Owen Law
Mari Dumett
HTA313E
December 21, 2015

Cybernetic Expression: Hybridity, Sociology and Transformers

Cybernetics, famously defined by philosopher Norbert Wiener in 1948 as “the science of communication and control between humans and machines” (Ballard, 1) has become a significant framework in the worlds of art, critical theory, architecture, and ethics in relation to the explosion of technology’s involvement in modern life arguably since before the term was even coined.

If we can consider technology the development of tools and practices for the performance of specific performances, then we must consider that the advent of these technologies, their half-life’s, outgrowths, and their significant effect on our behaviour has a long history. The emergence of favors, debt and slavery, currency, credit, speculation and futures have been laid out in detail by professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, David Graeber in his 2011 book Debt: the first 5000 years. Aside from giving technology and tools an important lineage parallel to the evolution of currency, it created an opportunity to connect the anthropology of economies to the equally modern study of technology’s internalizing effects. In another essay published only in the 21st century by professor of architecture David Gersten’s Discrete Machines of Desire in parallels the profound cognitive alterations these economic developments had on people and our conceptions of time and desire, stating that the “concept of deferred consumption is the primary function of currency, and it has a direct impact on the capacity of capital instruments to mediate time.” (Gersten, 4) and the Manhattan Project. Described by Gersten as “Linking capital, politics, technology, life and death” (5), Oppenheimer is implicated in the birth of two perversely paradigmatic technologies, nuclear weapons and digital computation.

Computers, credit, and the development of nuclear weaponry have been widely identified as underpinnings in the conception of human identity and behavior, technologies developed in consideration of these have understandably spawned countless critical artistic investigations of the limitations, roles, ethics, and internalized effects of technology (consumer and industrial) on self-perception. An early and prominent example of this practice is the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artist of the interwar Weimer Republic, Otto Dix. He along with many European artists following the first World War  produced art in the context of a society dealing with the unprecedented effects of new type of warfare made possible by seemingly insatiable technological advances. The historical ‘Invalid’ not only faced new dangers, mechanical, chemical and psychological, but came home looking much different and was recontextualized to reflect the difference in perception. Injured veterans were reassembled and plainly reinserted into society after suffering injuries that would have easily killed a soldier in previous wars, and were fitted with prosthetic and provisional limbs. This was an early visibly cybernetic population living adjacent to the rest, and made visible new dimensions between life and death, one extended by technology

Otto Dix, The Skat Players - Card Playing Invalids, 1920

Nam June Paik is recognized as a pioneer in bringing then contemporary and groundbreaking technology and it’s pressing sociological impact into the context of art. Raised in a wealthy industrialist household, Paik received an international education in both Japan and Korea, and received a degree in aesthetics after writing a dissertation on the compositions of modernist musician Schonburg. When the opportunity arose to move to Germany to pursue and art practice, Paik became fixated by the work of the renowned music theorist and Fluxus influencer, John Cage. Paik’s career in art materialized human sentimentalities, desires, and play, and was the beginning of practice based on the provocation of crossing human and machine systems,  Along with his frequent collaborator, the Japanese artist Shuya Abe, Paik posited important artistic gestures in humanizing systems and technology.  In a performance of Robot K-456, a 20-channel anthropomorphized robot doffs it’s hat at the audience along with a variety of other humanoid gestures. It started it’s life as an androgyne and later acquiring a sandpaper and flint penis. Following some complaints, the penis was removed and the duo recast it a female. After moving to New York in 1964 and adopting the television as his primary expressive medium, Paik and Charlotte Moorman performed the celebrated TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1965). Moorman performed the cello while outfitted with a bra designed by Paik with screens in place of the cups.. Described by curator Douglas Fogle, the bra was designed as “an object which conflates the use value of technology with the exchange value of fashion, Paik saw his TV Bra as a way of humanizing the technological by forcing it into a hybrid relationship with the body.” (Fogle, 1)


Nam June Paik, TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1965

Fogle added, “By conflating sexuality (Moorman performed clothed only by the TV Bra), performance art, corporate entertainment media (the live signal on the two televisions), classical music, and sculpture, Paik used this technology to subvert the numbing effects of the electronic age that McLuhan alluded to.”(Fogle, 1) Controversy, praise, and conversation ensued which levied the imperative question of hybridity to new participants. Paik soon after embodied his position of an international artist tasked with spearheading the pursuits of new media, video, and cybernetic art. Ideas of cybernetics and post/transhumanism began to proliferate through these new networked circles grappling with radically expanding fields of possibility. The inception and ubiquity of the internet soon offered unparalleled access to these circles for expanded dialogue and collaboration.

