Cybernetics Is Born

Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics was published the same year as Claude Shannon’s "A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Max Bense would apply both their works to aesthetics in his pioneering work, Aesthetica (1965), which laid the theoretical foundations of digital and AI art with computer art.

Cybernetics thus played a vital role in both the birth of digital art and artificial intelligence, thus making it one of the single most important moments on the timeline. Max Bense and his role at the University of Stuttgart explains the connection to computer art, specifically. He taught the first European computer artists, Georg Nees and Frieder Nake, leaving an indelible marks on their thinking that last to this day, as this 2018 talk by Nake demonstrates.

For artificial intelligence, cybernetics was an early attempt to unite machines and organic beings in a functional way, as it sought a theory of control, feedback and communication applicable to machines as well as animals. In the book Art in the Age of Machine Learning, author Sofian Audry argues that the concept of machine learning dates back to cybernetics.

According to the writer Jack Burnham, curator of the legendary Software exhibition:

“One of the landmarks in the history of science occurred in 1947 when the M.I.T. mathematician Norbert Wiener along with his colleague Arture Rosenblueth of Harvard, coined the word Cybernetics.”