========================================================================
Cybernetics in the 3rd Millennium (C3M) — Volume 9 Number 2, Apr. 2011
 Alan B. Scrivener — www.well.com/user/abs — mailto:abs@well.com
========================================================================


In this issue: 

Stop the Presses!

Presses


"The ideas which seemed to be me can also become immanent in you.
May they survive — if true."


Sometimes things are just too big to see.  Cybernetics co-founder
Gregory Bateson's youngest daughter, Nora Bateson, connected with me
on Facebook through some Santa Cruz friends, and I have followed her
project of completing a documentary film about her father, "An Ecology
of Mind," and showing it worldwide:

     
  • The Vancouver International Film Festival — October 2-3, 2010 

  • Special Event in conjunction with the 2010 Bioneers Conference,
San Rafael, CA — October 10, 2010 

  • Rome, Italy — November 6, 2010

  • Milan, Italy — November 8, 2010

  • Spokane, WA — International Film Festival — February 12, 2011

  • Eugene, OR — University of Oregon at Eugene's
2011 Cinema Pacific Film Festival — April 7, 2011

I have been eagerly awaiting its arrival in SoCal, so I can see it.
Meanwhile, I watched the preview on YouTube.



But, somehow, it didn't occur to me to mention any of this in the last issue of C3M.  Doh!

More info:

Next showing: University of Oregon at Eugene's 2011 Cinema Pacific
Film Festival Screening April 7, 6:45 PM at Bijou Art Cinemas


Remembering Heinz Von Foerster



Von Foersters
Heinz and Mai Von Foerster




"... we may compare the sensitivity of the [Central Nervous System] to
changes of the INTERNAL environment (the sum-total of all micro-environments)
[with] those of the EXTERNAL environment (all sensory receptors).  Since there
are only a hundred million [10^8] sensory receptors, and about ten-thousand
billion [10^13] synapses, we are 100,000 [10^5] times more receptive to
changes to our internal than in our external environment."

— Heinz Von Foerster, 1973

    "On Constructing a Reality"
Environmental Design Research, Vol. 2



CENTENNIAL

While moving my household, I came across a box labeled "UNDERSTANDING
WHOLE SYSTEMS REPRINTS."  Luckily I wrote the label, oh, thirty years
ago, and so could decode it.  It's one of several boxes of material for
a book I was once writing called "Understanding Whole Systems."  This box
contained reprints of papers I'd collected over the years that seemed
relevant to the project.  Amongst many other fascinating things, I found
nine reprints of papers by Heinz Von Foerster, his collaborators and students.
(On the top of each I had written "a gift from Heinz Von Foerster.")

I pulled one reprint out, "On Constructing a Reality" by Heinz Von Foerster,
and started reading it.  (I may have picked it because it had the Eye of
Horus on the cover.)

Part way through I quoted the paper on Facebook -- an abbreviated version
of the epigram at the beginning of this section (420 character limit, you
know).  A friend replied that it was the 100th anniversary of Von Foerster's
birth this year.

(On the occasion of Heinz von Foerster's 85th birthday, on November 13, 1996,
a web page was created in his honor,

and on the occasion of his 90th birthday on November 13, 2001, a booklet with
CD-ROM was co-produced by echoraum and the Heinz von Foerster Society.

Don't know yet what's planned for his 100th.)

Well, well, a hundred years old.  I decided it was time to revisit this Grand
Master of Cybernetics.  I began to remember how I met him.

STRUDEL
 
As the strudel bakes, the stories tuck themselves between the 
apple slices. Later, when [children] eat the strudel, it seems
they can taste those stories.

    — Joanne Rocklin, 2000 
      "Teacher's Guide to Strudel Stories"
 
It must have been around 1978.  I was researching another book, "A History
of Cybernetic Thought."  I'd been at UC Santa Cruz, picking Gregory Bateson's
brain on the topic. At one point he suggested I go visit Heinz.  He was just
a little ways up the coast, living in retirement with wife Mai, somewhere
between Davenport and Pescadero if I recall correctly.

Von Foerster, a pioneer of the Macy Foundation meetings on Feedback, like
Bateson, turned out to be a treasure trove of cybernetic history.  I still
have my notes from that meeting (somewhere) and will share them in a future
issue of C3M.

Then, Mai brought out the coffee and strudel.  "Have you ever had strudel?"
Heinz asked with glee.  I hadn't.  "Then you are in for a treat!" he told me.
And I was.


apfelstrudel
apfelstrudel


Ever since, when my travels have taken me to places like German Village
in Columbus, OH,

and Old World Village in Huntington Beach, CA,

I have always sought out the strudel.

A GIFT

As I was leaving, Professor Von Foerster gave me a stack of reprints.
I don't know how many there were, because I didn't inventory them then,
but now I have nine.  And now I have an inventory.  To my amazement,
all but two are available as PDF files on the web, and those two are in
a book for sale on Amazon.

a gift from Heinz Von Foerster: 9 reprints




 year author(s) title citation link have I
read?		 in Cyb.
of Cyb?		 


