The Fabulous Loop de Loop
THE PORTA PAK: SONY VIDEOROVER DV-2400 (1967) + SONY VIDEOROVER II AV-3400 (1970)
Gregory Bateson's text Awake appeared in the fifth issue of Radical Software. It clearly annotated the errors in epistemology that threatened the future of Spaceship Earth in the second half of the twentieth century.
““[T]he ideas which dominate our civilization at the present time date in their most virulent form [are] from the Industrial Revolution.
a) It's us against the environment.
b) It's us against other men.
c) It's the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.
d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.
e) We live within an infinitely expanding "frontier."
f) Economic determinism is common sense.
g) Technology will do it for us .
We submit that these ideas are simply proved false by the great but ultimately destructive achievement of our technology in the last 150 years. Likewise they appear to be false under modern ecological theory. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself...” 2 The term ‘media ecology’ was developed in the pages of Radical Software in the early 1970s. Arlo Raymond attempted a definition in issue 1. Media ecology was, for him:”the study of media and communications and its affect on media and society.” In STEM, Bateson took a more radical position, within a media ecology there is no distinction among technology, affect, and sociability.3
Bateson's ideas which crossed between ecology and media ecology, were seminal in the development of video art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bateson had been a prominent and active voice in debates about art and society throughout the 1950s. For instance, Bateson was a member of the Western Roundtable on Modern Art in San Francisco in 1949, which included Marcel Duchamp. In 1957 Bateson and Marcel Duchamp joined Frank Lloyd Wright and Mayer Shapiro at the AFA Conference. It was here that Bateson further developed a (media) ecological understanding of art. Schipiro represented the old-guard, regarding painting's foremost virtue to be its fundamental opposition to mass media, a view which was opposed by Bateson and Duchamp. Duchamp delivered his now famous paper The Creative Act with Bateson presenting a text entitled Creative Imagination 4 which was later published in STEM.
The 1957 conference was noteworthy because it attracted a much larger audience than expected and because there was an insistence from those presenting, and the audience to discuss communication systems in relation to the arts. This was in the wake of an increased mass media presence and as the discourse on cybernetics became accessible to more people through (for instance) Norbert Wiener's books, a popularisation of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory as well as Bateson's own writing, including Communication and the Social Matrix of Psychiatry (with Jurgen Ruesch). Duchamp's paper sidesteps Schipiro's conservative position and holds the communicative and medial nature of art to be beyond the intention of the artist. The public decodes or 'deciphers' the intentions of the artist and inso doing become creators of it.5 Bateson's paper is more assuredly cybernetic in nature. Creative imagination addresses the particular nature of artistic communication, which, as opposed to everyday communication, is a means of meta-level communication, art for Bateson is inherently self-reflexive, it communicates about communication. If Schipiro was interested in art as a form of resistance, or bulwark, to communication, a space immune from the perennial effects of communication, Bateson sees art as a play between different levels of communication, a play which makes those different levels visible.6. This position would be the central tenet of early video art and the media theory discussed in Radical Software and would be a formative influence on artists such as Dan Graham (profoundly influenced by Bateson and Radical Software). For Bateson, aesthetic awareness allows for an understanding of the process by which it is possible to acquire knowledge7. This produces the grounds on which a communications system is framed to be made visible, which for a generation of artists in the 1960s and 70s situated art as an inherently self-reflexive, self-critical and context-critical endeavour. For Bateson communication produces context and further reflection on the production of that context.
