 I'm welcome. So my name is Shria Chatterjee and I'm head of research and learning at the Paul Mellon Centre. And so this is the first session of summer research seminar series and it's called Liquid Crystal Concrete, the Arts in West War Britain. We have some housekeeping to do before I sort of go into details about today's programme. I'm going to wear a mask so just tell me if you hear me all right. Oh, fine. Good. So fire safety stuff. There are no fire drills scheduled for the duration of this event. So if the fire alarm sounds, please leave your belongings behind and calmly begin to evacuate the building. Your nearest fire exits are on the ground floor through either front doors of the centre. Please assemble outside 28 Bedford Square, which is to the right as you leave the building and don't leave the area or attempt to return to the centre until you've been advised it's safe to do so by a member of PMC staff. That's all for fire safety stuff. So I think a little bit about why we're all here. This series was put together, really to think together about the arts of post-war Britain as an interdisciplinary and also transcultural terrain of research. Over the next few weeks, you're all really welcome to join for the other talks. You'll hear from scholars who engage with the intersections of art, technology in new media, the environment, issues of empire and world-making and also questions of migration. This evening's session, as you know, is on British cybernetic art. I'm so delighted to welcome Catherine Mason and Ernest Edmonds to the Paul Mellon Centre. So the first part of the evening, Catherine will deliver a talk titled British cybernetic art, The Origins of Digital Art, which provides a look at the more than 50-year history behind contemporary digital art, thinking primarily about cybernetics and its relationship to art schools in Britain. As a wave introduction, Catherine Mason is an independent art historian. She writes about historic and contemporary digital art, art schools in the history of computer arts, early British computer animation, among many other things. So after her talk, Catherine will be in conversation with Professor Ernest Edmonds, who is an artist who pioneered the field of computational art from the 1960s when he taught at Leicester Polytechnic. His books include The Art of Interaction and From Fingers to Digits, an Artificial Aesthetic, which was co-written with Margaret Bowden. We'll have two parts to this evening, and they follow on directly from one another. After that we'll have time for questions, quite a lot of time for questions, and then we have reception just round next door. We're really excited to have Catherine and Edmonds here with us tonight at the Paul Mellon Centre in person, and also to see all of you here in person and lots of you joining online. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Catherine. Thank you very much, thank you very much, Sreana. I'm very pleased to be here. So today we're going to, this evening we're going to take a look at how artists came to use computers and digital information technologies in their art. Well, the answer lies at least partly in the post-war science of cybernetics and its strong link with British art schools. So what we're going to see tonight is a particularly British interpretation of art informed by systems and technology, which eventually became more focused in the late 1960s and into the 70s, particularly in art schools. Now this is a huge field, so in the short space of time I have tonight, we're just going to have a general introduction, and I hope to hit some of the highlights to give you an idea of the wealth of activity that took place during this period, and some of the reasons behind it. Well in the immediate post-war period there were no computers available to artists, but there was a great wealth of conceptual thinking, and this was inspired by the science of cybernetics, which influenced subsequent generations, and a computational way of thinking about art production began to take shape. Now as we'll see throughout this session, this concept had a profound impact on artists by giving them a framework within which they could consider new technologies. And much of this work was experimental and collaborative in nature, and in fact it's this collaborative aspect that comes to define the early days of computer arts activities in Britain. So the new scientific development of cybernetics was to inform the gestation of computer arts, but what is cybernetics? Well it's originally a Greek term, Kubernetes, which meant pilot or steersman, and cybernetics as a term was first used by Plato in his dialogues to denote a governor of a country. But the discipline of cybernetics in the modern sense was coined by a mathematician at MIT in the late 1940s, Norbert Wiener, and his seminal book of 1948, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, was extremely influential. Now according to Wiener at a basic level, cybernetics refers to the set of problems centered about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or in living tissue. Now this includes the communication within an observer and between the observer and their environment. So I'm going to summarize here greatly, but the basic concept of cybernetics is that the behaviour of all organisms, machines, and other physical systems is controlled by their communication structures, both within themselves and within their environment. So the idea of control and communication, as you can see here, is at the root of cybernetics. And self-regulation by feedback is found in all cybernetics systems and processes, whether natural, mechanical, or social. So now with this new field of cybernetics, different disciplines could have a shared vocabulary, and it could also apply to many different fields. On both sides of the Atlantic, the potential that cybernetics held for creating improvements in complex systems was quickly recognized. And Wiener's book was hugely far-reaching, and these notions of control, feedback, and communication penetrated almost every aspect of technical culture. Now in the UK, it was the most intellectually powerful and influential cybernetics group was the ratio club, which started out in Cambridge in 1949. And this included outstanding psychiatrists, neurologists, mathematicians, engineers, and others who met to discuss issues such as new ways of thinking about behaviour generating mechanisms and information processing in brains and machines. And the members included, you can see them here, Alan Turing, who's down there on the lower left. Of course Alan Turing University regarded as one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence. At this time he was working on one of the world's first stored program computers in Manchester. Also part of the ratio group club was Jack Good, who'd worked on the top secret code cracking project at Bletchley Park during the war. Another member was Rosh Ashby, and he is regarded as one of the most influential pioneers of cybernetics and system science, and wrote a very influential book called Design for a Brain in 1952. He also created a homeostat machine, and you can see that here. Now this is a system that could respond in changes to conditions and maintain its own stability. So this homeostat machine of 1948 is the earliest device to be created that had the capacity of adapting to its own environment. And you can see here what's made from four repurposed RAF bomb control units that could respond in changes. They were filled with water, and the machine was designed to automatically adapt its configuration to stabilize the effects of any kind of disturbance that you might introduce into the system. Now this captured the public imagination, scientific community imagination, as you might imagine, like Noah. And Time Magazine described this as the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man. Someone else who was a member of the ratio group was William Gray Walter, and he created some of the first electronic autonomous robots. Now these were used as a tool to study ideas about brain function, and they were three-wheeled light-following tortoises. They were called tortoises because of their shape and the sort of slow rate of movement that they made around the floor. And also they taught us about the secrets of organization and life. And here you can see them exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Many other members of the ratio club we don't have time to go into today, but very influential group. So it was in this atmosphere of enormous energy and optimism that pervaded post-war Britain as it began to rebuild that these people were hungry to push science in new and important directions. And cybernetics rapidly developed from a specialist term, meaning a specific scientific field of study, to become more of a household word that covered a whole gamut of expectations about the future in the 1950s. And this is particularly within the art world. Now cybernetics began to impact the visual arts from about the mid-50s onwards. And it is noteworthy that the artists who began to investigate it came from a constructivist or Bauhaus influenced background. And among the first artists in Britain to consider the implications of science, new technology and the mass media for art and society were the independent group. And here you can see some of the members here in the mid-50s. The independent group was a loose gathering of young artists, designers, architects, theorists centered around the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the ICA. And they were inspired by a wide range of subjects including scientific developments and popular and American culture. Members included Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Palotzi who you can see here, Nigel Henderson also pictured here, William Turnbull, Lawrence Allaway, Rainer Bannum, The Smithsons, Allison and Peter Smithson, and others. And they represented a cross-section of the visual arts and design, theory and criticism. And many of these people had become familiar with technology during wartime. They worked with technology during the war. The independent group generally believed that visual culture did not exist in a vacuum. Instead it was informed in direct relation to science and technology. But we