The Text

The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems by Bill Nichols

Nichol’s essay, a pivotal and interesting investigation into cybernetic systems uses Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as the way to understand the changes to our society through the appearance of cybernetic systems. Nichol’s article articulates that a cybernetic system, the computer system is symbol, not unlike how the camera was a symbol for Benjamin’s ideas of reproduction. Further, for Nichol’s there are profound shifts that come with the metaphor of the cybernetic system. In particular, the shift from the mechanical to the cybernetic has created a… “more communal form of perception similar  to that which was attendant upon face to face ritual and aura but which is now mediated by anonymous circuitry and the simulation of direct encounter….”(125). In a sense, Nichols is arguing that the cybernetic system replaces the real with simulations and that these simulations mimic our social relations and redefine them as through the political ramifications of visual and technological manifestations. The simulation becomes the fetish object that is it is the process of simulated intersubjectivity that defines the shift. Nichol’s writes this shift, like the shift of reproduction for Benjamin creates…. “radical change in the nature of art implies that our very ways of seeing the world have changed…”(123). And it is at this moment for Nichols, that cybernetic systems are able to change our mode of seeing, our political system and the nature of being human.

Nichols, Bill. “The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems”.  Electronic Culture; Technology and Visual Representation. Ed. Timothy Druckery. New York: Aperture Foundation Books. 1996, pp.121 - 143

      The Technology

Cybernetic Systems

External Sites of Interest

BIll Nichols faculty page at SFSU

The Nature of Cybernetic Systems    by C. Joslyn

The American Society for Cybernetics

The Text

The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace by Pierre Levy

A decidedly Utopian approach to the changes of the cybernetic system towards our culture, Levy defines the cybernetic systems in terms of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.  Here he writes, that cyberspace … “refers less to the new media of information transmission than to original modes of creation and navigation within knowledge…”(372). For Levy, it is not so much the technological hardware that is important and changes our culture, but rather the set of social relations that these new technologies are able to develop. In particular, Levy prescribes three significant changes between artist, artwork and viewer. First, the messages now revolve around the individual receiver, which for Levy is the opposite of mass media. Second that the distinctions between the author and reader have been blurred. And third, that the ability to resample and change a work blurs the distinction between the message and the work of art. Importantly for Levy, these changes in how a work of art function also are predicated on the communal creation of shared language, which is very much what Gibson describes in his novel Neuromancer. For Levy, the Utopian ideals of a shared common language that the changes in the dissemination of the cybernetic work is a change welcomed perhaps a too uncritically.

Levy, Pierre. “The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace.” Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Ed. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 2001, pp. 370 – 380