 1967 Gotthard, Günther
Von Foerster, Heinz
Biological Computer Laboratory
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Illinois, Urbana		 The Logical Structure of
Evolution and Emanation		 Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences,
138 (2) 874-891 (1967)		 complete no no 


 1969 Pask, Gordon
Biological Computer Laboratory
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Illinois, Urbana		 The Meaning of Cybernetics
In the Behavioural Sciences		 Progress of Cybernetics,
Vol. 1, J. Rose (ed.), Gordon and Breach,
New York, pp. 15-44 (1969)		 complete no yes 


 1970 Maturana, Humberto
University of Chile, Santiago		 Neurophysiology of Cognition Chapter One of Cognition: A Multiple View,
P. Garvin (ed.), Spartan Books,
New York, pp. 3-23 (1970)		 buy no yes 


 1970 Von Foerster, Heinz
Biological Computer Laboratory
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL		 Thoughts and Notes On Cognition Chapter Two of Cognition: A Multiple View,
P. Garvin (ed.), Spartan Books,
New York, pp. 25-48 (1970)		 buy yes no 


 1972 Von Foerster, Heinz
Biological Computer Laboratory
University of Illinois, Urbana		 Notes On An Epistemology
For Living Things		 L'Unité De L'Homme — Invariants
Biologiques Et Universaux Culturels		 complete no no 


 1973 Von Foerster, Heinz
Professor of Biophysics and Electrical Engineering
Biological Computer Laboratory
University of Illinois, Urbana		 On Constructing a Reality Environmental Design Research,
Vol. 2, W. F. E. Preiser (ed.)
Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross; Stroudsburg,
35-46 (1973), based on a lecture given at the
opening of the fourth International Conference
on Environmental Design Research,
April 15, 1973 at Virginia Polytechnic Institute,
Blacksburg, VA		 complete yes yes 


 1974 Von Foerster, Heinz
University of Illinois, Urbana		 Perception of the Future
and the Future of Perception		 adaptation of an address given on March 29, 1971,
at the opening of the Twenty-fourth Annual
Conference on World Affairs
at the University of Colorado, Boulder		 complete no no 


 1974 Gotthard, Günther
Electrical Engineering Research Laboratory
University of Illinois, Urbana		 Cybernetic Ontology and
Transjunctional Operations		 Self Oraganizing Systems 1962
Yovits, Jacobi and Goldstein (eds.)
Spartan Books, Washington, D.C.
pp. 313-392 (1962)		 complete no no 


 1974 Weston, Paul E.
Von Foerster, Heinz
Biological Computer Laboratory
University of Illinois, Urbana		 Artificial Intelligence and
Machines That Understand		 Annual Review of Physical Chemistry,
Vol. 24		 complete no no 




(I've also noted which one's I've actually read, and which appear in the
book "Cybernetics of Cybernetics.")

CYBERNETICS SQUARED

In his office at Kresge College at UCSC, on a shelf, Gregory Bateson had a
copy of "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" by Von Foerster, his collaborators
and students.  Bateson was kind enough to let me make notes and photocopies
from it.  I sought my own.  In 1995 it was reprinted and I got my wish.
Now at last I am slowly reading it.



Cybernetics of Cybernetics

Cybernetics of Cybernetics



It looks like a collage of a book, put together by a bunch of excited, creative
students in the 1970s.  It consists mostly of reprints of seminal cybernetics
papers — ah, the Golden Age of Fair Use — and most of the rest is
a sort of glossary.  It seems they made inquiries to a number of cybernetic
luminaries who they identify by initials, including:

    

  • Gregory Bateson (G.B.),

  • Stafford Beer (S.B.)

  • Stewart Brand (S.Br.)

  • Ivan Illichv (I.I.)

  • John Lilly (J.L.)

  • Charles Muses (C.M.)

  • Claudio Naranjo (C.N.)

  • Gordon Pask (G.P.)

  • G. Spencer Brown (G.S.-B.)

  • Heinz Von Foerster (H.V.F.)

  • Klaus Witz (K.W.)


Each was given a list of words to define, such as:

    

  • ABDUCTION

  • ACCESS

  • ADAPTATION

  • ALGEBRA

  • ALGORITHM

  • ALLOPOIETIC

  • ARGUMENT


...to give half the As.  I'm not sure if they only gave some definitions,
of if the book's producers edited the results, but a sparse mix of multiple
definitions by multiple authors is provided throughout.  They make great
short-attention-span reading.  One of my favorites was:

TOOL
A tool consists of a use at one and A grasp at the other.  Tools, tasks,
and users co-evolve in rich interaction.  [S.Br.]


The book is also packed with diagrams of how the definitions inter-relate 
— and other, mostly decorative illustrations.  (The two mythic
creatures biting each other below are an example.)

