Simpósio Emoção Art.ficial 3.0: Cybernetics Interface

São Paulo, July 19th to 22th, 2006

Since its official conception in 1948, by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, cybernetics has been influencing not only the formation of computer networks and robotics, but also other fields which are apparently distant from technology, such as socials sciences, anthropology and family therapy. The same can be said about interfaces, which until recently had been limited to research on the interaction between humans and machines. Today, interface science has become a part of a new culture and of a news art form.

In the symposium of the event Art.ficial Emotion 3.0, a diverse group of guests reflected on the importance of the ideas suggested by the terms “interface” and “cybernetics”. The program started with the opening lecture of Edmond Couchot and continues with six roundtables, always comprised of artists and researchers. Who discuss themes such as interface science, the cybernetics discipline, computational art, self-organizing systems, the chaos theory, among others. In addition to the opening lecture and the roundtables, the symposium counted on three special lectures delivered by Otto Rössler, Jasia Reichardt and Paul Pangaro, thinkers, whose work are recognized worldwide.

Sparkles of intelligence and an outline of emotion

by Luiza Fagá and Thiago Rosenberg

Edmond Couchot, a professor emeritus at the University of Paris 8, gave the opening talk at the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium held on July 19th. “An artist, a scientist, a theorist, a professor, Couchot is all this,” defined André Vallias, moderator of the meeting. “He is the incarnation of a Renaissance man in the 21st century.”

Emotion and intelligence

One of the points highlighted by Couchot was the importance of simulating human emotions in machines. It sounds paradoxical, since emotions, considered as irrational traits in human beings, might seem unimportant to science. But, Couchot presented two arguments that justify the validity of research in this area.

The first has a scientific base. According to him, studies have evidence of a strong connection between intelligence and emotion. Therefore, simulating emotions would be necessary to develop artificial intelligence. “The question is not if machines can have emotions or not,” he said. “The question is if they can be intelligent without emotion.” Despite that, Couchot remembered that the ability to recognize and simulate emotions does not mean that machines can feel or experience them. Artificial emotion does not give them superior intelligence, that is, consciousness of consciousness.

The second reason presented by Couchot is practical. The simulation of emotions would facilitate the communication between man and machine. On the one hand, upon being able to recognize users emotions, the computer would be able to adapt and optimize its performance, changing behavior upon noticing the dissatisfaction of the user or repeating actions which pleased him.

On the other hand, the ability to simulate such emotions would result in considering machines fellow creatures, facilitating the man/machine dialogue. “The autonomy of behavior and the simulation of emotions manifested by virtual artifacts provokes a strong feeling of empathy in the “interactor,” stated Couchot.

Art and authorship

Cybernetic art, however, often times tries to disturb this communication, making the presence of the author evident. In this case, the professor gave as an example, the work Portraits, by Joseph Nechvatal, in which the portrait of the observer suffers constant changes.

But, the notion of authorship is alto relative in this artistic production, since the spectator, in addition to interacting with the works helps to create them. Hence, there is a change in the status of the artist, who doesn’t want his work to be totally finished, of the spectator, who becomes a co-author, and of the work itself, which has a certain degree of autonomy, now. A process that is seen by Couchot with satisfaction, but, which is also pointed out as one of the reasons for the reluctance in recognizing artistic value in these works and the consequent difficulty in entering the market.

The creator and the creature

During the lecture, Couchot stated that “technology would be a means for man to be set free from his internal processes,” just like in the past when tools such as the hammer, for example, enabled hands to be set free. “But, can all internal processes become external?” He asked.

As this exteriorization process takes place, the machine looks more like us. On this, Couchot said that man, often times, takes on the role of the “jealous god” because he doesn’t want to grant freedom to his own creation and pointed out a contradiction in doing so: the objective of these works is to give machines human traits, and one of our main traits is autonomy.

The professor said we shouldn’t fear being surpassed by our creatures. According to him, intelligence doesn’t exist in itself, only as manifestation or by means of a support. Therefore, it would be impossible to reproduce human intelligence in inanimate objects. For now, machines only have a “sparkle of intelligence and an outline of emotion.” Furthermore, if man seeks to perfectly reproduce another human being, there are, and always have been, more practical ways of doing so.

Meet La Plume et le Pissenlit, a work by Edmond Couchot in which virtual dandelions are moved by the public.

Cybernetic art, yesterday and today

 

by Edson Cruz and Kiel Pimenta

The present and past of cybernetic art met at the second roundtable of Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium. Writer and curator Jasia Reichardt and performance artist Golan Levin gave explanations that incidentally combined perfectly.

