show that ontology makes a difference, but most of my examples
have concerned specific systems or artifacts; here we can see that it makes a
difference more generally, now in an overall stance toward design.
P O W E R
Following this line of thought takes us to another theme that has run through
the topic: power. Throughout, and especially in the later chapters, I have
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