"Light and Sound, Not Song and Dance": Cybernetic Subjectivity in the Environmental Art of the Pulsa Group, 1966–1973
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The proliferation of computing technologies and their attendant futurisms throughout the 1960s and 1970s prompted engineers and artists alike to reckon with a world humans would share with artificially intelligent machines. However, current scholarship around this period of techno-aesthetic experimentation lacks a full-scale exegesis of the work of the Pulsa Group, an artists collective composed of seven Yale University graduates who lived communally and created programmed environments from 1967 to 1973. This thesis makes use of archival research and interviews to chart the arc of Pulsa’s career, beginning with the light and sound environments they constructed in a New Haven loft and ending with their implementation of a feedback-enabled environment wherein human movements elicited responses from a computational infrastructure. I characterize the group’s iterative work process as moving toward evolutionary environments aimed at evolving the human perceptual panoply to better cope with a dawning cybernetic age. The audience’s experience of a Pulsa environment bolsters this project in that the boundary between art and viewer or object and subject becomes blurry—the human and the machine are in fact interdependent. Eventually, Pulsa took their environments to the urban environment, where the dream of facilitating dialogue between computers and their users became an element of city planning. Finally, Pulsa’s work evolved toward mutualistic feedback between participants and environment, where input from people in the space affected the system output. Rather than attempting to control participant behavior, I argue, Pulsa’s interactive works created a networked environment in which action could occur and be fed back into the system. In the resultant social vision, control persists not in the overt control of behavior, but in the creation of seemingly endless opportunities for action within a system that learns from those choices.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Scott, Hannah |
|---|---|
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Program in Science, Technology, and Society |
| Primary advisor | Turner, Fred |
Subjects
| Subject | Pulsa |
|---|---|
| Subject | STS |
| Subject | cybernetics |
| Subject | art and technology |
| Subject | environmental art |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Scott, Hannah. (2021). "Light and Sound, Not Song and Dance": Cybernetic Subjectivity in the Environmental Art of the Pulsa Group, 1966–1973. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/yf322sc9397
Collection
Stanford University, Program in Science, Technology and Society, Honors Theses
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- Contact
- hannahmargaretscott@gmail.com
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