emoção art.ficial

by Edson Cruz

O legado de Gordon Pask (The legacy of Gordon Pask) was the sixth roundtable at the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium, in which, in a little more than one hour and a half, Paul Pangaro, a professor in computing and Pask’s collaborator, and Usman Haque, a professor at the Bartlett school of architecture, in London, and artist and creator of the interactive installation Evolving Sonic Environments, present at Emoção Art.ficial 3.0, talked and showed some of the works and ideas of Gordon Pask, an engineer and cyberneticist, and how they influenced their own ideas and works.

A video made by the BBC, The Experimenters, showed part of Pask’s career and works. His ideas started from the attempt to understand how we learn, creating learning machines and systems. “Pask wanted to find out how people learn when involved in a conversation,” declared Pangaro in his talk.

The legacy
Pask, according to Pangaro, was an engineer who created his own learning machines and with this developed a cybernetic theory about human conversation. His starting point was the focus on the personal nature of reality, proposing a process to apprehend the world as of the agreement between actors that interact in a specific environment. 

To Pask, according to the panelists, cybernetics has always been connected to conversation. Pangaro gives the example of the thermostat and human interference on it. Human beings apply cybernetic principles when they try to adjust it to a specific temperature, to a different objective from what would be initially expected. This process is called first order cybernetics. When human beings start to observe themselves in action and to modify this action or not, a transition between the first and second orders takes place.

When asked if the concept of beauty would penetrate his cybernetic concept, Pask answers that it would, mentioning the great mathematical demonstrations that more than numeric clarity showed elegance. Beauty, therefore, would be connected to the coherence of organization and form. And that is what he was after, said Pangaro, to create coherence through his experiences. An idea that is very close to what was established by neurobiologist Humberto Maturana in his classic work on cognition.

Lightness and brilliance
Haque said that he only understood Pask’s concepts, which today are so connected to his own creations, three years after the first time he heard them. It was in the Serendipity project (theme of Jasia Reichardt’s talk in the Cybernetics, Art, Ideas roundtable) that he was attracted to Pask’s sculpture, The Colloquy of Mobiles. It was a type of non-linear, non-causal interactive work. Something that Haque was also seeking: a work that was not only a device that reacted automatically to a stimulus. As of then, Haque developed projects which increasingly more helped him to become familiarized with Pask’s ideas.

One of the most interesting projects shown by Haque on the large screen was Sky Ear, whose starting point was his perception that carrying and using a cell phone influence the way we currently use space. We move to answer a call, or we avoid certain places where cell phones are not allowed to ring. He created something that looked like bubbles, which together were thrown up to the sky, generating a kind of magnetic cloud manipulated and modified in its colors through the interaction with people on the ground, by means of mobile phone calls. By what we saw on the large screen, the effect was fascinating.

He showed details and diagrams of his work in partnership with Robert Davis, Evolving Sonic Environments, shown in this edition of the exhibition. A work whose premise is the interest in knowing how space perceives beings, and not the other way round, as would be expected due to his background in architecture.

The Paskian approach was put into practice by the panelists with no affectation and at the service of creative intelligence. A brilliant and motivating talk that showed us that cybernetics is neither cold nor boring. Especially, when the thinkers and artists that work with it are open and use interaction as the basis to improve human beings and society, and not only as a metaphor.

Tags: beleza, cognição, communication, England
Posted in Simposyum 2006 | No Comments »