Orit Halpern • www.orithalpern.net • HalpernO@newschool.edu
Beautiful Data:
A History of Vision and Reason since 1945
1956 Cybernetic Figures
I.
1959 Moscow Cultural Exchange,
Glimpses of the United States, MultiMedia Installation by Charles and Ray
Eames
1943 Neural Nets
Overview of the Manuscript
In his memoir, Ex-Prodigy, the MIT professor and cybernetics researcher Norbert Wiener
writes, “I longed to be a naturalist as other boys longed to be policemen and locomotive
engineers. I was only dimly aware of the way in which the age of the naturalist and
explorer was running out, leaving the mere tasks of gleaning to the next generation.”1
Developing this theme, he later writes, “even in zoology and botany, it was diagrams of
complicated structures and the problems of growth and organization which excited my
interest fully as much as tales of adventure and discovery…”2 In a series of popular
books and technical manifestos, Wiener goes on to interrogate this “problem” that
complexity poses. Written in a reflective moment after World War II, Wiener’s
comments seek to mark the passing of one age to another—the end of “exploration” and
the emergence of another type of “organization”.
This is no small claim. Wiener indicates a desire to see an older archival order adjoined
to modern interests in taxonomy and ontology rendered obsolete by another mode of
thought invested in prediction, self-referentiality, and communication. He dreams of a
world where there is no “unknown” left to discover, only an accumulation of records that
must be recombined, analyzed, and processed. Wiener argues that in observing too
closely and documenting too “meticulously”, one is unable to deduce patterns, to produce
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2
Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, Third Printing, 1972 ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1953).,p.63.
Ibid.
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in his words a “flow of ideas”. He expresses a new desire—to model thought, itself, from
data flows.
Wiener’s memoires bridge between late 19th and early 20th century ideals of taxonomy,
ontology, and archiving and post mid-20th century concepts of organization, method, and
storage. He articulates a desire to see previous traditions in natural history and scientific
representation replaced by a discourse of active diagrams, processes, and complexity. My
book, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945, takes Weiner’s words
as a point of departure to explore this historical shift in attitudes to perception,
temporality, and epistemology occurring after the war.
We are arguably still negotiating the legacy of this transformation. Weiner’s memories
find concrete expression in such diverse places like the new multi-media architectures of
spectacular geo-politics and the minute neural nets of the mind. All these locations
repeat, encode, and circulate a way of looking and interpreting that can be said to
constitute an architecture of both knowledge and perception.
Today, seated behind our personal computer monitors, constantly logged in to data
networks through our personal devices, we stare at interfaces with multiple screens and
no longer aspire to go out and explore the world. There is no “unknown” left to discover.
We have come to assume the world is always already fully recorded and archived;
accessible at a moment’s notice through the logics of computational searches. Wiener’s
words seemingly technologically realized. Our relationship to historical time,
documentation, and knowledge apparently reconfigured through the terms of
communication and control. In the realms of neuro-science and the many attention deficit
disorders we now cultivate as pathologies this situation is ordained genetic. Humanity, it
seems, always sought to communicate through screens, always wanted to garner ever
more data from more locations, more immediately.
It is my ambition in this book to denaturalize these assumptions. How would one, then,
go about telling a history of this structure of perception and the cultural forms of the
interface and storage systems upon which it rests? How would one narrate a history of
our contemporary forms of interactivity and attention? Beautiful Data addresses this
question methodologically, historically, and ethically.
Miming Wiener’s opening refrain about a historical transformation in epistemology and
ontology, Beautiful Data links histories of the archive and knowledge to genealogies of
digital media. Using the post-war discourse of cybernetics—the study of communication
and control—as a point of departure, this book maps contemporary obsessions with
storage and interactivity in digital systems to previous modernist concerns with
temporality, representation, and archiving.
To map this history, the book links together scientific studies from the life and
communication sciences on vision and neural nets, the work of designers and artists in
marketing, propaganda, and education, philosophical writings on computing, cybernetics,
and theories of mathematical communication and finally, social and human science
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research on race, politics, changing urban environments, and economics. Tracing these
many nodes where both subjectivities and populations were reformulated through new
models iteratively produced between design, the humanities, and the social sciences and
the cybernetics and communication sciences, I argue that there occurred a fundamental
reorganization of knowledge, perception, and cognition—vision and reason—that is the
infrastructure for contemporary discourses of interactivity, visualization, networking, and
“big data”.
