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THE ARTISTIC USE OF CYBERNETIC BEINGS
Caroline A. Jones

Caroline A. Jones is a professor of art history in the Department of Architecture at MIT
and author of Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses; Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar
American Artist; and The Global Work of Art.

Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important.
— Nam June Paik, 1966

Artificial intelligence was not what artists first wanted out of cybernetics, once Norbert
Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society came out in 1950.
The range of artists who identified themselves with cybernetics in the fifties and sixties
initially had little access to “thinking machines.” Moreover, craft-minded engineers had
already been making turtles, jugglers, and light-seeking robot babes, not giant brains.
Using breadboards, copper wire, simple switches, and electronic sensors, artists followed
cyberneticians in making sculptures and environments that simulated interactive
sentience—analog movements and interfaces that had more to do with instinctive drives
and postwar sexual politics than the automation of knowledge production. Now obscured
by an ideology of a free-floating “intelligence” untethered by either hardware or flesh, AI
has forgotten the early days of cybernetics’ uptake by artists. Those efforts are worth
revisiting; they modeled relations with what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari have called the “machinic phylum,” having to do with how humans think
and feel in bodies engaged with a physical, material, emotionally stimulating, and
signaling world.
Cybernetics now seems to have collapsed into an all-pervasive discourse of AI
that was far from preordained. “Cybernetics,” as a word, claimed postwar newness for
concepts that were easily four centuries old: notions of feedback, machine damping,
biological homeostasis, logical calculation, and systems thinking that had been around
since the Enlightenment (boosted by the Industrial Revolution). The names in this
lineage include Descartes, Leibniz, Sadi Carnot, Clausius, Maxwell, and Watt. Wiener’s
coinage nonetheless had profound cultural effects.47 The ubiquity today of the prefix
“cyber-” confirms the desire for a crisp signifier of the tangled relations between humans
and machines. In Wiener’s usage, things “cyber” simply involved “control and
communication in the animal and the machine.” But after the digital revolution, “cyber”
moved beyond servomechanisms, feedback loops, and switches to encompass software,
algorithms, and cyborgs. The work of cybernetically inclined artists concerns the
emergent behaviors of life that elude AI in its current condition.
As to that original coinage, Wiener had reached back to the ancient Greek to
borrow the word for “steersman” (κυβερνήτης / kubernétés), a masculine figure
channeling power and instinct at the helm of a ship, who read the waves, judged the
wind, kept a hand on the tiller, and directed the slaves as they mindlessly (mechanically)
churned their oars. The Greek had already migrated into modern English via Latin, going

47 Wiener later had to admit the earlier coinage of the word in 1834 by André-Marie Ampère, who had
intended it to mean the “science of government,” a concept that remained dormant until the 20th century.

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