In addition, two more "books" are included: the Parabook, which
contains information about the book — for example: an index of the
glossary terms — and the Metabook, which recapitulates the
undersized diagrams of how the glossary terms are related.

In preparing the table above of publications I received from Heinz,
I wanted to check which ones appeared in Cyb. of Cyb..  By
chance my book had opened to "On Constructing a Reality," so I knew
about that one.  But I was hindered by the lack of a Table of Contents
at the beginning of the book.  A look on-line confirmed that the book was
widely believed to lack one.  But then I discovered, buried in the Parabook,
there was one after all.  Perhaps they didn't want it at the beginning
so you would dive right in.  But by now it seemed like a digital version of
the contents would be handy, and since one didn't seem to exist, I put in the
time to key it in.

The use of upper and lower case is a little "hinky," but I preserved it
anyway; not sure why.  I broke out the author and title information
in tabular form, so it could be easily imported to a database later on.
Words listed in italics (and all caps) are glossary terms; they have many
authors, but those authors are not listed in the contents, so I didn't
track them down.  When an author is listed with the word "BIBLIOGRAPHY" 
it means a list of their pertinent published works to date is provided;
a possible boon for future cybernetic historians.

Sorry I didn't have time to list in detail the Parabook and Metabook.


CYBERNETICS OF CYBERNETICS TABLE OF CONTENTS




 page Author(s) Title 


 1  FIRST ORDER CYBERNETICS
SECOND ORDER CYBERNETICS		 


 2  CYBERNETICS 


 5 WIENER, N.
(With an introduction by Heinz Von Foerster)		 "Cybernetics" 


 12 Wiener, Norbert BIBLIOGRAPHY 


 18 PASK, G. "The Background of Cybernetics" 


 23 ASHBY, W.R. "What Is New" 


 26 Ashby, W. Ross BIBLIOGRAPHY 


 30 LAMONT, V. "Societies" 


 31 LAMONT, V. "Journals" 


 32  GENERAL SYSTEM THEORY 


 33  SYSTEM
FEEDBACK		 


 35 CLOUGH, R. "Two Examples of Negative Feedback" 


 39 POWERS, W.T. "Feedback: Beyond Behaviorism" (Summary) 


 40 BAUM, W.M.
REESE, H.W.		 "Feedback: Beyond Behaviorism" 


 41 POWERS, W.T. "Feedback: Beyond Behaviorism" 


 43 CLOUGH, P. "Feedback and Feedback Control: No Dialog" 


 44 NAST, J. "Feedback and Behaviorism" 


 44 CLOUGH, R. "Booty" 


 46  ULTRASTABILITY 


 47 REBITZER, J. "Playing With Feedback" 


 47 CLOUGH, P. "Mechanism Maybe" 


 48 CLOUGH, R. "S, S*, delta, R" 


 51  GOAL 


 53  HOMEOSTASIS 


 54 HAWKINS, D. "The Nature of Purpose" 


 63  PROCESS
CONTROL
HIERARCHY		 


 64  HETERARCHY 


 65 MCCULLOCH, W.S. "A Heterarchy of Values Determined By the Topology of Nervous Nets" 


 68 McCulloch, Warren S. BIBLIOGRAPHY 


 79  HOLISM 


 80  REDUCTIONISM
VARIETY		 


 81 PASK, G. "Industrial Cybernetics" 


 86 BEER, S. "Managing Modern Complexity" 


 97  CONDITIONING 


 98  ADAPTATION 


 102  RETICULUM 


 103  RETICULAR FORMATION
STRUCTURE		 


 104  ORGANIZATION 


 105  ALLOPOIETIC 


 106 ASHBY, W.R. "The Self-Reproducing System" 


 111  AUTOPOIESIS 


 112 MATURANA, H.R. "Neurophysiology of Cognition" 


 123  REPRODUCTION
EVOLUTION		 


 125  SCIENTIFIC METHOD 


 128 VON FOERSTER, H. "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" (Physiology of Revolution) 


 130 UMPLEBY, S.A. "On Making a Scientific Revolution" 


 132  INTUITION
ALGEBRA		 


 133  ARITHMETIC 


 133 WILSON, K.L. "Enrico Fibonacci" 


 134  NUMBER
ALGORITHM		 


 135 KOLAKOWSKI, L. "In Praise of Inconsistency" 


 140  PROGRAM 


 141  TOOL
COMPUTATION		 


 142 SHULTZ, D. "Reflections On Notation and Cognition" 


 150  COMPUTER
MACHINE		 


 151  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 


 152 AMOSOV, N.M. "Simulation of Thinking Processes" 


 168  FUTURE 


 169  TIME 


 171  ORDER 


 173 LÖFGREN, L. "Recognition of Order and Evolutionary Systems" 