must remember that this was not an obvious approach to art practice at this time. They were actually very avant-garde in their way of thinking. For example, the British cybernetics expert E.W. Mayer was invited to the group to talk about a lecture called probability and information theory and their application to the visual arts. This was in 1955. And this results in one of the members, John McHale, whose work you can see here, producing a whole range, a whole series of collages based on the theme of the transistor. A transistor had just recently been invented at this time and had revolutionized communications. So the one you can see here on the right, on the left rather, is from the Tate Gallery from 1954. And then there's another one which he made in America. So he actually reassembled materials that he cut out of magazines and mass media to create these new technological automata creatures. McHale actually said, and I quote here, they are out of Frankenstein by way of IBM. And then later he went, a couple of years after this, he went to the U.S. on a Yale university scholarship to study under Joseph Albers, the ex-Bowhouse master. And that machine made America, too, on the right-hand side there. That one dates from that period when he was in the States. Too hard to hear. Is that better? Okay. Now, Joe McHale and Richard Hamilton both were interested in machines, mechanisms and ready-made articles. And in this they were partly inspired by Siegfried Gideon, who wrote a book in 1948 called Mechanisation Takes Command. Now Gideon suggested, and I quote, artists should resort to elements such as machines, mechanisms and ready-made articles such as some of the few true products of the period to liberate themselves from the ruling taste. So here we see the beginnings of what might be called a human machine interface in art. And this resulted in Richard Hamilton's Man Machine and Motion exhibition of 1955, which was all about this, the synergy of human and machine. Now the catalogue to this exhibition states, the relation between man and machine is a kind of union. The two act together like a single creature. Well, the show contained approximately 220 mainly photographic documents from all periods of history illustrating the technical evolution of all human mobility. So here we have imagery from space. You can see there's a spaceman in a suit there, sort of to the left, to the right. I'm going to get my hand. Deep Sea Diver. Underwater, sorry, spacemen are here. Deep Sea Diver's underwater machines. Also air was involved with glider and then there's some air and land. So he had space, air, land and sea. And the way that the human and machine worked in synergy together. Now this was a very unusual display at the time and a cross-disciplinary way of thinking using non-art imagery. These are all found images taken from mass media. Hamilton's long-standing interest in science went back to the exhibition growth and form of 1951, which was the ICA's contribution to the Festival of Britain. And in this he was inspired by the biological scientist Darcy Wentworth Thompson. In his book of the very similar name on growth and form. Now Darcy Wentworth Thompson looked at the way things grow and the shapes they take. This is a study of morphogenesis. And this was highly influential in the art world, even inspiring artists to this day. And Hamilton's exhibition, you can see on the right hand side there, was an attempt to bring the arts and sciences together with the aim of demonstrating what they might have in common. And again he's presenting imagery which is non-traditional art imagery. So this is scientific imagery presented as an aesthetic experience. So he's got pictures of microscopic life forms. He had on view some bones and some x-rays. And indeed the display itself was unusual at the time. It was groundbreaking. It was almost an immersive environment. You could walk through this exhibition in amongst these different displays. Very different from a traditional gallery display of works hanging on a wall around four rooms of a wall, of a room. So both of these shows were revolutionary new concepts not really seen before in the art world. And they were the first of a series of landmark exhibitions bringing together the arts and sciences, several of which were staged at the ICA right through to 1968. But of particular relevance for the birth of computer art is the show This Is Tomorrow at the White Chapel in 1956. And this was a collaborative exhibition by the independent group. Now one of the key themes of this show was design and communication and the breaking down of traditional divisions in the arts, which the artists believed, and I'm quoting from the catalogue here, they believed limited their efficiency and made collaboration difficult. So if you didn't have, if you kept the traditional boundaries in art, it limited efficiency and made collaboration difficult. So we needed to break down traditional barriers in the arts, the traditional divisions, sculpture, painting, architecture. There could be a bit more fluidity in what art actually is or was. Now within this exhibition, the catalogue you can see on the right hand side there, is a very major step forward in British art. And this is the very first time that a published reference to the use of a computer with regard to art making is ever published in the UK. So this is 1956, this is tomorrow catalogue, I've got a little one here. And what the artists have done, and you can see this is section 12 of the catalogue, is present a chart detailing potential tools and methods of practice. So I don't hope you can read, but it's as well as traditional things like fingers at the top, arranged in or on hands, operated or produced by the body. We also have further down things like punched paper tape, magnetic surfaces, wire tape and discs, counter wheels, arranged in or on, desk calculating machines, punched card machines, machinery, operated or produced by motor and input instructions. So here we have the key to the new way that these artists are thinking about art production. And a few pages later, they reference the author Edmund C. Berkeley and the concept of a giant brain or machine as a giant brain. Well, Berkeley was an American who published a popular book called Giant Brains or Machines that Think in 1949. And this book used very clear language, it was set out for non-specialists. And it's really both a primer and a manifesto. And in it Berkeley describes concepts such as binary, what binary is, what input and output are. And here you can see a bit of publicity material, which I love from this book produced by Wiley publishers, glimpse your future in giant brains or machines that think. And he also asked lots of interesting questions like can machines think? So this emphasized the futuristic aspect of this subject. And there's a wonderful visual on this book of a head, a brain tapped into some kind of machine there. Straight into the brain. So this really captured people's imaginations. And it appears to have been the reference point for the independent group. Because here's Edmund C. Berkeley on the left-hand side. And he is publishing a chart which is very similar to the one of the independent group. So we have physical objects, electronic tubes, arranged inner-on machinery, operator produced by motor and input instructions. And then he's got a checklist of various things as to whether it's low cost or takes up much space, is it permanent, is it erasable, is it versatile. So at the top he's got nerve cells, arranged inner-on the human brain, operator produced by the body. And it is not very low cost, but it doesn't take up very much space. It seems kind of amusing to us today. But you can see how for a lay person this was very inspiring for an artist to consider this type of technology. Actually, I've got a close-up of that slide, I think. I'm going the wrong way. Oh, there we are. Oh, here we are. This is much better. Okay, here we can see much better. So here's his little checklist. Electrostatic storage tubes, machinery, motor and input instructions, punched paper cards in paper tape, exactly similar to the independent group here who were very inspired by this. Well, in 1953 Hamilton went on to teach at King's College Derm University at the City of Newcastle upon Tyne. And together with Victor Passmore he set up and ran a basic design course, which is a new type of art education in Britain. Now basic design built upon the Bauhaus concept of an integrated method of teaching to train artists and craftspeople to participate in the expanding industrial society. And it placed emphasis on learning through experimentation and focused on the student rather than the curriculum and on the learning process rather than the results. It also focused on the value of group enterprise rather than individual endeavour. Now there had been courses of basic design before at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and several independent group members taught on those courses. But at King's College Newcastle under Hamilton and Passmore this was the most radical and progressive art education available in Britain at this time. So we are starting to get a sense of process as being as important, if not more important than object and ideas like cooperation entering the art conversation. Now basic design in Britain was also a crucial component of the development of abstraction here. Victor Passmore had moved from an impressionistic figurative style to pure abstraction based on the principles of constructivism and was by this time one of the leading art abstract painters in Britain. And he believed and here I quote that a modern basic course should assume a relative outlook in which only the beginning is defined and not the end. So you can see he is at work on a mural for the Festival of Britain. Here are some of Richard Hamilton's lecture slides and he has got on the right hand side you can see an advertisement for Ford motorcars and an early kind of airplane glider. So he's really saying that modern advertising has myths and fantasies as vital as any in history. And again we're seeing part of the fusion of human and machine and the formulation of a new mythology of what might be called the technological superhuman. This fed very much into his man machine motion show