This medial reading of aesthetics is in line with the valorization of creativity which was part of the post WWII's reinvention of the liberal subject: the self-reflexive self, constituted within media circuits (media-ecologies), which Bateson and Ruesch's Communication and the Social Matrix of Psychiatry had concerned itself. Here the self is beyond the individual subjectivity of ‘I’, mind is "immanent in the larger system, man plus environment. Communication is the "substance of common being" “8. Central to Bateson’s understanding of art was a conception of aesthetics as a form of ‘deutero-learning’ which deals with “context and classes of context” (as opposed to proto-learning which deals with “narrow fact”).9
When artistic practice and discourse finally adopted ideas of self-reflexivity and radical mediality in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was largely because of the influence Bateson10 had exacted on the counterculture from the 1960s on. Bateson’s vision of 'mind' as unbounded within a field of technological communication found resonance with a generation raised on the mass media and had also felt the alienating affects of that media. Many had also experienced some dissolution of the essential self through exposure to hallucinogenics, which provided a model demonstration of a self which is medial and co-exensive Gregory Bateson himself had been a participant in the CIA’s LSD experiments in the 1950s. The drug was administered to him by CIA agent Harold Abramson. In 1959 Bateson helped arrange for his friend, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, to take the drug at a research program located off the Stanford campus (see chapter b) 11. This was the same programme at which Ken Keasy and Stuart Brand met. Keasy and Brand went on to organise the multi-media Trips Festival in 196612. In the following year Kesey and his Merry Pranksters boarded the magic bus and Brand (a semi-detached merry prankster) founded the Whole Earth Catalog. . 13
Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalogue provided channels through which cybernetic ideas of self-sustaining systems could flow. Core inspiration for the Whole Earth Catalogue was provided by Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McCluhn. Bateson’s influence would be more evident as the ecological issues became more urgent. Brand’s next publication Co-evolutionary Quarterly (1974-1985) provided a specifically Batesonian emphasis in which a cybernetic notion of mind and ecology was adopted. Brand would remain a proselytiser of Bateson’s ideas up until Bateson’s death in 1980 and supported the last book Bateson was to publish in his lifetime, Mind & Nature. The ideals of self-sufficiency and self-sustainability had been narrated in cybernetic terms for the self-sufficient communities that were established from the mid-sixties on. 14 These attitudes and practices were re-coded into self-sufficient media ecologies as the 1970s approached, flowing through the output of media groups such as Raindance, TVTV (Top Value TeleVision), Antfarm and Videofreek. In the era of second-order cybernetics the emphasis was on experiments in technologies of self – re-programming the system, programming the community. In the 70s the ‘tools for living’ were changing but the cybernetic epistemology remained in tact. The Raindance Corporation was established as a platform for media activism and as a think tank – a radical alternative to the RAND Corporation15. Radical Software provided a forum for discussion, the decimation of information and the formulation of media theory as well as a platform for established writers and theorists. The founders and contributors to Radical Software were largely artists working with the new Porta Pak video system which became accessible at the end of the 1960s. At the cost of $1500 it was not cheap, but it was in the range of many more users than had previously been the case, and could be easily acquired by collectives. Tapes were easy to distribute, and could be re-used and copied. The second technological revolution came in the form of cable (CATV). Ralph Lee Smith’s article The Wired Nation (1970) heralded a new media revolution which would accord access to the contact of “newspapers, mail service, banking and shopping facilities, data from libraries and other storage centres, school curricula and other forms of information too numerous to specify. In short, every home and office will contain a communications centre of a breadth and flexibility to influence every aspect of private and community life.” 16. The artists Frank Gillette and Ira Schnider, in the first issue of Radical Software (1970), recognised that the combination of cable hooked up to portable video equipment would break the ecology of the mass media, radically changing the subject positions of producers and consumers of media.17CATV, like CCTV, was a closed circuit system extended to a very great extent allowing for a feedback loop of communication between participants over a great distances.18 The recursive structure of this system could take the form of shared communication and could equally create positive feedback (noise). Both feedback as noise and negative feedback as a system of control offered political and artistic potential which the community around Radical Software were keen to exploit.
Raindance and Michael Shemberg’s publication Guerrilla Television (with graphics by architect-design collective Antfarm) (1971) would identify mainstream ‘Media America’ as designed to minimise such feedback, allowing only a one-way flow between sender and receiver. This resulted in an accumulation of cultural power into the hands of corporate America. Portable video systems, along with access to cable technology, would help redress this imbalance. A principle platform in the pages of Radical Software, therefore, was to lobby for the open uses of CATV (the appointment of licences began in 1970). Between 1968 and 1972 cable operators offered support to community based projects, this was exploited by a wave of artist-activist initiatives and underwritten by New York State Council for the Arts (which in 1970 increased its budget to the arts from $2m to $20m). Initiatives by artists and artist collectives also received support from private foundations 19The emphasis and motivation on the community of video artists working for and around Radical Software was on community based media projects and ecological activist projects (the annual Earth Day began in 1970) (98). Paul Ryan had worked for Marshall McLuhan whilst McLuhan was visiting professor at Fordam University (1967-1968). McLuhan gave Ryan, Frank Gillette and Nam June Paik access to Sony Porta Paks that McLuhan had received from them from Sony (he had little practical use for them).
