About Gordon Pask
Cybernetic Serendipity
Colloquy of Mobiles
About Gordon Pask
Andrew Gordon Speedie-Pask, M.A., Ph.D., D.Sc., Sc. D., lived many lives in the span of one. Over the course of his 68 years, he stayed up for 36-hour days, published 6 books and 270 papers, soldered machines into behaving like learning organisms, and developed a comprehensive theory of human cognition. If the worlds of psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science knew his work better, they would never be the same: for then they could hold the human and the rational, subjective and objective, in the same frame.
When Pask built his machines and his theory, his philosophical view was at odds with artificial intelligence, which arose from the seeds of cybernetics but presumes that knowledge is a commodity to pluck from the environment and stick in a cubbyhole. Pask's learning environments, whether for entertainment or touch-typing or statistics, viewed the human as part of a resonance that looped from the human, through the environment or apparatus, back through the human and around again. For Pask, that is the interaction by which we understand each other when we speak or dance together. He specified how this works in detail in his many publications on Conversation Theory.
Conversation Theory has provided cybernetics its prescriptive power for modeling, learning, and agreement. Which the colloquy of mobiles explores in the form of an interactive installation
CYBERNETIC SERENDIPITY
Cybernetic serendipity was an international exhibition exploring and demonstrating some of the relationships between technology and creativity.
The aim of the exhibition was to present an idea of activity which manifests artists’ involvement with science and the scientists’ involvement with the arts; also to show the links between the random systems employed by artists, composers and poets, and those involved with the making and the use of cybernetic devices.
The exhibition was divided into three sections:
1. Computer-generated graphics, computer animated films, computer-composed and played music, and computer poems and texts.
2. Cybernetic devices as works of art, cybernetic environments, remote control robots and painting machines.
3. Machines demonstrating the uses of computers and an environment dealing with the history of cybernetics.
Cybernetic Serendipity deals with possibilities rather than achievements, and in this sense, it is prematurely optimistic.
Colloquy of Mobiles
COLLOQUY OF MOBILES creates a human environment that contains conversational machines, a condition that is now part of everyday life. COLLOQUY allows gallery audiences to participate in immersive, real-time interactions that are surprising and provocative.
The experience of moving among the mobiles of the installation and engaging them via sound, speech, body movements, and facial expressions, will offer a rational as well as an emotional sense of what it means to live among machines that converse. The COLLOQUY 2018 Project will change how we feel about going home to voice interfaces such as Siri and Alexa, and how we experience living among smart machines.
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