Jasia focused on the past. She was assistant-director at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), in London, from 1963 to 1971 and became famous for having organized Cybernetic Serendipity, in 1968, one of the first exhibitions to explore the relations between art and technology, even before the appearance of computers as we know them today. She started her presentation by showing images of precursor works, such as collages of the 20’s that already worked with the theme of the machine-man relation, up to the famous exhibit of 1968.

Serendipity means the possibility of making a casual and happy discovery, and that was exactly the objective of the exhibition: to gather people who had never met before, who didn’t even have to be artists, as long as they were able to create art with the new technological tools. In addition to photos of the works and some videos shown in the exhibition, Jasia brought forth some interesting points: the poster was typed and there was no catalogue. But the most complicated detail is that there is neither a filmed recording of the exhibition, nor of the 16 lectures given.

Levin spoke first, but he brought information from the present which complemented Jasia’s talk “serendipitously”. A renowned new media artist, he showed some projects that synthesize his proposal of studying the relation of human beings and machines. Mentioning as a source of inspiration one of the pioneers of electronic art, Myron Krueger, who said that “response is the medium”, and making a counterpoint with the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Levin stated that he is interested in a non-verbal dialogue between man and machine and the visualization of the communication processes. “My work is mistakenly associated with sound and image, but I am interested in gestures,” he said. “The response [the way signals are transmitted] is the main focus of my work,” he added.

To do this, he created the Audiovisual Environment Suite software that enables the production of sounds as of abstract animations drawn in real time, on a computer.

Among the most interesting projects shown was A Telesymphony, from 2001, in which he gathered 200 people in a theater, who on having their mobile phone numbers registered at a data bank received a new ringtone. During the event, the production crew called the mobile cell phones, which reproduced the new sounds, one after the other, forming a real symphony. Another project shown was Re-Mark, from 2002, in which the voice of the spectator reproduced on a microphone and his shadows projected on a screen triggered a response in the form of sounds and words. A more sophisticated version of this idea can be seen at the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 exhibition: the work Messa di Voce, from 2003, made in partnership with Zachary Lieberman.

At the final debate, when questioned about what she would do next, Jasia quoted Apollinaire, who had already talked about virtual reality way before it happened, to justify that she is still interested in new technologies and in their possibilities. And she was ironic: “Today, there is a search for the past. Therefore, I am busy.”

Broaden your horizons

 

by Thiago Rosenberg

Belgian biologist Christa Sommerer and French artist Laurent Mignonneau directors of the Department for Interface Culture at the Linz Institute for Media, joined the two Brazilian artists Daniela Kutschat and Rejane Cantoni to form the third roundtable at the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium, Além das Interfaces (Beyond Interfaces). The meeting gave an idea of how interfaces recently developed by artists and researchers enable new sensorial and artistic experiences.

The two couples showed their interactive works that combine art and science. Art that is not considered lysergic because it creates no hallucinations, but rather transforms what is unreal into reality. An imaginary world that surfaces by means of interfaces built by artists-scientists, who use technology to enable interaction with new realities or hidden aspects of our own reality.

Virtual fauna and floraWith Mignonneau in silence, Christa spoke on behalf of the Belgian-French couple. Initially, she commented on the work A-Volve, which is able to transform drawings made by interactors into virtual water beings that interact with each other. Each figure drawn corresponds to a genetic algorithm, which determines the format, behavior and speed of the creature. It is very similar to recent Life Writer, a work present in this edition of the Emoção Art.ficial exhibition, in which beings come to life after being typed on an old typewriter. But in this case, the letters and not the lines made by hand determine the genetic code of the virtual being. 

Works such as Interactive Plant Growing and Trans Plant, also mentioned by Christa, replace the fauna of previous works that are inexistent in nature, by virtual flora. In the first one, the touch of the interactors on different real plant species, which are laid out close to a monitor, make their virtual counterparts grow. In Trans Plant, the interactor is represented in an initially empty virtual environment, where he makes plants grow as he moves.

Beauty is in the objectiveDaniela and Rejane addressed OP_ERA, a project that has been developed by both of them since 1999. Defined as “a multi-sensorial experimentation tool of space concepts”, in general terms, it consists in the creation of simulated environments capable of generating new forms of sensorial perception. OP_ERA: Hyperviews, present in Emoção Art.ficial 2.0, for example, explores representations of a four dimensional hypercube. OP_ERA: Haptic Wall, in turn, is a wall-interface that produces stimuli of touch through sound data.

