Edward A. Shanken (2003), 'From Cybernetics to Telematics: The Art. Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott', in Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-94.


Rather than a historical approach much work in the area of technology is forward-looking theories such as Roy Ascott's 'visionary work' in that it follows in the tradition of futurologists like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, as well as the futurist Filippo Marinetti. This approach is often criticised as 'technological utopianism' (Shanken, 2003: 2). I would advocate a theory that looks forwards and backwards simultaneously - to engage in one or the other can be too deterministic (ideological in terms of a belief in progress and teleological perhaps - although Ascott would argue nonlinear no doubt). 

There should be feedback loops here too. I say this in connection with Ascott's radical pedagogy - in which art and the teaching situation was seen in the tradition of cybernetics as a creative situation in which feedback loops exist within the system producing/inducing learning behaviours. Thus potential learning exists in the sense that: 'Out of the flux, a many-sided organism may evolve' (2003; 102) and correspondingly '"the generative idea... is worked out in perpetual interweaving"... which is no longer the product of a single author but is now pleated together through the process of distributed authorship' (Shaken quoting Ascott quoting Barthes, 2003: 66). In this way and in line with the conceptual tradition of the time, Ascott could surmise that 'the art of our time is one of system, process, behaviour, interaction' (2003: 214) extending this to: 'Culture has been well defined as "the sum of all the learned behaviours that exist in a given locality"' (2003: 99; Jasia Reichardt's exhibition 'Cybernetic Serendipity', 1968, is largely regarded as a historical marker for combining art and cybernetic ideas). Thus the production of art and learning might be seen to be mutually supportive: 
'The two activities, creative and pedagogic, interact, each feeding back to the other' bound together becoming a 'force for change in society' (2003: 98; often bound together in the form of writing - again in the tradition of conceptual art of the time). For Shanken, this points to the 'paradoxical nature of knowledge and the contradictions inherent in formal epistemologies' (2003: 5) - views predicated on an understanding of information and systems theory. From this perspective, symbolic information systems like text or numbers or code - any linguistic or mathematical systems - might be seen to be artistic material. Ascott famously extends this conceptual framework to behaviour in the quote from 'The Construction of Change' in Cambrige Opinion 37 (1964) that introduces Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972): 

"To discuss what one is doing rather than the artwork which results, to attempt to unravel the loops of creative activity, is, in many ways, a behavioural problem. The fusion of art, science and personality is involved. It leads to a consideration of our total relationship to a work of art, in which physical moves may lead to conceptual moves, in which Behaviour relates to Idea...'An organism is most efficient when it knows its own internal order.'" (Ascott, in Lippard, 1973: 1; & Ascott, 2003: 97). 

From this principle of feedback, you can see how Ascott might come up with the following logic: 'The computer may be linked to an artwork, and the artwork may in some sense be a computer.' (2003: 129) This could just as well be extended to software of course, but the focus on hardware or the technical apparatus has a distinct history. Shanken cites the well-known source for new media commentators in Brecht's comments on radio. Unfortunately, the potential for radio as a two way send and receive communication media was not realised at that time.  

'[L]et the listener speak as well as hear... bring him [her] into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers... [I]t must follow the prime objective of turning the audience not only into pupils but also into teachers. It is the radio's formal task to give these educational operations an interesting turn, i.e. to ensure that these interests interest people. Such an attempt by the radio to put its instruction into an artistic form would link up with the modern artists to give art an instructive character.'
(Berthold Brecht (1932) 'The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication' in Shanken 2003: 55)

Shanken makes a spurious connection here. The quote owes more to the spirit of Benjamin than Ascott - for the engagement with the apparatus here is a means to engage with the relations of production (something that Ascott is fairly unconcerned with); it is instructional in terms of politics of course. Turning receivers into senders (what Benjamin calls readers into writers) contradicts the broadcast principles of centralised, authoritarian politics, art and teaching. A critique of much interactive art and its spurious choices might be formulated in much the same way (of turning observers into participants perhaps) unless social relations are invoked - but this lies outside the scope of the work here. To avoid the techno-determinism of McLuhan, it is worth noting that Shanken sees it as imperative to maintain the 'dialectic between medium and message as co-determining elements of social practice' (2003: 84). One might simply re-read Benjamin or Brecht for a more detailed position on this non-separation of form and content.