From Cyber2008: day 1

Cyber 2008 is entitled 'Thinking and making connections'.

The first day for me has certainly been a day of seeing connections. There's no doubt that cybernetics reaches in all sorts of directions. A pleasing link today was the talk by Jasia Reichardt. As Assistant Director of the ICA in London, Jaisa was responsible for the 'Between Poetry and Painting' exhibition in 1965 that I mentioned here. Jasia talked more about a later exhibition entitled 'Cybernetic Serendipity' in 1968. It sounds intriguing, but at this stage I'm not sure quite how it feeds in to my own ideas.

In fact it will take on a while to 'process' all I've heard today. One, maybe superficial, observation, (but also one that supports the justification for Chris Bissell's talk) is that the speakers coming from non-engineering backgrounds clearly rely very heavily on references to Norbert Wiener. There's been very little mention of Shannon. Of course the reference to cybernetics on the conference title immediatley makes the Wiener link, but to my mind Shannon is every bit as significant as Wiener. It will be interesting to see what sort of reaction our panel session (papers by Chris Bissell, Magnus Ramage and me) gets tomorrow.