The artists ironically highlighted the difficulties faced by those who work with art and technology in countries like Brazil. “Rather than an economic difficulty,” stated Rejane, “the difficulty lies in understanding what is produced.” “The great issue is understanding this new artistic expression that still hasn’t found a place in the market.”

On the validity of the concept of beauty in works of this kind, Rejane said she is not concerned with the appearance of OP_ERA. “Our objective is to put you there and transport you from the first to the eleventh dimension,” she said. “Beauty lies in achieving objectives.”

The Endophysicist Against the Evil God

by Luiza Fagá

The fourth meeting of Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium received as a guest German physicist Otto Rössler. Having renowned works in the areas of medicine, mathematics and technological art, he is a specialist in what he calls endophysics. “We should thank his father for not allowing him to become a monk,” joked mediator André Vallias.

Rössler started the lecture by saying that his science drifts on a fragile limit between the sublime and ridicule. “Endophysics is a joke, but it is a serious joke,” he said, with the same good mood in which he conducted the whole presentation.

The physicist, always didactically, drew a simple equation to describe our relation with the outer world. The universe as a whole would be the sum of the observer and the object. Therefore, to understand the object, the observer should place himself on the other side of the equation. Thus, the object would be equal to the universe, subtracting from it the observer. That is, to objectively analyze any object, the observer would have to be positioned outside the process, which is impossible since he is an indissociable part of it. “You only have access to the differences between you and the rest of the universe. That is perspective,” he concluded.

The god of the world
Archimedes’ Point is a solid point, where one could push the world with a lever. The concept sounds abstract, but the physicist was able to transform it into something palpable with one example. “I think you know it, it’s called a laptop.” On a computer’s screen, we have an artificial universe that can be reprogrammed. He explained that this artificial universe is made up of particles obtained by calculations. “We tend to define ourselves by age, appearance. But, in truth, we are also made up of particles.” With the sum of apparently obvious statements, Rössler came to an unexpected conclusion.

The world would be a machine and we, slaves of the operator. But, actually, we would be the operator, parts of a system that is self-controlling. According to him, the attitude toward that, is essentially, passive. To accept the condition of being at the mercy of a superior sphere, an “evil god”, would be “disturbing determinism”. “But you have the chance to respond. If the world is a prison, we need to know how to get out,’ he said. This confrontation would distinguish those who faced it from their fellow creatures. Otto Rössler concluded, “The great issue is if a program can force the programmer to respond. In my opinion, it can.”

On Men and Robot-Dogs

 

by Thiago Rosenberg

The similarities between a living organism, with its complex immune system, and the equally complex workings of machines were the focus of the fifth meeting of the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium, Seres Humanos, Reflexões e Máquinas (Human Beings, Reflections and Machines). Immunologist, Nelson Monteiro Vaz and French artist, France Cadet participated in the debate.

Vaz’s talk was different from that of the other participants of the event since he limited himself to the issues of his area, biology, leaving it up to the public to connect them to the workings of machines. He addressed processes of the immune system, among which the ability to reject or not foreign bodies, understood by many as intelligent. But, one of the conclusions presented by the scientist, who knew Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, points to the idea that “the intelligence of the immune system is in our perceptions.”

Controversial little robotsFrance added doses of art and criticism to the discussion. Or, more specifically, critical art. She commented on her work with robot-dogs Dog[LAB]01, from 2004, present in the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 exhibition. These are seven autonomous robots, dogs with the characteristics of other animal species, previously programmed and coordinated to act in a specific manner. A reference to the first cloned mammal and a work critical of experiments of the kind, Dolly is 50% dog, 30% ewe, 15% cow and 5% sheep. A robot-dog with cow hide, subject to constant behavioral alterations, as if suffering from the mad cow disease, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).

Jelly Doggy, in turn, represents a dog with the genes of a chameleon and a jelly fish, but which is neither adapted to land nor water. Endowed with Green Fluorescent Protein, the GFP Puppy is a reference to Alba, Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent bunny.

Dissatisfied with the way part of the public reacted to the installation, by having fun and not becoming critically moved by the actions performed by the robots, France thought of a more daring project. In Dog[LAB]02, from 2006, there are 20 robots, all identical as clones, which simulate the symptoms of the mad cow disease, in a performance that ends with the simultaneous death of all of them. “I wanted to create something scarier,” said the artist, who, according to the work’s repercussion was able to reach her objective. “They said I was an insensitive artist, that I shouldn’t talk about the mad cow disease, that I was planning a boycott, etc. It’s funny how a simple little robot can cause so much controversy.”