which included input from his students and opened at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle before moving down to the ICA. Here's some student work from this period. Again, this was a unique concept in British education at this time. No more copying from plaster casts. No more studying the old masters. This is what had dominated our education since the founding of the Royal Academy. Basic design attempted to take into account the revolutionary developments of modern art including American abstract expressionism as well as popular culture, advertising movies, etc. And these works here are students' exercises in media dexterity. Now the influence of cybernetics spread to other art schools and eventually into polytechnics as the students themselves went on to teach. For example, we have the student of Richard Hamilton's basic course seen here, Roy Ascot. Now Roy Ascot is a very important person in the history of cybernetic art in Britain. He was influenced by the radar technology he encountered during his national service in the RAF and he was inspired by Passmore's constructivism. He incorporated an interactive element into his work that reflected his interest in communications and the theory of cybernetics. He believed and I quote, we are moving towards a fully cybernated society where processes of retroaction, instant communication and automatic flexibility will inform every aspect of our environment. And this has come to be very much true as we know in our present day. So here you can see some of his change paintings. Now he took something here of Jackson Pollock's gestural painting and arrived at the idea that Pollock's paintings contain a visual metaphor for networks. So he was influenced in this by the big Pollock retrospective in 1958 at the White Chapel. But understood in the light of cybernetics this is a work of art as a system which includes the painter, the creator and the viewer. The participant. So Roy Ascot said, if you get six of these basic seeds, elements from Jackson Pollock's gestural painting and paint them on transparent sheets and put them in a runner, they could slide back and forth one behind the other. And that's really what you're doing in painting except that you aren't doing it. You're getting the viewer to do it. The viewer can make their own pictures. So that's what you see here is there's actually a viewer down in that lower slide. Moving the perspex panels with the different images on the back and forth so that you get a change that the viewer can participate in. It's a kind of relationship with the audience in a practical way that wasn't seen in abstract expressionism. Now in 1961 Ascot went to Ealing Art School and there he created an extraordinary new type of second generation basic course which he named the ground course to emphasize learning from the ground up. And this was among the first of the new foundation courses. Foundation courses were brought about by the Coldstream as a result of the Coldstream Report of 1960. And this was part of the radical reform of the whole of the art and design sector at this time. In fact these foundation courses remain an integral part of British art education to this day. Well Ascot's course was revolutionary. He was trying to better equip his students for a cybernetic world that was becoming to a large extent automated and where human perception was mediated through a range of mechanisms. The construction of change was his first substantial reflection on the importance of cybernetics to his own creative process and by extension as a basis for the ground course itself. And here you can see he says cybernetics is concerned with what things do and how they do them and the process within which they behave. It takes a dynamic view of life not unlike that of the artist. Control and communication in animal machine is a proper study for the artist. Well in the studio on the ground course there was no timetable, no official timetable. It was a radical way of working. Ascot developed a way of teaching that was not based on the traditional master and apprentice system. Instead he made behaviour and process a teach for the course. The tutors set the students projects using analog devices such as calibrators for selecting human characteristics and behaviour alterations in a random but systematic manner as seen here. And you could construct your own exercise by choosing the parameters. So this is a physical dial that exists made out of paper cardboard and you can move the different wheels around and select different characteristics through which you can then use as a system for making a piece of art with. You could construct your own exercise by setting the parameters for what you wanted to do. And mind maps were another thing that they used an analog device that they used exercises in analysis and behaviour again. So Ascot is here teaching cooperation and interdependence. And such devices were used as part of a computational way of thinking because of course they did not have access to computers at this date. Well important figures of the day taught at Ealing including Harold and Bernard Cohen and the American Ron Cataill and many others. And Ascot also brought in guest lecturers including Gustav Metzger the inventor of auto-destructive art. And this is artwork with the capacity to destroy itself after a finite existence. And here you can see Metzger performing one of his acid action painting events in London in 61 where he sprayed three large nylon sheets with hydrochloric acid so that they began to disintegrate in seconds and in about 20 minutes there is nothing left but just the ragged remains. Well Metzger later on produced the destruction art symposium in 66 and this attracted famous artists including Yoko Ono who did her cut piece there. If any of you know that work very famous now. Well Metzger was one of the first artists to actually detail the specific use of a computer in relation to his practice. And here you have a sheet showing a number of his manifestos. His 1961 manifesto declared his interest in computer controlled cybernetic systems. He wrote, the immediate objective is the creation with the aid of computers of works of art whose movements are programmed and include self-regulation. Now Metzger realised that computers had amazing potential although his interest in them was primarily as metaphors. He did work for many years on his massive proposal, five screens with computer and you can see it here in the cybernetic serendipity catalogue although he's only done a drawing with four screens. But this was a computer controlled environment a big environmental work, massive work which again would degrade over a period of time, in this case 10 years. And it was made up of giant walls that ejected elements out of them and you can see his drawing for it. It was also interactive. People living nearby could influence the destruction. He wrote, the spectator by means of electronic devices can have a direct bearing on the action of these works. Sounds very much like something you might get today doesn't it? However this was unrealised due to costs, it was massive and way too expensive to ever be realised. But very interesting as a proposal. Metzger's talk at Ealing Art School was extremely influential upon the students and staff and it encouraged Ealing College student Pete Townsend of the band The Who to later invent auto-destructive rock where he smashed his guitars on the stage in the 70s. Another visitor to Ealing was the cybernetician Gordon Pask a member of the British Cybernetics School and he was concerned with the role that computers and new information technologies could play in making a positive contribution to our lives. As a student at Cambridge Pask had actually met Norbert Wiener. Here he is, his early music colour machine and this is probably the first cybernetically inspired performance system in the UK. So this is a machine that he built himself and it really crosses the fields of art, music, performance and science. In fact my colleague Nick Lambert has written as an example of an early piece of interactive art that was so far ahead of its time that the vocabulary to describe it really doesn't exist. It was very interactive the performer could play the machine and light and sound emanated from it. So this is a true joint product of human machine interchange. The human performer didn't control the performance nor did the machine. They worked together in synergy. And in 1964 Pask gave a lecture at Ealing on systems theory and cybernetics and this had a major impact on both staff and students. So the 60s were a time of major revolution in the arts and many traditional critical frameworks were being questioned, undermined and replaced. There was a pervasive sense of failure that somehow the great achievements of European art which many had previously assumed to be the pinnacle of human culture had counted for nothing when the great social catastrophe of the war had unfolded. So people were questioning perhaps the art world has been essentially separated from the society that it sought to represent and serve and into this debate came the technological optimism of the cybernetics school. So after Pask's talk another of the teachers at Ealing Noel Forrester designed this diagram that you can see here and this is just part of it a statement of intention and this was for an exhibition that Roy Ascott held in London and it detailed the interrelated nature of many of the cybernetic ideas around at the time. So we can have things like you can see up there at society as an organism and requiring a vigilant inspection and a viable program for planning of all points. Adaptive control is required to make stable our society and then all of these different things feed into a contingent environment and then there is feedback from various other systems going on. So this is a kind of statement of intent of how a person could consider new forms of art. Will Ascott later move to Ipswich Civic College from 1964 and he became head of fine art there and he constructed a similar type of course to his ground course and for a very brief time Ipswich Civic College became a hotbed of experimental art. One of the students was Brian Eno whom you can see here in the studio. So Ascott's important contribution to art education can be