Ryan and Gillette, along with their colleague Roy Skodnick – nicknamed the “Bateson Boys” because of their fondness for Bateson’s theories – would become key architects in the discourse of video-art-activism as it emerged from the ecological movement. They produced seminal works, texts and forums for theory and practice (often through the offices of Raindance and Radical Software). Radical software combined pragmatic advice of how to work the technology with an emergent theoretical framework which considered the implications of that technology on future culture and society. 20 The experimental epistemology of Craik, McCulloch, Ashby, Grey Walter was extended into a new era, this time incorporating the experimenter as an integral part of the experiment.
If the Porta Pak as a piece of technology encouraged a radical new form of social-media and media collectivity, it also allowed for the creation of artworks which made the individuals place within a media circuitry visible. Paul Ryan’s Everyman’s Mobius Strip (1969), Frank Gillette and Ira Scheider’s Wipe Cycle (1968),and Dan Graham’s TV Camera/ Monitor Performance (1971); Frank Gillette’s, Video: Process and Meta-Process (1973) all performed the logic of the self as co-extensive to a given system =[nervous system, system, environment]. As Skodnick was to reflect years later, social movements and media movements were converging “[…] with Bateson as principle guide to the complexities of nature and culture. [Frank] Gillette did it, Randy Sherman did it, and apparently [Dan] Graham did it too. Anyone who happened to get hold of a portable video system at the time immediately overloaded on circuits, playback, feedback and fabulous loop de loop.” 21The Porta Pak, Skodnick observed, was a “beautiful system” that not only allowed the user to “ track social behaviour but also to see how social behaviour is framed […] TV dissolved into a more plastic language.” Skodnick continues, “ [T]here was a full-bore media war of information then, and visual information was fully up for grabs. We could put ourselves in it, see ourselves seeing ourselves, and even enter the jouster with the ‘News cycle’ emptying out, as was demonstrated in [Gillette’s] Wipe Cycle.” Such was the “radical ecology of Radical Software”. 2223
A progression between Behaviour, Teleology & Purpose, the McCuloch-Pitts model, Norbert Wiener’s negentropy and, Ashby’s Homeostat (which we discussed earlier) and the emerging ecology movement and media ecology can be found in Bateson's 1968 essays Effects of Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation 24 and The Roots of Ecological Crisis.
In Conscious Purpose versus Nature 25 Bateson notes that the chain of being and the place of the mind within it, as understood in pre-modern cultures and in non-occidental cultures, has suffered a reversal in the modern Western scientific era. In the modern conception the supreme mind (God/ mind of Man) was at the top, enjoying mastery over the creatures below him, from the higher primates to the protozoa bubbling at the bottom. Bateson argues that this conception does not allow for a conception of mind as imminent within a series of co-extensive systems. The publication of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's evolutionary theory at the beginning of the 19th century – “the first organised transforms theory of evolution”. 26– ushered in a Copernican revolution in the biological field. Philosophie Zoologique (1809) is revolutionary, Bateson contends, because it acknowledged that the order of nature runs in a converse direction, suggesting that mind is indeed emergent and imminent within an ecology 27.Up until Lamarck "mind was an explanation of the biological world. But, Hey presto, the question now arose: is the biological world the explanation of mind?" 28 […] “Some years [after Lamarck], Russel Wallis, in his correspondence to Charles Darwin described the process of natural selection as akin to the regulation of a steam engine by a governor.”29) The full implications of Wallis' insight, that such ecological systems are regulated by negative feedback, lay dormant until after WWII when the revolution in cybernetics and communication theory allowed for a clearer understanding of feedback as a general regulating