The book traces three key themes critical to this reformulation of vision, attention, and
knowledge after the Second World War:
1) Epistemology: I trace a transformation in ideals of truth and objectivity in the human
and communication sciences. I document a shift in scientific practice and standards of
truth from a focus on discovery, archiving, and documentation of new facts about nature
to an emphasis on pattern-seeking, analysis, and recombining data.
2) Perception: I document the reconstitution of the observer, and the emergence of the
idea of “interactivity” as a dominant model for human attention in psychology, design,
and cognitive science. I argue that accompanying a shift in attitudes to data and
information in the sciences, one can document the emergence of information intensive
and multi-screen designs, the rise of communication design as a discipline and a core tool
for training in engineering, urban planning, and business schools, and the emergence of
the idea of the “interface” as a central design concern. These practices envisioned a new
type of spectator, one simultaneously radically self-referential and environmentally
networked; an observer who could scan data fields, find patterns, and constantly respond
to feedback from the environment.
3) Cognition: I map the redefinition of consciousness and psychology—at both individual
and organizational levels--into cognition. Psychic processes in this period came to be
understood through models derived from communication theories, circuits, and
computing in the human, neuro, and social sciences. This transformation in the definition
of consciousness and thought developed a model of the human subject as an agent in
networks intimately connected to other beings and open to the environment; offering a
new set of tools for measuring, managing, and designing individual and organizational
behavior in locations ranging from urban planning to marketing to politics.
But I want us to turn our attention to one final element. As the opening images
demonstrate, one of the central convictions of Beautiful Data is that while technologies
and mediums like computers are central in re-conceiving the practices of perception and
concomitant forms of representation, they are hardly determinate. As the very title of the
text denotes, this is a book about histories of perception, cognition, and representation; a
history of vision not a history of technology.
These neural nets and multi-media architectures must be treated as “failed” projects.
They are wish images. In their time, they did not produce the intended effects their
designers hoped for. In this sense, these opening images and memoirs demonstrate the
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desires that anticipate any technology. They are prototypes to a world that did not yet
exist when they were produced. That there is any resemblance between our present and
these wish-images is a matter of historical accident and choice.
It is to these accidents and choices that this book is dedicated. In making a history of
vision and reason an appropriate historical and philosophical object, constructed and
unstable, Beautiful Data reveals the possibility that our contemporary attitudes to
communication and technology may contain within them an evolutionary archive of
potential paths for articulation—some that have been realized, and some that have yet to
be imagined. What direction those imaginations take is at stake in how we choose to
narrate the history of our digital systems and our contemporary modes of perception.
II.
Book Organization
This history operates like the feedback loops of machines between storage,
memory and interface. The book vacillates between demonstrating synchronic
ideas of aesthetics and cognition at the time, and diachronically exploring how
mid-20th century ideas of vision, knowledge, and recording were haunted and
troubled in untimely ways by older 19th century concepts borrowed from
psychoanalysis, philosophy, mathematics, and physics.
The first chapter, “Archive”, is a map to the book and outlines the dominant
themes of archiving, knowledge, and vision by mapping the work of Norbert
Wiener and his colleagues, particularly in neuro and cognitive science at MIT, in
relationship to 19th century concepts of recording, memory, and time. I track how
process philosophy, psycho-analysis, pragmatism, Gibbsian physics and cinema
and photography were reformulated in cybernetics to produce contemporary
concepts of interactivity, storage, and information. Focusing on the cybernetic use
of Bergsonism, Pragmatism, and psychoanalysis, I make a case for a contested
history of time in digital media, and probe the emergent potentials of a tension
between the archive and the interface that underpins contemporary desires for
interaction, data storage, and data visualization.
