Memoir of 1960s art‑science gatherings featuring Wiener, MIT scholars, and Stewart Brand

During the Festival, I received an unexpected phone call from Wiener’s colleague Arthur K. Solomon, head of Harvard’s graduate program in biophysics. Wiener had died the year before, and Solomon and Wiener’s other close colleagues at MIT and Harvard had been reading about the Expanded Cinema Festival in the New York Times and were intrigued by the connection to Wiener’s work. Solomon invited me to bring some of the artists up to Cambridge to meet with him and a group that included MIT sensory- communications researcher Walter Rosenblith, Harvard applied mathematician Anthony Oettinger, and MIT engineer Harold “Doc” Edgerton, inventor of the strobe light. Like many other “art meets science” situations I’ve been involved in since, the two-day event was an informed failure: ships passing in the night. But I took it all onboard and the event was consequential in some interesting ways—one of which came from the fact that they took us to see “the” computer. Computers were a rarity back then; at least, none of us on the visit had ever seen one. We were ushered into a large space on the MIT campus, in the middle of which there was a “cold room” raised off the floor and enclosed in glass, in which technicians wearing white lab coats, scarves, and gloves were busy collating punch cards coming through an enormous machine. When I approached, the steam from my breath fogged up the window into the cold room. Wiping it off, I saw “the” computer. I fell in love. Later, in the Fall of 1967, I went to Menlo Park to spend time with Stewart Brand, whom I had met in New York in 1965 when he was a satellite member of the USCO group of artists. Now, with his wife Lois, a mathematician, he was preparing the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog for publication. While Lois and the team did the heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics that Cage had handed to me the year before, and debating Wiener’s ideas. Inspired by this set of ideas, I began to develop a theme, a mantra of sorts, that has informed my endeavors since: “new technologies = new perceptions.” Inspired by communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, architect-designer Buckminster Fuller, futurist John McHale, and cultural anthropologists Edward T. (Ned) Hall and Edmund Carpenter, I started reading avidly in the field of information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory. McLuhan suggested I read biologist J.Z. Young’s Doubt and Certainty in Science in which he said that we create tools and we mold ourselves through our use of them. The other text he recommended was Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon’s 1949 paper “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which begins: “The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theater, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior." Who knew that within two decades of that moment we would begin to recognize the brain as a computer? And in the next two decades, as we built our computers into the Internet, that we would begin to realize that the brain is not a computer, but a network of computers? Certainly not Wiener, a specialist in analogue feedback circuits designed to control machines, nor the artists, nor, least of all, myself. “We must cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.” 10 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016230