Caroline A. Jones links cybernetics history to cultural critique in MIT course

Caroline A. Jones’ interest in modern and contemporary art is enriched by a willingness to delve into the technologies involved in its production, distribution, and reception. “As an art historian, a lot of my questions are about what kind of art we can make, what kind of thought we can make, what kind of ideas we can make that could stretch the human beyond our stubborn, selfish, ‘only concerned with our small group’ parameters. The Philosophers and philosophies I’m drawn to are those that question the Western obsession with individualism. Those are coming from so many different places, and they re reviving so many different kinds of questions and problems that were raised in the 1960s.” She has recently turned her attention to the history of cybernetics. Her MIT course, “Automata, Automatism, Systems, Cybernetics,” explores the history of the human/machine interface in terms of feedback, exploring the cultural rather than engineering uptake of this idea. She begins with primary readings by Wiener, Shannon, and Turing and then pivots from the scientists and engineers to the work and ideas of artists, feminists, postmodern theorists. Her goal: to come up with a new central paradigm of evolution that’s culture-based—“communalism and interspecies symbiosis rather than survival of the fittest.” As a historian, Caroline draws a distinction between what she has termed “left cybernetics” and “right cybernetics”: “What do I mean by left cybernetics? In one sense, it’s a pun or a joke: the cybernetics that was ‘left’ behind. On another level, it’s a vague political grouping connoting our Left Coast: California, Esalen, the group that Dave Kaiser calls the ‘hippie physicists.’ It’s not an adequate term, but it’s away of recognizing that there was a group beholden to the military-industrial complex, sometimes very unhappily, who gave us the tools to critique it.” 173 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016976