Learn more about cybernetics, and understand basic concepts of artificial intelligence.

The Paskian Approach: Conversation

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.

Portraits and Portraits

by Luiz Fagá

Retratos Eletrônicos (Electronic Portraits), the sixth meeting of the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium brought to the debate a theme that has been quite discussed during the digital images era: the reproduction and modification of real images.

Conducted by writer and curator Jasia Reichardt, the talk was initiated by a statement that tends to cause controversy. Digitally modified electronic portraits can, and usually do come closer to the model than the conventional ones.

According to her, there are two main differences between conventional and electronic portraits. The first one is that the artists that develop the latter type of portraits are more tied to technology. In addition, because these artists work with virtual portraits, they can show not what we know, but what we could know. “Virtual portraits allow us to see people as we would never see them in real life.”

Kyoko, Jasia and the middle layer
Jasia divided human beings into three layers. The superficial one would correspond to behavior, which adapts to society, and so enables us to live in it. The deepest one would be formed by instincts. Even though it is blind and deaf to standards and conventions, it makes our existence possible. The real individual would be in the middle layer, squeezed between the other two. “Artists that work with portraits should seek this layer.”

Jasia gave examples of the side of electronic portraits opposed to the one defended by her, which proposes the search for the essence layer. Kyoko Date, the first virtual Japanese singer, or the most recent Lara Croft are mirrors of the standards of a time and have no individuality. “Angelina Jolie gave Lara the curves but not the essence. In the virtual world of celebrities, the middle layer does not survive,” she concluded.

Virtual, but Autonomous

by Kiel Pimenta and Thiago Rosenberg

Michel Bret, a professor of the University Paris 8, gave birth to an artificial being in front of the audience in Itaú Cultural Hall. A naked immobile being on the monitor of its creator’s laptop, projected on the big screen of the room, and initially as active as a vegetable. Then Bret inserted in the recently born creature, an artificial retina capable of capturing images from a webcam. “Can it see?” Asked the professor, who had white beard and was wearing a tank top, like a 21st century prophet.

This took place during the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium, which together with Bret counted on the participation of Marie-Hélène Tramus, from University Paris 8, and Diana Domingues, from University Caxias do Sul.

From the first steps to improvisation

After the retina, the virtual being received an artificial brain, and a muscular system was coupled to it. Thus, each movement captured by the webcam was processed by the brain, which sent orders of movement to the muscles. Bret, by doing certain gestures with his hand in front of the camera, taught some of these movements to the character, which in a few seconds learned how to crouch, jump, stretch, etc. And once the basic actions are learned, the being no longer imitates and attains some autonomy, improvising non-programmed movements.

Marie-Hélène talked about La Funambule Virtuelle, a work carried out in partnership with Bret and present in the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 exhibition, in which a virtual tightrope artist reacts to the movements of the interactor. She highlighted that this kind of work shows the sensorial characteristics of the work, with its own perceptions, which before was reserved to the observer alone. “This changes the nature of the interactivity,” she stated. “The work presents behavior that is closest to that of humans.”

Answering a question raised by the public, that the virtual ballerina did not accurately reproduce the movements of the people that interacted with the work, Bret said that “the project is not to create a clown, but a dialogue.” “The idea is not to copy but to interact.”

Diana started her talk mentioning Walter Benjamin (“the author as producer”) and highlighting the collaborative and transdisciplinary character of the works that she has been developing in the area of art software. To her, art is not in the code, but in the way artists manipulate it and in language. She stated that artists working with software is not something new, and mentioned as examples the works of David Rockeby and Edmond Couchot (such as Les Plissenlits, part of the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 exhibition).

Scribbles of an Endophysicist

by Kiel Pimenta and Luiza Fagá

Otto Rössler is a strange character. Strangely charismatic. A mixture of a mad scientist, a prophet of the apocalypse and a disseminator of goodness. “Benevolence is the opposite of cruelty,” he said. “That’s what the world needs.” Rössler shared his second participation in the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium with technological artist Bill Seaman. Seaman is an artist and Rössler … an Endophysicist. Endophysics is the science of the inside, as opposed to exophysics. Is that clear?

Seaman started his talk with a question: are we electrochemical computers? To which, he answered that yes, we are a bio-computer. To him, a conscious computer is one which can be creative, has knowledge, synthetic emotions, etc. According to him, to build one, you have to “observe the functionality of a system and set up a system with the same functionality.” Seaman talked about the paradigm of the neo sentience and then focused on his concept of pattern flows that guides his work shown on Emoção Art.ficial 3.0: The Thoughtbody Environment Interface. He showed an image, which at first, would explain his theory. “Bill is the only one who understands this image”, said Rössler jokingly.

