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designer to craft a spindly “male” apparatus of hinges and rods, set up to communicate
with bulbous “female” fiberglass entities nearby. Whether anyone could actually map the
quiddities of the program (or glean its reactionary gender theater) without reading the
catalog essay is an open question. What is significant is Pask’s focus on the behaviors of
his automata, their interactivity, their responsiveness within an artificially modulated
environment, and their “reflection” of human behaviors.

The ICA’s “Cybernetic Serendipity” introduced an important paradigm: the
machinic ecosystem, in which the viewer was a biological part, tasked with figuring out
just what the triggers for interaction might be. The visitors in those London galleries
suddenly became “cybernetic organisms”—cyborgs—since to experience the art
adequately, one needed to enter a kind of symbiotic colloquy with the servomechanisms.
This turn toward human-machine interactive environments as an aesthetic becomes
clearer when we examine a few other artworks from the period, beginning with one
constituting an early instance of emergent behavior—Senster, the interactive sculpture by
artist/engineer Edward Ihnatowicz (1970), celebrated by medical robotics engineer Alex
Zivanovic, editor of a Web site devoted to Ihnatowicz’s little-known career, as “one of
the first computer controlled interactive robotic works of art.” Here, “the computer”
makes its entry (albeit a twelve-bit, limited device). But rather than “intelligence,”
Ihnatowicz sought to make an avatar of affective behavior. Key to Senster ’s uncanny
success was the programming with which Ihnatowicz constrained the fifteen-foot-long
hydraulic apparatus (its hinge design and looming appearance inspired by a lobster claw)
to convey shyness in responding to humans in its proximity. Senster ’s sound channels
and motion sensors were set to recoil at loud noises and sudden aggressive movements.
Only those humans willing to speak softly and modulate their gestures would be
rewarded by Senster ’s quiet, inquisitive approach—an experience that became real for
Ihnatowicz himself when he first assembled the program and the machine turned to him
solicitously after he’d cleared his throat.

In these artistic uses of cybernetic beings, we sense a growing necessity to train
the public to experience itself as embedded in a technologized environment, modifying
itself to communicate intuitively with machines. This necessity had already become
explicit in Tsai’s “Cybernetic Sculpture” show. Those experiencing his immersive
installation were expected to experiment with machinic life: What behaviors would
trigger the servomechanisms? Likely, the human gallery attendant would have had to
explain the protocol: “Clap your hands—that gets the sculptures to respond.” As an early
critic described it:

A grove of slender stainless-steel rods rises from a plate. This base vibrates at 30
cycles per second; the rods flex rapidly, in harmonic curves. Set in a dark room,
they are lit by strobes. The pulse of the flashing lights varies—they are
connected to sound and proximity sensors. The result is that when one
approaches a Tsai or makes a noise in its vicinity, the thing responds. The rods
appear to move; there is a shimmering, a flashing, an eerie ballet of metal, whose
apparent movements range from stillness to jittering and back to a slow,
indescribably sensuous undulation.⁴⁹

⁴⁹ Robert Hughes, Time magazine (October 2, 1972) review of Tsai exhibition at Denise René gallery.

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