principle within different scaled ecological systems (from a single cell to a complex environment, such as Spaceship Earth). It also allowed for an understanding of the formation of social relations and individuation of the human psyche as a process of circular causality driven by purpose. If pre modern societies had an understanding that mind was coextensive within a series of systems this was rediscovered in the post-cybernetic era as "nowadays cybernetics deals with much more complex systems" of human behaviour, human organization, any biological systems which are all self-corrective. Such systems are always conservative of something, the change in the fuel supply effects the motion of the flywheel which is regulated by the governor (435) This transaction, in relation to any system, might be understood as survival. This tendency of self-correcting systems toward conservatism is now directed to the subject of the human psych. Bateson notes that the difficulty people have in seeing the obvious, or with coping with disturbing information 30 is an artefact of the system. The tendency to reinforce resistance to the obvious or the disturbing is systematic. "This is a system which conserves descriptive statements about the human being, body and soul. For the same is true of the psychology of the individual , where learning occurs, to conserve the opinions and components of the status quo." 31 Society and the ecosystem are systems of the same general kind. In all such systems there is an "uneasy balance of dependency and competition". The components of a system are "segmented" so that change is localised [...] The biological system is driven to reproduce, even if, to state the obvious, overpopulation will result in a strain on the larger system: any "monkeying with the system is likely to disrupt the equilibrium." 32. It is therefore, "quite a trick" to balance dependency and competition. The system is segmented so that no single part has access to the "total mind" . However, and here Bateson introduces a mysterious (almost mystical element), “there is a " "semipermiable" linkage between consciousness and the remainder of the total mind. A certain limited amount of information about what is happening in this larger part of the mind seems to be relayed to what we may call the screen of consciousness." 33 Because the screen of consciousness is a filtration system it necessarily provides partial information. The whole mind cannot be comprehended in part of that mind, to comprehend the circuitry of the system would require more circuitry which produces an infinitely recursive logic &c. 34 The question now arises, how is this limited selection of information which plays on the screen of consciousness selected and filtered? "I am guided in my perception by purposes." , thought is responsive and immanent "I get a myth about this subject which might be quite correct. I am interested in getting that myth as I talk. It is relevant to my purposes that you hear me."35. In this anecdote thought is imminent to purpose. Purpose becomes that which builds subjects and relations to subjects within the system.36 Here subjects and objects are performativly produced within a circuit of communication where competition and dependency are central agents.
Here Bateson mounts a critique of instrumental reason and the instrumentalization of cybernetic principles: "What happens to the picture of a cybernetic system [...] when that picture is selectively drawn to answer only questions of purpose?" 37If a system is organized only in terms of purpose it ends up with a “bag of tricks” and no wisdom about the system as a whole, it is organised to arrive at short cuts and quick fixes and to follow the shortest logical path, which may be "dinner; it may be a Beethoven sonata; it may be sex. Above all it may be money and power." 38. The cause for concern, for Bateson, is the "addition of modern technology to the old system" The system orientated by purpose that consciousness has been using for more than a million years has produced more effective machinery "transportation systems, airplanes, weaponry, medicine, pesticides, and so forth" all produced through the agency of conscious purpose.
Bateson gives an account of conscious purpose which begins in myth.
