Page 61 - Studio International - April 1970

If writing about art has any value at all at a which had mushroomed in the United States scope of statistics of psychic behaviour will be
time when art works and processes are them- and Europe since the publication of Norbert immense, providing the opportunity for the
selves polemical, it can only be to discuss Wiener's `Cybernetics'2 in 1948, poured into first time of comparative psychic research on
alternative futures. Futurology,1 the business the Soviet Union, knocking over the preju- a gigantic scale. The feedback of all this on
of generating scenarios which are projections dices of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and our thinking is likely to be considerable. Art
into the future from variables of the present, galvanizing research workers in many disci- will no doubt adjust its parameters in
is a game indulged in by economists, sociolo- plines. The establishment of the USSR, response.
gists and astrologers from New York to Delhi. having prevaricated for so long, woke up to In the West also research on psi has been
Their aim, via statistics or the occult, as the the enormous importance of the subject and, consistent if limited. But recently work with a
case may be, is to produce 'surprise-free' pre- with astonishing foresight, the 22nd Congress machine which automatically generates ran-
dictions for their clients. For the artist there of the CPSU in 1961 decreed that it should be dom events has yielded valuable results,
is no client, at any rate in advance of the
assembly of his ideas, and so for us the gener-
ating of futuribles is essentially a far less con-
strained affair, and may become a creative
act.
My interest is in discussing, not a range of
specific futuribles, nor a detailed scenario in a
given location, but a general model of the
factors which will operate on culture over the
next twenty-five years. The model takes the
form of an arch which bridges two apparently
opposed spheres : cybernetics and para-
psychology. The west and east sides of the
mind, so to speak; technology and telepathy;
provision and prevision; cyb and psi.
There seems to me to be a very beautiful set of
correspondences and potential interactions
between these fields of activity. A rainbow
arch unites them. A general systems approach
would enable us to investigate the two aspects
of a whole system of prediction, control and
communication. This arch could support a
whole artistic culture. Extra-sensory percep-
tion, in so far as it has been shown to exist in
terms of telepathy and clairvoyance, is the
most perfect form of communication and
social feedback imaginable, although its
manifestation is erratic. Applied cybernetics,
on the other hand, which is efficient and
reliable, contributes to an idea of the perfecta- applied to the whole Soviet system. Seeing it enough for the New Scientist4 to have finally
bility of systems which, due to the limitations as a means of obtaining the economy of accepted the validity of the ESP hypothesis,
of media, it can never hope to attain abso- abundance, and that 'automation is a uni- where formerly much controversy has reigned.
lutely. ESP is instant, but sporadic. Cyber- versal law of development', they have effec- Dr Helmut Schmidt who did the work at
netics is universal, but entropic. tively redefined cybernetics as the science of Boeing Scientific Research laboratories in
It is interesting to note that in the Soviet government, which was the meaning Ampere Seattle has now joined Rhine's laboratory.
Union an advanced study of parapsychology had originally coined many years before However, it is Herman Kahn at the Hudson
is carried out in the Laboratory of Biological Norbert Wiener. Russia had come a long way Institute, New York, who has captured the
Cybernetics in Leningrad University. If its from the pejorative definition of cybernetics public's imagination with his predictive
work is less popularly known than that of Dr given in the 1954 Soviet 'Filosofski slovar' : 'a systems.5 These rely, not on psychic per-
J. B. Rhine of Duke University, North Caro- form of reactionary pseudoscience originating ception or clairvoyance of an occult kind, but
lina, this is probably because it was suppressed in the United States after World War II . . . a on raw cartesian procedures of assembling
for many years under Stalin, when Vasiliev, form of contemporary mechanisation.' hard facts and extrapolating into the long-
the great exponent of psychic behaviour, was This is worth mentioning, I think, since now term future scenarios which have a real
prevented from research and writing by the all aspects of Soviet government—shelters, economic and political value to the US
Soviet Academy of Sciences. The end of sup- storage, transport, agriculture, production, Government and the big corporations. His
pression of psi research corresponds in time medicine, defence, research and so on—are task is not to predict the future but to sketch
to the end of the ban on cybernetics. The to be linked into one master cybernetic alternative futures.
political theorists of the USSR were, for at system, with the capability of correlating Prediction, control and communication; hu-
least ten years, unable to reconcile the impli- behaviours, trends and needs from minute to man behaviour; process and system; organiza-
cations of cybernetic theory to Marxist- minute across the entire country. The tion and entropy. What does this all add up to,
Leninist doctrine. `Unified Information System' is scheduled for and how is it relevant to art?
All the while engineers, biologists and mathe- completion during the 1970-75 period.3 We have read a great deal in recent years of
maticians were struggling to have cybernetics Apart from economic prediction and scien- the qualities of feedback in visual culture; of
admitted to their fields of research. When the tific future studies, the research institutes for interaction between artwork and audience; I
ban was lifted in 1958, the floodgates opened. parapsychology and biological cybernetics have myself contributed the idea of a general
Journals, books and papers on the subject will gain a great deal. At once we see that the behavioural quality in twentieth-century art