The second chapter, “Communicative Objectivity”, is about the interface, the
training of the observer, and design in the 1950’s-60’s. The chapter traces the
reformulation of perception, particularly vision by examining how cybernetic
concepts transformed design practice and engineering, business school, and
design pedagogy. Tracing the work of two designers and an urban planner--the
designer and artist Gyorgy Kepes, the urban planner Kevin Lynch, and the
designer Charles Eames—the chapter scales between the training of the individual
observer, to a changing aesthetics of information and knowledge, and the
emergence of environmental and systems approaches to management and
planning. These three figures were central to American modernism, post-war
design and engineering education, and urban planning, and all of them engaged
with cybernetics and the communication and cognitive sciences. Their work is
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landmark in creating infrastructures for post-war American life—both attentive
and physical.
In their respective projects we can trace the re-imaging of the observer as isolated
but networked. This observer was linked to a new aesthetics of visualization and
management; interactivity as a personal mode of attention and environment as a
discourse for managing systems became interlaced ideals in fields ranging from
marketing to urban planning. The chapter culminates with an examination of one
site where practices in design, marketing, and management recombined in the
1963-64 New York World’s Fair with the innovative launch of the IBM
installation “Think” advertising the new information economy, by way of an
aesthetic of information inundation as a virtue, in the midst of massive urban
transformations in transportation, suburbanization, economy, and race relations.
The third chapter explores the doppelganger of perception in cybernetics—
cognition. I examine how aesthetics and perception were linked in new
assemblages to revise how, to cite IBM, we “think”. Starting with psychiatrist and
cybernetician, Warren McCulloch and logician Walter Pitt’s conception of neural
nets, I examine how these new ideas about mind and communication entered
fields ranging from government to economics to computing. I trace the networks
of interchange between cybernetic ideas of mind, and the work of political
scientists, such as Harvard professor, Karl Deutsch, organizational management,
finance, and artificial intelligence pioneer, Herbert Simon, and a number of other
human and social scientists.
These nervous networks while labeled rational were also in McCulloch’s
psychiatrically informed language “psychotic”. Arguably psychotic logic became
the definition of rationality and subsequently an infrastructure for data mining
with implications for governance and economy. Curiously enough, having turned
to psychosis and logic to redefine the behavior of subjects and systems, policy
makers and social scientists turned to data visualization as a technique to
compensate for what was increasingly understood to be a world of unknowns,
chance, and unreasonable behavior.
The remaining question is why it had been forgotten that rationality was defined
in terms of psychosis, not reason, throughout the 1950’s? And what is at stake in
our contemporary amnesia? While contemporary culture looks ever more
frequently to neuro-science, behaviorism, and data mining to predict human
behavior, economists, policy makers and even the public also continue to insist on
older 19th and earlier 20th century definitions of consciousness and choice. Politics
happens in this interstice between the memory of liberal reason and the embrace
of psychotic logics.
The fourth chapter completes the book in a feedback loop, by linking the
transformations in cognition and perception with governance and rationality, to
ask specifically how politics and aesthetics are linked through the valorization of
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beautiful data. Examining cybernetic work on vision and cognition done by
McCulloch, MIT neuro-scientist Jerome Lettvin, and psychologist George Miller
in connection to the design practices of prominent American Modernist designers,
George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, I make a case for the radical
reformulation of the very tactics by which bodies, territories, and networks are
governed through measurement and attention.
Asking whether these aesthetic strategies encompass what we now label “biopolitics” the book ends in interrogating the ethical and political implications of
making data beautiful and affective. In the final epilogue we find ourselves
simultaneously inside the gardens of IBM’s corporate headquarters in suburban
New York, and standing on hilltops in Jerusalem at the Israel Museum’s sculpture
garden, contemplating the work of another prominent mid-century artist, Isamu
Noguchi, and considering the implications of a new information aesthetics that
links the inside of corporations to the reformulation of territories.
This book is, therefore, a speculative endeavor in all manners by which speculate is
defined—as both a matter of reflection and mediation, a matter of conjecture, and a
matter of risk with possible gains and losses. And like the many speculators and
corporations trying to bank in on big data and visualization, only to be frustrated in their
financial ambitions, it is useful to be reminded the present is often haunted by the past
and the future is often cloudy and never predictable...visualizable but not necessarily
visible.
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