God, in a retelling of the Judo-Christian creation myth, was cast out of the garden on the day that Adam and Eve worked out how to stack one box on top of another in order to get their hands on the apple. At the point at which they realised that A & B can result in C, and were defined by a local aim and purpose they were "cast out of the garden of the concept of their own systemic nature." 39 our consciousness is conditioned to conscious purpose, which is projected onto the screen of our consciousness, such purpose defines the subjects and objects in our world, we produce technologies to meet those purposes, together these things constitute a system which we strive to preserve. We see as through a glass darkly – "Consciousness is blinded to the systematic nature of the individual man" . Bateson continues to wax biblical: “Lack of systematic wisdom is always punished”. 40 41 Bateson presents a cybernetic paradox of consciousness. Bateson continues to call for a revision of "the occidental errors of epistemology" 42, and calls for a humility in the face of nature and in relation to what is known by human beings. Bateson finds useful models in Zen Buddhism, which challenges the sovereignty of the self in relation to natural systems; artistic or aesthetic pursuits which operate under the order of self-reflexive, deutero-learning which alters the register of hierarchical perception; the 'best of religion' serves as a corrective to 'overrun' (positive feedback producing inflexibility and instability within a system). In this respect the lines of engagement are ostensibly the same as the 1950s, but the stakes at the end of the 1960s, when an ecological disaster seems imminent, are more desperate. Bateson wrote in Radical Software: “... all of the many current threats to man”s survival are traceable to three root causes: a) technological progress b) population increase c) certain errors in the thinking and attitudes of occidental culture. (Our “values” are wrong!)” 43The question for Bateson in Restructuring the Ecology of a Great City – written for the office of New York City Mayor John Lindsy and published in the fourth issue of Radical Software 44– is how to conserve and protect flexibility, which is a measure of the degree of adaptability within the parameters of a given system. Bateson begins the essay by establishing that the exploitation of resources over thousands of years by humans has resulted in a reduction of such flexibility. Human society has been progressively unstable since the introduction of the wheel, metal and script. Indeed the 'pathologies of our time' are an accumulation of a loss of flexibility over a very long period. The ideal city is considered as "a single system or environment with 'high' civilization" in which the flexibility of the civilization and of the environment are equal. The designation 'High' corresponds to the degree of self-knowledge or 'wisdom' of a given society, this is passed down by individuals through institutions (schools, family, church for instance).
Bateson shifts between actual and hypothetical societies; and also actual-hypothetical past and present societies, positing an ideal, ecological society which primarily uses that energy which is available to Spaceship Earth, principally solar, wind, photosynthesis and tidal energy.
To illustrate the ecological city, and the more general issue of flexibility within a system, Bateson again returns to W. Ross Ashby's Homeostat. In Ashby's model, and Bateson's city, flexibility operates within set parameters, the upper and lower limits of which are strained when tested, resulting in a loss of flexibility throughout that system. Bateson uses the practical (whilst somehow generally hypothetical) example of over-population, which exacts strains on housing, transportation systems and education if tested to the limit, resulting in the city becoming less self-sustainable, less flexible, less ecologically responsive. Bateson advocates the control of ecological resources and seeks to establish authority to preserve the flexibility that does exist (and to allow for instances for it to exist where it currently does not). This, Bateson argues, may justify 'tyrannical' measures.
Bateson advocates a radical humility on the part of humankind, warning that in seeking to have control of a given system one destroys it. The aim is to find one's place within an ecology, which requires a large philosophical AND spiritual leap in the first instance. Bateson has little faith in the current economic and political system – the Viet-Nam war is a folly, the pollution of the environment by corporations is reprehensible, overpopulation and the pollution of ecological systems by DDT indicate that it may be 'too late'. The interventions he makes – speaking on behalf of the Ecology Bill in Hawaii, and the debate on the future city in New York, for example – call for long term changes of individual and collective philosophy, reform where possible (Hawaii) and anti-democratic legislation if necessary (New York). The stakes are high, the very survival of Spaceship Earth.
For Bateson " cybernetics is [...] not simply a change in attitude, but even a change in the understanding of what an attitude is." 45 This introduces the political subject as transcendent: In later writings Bateson would consider that liberal reason requires a self-reflexivity which would allow a profound change in subjectivity. As with Bateson’s consideration of then human psyche or the social unit, there is always a paradox at the centre. For the subject to see themselves beyond the screen of consciousness is not possible, because the the screen of consciousness is the interface between the map of the self and the territory of the self. To know one’s place within system requires a transcendent self-reflexivity. The double bind would be that this transcendent self-reflexivity would be simultaneously a revelation of the self and a negation of the self. To think on the register of the total mind would allow one to see beyond the screen of consciousness and to recognize one’s place in the system. The ecological subject would transcend subjectivity, coming into being at the moment of its dissolution.
In the this chapter we considered Bateson’s aesthetics in relation to Bateson’s ecology. Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology necessitates a self-reflective understanding of the individual’s place within a larger system. The (second order) cybernetic approach to negentropy holds that human + environment are part of a single system. Humans are in the position to operate on a “deteuro-level” and order their environment (given that this is to a limited degree given that the universe is, in the long run, entropic). Humans, through making choices, order their environment – an aesthetic position. Humans’ failour to understand their place in the overall system can lead to disastrous environmental consequences, as a sub-system seeks to preserve aspects within itself which run contrary to the order of the greater system – an ecological position.
