Above and below: Replica of Gordon Pask’s 1968 “Colloquy of Mobiles” by TJ McLeish and Paul Pangaro at ZKM. Photo and video by TJ McLeish and Patricia Machado.
Today at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, a fully-animated Colloquy of Mobiles was displayed at the opening of their exhibition titled »BioMedia: The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior«. Our replica of Gordon Pask’s 1968 Colloquy is perfectly poised to respond to ZKM’s intentions as expressed on the exhibition’s web page: “Who or what defines what is alive and what is intelligent? … What does cooperation of human beings and artificial agents look like? … The exhibition »BioMedia« invites visitors to learn about and discuss possible forms of cohabitation between organic and artificial forms of life.”
The need for #NewMacy Meetings arose at the start of COVID-19. Overpowering realizations about global systemic challenges, beyond the current biological pandemic, demanded response. Design began with a broad community of colleagues through conversation and critique. A comprehensive manifesto emerged, followed by a focused and justifiable path for responding to the pandemic of “Today’s AI”. Most recently a conference keynote has captured the rationale and overall plan.
Why “Today’s AI” as a phrase? Not all AI is negative—yet so much of the artificial intelligence inside of today’s tech is manipulating what we see and distorting the world we share. Fueled by massive increases in “big data” and compute power, the machine-learning algorithms behind “Today’s AI” are tirelessly fomenting polarization, spreading social bias, pushing irrelevant products, co-opting our attention, addicting us to harmful activities, and surveilling our lives. A single, unregulated, global social-media platform, implicated in that litany of harm, has 2.8 billion active users. The Internet and its ubiquitous digital devices touch over 4.5 billion people. Surely “Today’s AI” is a pandemic of technology at global scale.
Technology itself is not at fault. How we fashion it, the values we embed in it, and the motivations that promote it are at fault, serving the ends of companies that compromise the social fabric of our lives.
Above and below: Replica of Gordon Pask’s 1968 “Colloquy of Mobiles” by TJ McLeish and Paul Pangaro now installed at ZKM. All photos courtesy of Morgane Stricot, ZKM.
Today we celebrate the anniversary of the unveiling of our replica of Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles on February 26, 2020, at Centre Pompidou in Paris where it was part of the extraordinary exhibition MUTATIONS / CRÉATIONS 4: NEURONES / LES INTELLIGENCES SIMULÉES.
That opening was rich in energy and interactions as demonstrated in these short videos.
In March the exhibition had to close prematurely due to COVID.
Thereafter the great staff of Centre Pompidou and ZKM disassembled, transported, and reassembled Colloquy at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, where it has become part of the permanent collection.
We look forward to the museum’s reopening to the public and the opportunity for TJ Mcleish, Colloquy’s master fabricator, to travel to ZKM and animate the replica to make it fully operational once again.
Quote above: An approach to interface design based on Heinz von Foerster’s Ethical Imperative where “choices” are distinguished from “options” — options are anything that is possible, while choices are only those options that are viable and well-suited to this user in this moment.
More and more, today’s AI makes the world we see and the world we live in — and we need to respond. In a presentation hosted by the AiTech Agora at TU Delft, Paul Pangaro responds with a proposal for collaboration that bridges AI and cybernetics with conversation.
“Pandemic” comes from “all” and “people”, meaning something negative that effects us all. While not biological, today’s AI foments polarization, pushes irrelevant products, spreads social bias, and surveils our lives. AI touches billions and sways more of us, in more invasive and uncontrolled ways, every day.
Here are more details for our first meeting of the revival of the Macy Meetings in cybernetics on Sunday September 13th at Noon EDT, first reported in this prior post, as follows:
Our speakers Larry Richards and Ben Sweeting will respond to the provocation, “Why Can’t Cybernetics Tame Pandemics?” Then our respondents will each answer the questions, “Where did the speakers agree?” and “What did they leave out?” Our confirmed respondents are BCE Scott and Patricia Ticineto Clough. The speakers are then allowed to respond, and the process repeats. Read below for a longer description of context and intention.