In present day we’re afforded infinite digital and virtual platforms to knowingly or unknowingly participate in furthering many of Paik’s profferings, what might have seemed inconceivably perverse in Paik’s time is now commonplace, infinitely reproducible, and ultimately unregulatable on the internet. In one of immeasurable examples, an artist going by the username ‘The Trunchbull’ (shokveyv.tumblr.com) renders and uploads pornographic images depicting anthropomorphic robots from the animated Transformers franchise. Ranging from masturbation and intercourse, the rampant extension of fanart to more taboo fetishes such as snuff and torture suggests a metaphysical extension to Paik’s initial innuendos. Inherent to this practice is the sheer proliferation of this type of imagery and the constant appropriation of source material for the sake of depicting a desired image, not only does the content depict hypersexualized cybernetics, but the process of creating and uploading for shared viewership in the public domain demonstrates a desire for shared consumership and often a disregard for where the content ends up as other web users might download, alter, upload which rejects the idea of original content. This culture developed directly as an externality of the internet, and has evolved into political debate conflicting with existing systems ownership, identity and surveillance. Virtual depictions of technology such as robots demonstrating sentience and experiencing sexual pleasure, a right once reserved for organic organisms, adds layers of complexity and tension that shifts the paradigm beyond cybernetics to one artificial intelligence in which the line of what constitutes a “living” versus a “mechanical” thing is irrevocably blurred. If cybernetics posited the potential for control over systems which use technology, the paradigmatic turn towards artificial intelligence suggests that that “control” was inevitably an a time-bound illusion, a simple misconstruction that technology is inherently dependent on humans and not the reverse. This limited framework failed to account for a time beyond the interstitiality of technology controlled by man and for technology that controls itself. One doesn’t need to look further than the decisive move to the algorithmically designated derivatives market, and the financial crash of 2007-2010 in which human stock traders were replaced with computer algorithms that trade using mathematical models to recall the perils of assuming humans are essential or even necessary in the sphere of technological systems.



Turnbull, stills from untitled animated gif, 2015

On one hand we might be conditioned to believe that since technology derives from man, control over technology inherently belongs to mankind. Naim June Paik and a host of others cybernetic thinkers thought to challenge this construction by suggesting an unconsidered mutuality that incorporated the technological with the organic, thus leveling the playing field. Contemporarily we're left to reconcile a world of systems delusions where man and the accompanying analog systems and sensibilities still suppose themselves as the unequivocal inventor, subject, and user of technology despite persistent technological testimony that unseats the ideation of human dependence or mutuality. This new pervasive reality casts man in the light of hubris for not conceiving of a world of human subjugation under technologically controlled systems. In 1974 Ted Nelson, a sociologist specializing in information technology, wrote in his book regarding human knowledge, ComputerLib/Dream Machines "EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly." (Nelson, DM45). In 1987 Nelson revised this statement to include that "Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't." ( Nelson, DM31). Paik’s work generated a platform for lasting discussion, significantly the necessary concession of man’s propensity to internalize, underestimate, and minimize the sociological impacts of technology with the rate at which we familiarize ourselves with them. The ideas that concerned Paik; hybridity, imagining and performing a ‘cyberneting’ of things, as well as considering the consequences of our proximity to those things, have progressed incrementally throughout history, presently technological and social systems plunge and surge like breaking waves. How long can this framework of progress last? Does recognition of these systems change anything?








Ballard, S. (2013). Nam June Paik, cybernetics and machines at play. In K. Cleland, L. Fisher and R. Harley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium of Electronic Art (pp. 1-4). Sydney: ISEA.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville, 2011. Print.

Gersten, David. "Discrete Machines of Desire: From Edward Bernays to Robert Oppenheimer." Technology and Human Desire. New York. Lecture.

Fogle, Douglas. "TV Bra for Living Sculpture." Print.

Nelson, Theodor H. Computer Lib ; Dream Machines. Rev. ed. Redmond, Wash.: Tempus of Microsoft, 1987. Print.