 179  RANDOMNESS 


 180 KOWACK, G. "If You Smile At Me I Will Understand..." 


 182  ENTROPY
NEGENTROPY		 


 183 FELDMAN, B., ET AL "H, Entropy, Information Theory, Partitions, Coalitions, Tables" 


 219  REDUNDANCY 


 220 VON FOERSTER, H. "On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments" 


 231  SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEM 


 232 ASHBY, W.R. "Principles of Self-Organizing Systems" 


 243  Parabook 


 244  CONCEPT 


 245  PREDICATION 


 246  CONVERSATION 


 248  INTERVIEW 


 249 HOWE, R.H. "Habermas Outline" 


 256  ACCESS
LANGUAGE		 


 259 SIELINSKI, B. "A Cybernetic Book" 


 260  METAPHOR 


 262  PARADOX 


 266  HALLUCINATION
ILLUSION		 


 268  PERCEPTION 


 269  CONSCIOUSNESS 


 272 FISCHER, R. "A Cartography of the Ecstatic and Meditative States" 


 282  SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 


 283  COGNITION 


 287  KNOWLEDGE 


 288 HABERMAS, J. "Knowledge and Human Interest" 


 297  UNDERSTANDING 


 298  LEARNING 


 299  LEARNING MODEL 


 301 PASK, G. "Anti-Hodmanship: A Report on the State and Prospects of CAI" 


 306 SLOAN, S. "Innovation, Imagination and Education: A Recapitulation of Gordon Pask on Learning" 


 312  HOLIST
MEMORY		 


 314 VON FOERSTER, H. "Memory Without Record" 


 333  MODEL 


 336 BRÜN, H. "The Need of Cognition for the Cognition of Needs" 


 341  SOCIETY 


 342  SOCIALIZATION 


 343 VON FOERSTER, H. "Personalities, Affinities, Genes and Happenings" 


 346 HOWE, R.H. "Theses on Literature /LITERATURE" 


 350 CLOUGH, P. "Recently, Sociology" 


 351  INDIVIDUAL 


 354 WILSON, K.
BRÜN, H.		 "Assignment for Cybernetician #5" 


 354 FORD, B.J. "Response" 


 355 LEBAILLY, A. "Response" 


 355 PETTY, D. "Response" 


 355 GOOCH, S. "Response" 


 356  CHANCE 


 358  NECESSITY 


 360  NEED 


 361 BRÜN, H. "about five of the great Is" 


 361 REBITZER, R. "I Need" 


 362  EVIDENCE 


 364 HACMANN, J. "LAW: Reflections" 


 365 BRÜN, H. "Premises" 


 371  ARGUMENT
VALUE		 


 372  RELEVANCE
FACT		 


 373  FICTION 


 374  OBJECTIVITY
REALITY		 


 376 VON FOERSTER, H. "On Constructing a Reality" 


 382 BRÜN, H. "Competition vs. Cooperation" 


 386 HARDIN, G. "The Cybernetics of Competiton: A Biologist's View of Society" 


 401  OBSERVER 


 402 PASK, G. "The Meaning of Cybernetics in the Behavioral Sciences" 


 417  SURVEILLANCE 


 419  DOUBLE-BIND 


 421 WILSON, K. "The Establishment of Connections" 


 422 FORD, B.J. "The Establishment of Connections" 


 423 BRÜN, H. "The Establishment of Connections" 


 424  INTENTION, EXTENSION 


 425  DESCRIPTION 


 427 HERMANN, H.T.
KOTELLY, J.C.		 "An Approach To Formal Psychiatry" 


 446  ABDUCTION 


 447  EXPLANATION 


 448  HEURISTIC 


 450 HOWE, H.R. "Positivism and Reflection" 


 452  CONTEXT 


 454 REBITZER, R.
REBITZER, J.		 "Distinction Is a Perfect Continence" 


 455 WILSON, K. "Metaface" 


 456  AUTONOMY 


 457 MATURANA, H.R. "Cognitive Strategies" 


 470  DESIRE 


 472 BRÜN, H. "Drawing Distinctions, Links, Contradictions" 


 477  COMMUNICATION 


 479  COMPOSITION 


 480  ONTOLOGY 


 481 GOTTHARD, GÜNTHER
(translated by Richard Herbert Rowe)		 "The Historical Category of the Now" 


 487 Gotthard, Günther BIBLIOGRAPHY 


 490  TRUTH 


 501 ROWE, R.H.H
SLOAN, S.		 Metabook 





VON FOERSTER TODAY



Von Foerster mind map
Heinz Von Foerster "mind map" from en.domotica.net/Heinz_von_Foerster


Heinz Von Foerster passed away in 2002.  Mai, his wife of over 60 years,
followed him in 2003.

In revisiting Cybernetics of Cybernetics, and actually endeavoring
to read it straight through (currently on page 96), I've noticed that it is,
in fact, a hypertext.  The hypertext idea was "in the air" in the
mid-1970s, so it's not too surprising.  What is surprising is that in the
web era no industrious group of students has tried to get "Cyb. of Cyb."
all entered as an interlinked set of web pages.