We live in the unprecedented era of multiple global pandemics: COVID-19, rapacious technology, uncontrolled climate change, inequitable healthcare, systemic racism, unprincipled socio-economic structures, food and water insecurity… the list is far longer. Science, governance, and society have failed. If we’re going to make a dent we need sharper systemic tools, much broader inclusivity, and new generations engaged in conversations for action.
The original Macy Meetings were held from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, convened to explore the new art and science of systems that have purpose: cybernetics. Participants were international scholars who brought cybernetic frameworks back to their disciplines and changed the global discourse across the hard and soft sciences.
You are invited to the launch of #NewMacyMeetings in September 2020. This will be a modest first session, one of a series of experiments before a more formal and large-scale effort in 2021. This first session is called Why Can’t Cybernetics Tame Pandemics? This will comprise 2 speakers giving short positions on that question, and a few rounds with respondents who will answer: Where did the speakers agree? What did they leave out?
While following the ground-breaking tradition of trans-disciplinary conversations established by the original Macy Meetings, our #NewMacyMeetings must also be trans-global (diverse and inclusive) as well as trans-generational (engaging all ages).
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.
(Banner Image: TJ McLeish upgrading Colloquy in preparation for its heading to Europe. Perrier in tribute to Gordon Pask.)
After many weeks of toiling, master fabricator TJ McLeish has completed the mechatronic, digital hardware, and software upgrades to Colloquy 2018 in preparation for its crating and shipping to Centre Pompidou in Paris. There it will be shown in their major exhibition, MUTATIONS / CRÉATIONS 4: NEURONES / LES INTELLIGENCES SIMULÉES from 26 February through 20 April 2020.
When first created by Gordon Pask and shown in London in 1968, Colloquy of Mobiles was unlike any immersive gallery experience. Five interacting, human-scale mobiles (see photos below) held a “conversation” with each other through light and sound, exhibiting cooperation and competition. In significant ways, Pask’s “colloquy” (a “speaking together”) of mobiles from 1968 exceeds the interactivity of today’s conversational interfaces.
On the 50th anniversary of Pask’s original creation, the Colloquy 2018 Project implemented a replica faithful in appearance and behavior, while utilizing modern mechatronics and digital technology. With the success of the replica, the world-renowned Centre Pompidou requested that it become part of a major upcoming museum exhibition. Similarly, the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, has asked to acquire the work for their permanent collection.
1968: Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, London2018: Colloquy of Mobiles Replica, Detroit
Final preparations for this future of Colloquy 2018 were completed at Omnicorp Collective Detroit this past weekend, with the help of current and former students of the MFA IxD program of the College for Creative Studies, where the project was initiated 2 years ago by McLeish and Paul Pangaro. (You can read here about replicating Pask’s original Colloquy.) A wide range of upgrades were made to improve the reliability and behaviors of the mobiles before transferring the work to Artpack Services for crating and shipping.
That’s not a typo — A Turning Test. For Conversation.
We all know the Turing Test for Intelligence — when a human will judge if a machine is “intelligent.” I want a machine that will judge if a conversation is “intelligent.”
That’s right, “intelligent” — the quotes mean it’s ambiguous and we ought to discuss it. The meaning of “intelligent” is subject to opinion and personal values. For me, intelligent conversations are forward-moving, collaborative, generative — they go to new and interesting places. And for you?
Is it possible to ‘compute conversation’? I mean — is it possible to write heuristics that respond in surprising and stimulating ways, enabling a back-and-forth exchange among intelligent participants?
Gordon Pask not only thought so, he designed and built a series of machines that did so, as far back as 1953. Sure, some of those conversations were simple and his machines could not understand language or listen to speech — but all the mechanisms he built had memory (and so could learn) and displayed novel, unexpected behaviors (and so kept their co-participants engaged in the interaction). As a result, all of Pask’s machines could hold a form of conversation with humans (or sometimes, with other machines!).
The photo above is a control panel from 1958: Pask’s ‘Eucrates‘ environment, where a ‘teacher’ machine attempts to train a ‘pupil’ machine comprising neural nets (yup, neural nets in 1958). There are knobs labelled ‘awareness’ and ‘obstinacy’ — and don’t miss the wackiest one, ‘oblivesence.’ (Pask was British, so I hold to the definition in British dictionaries: ‘willful forgetfulness.’)
