Image above: Replica of Gordon Pask’s 1968 “The Colloquy of Mobiles” exhibited in the gallery of Centre Pompidou in 2020.
The replica of Gordon Pask’s 1968 Colloquy of Mobiles, reproduced by Paul Pangaro and TJ McLeish in 2018, is now on display in Centre Pompidou’s exhibition entitled MUTATIONS / CRÉATIONS 4: NEURONES / LES INTELLIGENCES SIMULÉES through April 20, 2020.
Click here for a gallery of short videos of the installation.
This is a new major phase of a multi-year project that began at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 2018. There in the Masters in Interaction Design program, TJ and I initiated the project with its students, as documented in the student-built project web site at ColloquyOfMobiles.com. By all accounts, the goal of replicating Colloquy faithfully to its appearance and behaviors has been a success. (Read more about recent steps in creating the replica of Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles in this update and the entire journey in the thread starting here.)
In the next phase, The Colloquy of Mobiles will enter the permanent collection of the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, under the care of Margit Rosen, Head of Department, Collections, Archives & Research. Margit has been a long-time champion of Pask, Colloquy, and the interconnections across cybernetics, art, and media.
These interconnections were explored during a symposium panel entitled “Dead Ends and the Future of Cybernetics. related to the exhibition. (Click here for the video). Sociologist and historian of science Andy Pickering, Margit, and I offer contexts for Pask’s vision, which eclipses the impoverished engagement of today’s screen-based technology. Colloquy is analog, organic, embodied, and conversant in ways that today’s technology does not touch. Andy explains how AI has led us down a tunnel (rather than to a “dead end” of the panel’s title) by not capturing the relationship of action and the body to the computing elements of intelligent processes. Margit eloquently places Pask’s works, including “A Cybernetic Theatre” and “The Fun Palace”, in the context of art and media evolution. Building on Andy’s eloquent comments, I further contrast cybernetics and AI. I offer that Pask’s formalisms for explaining how cognitive systems evolve could be a unifying bridge for neural nets and symbolic AI.