Someone else who noticed the web-like structure of the book was Jamie
Hutchinson, whose on-line essay "A Web Site Before Its Time —
Navigating Cyberspace, Then and Now" explores this idea.

A glance through the affiliations list in the table of papers above shows
a strong presence of the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of
Illinois in Urbana, a.k.a. BCL.  (My daughter commented, "Urbana, Illinois —
that's where HAL 9000 was born!")  According to commentary on the web,
this institution ranked as one of Professor Von Foerster's greatest
achievements.

Heinz understood the power of getting students together and giving them access
to photocopy machines, electric typewriters, and mimeograph machines, plus
maybe some press-on letters for titles and a light table with layout tape or
hot wax.  It was guerrilla publishing!

As a reader of the output of the process, I have mostly appreciated it
for the results it produced.  But those closer to it have also praised the
process involved.

Jamie Hutchinson at BCL posted the article "'Nerve center' of the cybernetic
world — Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory"


and Kevin Hamilton is assembling information under the title "Cybernetics on
the Prairie" about the BCL as well.

There is also a book about the lab called "An Unfinished Revolution?:
Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory / BCL 1958-1976"
(2007) by Albert Muller and Karl H. Muller, which I plan to read soon.



WHERE'S THE BEEF?



serpents
uncredited recursive reptiles in "Perception
of the Future and the Future of Perception"



"Some of the ideas expressed in this paper grew from the work sponsored
jointly by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under  Grants
AFOSR 7-67 and AF 49(683)-1680..."

    — Heinz Von Foerster, 1970
"Thoughts and Notes On Cognition"

After all this talk of Von Foerster's colleagues, conferences, publications,
students, legacy, and culinary influences, perhaps I should take a
moment and mention his ideas.  What I got as "take home value"
from "On Constructing a Reality" and "Thoughts and Notes On Cognition"
included these points:

    

  • reality is the output of an unconscious computational process
(same epistemological manifesto as Gregory Bateson)

  • our nerves do not communicate qualities, only quantities

  • an organism maps its environment onto its own internal coordinate system (see also Mary Catherine Bateson: "each of us is our own central metaphor")

  • some metaphors for mental activity abducted into computer engineering
and back out again, e.g. memory, are dangerous

  • we need to unlearn some things before we can learn about the mind

  • how did he get the U.S. Air Force to pay for epistemological research?




A SPOON FULL OF SUGAR



Gateway to the Mind
Gateway to the Mind VHS tape from Bell Science Series


Here's some candy to reward you for plowing through all this
neurology-informed epistemology (what my friend Dr. David Warner
might call neuro-cosmology).

Recently with my old school chum Bob Z. I watched one of the Bell Science
TV shows, "Gateways to the Mind" (1958).

(It's not on YouTube, but a post-techno noise-fest with video remixes from it is.)

I realized it gave my a lot of mental models of the nervous system, some
still installed in my thought processes.  It was the first place I heard
the word "feedback" used to describe error-correcting signals (negative
feedback), and not just the runaway shriek of a microphone-speaker loop
(positive feedback).

For variety, we also watched the similar (but more entertaining and less
educational) extinct EPCOT show/ride, "Cranium Command" (1989 - 2007),
which is on YouTube.



Other Stuff




Ed Dillinger: Encom isn't the business you started in your garage
anymore. We're billing accounts in thirty different countries; new
defense systems; we have one of the most sophisticated pieces of
equipment in existence.

Dr. Walter Gibbs: Oh, I know all that. Sometimes I wish I were
back in my garage.

Ed Dillinger: That can be arranged, Walter.

    — dialog from TRON, 1982

Some other research projects I've been up to lately:

TRON



Our local San Diego Professional Chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH had a field trip
to see Tron Legacy in 3D at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood,
with a laser light pre-show.

I made a timeline of TRON cultural milestones as a side-light:


TILOPOLIS


(As in tile + metropolis.)

In my consulting work I've been researching procedural city generation
for mobile games, and shared some work publicly.

Some of this work, and accompanying source code, overlaps with the material
from my June, 2010 talk for the San Diego Professional Chapter of ACM
SIGGRAPH: "Mathematics for Computer Graphics" — which I still plan to
post in its entirety.


OFF THE RECORD



I submitted an anecdote to InfoWorld's blog, "Off the Record" last month
and it was accepted.  The title is "Danger, danger! Newbies at work!"



Feature:
"If It's Just a Virtual Actor, Then Why Am I Feeling Real Emotions?"
(Part Three)

mask


(If you haven't read parts one and two, see the archives, listed at the end.)


ONE NIGHT IN CAJON PASS



"All realities are virtual."


