Norbert Wiener Publishes Cybernetics

Publication · North America

Norbert Wiener holds a cigar beside a wheeled cybernetic moth on a table, with handwritten equations covering the blackboard behind him. — Norbert Wiener with his cybernetic “moth,” c.1950, photographed after the 1948 publication of Cybernetics. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, c.1950. Reproduced as figure 1.2 in Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want (MIT Press, 2017), p.32; source copy hosted by the University of Southern California. Image source.

Norbert Wiener, the MIT mathematician whose significance is covered extensively on this timeline, published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. Cybernetics as a term comes from the Greek for steersman, and named a science of feedback. It described how systems, living or mechanical, measure the effects of their actions and correct themselves. Wiener drew on his wartime work on anti-aircraft prediction, mentioned previously in this Timeline and on meetings with Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, John von Neumann and others.

The impact of cybernetics on computation and AI is foundational to both. So, it's pretty important. For art, its ideas reached artists through Max Bense in Stuttgart and Jasia Reichardt's 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random.