Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

This talk examines the post-World War II proliferation of interest in computational automata, concentrating in particular on Claude Shannon and the roles his automata played within Bell Labs exhibition cultures. I argue that Shannon's theatrical automata were canny, artifactual “demos” that underscored their own conventionality and rendered the habits of observers discrete and legible. I distinguish these machines from the dramatic automata of Norbert Wiener and others, which typically aspired to the status of transcendental scientific “models.” On the basis of this distinction I argue that Shannon’s automata for promoted an “ethics of eccentricity” that provides an alternative to dominant cybernetic and AI (artificial intelligence) epistemologies.

Bernard Geoghegan is a doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. He has held positions as a visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a fellow at Northwestern's Center for Art and Technology, and a fellow at the Centre Pompidou's Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation.