Norbert Wiener — Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

1948

Artists: Norbert Wiener · Year: 1948 · Medium: Foundational theoretical book · Substrate: Printed book — mathematics, philosophy, biology · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA / Paris · Institution: MIT / MIT Press (originally co-published with Hermann & Cie, Paris) In 1948, the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The book is dense, technical, and almost unreadably mathematical in places; it also invented a field. Wiener's argument — that feedback loops are the common structure of biological, mechanical, and social systems, and that the mathematical tools for studying one are the tools for studying all — gave later generations of artists and theorists a vocabulary for thinking about systems, control, responsiveness, and information. Every subsequent moment in this archive sits, in some way, within the conceptual space Cybernetics opened. The book sold unexpectedly well. Translations into a dozen languages followed within the decade. Artists read it — Gordon Pask cited it, Nicolas Schöffer cited it, the Gruppo T in Milan built their early work in explicit dialogue with it. By the 1960s, the word cybernetic had become a modifier for art practices that took system behavior as their primary subject — cybernetic sculpture, cybernetic poetry, cybernetic art — with Wiener's book as the theoretical anchor. The 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA took his title verbatim. Wiener himself was uneasy about some of the consequences of the field he had founded. A 1960 essay, Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation, warned about the political risks of automated systems deployed faster than their implications could be understood. The warnings have aged well. He died in 1964. Lore Wiener trained at Harvard, Cambridge, and Göttingen, and had been a Harvard doctorate at eighteen and an MIT faculty member at twenty-four. Cybernetics was written in partnership with the Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, whose influence on the book's treatment of biological feedback is extensive. Wiener's autobiography Ex-Prodigy (1953) remains a readable source for the period. He died in Stockholm in 1964 at sixty-nine, while on a lecture tour. Sources • Wiener, Norbert — Cybernetics (MIT Press, 1948; revised 1961) • Conway, Flo; Siegelman, Jim — Dark Hero of the Information Age (Basic Books, 2005) • MIT Institute Archives — Wiener papers