traced through the following generation. Also teaching at Ipswich during the middle 60s was Stroud Cornock a Royal College of Art trained sculptor and here you can see him in the studio with some of his students he's actually on the far right there wearing a big calibrator type device around his neck. Again an analog device that you would rotate and select different behavioural characteristics and then you could act out an experimental piece of art with it. Well later in the late 60s Cornock moved to the city of Leicester Polytechnic where he founded a media handling course and the main principle of this course being that a belief in any medium was valid for artistic activity. And at Leicester during this time was also Ernest Edmunds who we'll hear from later. Stephen Willits was one of the students on Roy Ascott's original ground course at Ealing and he subsequently went on to teach at Ipswich. Now Willits realised that the audience is as important as the artist in creating meaning in the artwork. This is very different from the prevailing model of this time which held that the artist is a solitary creative individual isolated from the rest of the real world not participating in the market economy the ivory tower argument. But Willits said that it's completely wrong and his early student work manifestos that he gave out at gallery openings in the west end very much reflect his thinking at this time. So here we can see the realisation of the potential of the conceptual model and its field of behaviour proposed by the artist is cognition. These were typed by the way pieces of paper handed out to passersby at gallery openings which must have been very radical in 1961. Also we have a page from his notebook you can see here where he's got the artist and their environment and feedback from the environment in a circular sort of going around as a system. How can artwork genuinely involve genuine participation so that the interaction would be a more dynamic exchange between artist and audience? Will its practice used cybernetics as a way a model, a mode of questioning how art could function in society? Much of his work takes the form of diagrammatic drawings and conceptual models and this shifts the focus from the art object to the audience and again he was inspired here by Ross Ashby and Gordon Pask. Willis became a pioneer of conceptual art and especially of socially engaged housing projects from the 1970s. Before we see that slide I'm just going to mention this. Here we have a design, a diagram for a proposal for what a work of art could be as a model. The observer works within a given restriction by the object. The observer creates from his own space with objects. He has given a random situation from which he produces his own order. So again it's about an interactive way of thinking about art. Well as I said he started working with socially engaged projects from the 1970s working interactively with audiences especially in public housing estates and he produced very many writings and here are just two of his books that give you an idea of the sort of thing he was thinking about. Many of these ideas came together in the mid 70s with his work Metafilter which was an interactive work involving two participants mediating through a machine, responding to questions attempting to reach a state of agreement. Well the great interest in cybernetics and art in Britain culminated in the exhibition Cybernetics Serendipity at the ICA in 1968 created by Yasha Raiqard and this was the first gallery show of its type and certainly the first of its kind in Britain. It drew together leading artists from around the world. In fact there were 325 participants, covered a wide range of disciplines including painting, plotter drawings, dance, music, animation, poetry, film, performance, sculpture. And a scaled down version was even toured to the Kokoran Gallery in Washington DC and also to the Exploratorium in San Francisco and on to Japan. And here's an installation view of it and you can see on the left-hand side that's a cybernetics sculpture by Nicholas Schofer, a European artist and on the far right you can just make out the edge there that big round form of one of Gordon Pask's works and this is the colloquy of mobiles and here's a better view of it hanging from the ceiling. These were five robotic like figures mounted on to the ceiling and there were two males, they're the ones in the middle three females around the outside edge and they communicated with each other using light and sound and members of the public could also interact with these using mirrors and torches and flashing lights at them. So this was an exploration of machine to machine and person to machine communication and it was probably the first of its kind in the sense that being interactive immersive environment that you could walk around and through. Recently the colloquy of mobiles has been recreated by the college of creative studies in Detroit and they've remade the entire piece and put modern software behind it and here you can see it on view currently it's at the ZKM Museum in Germany and people can interact with it. Well one of the aims of cybernetic serendipity was to show the scope of what was possible emphasising the optimistic and celebratory nature of the undertaking and it was an enormously influential exhibition upon what might be termed the second generation computer art pioneers who saw this as a young people. And in the wake of cybernetic serendipity a whole new creative world started opening up and including of course the creation of the computer art society which was a group of like minded practitioners first mooted in 1968 and officially founded in 1969 with the exhibition event one and you're looking at the poster of that here this was an interdisciplinary exhibition and workshop and you can see the different types of art works that were undertaken there it was also the first time that a computer entered the Royal College of Art and members used this machine to make work during the weekend and this machine was borrowed from Imperial College Well this new creative world that was opening up for artists was held by advancements in technology computers became less bulky and slightly less expensive as the 60s progressed into the 1970s and here you can see the co-founder of John Lansdown on a teletype in 1969 and he is using this teletype system which is an easier method of getting your instructions into the computer without having to use punched cards on the main frame Lansdown was an architect by profession and he also had an interest in computer choreographed dance and he became a pioneer in producing computer generated notations for dance positions and that's what you see here with some students from the Royal Ballet School and they are holding print out of different types of laban dance notations so that they could then construct performance from it Well all of this excited Gustav Metzger who again became an early member of the computer art society to write if 500 artists were now to enter computer art they would find it difficult to exhaust the technical and aesthetic possibility of the existing mechanisms well we certainly have a lot more than 500 artists using computers nowadays don't we and it's still not exhausted Well books began to be published and all of these were very influential at the time there you can see cybernetics art and ideas by Yasha Reichart which was a couple years after cybernetics serendipity and a little book produced by the world of art at the time of course computers were still elaborate complex machines and gaining access for artists was a major hurdle that had to be overcome many artists had to write learn to write code themselves as we saw lands down doing in the previous pictures or to cultivate a relationship with a technician with whom they could collaborate and actually access the equipment and such relationships were helped by the creation of the polytechnics towards the end of the 1960s now polytechnics were combinations of hitherto separate colleges of art and colleges of technology and they were gathered together under one umbrella organization what administration took charge of a number of different disciplines which again was very new and of course this was particularly important for the early days of computer arts activity because it meant that people from different disciplines could cooperate more easily so artists could have the chance to access computer systems which usually belong to the math department and this is what happened at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry which you can see here these are some stills from a film by Clive Richards who was a graphic designer and he met Ron Johnson who was a computer programmer who said to him I have a machine that can draw well that's very exciting if you're a graphic designer in 1969-1970 and this resulted in spinning gazebo which was a film the very first computer animated film created in a British art school and this polytechnic later became Coventry University in fact art schools became incubators of computer arts during the 70s and at the Slade School of Art a pioneering computer art curriculum was established in 1974 by the systems artist Malcolm Hughes and this was a studio setup with computing equipment much of which the artists in the department constructed themselves and here you can see Dominic Bohr working on a teletype and to the right of that is a little green screen where he can do some previewing and on this side on the left hand side is a flat bed plotter where you could actually output your drawings the Slade in the 70s became a hotbed of activity in the UK particularly for artists interested in generative forms and cellular autonomy well this research was published by me in 2008 and recently this book has been reissued as an e-book with some slight updates and you can find that online and you can also follow me on Instagram where I post occasional snippets of British history from this time so thank you very much and we are now going to invite Professor Ernest Edmonds to join us and tell us all about the polytechnic culture and what it was like to actually make art as an artist during these times thank you I'm starting when I introduce you I've introduced you already so I think we can start thank you so much for