    — Timothy Leary

In 1991 the SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques

was held, for the first time, in Las Vegas.  A lot of outreach was done to
casino management, trying to get them to see the potential of computer
graphics for "location based entertainment," as it was being called then.
I have no doubt that senior sales management and business development types
at the likes of Silicon Graphics and VPL tried to get meetings with casino
investors such as Steve Wynn.  And I'm pretty sure some of these efforts
lead to the mid-90s "Virtual Reality Bubble" in Vegas, including the
Luxor Casino's "Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid" (1993),

and the Hilton's "Star Trek Experience" (1998).


But I'm getting ahead of the story.  One of the "firsts" at SIGGRAPH 1991
was having a curated, live technology demo area.  This has continued until
the present day under names like "Emerging Technologies," "Digital Bayou,"
"The Edge" and "Electric Garden."  But the first was called "Tomorrow's
Realities Galleries," and one of the two co-curators was none other than
my old boss from Rockwell, Steve Tice.  I volunteered to help.  It turned
out it was "down to the wire" on printing the show guide.  "I can get you
into it," he said on the phone, "but I need a title, right this minute."
I thought for a second, and said, "Technical Coordinator."  And so I was to
witness — and help with — the installation of a bunch of state-
of-the-art Virtual Reality (VR) demos.

My employer, Stardent Computer, was exhibiting that year (their last booth
before imploding the following October) and I elected to drive out rather
than fly, bringing some equipment.  I wanted to be there early to help with
the VR technology setup, and I wanted a car while I was in Vegas.  (I also
brought my wife, and we stayed at the new Excalibur, which was cheaper than
the Hilton where the other Stardent people stayed, so I got no flack.)

So here I was driving to Vegas late in the day, from Los Angeles County.  It
was already dark, and I was making my way up the Cajon Pass north out of
San Bernardino into the Mojave Desert.  I was alone — my wife would fly in later.


Suddenly traffic slowed way down.  I was chill at first.  I had some
mix tapes I'd made recently, and was playing them to relieve the boredom
of "highway hypnosis."  A song that came on was "One" by Metallica.
I had recorded it off of MTV on stereo VHS tape, and then dubbed from
that to cassette, so it had all the dialog and sound effects from the MTV
video version.

The video had borrowed heavily from the 1971 film "Johnny Got His Gun" directed
by Dalton Trumbo, based on his own 1939 novel.

According to the Wikipedia for the film,

"The music video for Metallica's 1988 song 'One', featured excerpts from the
film. Rather than pursue an ongoing license for their use, the band bought
the rights to the movie in its entirety." 

This amazing film tells the story of a soldier in World War One who is so
badly wounded that he can't tell where he is at first, nor can he tell
dreams from waking.  He gradually figures out that he has lost his arms,
legs, eyes, mouth and entire face.  Something about this story seemed
connected with the exciting new research into Virtual Reality that I
expected to see at SIGGRAPH.

By now the traffic had stopped.  Up ahead I saw a police car with its
red and blue flashing lights.  On the radio I'd heard there was an injury
accident on the pass, so I resolved to be patient.  Then the police car rose
into the air, hovered for a minute, and flew right over me headed towards
San Bernardino and a trauma center.  I realized upon reflection that this
had been a "life flight" helicopter, not a police car.  But for a moment
there I thought I might be seeing things.  It was an exciting, bewildering,
exhilarating experience.

I was so struck by this event that when I arrived in Las Vegas, and found
there was an airbrushed T-shirt booth in my hotel, I commissioned a shirt,
based on a sketch I provided, that said "All realities are virtual,"
along with a picture of a disembodied brain with eyes.  (I still have it.)


t-shirt
airbrushed T-shirt



COORDINATING TECH



"If participants have their way, VR will be a very social technology."




Since I was self-appointed and self-titled, I wasn't quite sure what I should
do when I arrived at setup for the VR technology gallery.  There was an
office upstairs overlooking the exhibit space, so I set up my Mac SE
and laserprinter from Stardent, along with an acoustic modem.  Commandeering
the FAX line, I was able to telnet into my Stardent system in Los Angeles
if needed, or to Stardent HQ in Concord, Mass., from which I could send and
receive email from the stardent.com domain, and also I could telnet into the
Well in Sausalito, CA, and send and receive personal email.  (This was before
the World Wide Web took off, but other interesting things were already
happening on the Internet.)  I got really excited when I discovered I'd
gotten an email from Billy Idol, who said he might make it to a party I
was throwing.  (He didn't, but Todd Rungren did!)

The "Tomorrow's Realities Gallery" was co-chaired by Steve Tice and another
guy whose name I don't remember.  He was one those arrogant New Yorker types
who had to have an entourage with him at all times to tell him how great
he was, and I found him pretty useless.  The only thing I remember he did
was to veto a plan by some of the Dutch volunteers to print up some
t-shirts for the participants, at our own expense.

So I invented my job.  I got a clipboard and walked around the venue, asking
the folks at each exhibit if everything was going okay.  If they had problems,
I wrote them down.  Then I took a stab at solving them.  If I didn't have
the resources, I went to Steve for help.  Then I repeated.  Over several days
I solved a lot of problems for a lot of people using this method.

