Less Interference / More Dance!

Gordon Pask designed his “Colloquy of Mobiles” for the groundbreaking 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, where Colloquy was by far the most ambitious, outlandish, and revolutionary work. Life-sized mobiles interacted with each other and with the audience through light and sound, “conversing” in multi-layer engagements. Seeming to have fallen from outer space, Colloquy brings continuity between Pask’s interactive machines of the 1950s and his rigorous cybernetic theory of conversations of the 1970s. He was always asking, What is conversation? And how can novelty in conversation lead to new experiences and novel concepts? 

While fabricating a full-scale replica of Colloquy at the College for Creative Studies, we imagined how astonishing it must have been in 1968. Yet we were unprepared for its impact in 2018: audiences of interaction designers, media artists, students, scholars, and the general public all found Colloquy’s organic, analog presence to be utterly seductive. What were Pask’s questions 50 years ago such that he could create Colloquy then? What would he be saying to us today?

He would certainly scoff at the digital computers in our pockets that interrupt us incessantly, without offering much by way of his notion of “novelty.” For Pask, as in his Colloquy, conversation is a dance of serendipity and synchronization, surprise or disengagement, in a quest for what is new. Today’s tech takes our attention for its purposes — leaving us with too little of our on-screen time in deep conversation with others. We mistake interference for interaction and are distracted from being ourselves. Without the social exercise of human-to-human engagement, our brains atrophy. We are left with “obesity of the brain.” The results are inanities and even broad cultural change as when, for example, social media brings a contagion of “fake news” and thence a decline of democracy.

Pask’s machines fore-fronted novelty in order to foster interaction. Today we can imagine that Pask would replace the Turing Test, where a human will judge whether a programmed machine is “intelligent”, with a Conversation Test, where a program would judge whether a conversation might be “generative”, that is, fruitful and energetic, self-driving because it stimulates our human curiosity for “the new.” Instead of “better” movies to watch, such a program in our pocket could guide us to better interactions. Perhaps a better life, a new era of human-computer interaction?

About those “recommendation engines” and “search engines” — can’t we see that they use our past to paint us a future more in their interest than in ours? They want to “monetize” us based on who we’ve already been. We mindlessly adopt AI technology that decides what we were, rather than offering up what we could be. But as conscious creatures we “live in the now” — wouldn’t we rather define our own future, our own becoming? We should be open to suggestions, sure — but these should be in the form of questions, not answers. Answers are dead (though admittedly some are useful). Questions are alive! Where is the Paskian novelty we need to keep up our energy and curiosity? Make me alive: make me a Question Engine to rev-up our conversations.

Perhaps the strongest provocation from Pask via Colloquy is this: we are biology. We are analog creatures that crave flow and engagement, coherence and delight. Just as Colloquy’s mobiles have bodies and behaviors, our bodies and behaviors are comprised of overlapping, simultaneous senses and feelings and actions, all ongoing. Our organic logic is analog, we process in real-time, “in the now.” These damn digital devices, these pixelized, splintering, flattening, trivializing interfaces are in our way. As human beings we want what we want even if we don’t yet know what that is. We want to become and want to flow into whatever that means. We want to make our own meaning, together.

Pask is asking, can we embrace our biology and “design for analog”? Colloquy’s proposal from 50 years ago is still astonishing, asking us what might we make together today? Let us begin: less interference, more dance!

The COLLOQUY 2018 Project was undertaken by the MFA Interaction Design program at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, with the support of its advisory board, private donors, Design Core Detroit, [proper reference to LASG/grant from you all], and the college’s provost, Bill Shields. The full-scale replica was designed and constructed by TJ McLeish, master fabricator of the project; Paul Pangaro was project lead and fund-raiser.