We also considered that the tendency to self-reflexivity is an artifice of the method described above. In the preceding chapters I have described a number of machines which solicit this self-reflexivity. In the last the Porta Pak becomes a technology of self and a technology of collectivity as the essential self is distributed through a feedback systems which feeds information about one’s de-centered self back through the nervous system. It was in the period of Radical Software that art became about self-reflexivity In the first instance it was not intended to be art in any conventional sense (no declarable art products were produced), it was rather an extension and expression of lives lived, an augmentation of potential. In this sense it was a negation of art which has been at the heart of the discourse of art since the birth of modernism, but it nevertheless provided a new condition that art recognised its own self-reflexivity – self-reflexivity was thereafter a condition of artistic production.
1Bateson, STEM 446 2Gregory Bateson Radical Software Issue 5 Volume 1, 33 3Bateson STEM. 87 4 Kaizen, 92 5M. Duchamp The Creative Act, ART-news Vol. 56, no. 4, 1957 6Kaizen 93 7Kaizen 94 8Bateson, in Kaizen 94 9 Bateson, Mind and Nature, 156 10With other’s, including Buckmaster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. 11Marks 1979:120 12F. Turner; From Counterculture to Cyberculture, University of Chicago Press, 2008 13 Outtake: Bateson, through his friendship with Alan Watts, also took an interest in Zen Buddhism as the model for a non-occidental, radically discentered, non-Cartesian philosophy STEVE P. HEIMS: Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 ; GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS: FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY INTERACTION
TO SOCIETAL FUNCTIONS 1977, 141-159
14Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture 15 The research and development arm of the industrial, military, academic complex) 16Lee Smith, in Joslit's Feedback, 91 17Radical Software, Issue 1. 1970 18Joslit, Feedback, 96-97 19 P. Ryan; A Genealogy of Video; Leonardo, Vol. 21, No. 1, 1988, pp. 39-44
20Ryan, Radical Software issue 4, 1971 outtake: Ryan was inspired by McLuhan at his most optimistic, who in Understanding Media, had posited that electronic media could result in “the ultimate harmony of all being” , this, in Radical Software was tempered with a politically critical approach which advocated “Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare” (Ryan, Radical Software 4) 21Skodnick: Radical Software and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson Author(s): Paul Ryan and Roy Skodnick; Art Journal, Vol. 68, No. 1 (SPRING 2009), 113 22Skodnick Radical Software and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson Author(s): Paul Ryan and Roy Skodnick: Art Journal, Vol. 68, No. 1 (SPRING 2009),113
23 Outtake Paul; Ryan: “Video itself mutated from a counter cultural gesture to an art genre. When video was principally a countercultural gesture, it held the promise of social change unmediated by the art world. Now, whatever promise of social change video holds is mediated by the art world. This is a significant difference. People unfamiliar with the mutation find it difficult to appreciate the unlimited sense of possibility that early video held.” It was in this milieu (middle space) that Bateson's ideas made their transition from the sphere of ecology into media art. 24 Bateson, STEM 446 25 Bateson STEM 433, 1968 26 Bateson, STEM 455 27 STEM (433) 28 STEM 434 29 STEM 435 Bateson also gives an account of this in Stewart Brand's For God Sake Margaret!, Co-Evolutionary Quarterly 197* 30 435 31 435 32 437 33Bateson STEM, 438 34Bateson STEM 438 35Bateson STEM, 438 36[here one might conceive the Peircian semiotic as a feedback loop between object and the interpretant. (see Mathew Fuller) 37Bateson STEM,439 38Bateson STEM,440 39Bateson STEM,441 40STEM 441 41Note: repeatedly, for Bateson, the behavior within one system becomes isomorphic with another = the human psyche is akin to the ecology of an oak tree; 42STEM 495 43Gregory Bateson, Awake, Radical Software No 5 Volume 1, 33 44Bateson Restructuring the Ecology of a Great City, Radical Software no 4 1970 45Bateson STEM, page?