Now it’s the endophysicist’s turn to talk. “Do you want me to draw?” Yes, we do. On an overhead projector, the white haired man with tremulous gestures drew the crooked images as imprecise as his words. But as he himself said in the previous meeting, “endophysics is an assault on objectivity and reinforces objectivity.” He will take us somewhere.

The assault
Rössler started the class saying that artificial intelligence is a “dangerous territory.” But, calm down, endophysics is an assault on objectivity. In nature, “everything flows downwards, toward death. But along this path, small things happen.” He drew a diagonal arrow facing downward and, in the middle of the way between the top and the base, a spiral. To better explain it, the scientist changed the difficult vocabulary for sweet words. It would be like water, when sliding down the rocks of a waterfall. In some parts of the way, it forms a small whirlpool. “If you give it a chance, it can produce beautiful things, even life.” And whenever possible, life will reproduce itself. “It’s as strong as a young person for whom the world is opening up.”

Another way energy escapes from death is by going toward point omega. To illustrate it, Rössler drew an arrow pointing upward. Point omega, a concept developed by philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, resides on its top. The infinite target, the maximum level of improvement and evolution. “Where all creative energy is concentrated.” According to the endophysicist, that is where surplus energy converges.

The reinforcement
Scientist-prophet Rössler said that if evolution is successful during infinite time, point omega will be naturally reached. But this bridge, between the current stage and the last stage of evolution can also be built by science.

According to Rössler, the main difference between the physical explanation of evolution and Darwin’s theory is that the former understands evolution as an intelligent process that can be predicted by means of algorithms and, therefore, reconstructed.

If science can predict and reproduce the evolution of a being and take this evolution to its highest point, this might imply having “the entire cosmos developing itself aiming at an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent being.” Endophysics reinforces objectivity. We arrived at benevolence and danger referred to by Rössler.

Cybernetics Isn’t Only Technological

by Ana Catarina Pinheiro

Paul Pangaro, a PhD in cybernetics and a computer science professor, closed Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium highlighting the importance of perceiving cybernetics in its social dimension. The professor talked about the interactivity cycles that characterize the most diverse routine situations, not only between machines and living beings, but between men.

With this, art and technology, united in the works at Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 exhibition, had their interaction and provocative dimension made explicit with meaning in the everyday reality context. The title of the lecture, mentioning the Citroën automobile brand, provided a clue to the approach, which brought the cybernetic notion to ordinary life and distanced it from the mystic of technological sophistication reigning in common sense.

Pangaro explained cybernetics as a causal circularity system, starting with the example of the automobile that was programmed to adjust its height in relation to the ground, regardless of the weight being transported. Therefore, based on a target, to maintain constant driveability, the car interacted with the environment and could self-regulate. This example explains the first order cybernetic logic: a self-contained organism that responds to external stimuli and self-modifies.

The professor continued saying that if we add to this feedback context, an observing system that interacts and self-regulates as of the first order, we will have second-order cybernetics. At this level, Pangaro included human relations, using the scheme of a simple conversation as an example. In the dialogue, the aim of the person in this situation – to satiate his hunger – is made explicit to the other who proposes possibilities that cooperatively lead to one or multiple actions, such as to prepare a dinner with several dishes on the menu.

In this sense, cybernetics appears as a mechanism in which a system modifies itself and modifies other systems, at the physical level and, especially, in the immateriality of aims and desires, adapting itself to reach shared objectives. It is a collaborative process that is applied from the learning of dance steps to the workings of participative democracy and to the production of knowledge.

Cybernetic artifactsPangaro recognizes that machines produced and programmed by man interact in second order cybernetic cycles, modifying themselves and creating new artifacts. However, the professor doubts that artifacts could coincide with the activity of the human brain, infinitely capable of operating with variables derived from interactions with machines, other living beings and with the environment.

In this case, Pangaro opposes cybernetics to the notion of artificial intelligence, suggesting the incapacity of a machine to reproduce the functioning of neural networks of the human brain. This is due to the assumption that is indispensable to artificial intelligence that reality corresponds to a truth that can be captured. According to the professor, for cybernetics, reality is built as of the negotiation of what truth is, not considered as a definitive and unbreakable scope, but as a result of interaction and cooperation. Thus, Pangaro says that “cybernetics is a way of seeing the world, a way of collaborating and negotiating.”