being with us today thank you it's great to have you here now I want to start off because you actually saw can we hear alright we're going to get slightly closer this is to come closer to me I'm going to ask you to gently sweep your hair behind your right shoulder is that just for appearance or I did I went several times as a matter of fact well I was interested in cybernetics as so many people were at this time a separate from art it was an important new subject and we read about it we were interested in following it and so on and so forth and of course I went to the ICA to see this exhibition which was inspiring and fascinating it contained some very interesting art but it contained some very interesting technology also and some very interesting challenges and so it was an exhibition from which lots of things could grow and ideas could grow this was really the point it wasn't just a show of some nice art it was quite different it was very stimulated and things like this hadn't been seen before had they been more typical that you would see in the ICA but my specific start was that I was I was working at the city of Leicester Polytechnic and I was making my art I've been making art for a very long time well not a very long time I was only in my 20s and I was making a multi-piece relief which I was having difficulty with making it arranged the way I wanted it now this is what became 19 and I think we can't see it I'm sorry there is something there which I'll mention in a moment and I was I have lived lots of parallel lives so I did a PhD in Mathematical Logic and I had a problem in logic and I found a way of solving it by writing a computer program I wrote a computer program I published the paper in the Journal of Symbolic Logic I didn't have to mention computers because I got the answer that way and you didn't have to say how you got the answer just that it was correct and then I realised that my art was very similar so I thought well hey I know how to deal with this so I wrote a program and in fact there's a bit of the program in a bit of it and I should add something because I think it came first of all was very advanced because it had a computer that A computer the whole institution one computer and only a tiny bit of it would fit in a room it had to fit in a much, much bigger room than this room probably the whole floor of this building speaking air conditioned people in general not being allowed in there he was looked after by technicians and the computer could only do one thing at a time I was very persuasive it turns out and they gave me a three hour slot and if you think about that what I meant was I had the computer universal computer resource I think what that would mean to that to run this program to try to solve my problem for my artwork fortunately I was an intelligent computer programmer I taught myself to program the year before so that was pretty good in those days I taught myself to program carefully and so what I did was as a computer programmer I taught myself to program carefully what I did was as my program was looking for a solution if it got anywhere near I got it to print it out on paper and then go on and try and do better and better the truth was in three hours my program never found a solution but it got quite close and just on this side here you can see there are two of the solutions that it got that were near solutions and the pencil pencil marks what I saw that if I changed those three round that was the solution so a little bit of human addition to the computer's power and we were there and so I had used a computer to make a what was really a relief slightly in the systems art tradition a physical object a physical object a sculptural Stroud Cornock you've already had the mention of well this artwork I wanted to spray it and I wanted to spray it with high quality paint and so on so I wandered over to the art department and said do you have a spray booth here and I found someone who ran the spray booth and that was Stroud Cornock he was interested in all kinds of media including spray guns and using that kind of paint so he helped me like that and of course we got talking and became friends and when he realised that I'd used a computer program he got very interested because of the history that Catherine has already told you about his thing so this was one of the newly formed polytechnics the city of Leicester and this was only one of a handful of centres around the UK at this time that had people who were interested in doing this kind of work so you're saying that because of this polytechnic structure you were able meet someone like Stroud Cornock exactly so the great thing about it was this mixture of subjects not just like a traditional university which was really much more limited in its range but we had architecture we had fine art we had graphic design all on the same camp and computer science and so on and I was able to walk around all of that for reasons that will skip because it was a complete accident I became a lecturer in computing and I thought how do I make my job interesting well I need to do stuff with art because that's what I'm really interested in and I could just walk across to the next building fantastic that's quite radical at the time indeed it was and would have been impossible in the university that I had studied in before which was Leicester University because it didn't have any of those departments no no so this is why this type of art becomes quite inter-disciplinary yes and being inter-disciplinary was central I was inter-disciplinary personally yes so you were suited to it and the environment in which I was working was inter-disciplinary and this was crucial and Stroud and I in fact set up a group within the university which was very deliberately inter-disciplinary in order to explore and discuss the future and you saw the future as being something that could be enhanced through this type of art production it was a new way of thinking about behaviour and the way that the mind works and the way that interactivity could work that would be different and would have potential for the future in art I mean we thought that artists should engage with the present and the future as it were should engage at the cutting edge of society and as you heard in Catherine's talk before cybernetics, interaction and so on were things at the cutting edge of society and we saw those as very much the things that we should engage with as artists and did so tell us about a couple of those projects that you actually engaged with, there was an important one I think was it the first one, data pack of 1969 okay so Stroud and I wrote a paper which is eventually, which we presented at a conference in 1970 and was then published in the journal Leonardo a couple of years later it was essentially a manifesto and to give a sort of one-sentence view of it we said the future of art was in interaction roughly speaking, there's a little bit more to it than that you're still using interaction to this day and still doing it to this day and this was a series of talks at this conference organised by the computer art society and they also had a space in the exhibition that was associated with the conference and we thought well let's put something in the exhibition that illustrates our point so jointly we made an interactive artwork extremely primitive by modern standards that was running in that show using a teletype, a graph plotter and so on where people could have a conversation with the computer I think you can see that here that's Stroud and myself working on it and you can see that he is hooked up and there is the teleprinter there's a printer indeed and below it you can see the paper tape which was used to destruct the computer what to do and so this was an interactive artwork in the sense that someone would have in quotes if I may put it like that a conversation with the computer through the teletype and that would drive what was ever drawn out so it would be individually determined and they would take away a data pack which is a drawing and a dialogue and blah blah blah and completely unique because every single time and everyone was unique yes and it couldn't be repeated because each communication exchange that happens is a unique exchange so we weren't proud of this as an artwork but we were proud of it as an illustration of where art could go in the future of course this was before PCs and whatnot we have to say again we take a lot of this for granted today it's actually not that long ago isn't it now there was something called the communications game which was very important yeah so a year later I was following my interest in cybernetics and looking more generally into something called general systems theory and animal and human behaviour and so on and so forth and I got very interested in this and thought I should try to explore this more extensively in my art and came up with the idea of making an artwork where the art was in the interaction between people through an electronic system in fact through a network actually I was making it at the same year that the internet was invented so so we didn't actually have the internet there was no web or anything like that but I had a soldering iron and I could build a network build things yeah by designing it electronically as you would need to do that but that's what I did then and where people in my first version of it six people could separately and separate from one another interact with the system where they were in fact interacting with other people transformed by the system at the actual system itself is not the artwork is it the artwork happens in the interaction between the people the art is in the behaviour as mediated through the technology and so this was the start of something that I'm still doing I mean I was even working on yesterday a whole stream of work which is like what you might call networked art where the core of it is the interaction between people in remote locations and of course these days it's easy to do with the internet and it's taken on a whole new meaning because when we were all locked down it was a way that you could communicate with other people overseas and create artworks with them so in fact I made a piece that was shown a few months ago where one part of it was in Leicester in the UK and