Cover image: Gordon Pask.
Presentation
Every day we live among machines talking to machines, and machines talking to people, and people talking to people through machines. In 1968 Gordon Pask imagined such a world with his ground-breaking work, Colloquy of Mobiles, one of the interactive installations in the seminal exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in London. Even with the comparatively simple sensors and computing of the day, audiences’ interactions with Colloquy were organic and analog, immersive and unpredictable, conversational and emergent.
This talk will describe the undertaking of designing and fabricating a full-scale replica of the original Colloquy. Pask’s human-machine interactive experiments in the 1950s and 60s give context to the available artifacts. From these foundations, the processes and outcomes of the project will be shown in images and videos. (See colloquyofmobiles.com.)
DownloadPresentation slides (200MB PDF without videos and including supplemental material)
DownloadAudio recording of presentation (24' presentation, 26' Q&A)
ViewSelf-running slideshow of presentation (42' including videos and supplemental material)
Special thanks to Liz Keim for the invitation.
Paul Pangaro is Chair and Associate Professor of MFA Interaction Design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He did his PhD with Pask in Conversation Theory in the cybernetics department at Brunel University (UK). His BS was in Humanities (Drama) / Computer Science at MIT. He was on Research Staff at the MIT Architecture Machine Group when he met Pask via Nicholas Negroponte, before the group morphed into the MIT Media Lab. Pangaro publishes and lectures on the role of conversation in human organizations, interactions with technology, and methodologies of design.