In searching the web for remnants of this event, I was astonished to discover
ACM SIGGRAPH's archives don't go back that far, and there is no official
record of the event.  I have my guidebook somewhere; probably in a locker
in one of dozens of bankers boxes after my recent move.  Maybe I will find it
and scan it another day.  I did find many folks whose Curriculum Vitae
references the event.  For example:

    

  • Moreland, John L.
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
Interactive Color (Macintosh program)
( ftp://ftp.sdsc.edu/pub/sdsc/graphics/interactive_color )


  • Myers, Rob
Process Arts in Santa Cruz
Plasm: Above the Drome
( www.plasm.com/rob/portfolio/Plasm/Plasm.html )
Three networked skyboards equip visitors to surf freely throughout a
shared virtual space. Each fiberglass skyboard is a custom full-body
input device, with force-sensing resistors driving the flight simulation
for the occupant's on-screen avatar. A large rear-screen projection in
front of each skyboard renders the cumulative adventures of all three
surfers in a common, infinitely wrapping space, as they dive below the
waves to slalom through the fishes, or soar overhead to trail confetti
across the sky.
[Installed at SIGGRAPH '91 Tomorrow's Realities Gallery, Las Vegas, 1991]


  • Naimark, M.
Naimark & Company
VBK - A Moviemap of Karlsruhe
( www.naimark.net/writing/karlsruhe.html )
EAT
( /www.naimark.net/projects/eat.html )


  • Noser, H.
The Animation of Autonomous Actors Based on Production Rules
[System presented at the "Tomorrow's Realities Gallery" SIGGRAPH '91,
18th ACM Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
Las Vegas, NV]


  • Ward, M., Azuma, R., Bennett, R., Gottschalk, S., Fuchs, H.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
A demonstrated optical tracker with scalable work area for head-mounted display systems.
Proceedings of 1992 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics
(Mar. 29 - Apr. 1, Cambridge, Mass.). Computer Graphics 1992, 43-52.


  • Wenzel, Elizabeth and Foster, S.
Human Systems Integration Division at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA
Virtual Acoustic Environments: The Convolvotron
Computer Graphics, 25 (4), 386. [Demonstration system
at the 1st annual "Tomorrow's Realities Gallery", SIGGRAPH '91,
18th ACM Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques,
Las Vegas, NV, July 27-August 2.] 


  • Zyda, Michael J. and Pratt, David R.
University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA
NPSNET: A 3D Visual Simulator for Virtual World Exploration and Experience
The presentation at SIGGRAPH was a live demonstration
showing the NPSNET system running networked over three IRIS workstations.
[Demonstrated in the Tomorrow's Realities Gallery, SIGGRAPH '91, Las Vegas,
28 Jul - 2 Aug 1991.]



To be frank, I don't remember a lot of these.  The virtual restaurant,
"EAT," was cool, though obviously absurd.  There was a great laser-disk-based
Mars flyover that was quite interactive and thrilling.  University of North
Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill had several cool things, including a bicycle and
a treadmill with VR glasses integrated.

The folks from Division in the UK had the most advanced, full-up, commercially
available VR system there, and they almost didn't get it working in time.
They needed a file from their UK headquarters via File Transfer Program
(FTP), and I was able to "save the day" with my acoustic modem and FAX line.
They gave me a t-shirt as appreciation, which I also still have.


t-shirt
Division T-shirt




PERFORMANCE ANIMATION



"You gotta work the suit."


    — Michael Keaton, on playing Batman


As excited as I was to experience VR for the first time (the last was at
Disney Quest Orlando in 2008, where the obsolete SGI graphics seemed dated...), 
at least I knew what VR was.  But the new concept I encountered was
from Tice's own compnay, Simgraphics, which had their public debut of
Performance Animation, a.k.a. VActors(TM), Synthespians, and Performance
Cartoons.

The specific demo in the gallery was "Suzy Surfer," a real-time
computer-generated character based on real-time input from a human
operator.  In essence, an electronic puppet.

I still keep in touch with Tice, and I prevailed upon him to give me some
good links and even to upload some video to YouTube about this historic
breakthrough.

    ( www.simg.com/ )

    ( www.allbusiness.com/north-america/united-states-california-metro-areas/454358-1.html )

    ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ji3WEX6Svw )

 
Warning: video begins with loud tone!


STUNT SCIENCE



"Do good things."


    — salutation used frequently by Dave Warner


After SIGGRAPH I was still troubled by the riddle of the Metallica video
— something was tickling my brain.  I finally got it.  Though VR
has great promise in the areas of educating and entertaining normal
people, it is in the application to the problems of the disabled that
it has the most to offer.