the other part was in the British Pavilion the Dubai Expo and with the internet it's easy yeah it's easy alright now there was also a big conference that you organised called the invention of problems and there were actually two of them one held at Leicester so this was important this came out of the idea that Stroud and I had that interdisciplinary activity was really important and would drive the art forward and the invention of problems well the art the creativity wasn't concerned with solving well defined problems that's easy you know in fact Einstein said if you can define a problem then it's easy you just got to do some maths the real problem is defining the problem in the first place so this term the invention of problems became the leading light of what we wanted to do and so we brought together people including Edward in Artifices you've seen one of his works here and many other people Steve Willards and so on came to Leicester for these two events also talking with computer scientists who were doing interactive stuff and we were trying to explore what were the implications of this new technology what were the implications of this new thinking and this new understanding of psychology that the cybernetics implied absolutely and Stephen Scrivener was a young artist who saw this he did and that's inspired him enormously he went on to the Slade to do some computational work Malcolm Hughes' first cohort that we mentioned there in 1974 we saw Dominic Form later on in the late 70s in the studio and he became important in this story didn't he, Steve? He did so two remarks about that first about Stephen Scrivener an interesting thing happened to me personally which is in the mid early 70s I had a department that I was in came to me and said the Science Research Council which is what it was called in those days are giving us a research studentship we could allocate to someone would you like to take it on and find a student so I thought well can I use this to further my interest in computer based art and the exploration of computers in art so I, but I could see this was a bit dodgy because this was like meant to be a Science Research Council thing so I rang the Science Research Council and said look I'm wondering about allocating this studentship to a student who will look at the implications of computers for art what do you think and they said that will be fine we'd be very happy so with that ammunition I then went to my head of department and said that this is what I want to do and the Science Research Council said it's fine so so you couldn't say no to that he didn't say no to that so the next thing I did is I went to talk to Stroud Cornock and I said who should I can you recommend anyone and he said well we had a really good student all the year before who's now at the Slade called Stephen Scrivener why don't we talk to him and I talk to him and later on Lester became an important centre for early PhDs it was a direction didn't it yes and significantly these first doctorates were for technically-orientated projects rather than for traditional media like painting now we need to point out here that prior to this time as an artist you could not get a PhD it didn't exist so it was only for PhDs were for doctors and different professions not art art historians perhaps art historians perhaps why were the first PhDs why were you able to get the first PhDs for artists in Britain out of Lester well it was in a way the trick of seeing that there was something you could do that was involved both in pushing the art forward and as a matter of fact pushing the technology forward which was something we knew about in terms of research and PhDs because of the research culture because of the research culture now it wasn't always technology because another person who did a PhD with me just after Stephen was Susan Tebi now she used mathematics in her art she didn't use a computer but nevertheless the same principle technologically-orientated kind of systematic sort of way systematic way and so I think that it's worth me adding Malcolm Hughes was an important member of the systems group Susan Tebi was assistant artist were very important in the influence they had on the thinking their work, their systematic work their use of mathematics of series, of repetition and so on was easily brought in to this technological world and so that people like Michael Kidna Edwardian Artovich and so on who came into our community through the Slade were very important in influencing the people writing software like in the early days people like Stephen Scrivener for example and that you could get a PhD this way with this technologically-orientated or systems-driven project because the examining bodies felt that it was easier or there was a way that you could examine it that you could justify it because otherwise how are you going to award a doctorate to somebody who's making a big painting because that's more subjective? Well we also had another big advantage with the polytechnics which is we came under the auspices of the CNA and the polytechnics were set up to deal with more practical matters than the old universities did so that all things relating outcomes in the world were more acceptable in polytechnics and the CNA in its wisdom had a slightly different rule for the submission of a PhD and it said, and I can't remember the exact words but it said that the PhD submission may include other material of some kind this meant it could be an exhibition it could be a painting et cetera et cetera this is the beginning of the practice-based PhD because initially before that time we need to point out that PhDs were written only so if you're an artist you're creating something visual you're creating an object in the world how are you going to produce a big body of written a big book of written but as you say there was this way the governing body the CNA was the governing body so to take my two examples two people I've mentioned already it was an interactive software that his examiners had to interact with a part of the examination as well as read a thesis Susan Tebi mounted an exhibition of her work that the examiner had to go around and look at as well as read the thesis so this was an innovation that was available to the polytechnics that gave them a big step forward in terms of PhDs in this area and you were really an innovator in this I think Ernest because then subsequently you would have other colleagues from different universities or educational establishments like George Mallant at the Royal College of Art would come to you and send students to you who wanted to do PhDs but there wasn't any means to get one well that particularly happened with the Slade so we had a very strong relationship with Slade so Malcolm Hughes who I see is a very important figure in this thing wouldn't give PhDs because the Slade didn't allow them they didn't have the rules to do that so he would pass students to me so we had a sort of arrangement and sometimes I would use him as an external supervisor or external examiner or whatever so you could be an artist signed up at the Slade but you could get your PhD through the polytechnic in Leicester because the Slade is part of the University of London and they don't allow PhDs for artists at this point and in fact there are still problems in the University of London with what's allowed to so there's a history of that as well so I think that's very interesting because we were kind of thinking about a thread of through art schools in this session this evening weren't we starting when we saw Richard Hamilton and then we saw Roy Ascot and then we were really getting right down and we're now well into the 1970s with you and your PhD programs maybe I could say something else but in time which is that when I was earlier than we've just been talking about I was a student at Leicester University and one of the philosophy lecturers introduced me to the staff of the foundation course the basic course at the art school which was run by people who'd been taught by Hamilton and Passamore Basic design became a phenomenon and the students went out all over and for a brief moment it became the most radical art education Britain and changed the face of British education still existing today the evidence of it foundation courses are still the rock bone of a British art school education as a foundation course you do your foundation then you do three years and in research the practice based PhD is now a standard thing and lots of people go for it don't they indeed they are and in fact a handbook has just come out of the Montfort University which used to be Leicester Polytechnic about practice based research fantastic and you were an innovator in that okay now what else have we got let's talk a little bit about your own work it does come from a constructivist tradition and we've mentioned that it incorporates interaction it also incorporates a lot of colour you're really keen on colour beautiful colour so yeah absolutely so how do you actually go about what kind of a system could you use to go about making an interaction between the audience and the art well that's a big question so let me just try to pick off some bits of that first of all the colour I mean what's been important to me is the colour modelling where the colour modelling relates to the perception of colour okay so a lot of people using computers use red green blue specification which is completely useless because it has got nothing whatsoever to do with how we perceive colour so you have to find other ways to do it okay and this has meant that one can deal with the sort of things that artists like Albers dealt with computationally which actually means more subtly okay so such it if you like so this has become quite an important element of it and so how you interact with colour is must be can therefore be dealt with by the computer in much more subtle ways like becoming a little bit lighter or becoming a little bit closer to the blues or something like that but the point about the other point in your question really is about how do you go about the interaction element and this is very difficult and the reason that I've done a lot of work in my life on human computer interaction is the truth is we didn't know enough about it and we still don't so we can't predict how