The cybernetic brain

Cybernetics is a mess: I associate it with media arts, design methods and strange machines as well as with management, war and abstracting everything into some simulatable system. It is, in a sense all of that, which already is an important point of the book: Cybernetics is a discipline that is nowhere at home: It has connections to art, academia, medicine, military but its all connection, and not "taught there", "researched here", "applied there". Indeed, the teaching/researching/applying often collapsed into one activity. It also does not focus much on knowledge-as-entity. If at all, it has principles and mechanisms. But it is well aware that some fixed points do in no way predict the outcome, but just provide some helpful ways to think about what happens: You can construct a very simple machine and know all its internal mechanisms and still be surprised how it interacts with the environment. So much for the very brief summary of the content.

My immediate interest in the book was sparked by a section on Alexander’s architectural patterns. Which was short, but nevertheless interesting. And I also read the rest.

I really liked the book itself: The combination of black with bright primary colors is on the dust jacket, but also on the cover and endpapers. The typography is nice in its combination of a serif with a monospace font (not sure why an additional third font was picked for the headlines, it makes some parts of the layout a bit uneasy). Many photos and diagrams accompany the texts, though as usual, they are often the final result of a complex process and not easy to understand by themselves.

The writing style is academic, but for an academic book, its very accessible; the newly-introduced terms are limited and are returned to again and again ("ontological theater"), the sentences can carry the thinking and understanding very well.

A really nice book that digs into the work of the first and second generations of British Cybernetics. The author's background in Science/Technology Studies, means he approaches from a sociological perspective, but is perfectly happy digging into some of the more dense technical stuff (which he explains very well).

In a book of this size there will always be things left out, but he manages to provide enough pointers for the interested reader to dig into random art projects, or how exactly a pond could be made into a computer.

If you want an intro to the work of Stafford Beer (though all of them are interesting), this is the best primer for his work that I know of.

Collective biography about some British second order cyberneticists (g.e. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, others). The history dances around disciplines like you'd expect cybernetics to. Would also recommend the related episodes of General Intellect Unit (and the podcast in general) as well!