I called up Dave Warner.  "Well, duh," he said.  He was way ahead of
me.  He had been doing medial school rotations and ended up in Pediatric
Rehab, kids who'd been in auto accidents mostly, having trouble with
doing their painful but necessary exercises.  I already knew Dave had hooked
these kids up to electrode-powered muscle-activated Nintendo games,
which gave the kids muscular workout while chasing donkeys and barrels, and
they worked harder at it than the traditional exercises.

But what I didn't know was that he and Tice had gotten together and pulled
a media stunt — they borrowed VActor equipment, saying it was going
to be on TV with sick kids; they got a TV crew to come, telling them to
expect sick kids and computer graphics, and they got Loma Linda Hospital
to let them use the kids, because the computers and TV cameras would be
there.  It worked.  They had a virtual character named "Eggwardo,"
a floating egg-shaped head, who appeared on the TV of a kid in a cancer
ward, and would talk to him or her on the phone.

    ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MBYB9WsjCM )

 
Warning: video begins with loud tone!

Dave used to calls these media events "stunt science," and insisted he
always used off-the-shelf technology, so any institution that saw the TV
broadcast was free to emulate application.

Now, this is more than an entertainment venue for these kids.  There is
clinical evidence, some of it from work at Loma Linda University
Medical Center, that mirthful laughter and peak experiences (including seeing
a magic trick, or a feeling of wonder like I had in Cajon Pass) can boost
the immune system.  If this works as intended, it's a healing technology.

Later there was a whole conference, "Medicine Meets Virtual Reality" (MMVR)
which started in 1994, and showcased work just like this, but at the time
Warner and Tice and their collaborators were the only ones doing it.


TO BE CONTINUED...



Comments

In February 2011 I received this email:

 Dear Mr. Scrivener, 
 
I recently came across your "Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory",
which I enjoyed immensely because it had reams of narrative woven into it,
which is how I like to take my information best (high intuition, low rigor).
 
I have been reading books on information and control in systems for about 5
years now. I work in healthcare and started the Complex Adaptive Systems
thing when I was studying management in Graduate School at Antioch University
in Keene NH.
 
I started a website some years ago to sort of put my ideas in front of myself,
and others, and am kind of surprised that the cybernetics/systems presence on
the internet isn't very 'emergent'; i.e. it doesn't seem to be evolving very
much. Not much of Gordon Pask's "Conversation", in which there is a mutual
learning going on.
 
Do you know of any good website formats which might rectify this? I'm
currently hosted by Microsoft, which is about as adaptive as a dead
dinosaur.
 
Thanks for your notes on all those books. I really enjoyed reading them,
and hopefully will see more of these works.
 
Sincerely,
 
Ebenezer T.
Boston MA
 
p.s. my website is called 'adaptingsystems.com'


(Note: if you email me about this eZine I may quote you in it, unless
you ask me not to!)

Ebenezer's comment about Gordon Pask's "Conversation"

got me thinking: this 'zine isn't really very interactive.  People
email me and I sometimes post their comments. I often agonize
about whether to post their names, and I avoid listing email addresses
to cut down on spam.  But because it is labor-intensive for me, I
don't do much of it, so this hasn't been a very useful place to have
conversations about cybernetics and systems.  (It's been seven years
since I got an email with this comment:

do you watch the japanese 'ghost in the shell' tv series at all?  it
touches upon many cybernetics / systems theory issues.
peace,
-z

and now the links are broken!)

Back in the early nineties I used to have some great on-line discussions
about Virtual Reality (VR), memory palaces, dead media, and a lot of other
cool stuff on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL),

with the likes of cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling, social commentator
Howard Rheingold, and techno-counter-culturist R. U. Sirius.
But I drifted away after a misleading article in Playboy Magazine
claimed it was some kind of wild and crazy dating site, which brought
in a flood of cluless and disruptive newbies.

So I sat up and took notice when I read that Facebook was rolling out a new
"Comments" widget that allows any web site to use Facebook credentials in a
comments box.

The widget allows me to delete comments I think are inappropriate, or ban
posters entirely.  It gives posters control over whether their comments are
copied to their Facebook Wall.  It sounds like it fits my needs.

I realize that some have raised the question of whether the loss of
anonymity enabled by this tool is Not a Good Thing.  For example,
Gordon Plutsky's "Facebook Comments — Does It Make Sense for Your Site?"
makes the observation: "Reduces nasty comments ... and all comments for
that matter."

And Steve Cheney's "How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity"
goes further, saying it stifles free speech.

But I'm actually not going to wade into this controversy.  I support the
idea that anonymous web posts are important, especially for the likes of
nuke plant whistleblowers and Tunisian rebels.  But I have never offered
anonymous comments, so all I'm doing is automating a pre-existing process,
and hopefully making it more obvious how someone's words will be used.

Please indicate which article you are commenting on.  Feel free to comment
on the Comments Widget as well.  (If you oppose it, and using it to complain
is too paradoxical for you, feel free to email me instead.)











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Last update:  10:40 PM PDT 07-Apr-2011