a human will react and so a lot of the work of designing human computer interaction and in my case particularly interactive art has to be kind of experimental right you actually have to have people interact with it before you understand what its nature is and so one thing that has been important is this idea of the design process or the creative process of an artwork needing to include partly finished work interacting with the public possibly in a public space if it's meant to be a public space artwork in order to find out how they react to it and when we were working a few years ago in Sydney Australia we were lucky enough to get a bit of the space of the powerhouse museum in Sydney which is a very well visited museum allocated to my research group and we called it beta space and beta space was curated by us our research group and we put interactive artworks in it but we put interactive artworks in it which were in a beta state that's to say the artist had made it had created it, it worked and everything but they hadn't actually had the public interacting with it and they could put it in there and then they could observe it or get people to observe it for them or they could interview people who interacted with it and find out about it and then go back into the studio and modify it in various ways so that it met their expectations and that sounds to me like good old fashioned feedback in cybernetics indeed that's exactly what it is but it's building that into this process of making art and not afraid to show something that is in process so not just working on your own in private in the studio and then saying now it's all finished now because that doesn't work for interactive art because we can't predict enough we don't know enough psychology to predict enough about what that work really is and the work is embedded in the interaction not what it looks like that's a very important thing that goes back to your idea of the communication game that the work of art takes place in between the participants who are engaging in it absolutely maybe we'll pause there and have a few questions yes, thank you so much I think I wanted to say how great it was to have just this conversation follow your talks an actual living artist a continuum just so I have a lot of questions that relate in some sense to your talk but also follow through to some of the things that come up in conversation so while you think of questions I'll start and one of the things that really struck me and I think you hinted at it quite a lot in your talk is the role of the political in this particular moment because I think in some sense there is this idea of thinking about society as a system this kind of technological optimism what can you do when you think about society as a system but also in some sense with the autodestructive stuff breaking down political systems as well I just be really curious to hear your thoughts about what was the role of the political in some of this in these sort of networks in some sense and then also really to hear both of your thoughts on this question well I think I've got to mention Gustav Metzger here haven't we really earnest because Gustav Metzger for those of you who don't know he passed away a few years ago sadly he was on the kinder transport he was born in Nuremberg and he was put on the kinder transport and taken out of Nazi Germany became a refugee to Britain and the trauma that he a large portion of his family was killed subsequently by the Nazi regime and a large portion of his work has been dealing with the trauma of warfare well where do these computing systems come from they come largely from weaponry research out of the second world war so Gustav was very good in the early days when we were talking like you know 6061 we saw his out of destructive art of reminding people that computers have the potential to be the most totalitarian tools ever used against society I think that's sort of he actually used the word totalitarian didn't he and reminding people that there's a social responsibility that comes with using this new technology and of course in those days the war and the remembrance of it was much closer to people and we're so far removed from it now although having said that we've got some major issues going on in the east which we hope we don't have to repeat any of this again but I think that people were Gustav particularly in his work was trying to and even to a lesser extent Stephen Willets although not in such a overtly political way to talk about how can we use these things for good with always the remembrance that they come from a weaponry and we're invented to control bombs what do you think about that Ernest? Of course that's absolutely right about Gustav but I think I'd add to that something sort of slightly broader which is that I think especially during the 60s we were all very concerned about this hierarchical view where in some people's minds the artist was some special person who dictated what was good and handed it down for the benefit of everyone to get some thing from it. And there certainly is no interaction or participation involved in that level because the artist knew everything was a kind of God and that was a political position that we were against and we saw the good side of the computer as giving us a way out of that certainly Stephen Willis stuff which was less obvious than the mescars was in that area but interactive computing altogether did this so the idea that the quality of the interaction the handing over of some of the creative experience even to the public from the artist that the artist should be enabling and encouraging creativity and others was a political position a very important we don't seem to have that idea today I don't think so much but I think that the idea is here in a conflict in artificial intelligence because to be very very brief on this but the conflict in artificial intelligence is between those people who think that AI should be used to make things that do clever stuff for humans and instead of humans to those people who think that it should be used to amplify human creativity pleasure and creativity which goes back to your wonderful article which was the human amplified by the computer so that probably enough so that was the question really in 1970 but it's still very much here isn't it we're still struggling with some of these ideas today thank you so I have many more questions but I think we have questions from the audience and also in the rooms so what we've done is we've switched it to the Q&A mic and I'm going to take yours talking of interaction there's lots of people online really enjoying this conversation from home I think the first question that we've received from someone called Christopher King at home actually just relates to what you have just said Ernest and he asked would a true honest application of cybernetic ideas to art practice dismantle the concept slash identity of the artist as produced under capital and there's a little wink at the end of that question so a provocation there and I think you were speaking to that sort of the anti hierarchy that sort of embedded in a lot of these ideas and thinking but of course it really should apply to all art Marcel Duchamp's made the point that he doesn't exist until someone looks at it and he was referring to a static artwork ok and so we need to reorientate our thinking in this way and so the same thing applies to this interactive art only more so that the artist is still doing something important but doesn't own everything and it's not some god who just tells everyone what's wonderful I had some questions about lines of influence so going right back to the first part of your talk with the lovely photograph of the independent group sitting on their EAMS chairs and thinking about kind of transatlantic connections and how obviously the Smithsons were friends with the EAMS but some of the systems processes are the kind of the table with the kind of hand fingers body it's very reminiscent of the kind of EAMS studio research processes so what was the kind of lines of influence thinking about that and then also thinking about going into your question about politics and the kind of work of someone like Elliot Noise for IBM the kind of real time feedback loops which then going from this kind of industrial design setting then kind of moved into a kind of war room setting so yeah transatlantic influences well yes I mean cybernetics was very much both sides of the Atlantic and it became I think I mentioned at some point I said something like it permeated every aspect of technological thought at the time you know thinking persons were very much interested in cybernetics weren't they earnest at the time and so I think that yes there's all these people were very much interconnected and we were actually speaking earlier Ernestine saying that things were seem to be smaller in those days you knew more people and you were introduced to people by other people because before the internet you couldn't just google something and so this is why conferences became so important places where people could meet and exchange ideas and your colleagues in different educational institutions were important so hence I wanted to really show how it passed from teacher to student the student went on to teach somewhere else so these ideas spread out like that and we take it for granted now that we can communicate with somebody in Australia just like that on the social media instinct in the 60s and 70s that was much harder to do so these lines were very much more important and I think everybody read the same books didn't they and nowadays there's so many books you couldn't possibly read everything but you could have more body of knowledge was easier to comprehend amongst thinking people am I explaining that very well what do you think Ernestine I think it was very important the personal connections and the personal networks which were quite small and were not limited to any one country necessarily but of course geography matter because then I remember for example talking with an important scientist and he said I've got to ring off now because I'm expecting a phone call from Chicago because in those days if you were having a phone call it was a big deal which meant that the geography mattered more than it does