Hey City Zen!

A lost essay by Wiener: "The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined that they would one day become central to civilization, with consequences both liberating and potentially dire. [...] If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty. [...] We must be willing to deal in facts rather than in fashionable ideologies if we wish to get through this period unharmed. Not even the brightest picture of an age in which man is the master, and in which we all have an excess of mechanical services will make up for the pains of transition, if we are not both humane and intelligent." Full essay @ M.I.T. Scholar’s 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found - NYTimes.com

Labels: cybernetics, Wiener

'One of Eno's favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go."' Full article "Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics" @ Rhizone

Brian Eno definitely deserves the "oblique strategy" prolonged gratification award. His hands have been breaking the frame of so many musicians and artists in the last decades, and in so doing generating amazing (cybernetic) art.



Thank you Artemy for the link.

Labels: art, cybernetics, Music