Page 46 - Studio International - March 1969

may be the feeling (a rather different one)
that in a specialized respect they are more
perfect than the human optical system.
In his evocation of the organic, Tsai obeys the
principles of cybernetics. The analogy with
the organic is far more thoroughgoing and
direct than in the case of an artist like Pol
Bury. Bury's post-1960 work, with its slow and
barely perceptible stirrings, reminds one of
organic life. But in his case the motor and
wiring are all hidden; what he does is
cunningly transform the monotonous re-
petition of a simple electric motor into
apparently arbitrary and unpredictable stir-
rings, which belie their mechanical origin.
The reason why his artifacts strike us as un-
cannily alive is that most of us in 1969 still 4
Kinetic wheel 1965
tend to think of machinery as being essentially Coll: Mr and Mrs Burt Stern, New York
repetitive, like a clockwork motor. Pol Bury
5
plays on this preconception of machinery by Harmonic sculpture 1968
disguising the motor's repetitiveness. He traps Coll: Mr and Mrs David Fox, Potomac
6
us into the admission that his artifacts, Untitled
though evidently driven by machinery, have Photo: Eugene Edward Weise
none of the characteristics of the machinery
we know of.
Bury's work, however engaging (and I have
introduced it here to make a necessary distinc-
tion rather than to disparage it), is a private
backwater compared with the possibilities
which Tsai opens up. Tsai's work demon-
strates, far more tellingly than any didactic
model could, how out-of-date is the idea of
machinery as monotonously and inexorably
repetitive. The more advanced machinery
of today possesses that very characteristic—
sensitivity to a changing environment—which
in the past has been regarded as the antithesis
of mechanical behaviour; and the theory of
cybernetics suggests that the analogies
between mechanical and organic behaviour
are accurate and profound. Tsai's objects are
self-organizing systems, like the sea-anemones
or water-plants which they evoke, in that they
maintain, by the control of certain variables,
a stability or equilibrium necessary to their
survival. They are of course less complex than
natural organisms, for the simplest living
creature performs far more complex trans-
formations of energy resources than any man-
made machine. But cybernetics recognizes a
type of resemblance between one system and
another which is less complete than one-to-one
equivalence; this is called homomorphism.
`Two machines' (writes Ashby in An Introduc-
tion to Cybernetics) 'are homomorphic when
they become alike if one is merely simplified,
i.e. observed with less than full discrimina-
tion.' A more familiar word which conveys
the idea is 'abstraction', or (in the mathe-
matical sense) 'model'.
`No living organism . . . is perfectly static'
write D. and K. Stanley-Jones in The
Kybernetics of Natural Systems. 'Life maintains
always a dynamic and therefore fluctuating
equilibrium between opposing tendencies . . .
The point of equilibrium therefore is not
rigidly fixed, as in a mechanical structure; it