today but nevertheless I've been certainly in what we were doing at the city of Leicester Polytechnic was very much concerned with the network that we had with other people elsewhere I've mentioned the slide but of course it wasn't just the slide but that was important that this network of people who knew one another and this was important also in the sense that we were all kind of on the outside or on the edge of the art world of the day because we were pushing things forward we weren't concerned with the Royal Academy or even pop art and so we needed those connections because there was no institutional support for it and the computer art society we saw the poster from the event one exhibition it was a membership organisation for any like minded person wanted to join it was very very open there were people in South America there were people in Japan there were people all over Europe there were people in Canada it had really wide range and they communicated with a bulletin that was mailed to the post I have a follow up question sorry and following your thoughts on the transatlantic nature of things but also I'm thinking about some sort of work in post independent India where like in the 1950s this idea which was coming very much from America the time of the kind of democratic potential of technology and how this kind of thinking about society and how communication especially and how design schools could really do things so that the people like trans and art and technology working with sort of community groups and so on and I was just curious honest about whether Alester were there did you have visiting do you have much sort of interactions with people coming from elsewhere to do maybe as you're not PhDs but were there systems in place or was there a time when systems started becoming systems is a bit over used in this context well formally I would say probably not but informally yes but they were done through personal connections and most of us had international personal connections and they got joined together sometimes interestingly encouraged by active students who were sometimes really much very much part of the development of these networks completely more than some of the staff were and so sometimes the student body was quite important in terms of moving things forward in this particular way and I remember I'm just a little bit of a side Yasha Reichart got a letter of introduction to IBM in the US and she was able to take this and access a whole host of people who were working everywhere from Bell, telephone labs which she could bring back some of the work to put on view but she had this letter of introduction it was quite important then your talk is what was wedded to the history of the British Art School and a lot has been said in praise of the polytechnic well I mean I wanted to say a few things that were a little less positive about this because you mentioned that the Coldstream report in 1960 so William Coldstream was director of the Slade School of Art for a long period of time and you know it could be suggested that the diploma in art design which was the result of his report, series of reports actually through to the 1970 was influenced British art schools with a kind of slade way of thinking in all sorts of ways but one of the things claims you made when you mentioned Roy Ascot was that the foundation course was an artifact of the Coldstream report which is not really the case it came out of the process and partly it came out of the process precisely because Coldstream was tasked by the Minister of Education with first of all the Ministry of Education was fed up with having this centralized system of art awards so effectively the diploma in art design allowed those who were able to run it relatively autonomous of the central system now they were not very pleased to give that up, that autonomy when polytechnics came along and said right we're absorbing all of you lots and so there's quite a lot to say about the about that process first of all the foundation course emerged as much because many colleges of art weren't qualified or equipped to run the diploma and there are students needed so they needed to do something so they ran foundation courses and then later on I mean you mentioned the CNAA but I mean for example my lecturer Ken Rowert at Leeds Polytechnic not only did they resist of course the business of being absorbed into Polytechnic and this also relates to the basic design trend that you were mentioning but also they didn't particularly he there's a Guardian article which I have that he wrote which challenges the notion of art degrees because the diploma slid into becoming an art degree and you talked about the sort of top end of the academic process with the PhD and that was interesting but I think that this sort of battle really going on you know between 69 and 70 involves for example at Lanchester Coventry School of Art stroke Lanchester precisely art and language as you know were closed down because why because the director of the Polytechnic wrote to the CNAA and said how can you run these courses effectively because they don't have any outcome they're not making any things so in a way the cybernetics kind of got around that and it's very interesting I mean because you're a mathematician you know that the word machine doesn't necessarily even refer to anything that's actually physical either but it can be just what we would normally think of as an inference a mathematical process and you're a logician too but even more interestingly so anyway I'll leave it at that You're totally right because I had to move very quickly so I apologise because I did very very quickly there's a lot more research here but you're quite right that that period was full of turmoil and that there were a lot of arguments and discussions going on during this and how do we want and how are we going to do it and who's going to run it and what's it going to be like is very controversial a lot controversial at the time So if I could just quickly comment that I could add to many more negatives to your negatives easily but it's just so happens that in the area of the potential of cybernetics and computing it happened to work well or quite well and in fact not as well as it should have because art students can still grow up without knowing anything about computers which is a bit weird in the modern world it's like going back 100 years and saying they do a painting course and never touch oil paint but nevertheless the round picture is that in the area that we're talking about today the polytechnic with its multidisciplinary capability did offer benefit but that isn't to say that everything was great from the art school point of view and as I say I could add many many negatives to the ones you've just mentioned and indeed not every polytechnic did this did it Ernest? Lest I add one advantage that of course it was a college of technology merging with a college of art and the principle of the college of art became the director of the polytechnic so we have a slight advantage over some of the other polytechnic but I mean there are many polytechnics you don't see this the art person never went down the hall and spoke to the person who was in charge of the computer is very rare we're talking about a small branch of art here which even to this day we've got issues of marginalization about being outside of the art world and there's a whole host of reasons and arguments about why that may or may why that might be we're talking about a small branch I thought there was someone who the technology comes from I'm not speaking to this sorry how it comes from the military and things like that and also what you're saying about art as needing to include this interactive process because I feel very strongly about that come from a technology I guess background and I see that problem that's really the main issue with technology is that it's not including that interactive process it's almost impossible really to do that so it's a very similar problem that's happening on these huge skills and I was wondering what you see as being ways to kind of solve those problems together other than education is really the only thing that I can think of as a common programs for both but I was just wondering about art as a solution to that or technology You set up a whole series of conferences creativity and cognition and some of this your innovation was to address many of these questions that were just asked weren't they Well I guess when we talked it wasn't just me but anyway I was very much part of that when we started that particular series of conferences which is still going and if you want to come to Venice in a couple of weeks that's the latest one it was set up because some of us found that there were all these people in art talking about technology in meetings and there was no real expert in technology turning up and then all these people in AI and technology talking about creativity and there were no artists invited even and they were even kind of not wanting them and we thought this was really a very very unhealthy situation so we started this series of conferences which brought these people together so you've got famous people who never even heard of one another because they came from completely different fields but I believe this is really important as an activity not just for the one conference series but for organising our educational system and so on that we really need to bring these things together and not divide things up as systems tend to be because it's usually at the boundaries or across the boundaries where the excitement is where the future is it's in the gap so if you say you've got to decide it used to be like in art schools are you a sculptor or a painter what a crazy idea it was and are you a humanities person or a science person these questions are stupid and very non-productive and they don't have to be they don't have to be the mechanisms to overcome them they're funding mechanisms we don't have time to talk about them fascinating I think on that note we have to close for today although I still have lots of burning questions and I imagine you do as well so we're really just moving the conversation to the drinks reception so we can talk over glass one thank you so much for coming and thank you so much to Catherine