Beautiful Data by Orit Halpern

8/10/2019 Beautiful Data by Orit Halpern

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_BEAUTIFUL DATA


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Experimental Futures. , , . A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit

Beautiful Data _


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and since 1945 ORIT HALPERN

Duke University Press_Durham and London _2014


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2014 Duke University Press. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States o America on acid- ree paper Typeset in Helvetica Neue and Minion by Tseng In ormation Systems, Inc.

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHalpern, Orit, 1972Beauti ul data : a history o vision and reason since 1945 / Orit Halpern.pages cm(Experimental utures)Includes bibliographical re erences and index.

978-0-8223-5730-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-5744-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Cybernetics. 2. Big data. 3. Perception. 4. Cognition.I. Title. II. Series: Experimental utures.

310. 35 2014003.54dc232014013032

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the supportof the Warner Publication Fund at Columbia University, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

Cover art: Images rom Kepes,New Landscape: patterns emergingrom charged particles; aerial survey o Chicago; oscilloscope

patterns o an Analogue Computer (1956). Background image:George Maciunas, Expanded Arts Diagram, (1966), detail. All Rights Reserved, George Maciunas Foundation, Inc., 2013.


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Contents

_vii . Speculating on Sense_1 . Dreams or Our

Perceptual Present_9

1 ARCHIVING. Temporality, Storage, andInteractivity in Cybernetics_39

2 VISUALIZING. Design, CommunicativeObjectivity, and the Inter ace_79

3 RATIONALIZING. Cognition, Time, and Logicin the Social and Behavioral Sciences_145

4 GOVERNING. Designing In ormationand Reconguring Population circa 1959_199

_239 _251 _271 _307 _327


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Acknowledgments

This book resulted rom a complex network o people, dispersed both geo-graphically and temporally. I give thanks to all o them.

This work began when I was a graduate student at Harvards Departmento the History o Science, and I am particularly grate ul to Peter Galison, who

rst encouraged me to ollow my interest in digital media and histories oknowledge and vision. He has been stead ast in encouraging new orms oscholarship and experimentation throughout my career. I also want to givespecial thanks to David Rodowick, who was critical in introducing me to newways to think about media and the productive and imaginative potentialso engaging with critical and poststructural theory. Allan Brandt and CharisThompson were ever-supportive readers, and provided intellectual guidancethroughout. My ellow graduate students also offered support and intellectual

inspiration, both during my time at Harvard and, perhaps more signicantly,aferward. I am particularly grate ul to Sharrona Pearl, Colin Milburn, CarlaNappi, Jimena Canales, Debbie Weinstein and Hannah Shell.

I was ortunate enough to have a postdoctoral ellowship at Duke Univer-sity rom 20062007 at the John Hope Franklin Center, dedicated to digitalmedia and its study. I proted enormously rom the prolonged engagementand support o a wonder ul working group headed by Timothy Lenoir andPriscilla Wald, both o whom provided an incredible environment or encour-aging new forms of scholarship and who have continued to be immensely sup-portive o my scholarship. I also beneted greatly rom input and exchangewith numerous members o the group, particularly Robert Mitchell, CathyDavidson, David Liu, Harry Halprin, and Mitali Routh.

At the New School or Social Research ( ), Eugene Lang College, andParsons School o Design I have enjoyed being in a truly emergent environ-ment, where change and intellectual experimentation has been regularly en-couraged by my colleagues and riends. I want to thank the members o theVisual Culture Working Group, who have provided an intellectual bedrocksince my arrival. Victoria Hattam, Deborah Levitt, David Brody, Janet Kray-nak, Margot Bauman, Pooja Rangan, Jeffrey Lieber, and Julie Napolin have


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viii_ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

all provided an amazing and ostering space to develop my thought and writ-ing. I must also thank my many colleagues who have so thought ully engagedmy work and supported my research: Ann Stoler, Janet Roitman, Ken Wark,Hugh Raffles, Shannon Mattern, Jeremy Varon, Inessa Medzihbovskya, Julia

Ott, and Banu Bargu.In the course o the past ew years, I have also had the great ortune o re-

ceiving both nancial and intellectual support from a number of organizationsand oundations. Throughout the years 20102012, I was a member o Colum-bia Universitys Seminar on the Theory and History o Media. I give sincerethanks to the members o the seminar, particularly Felicity Scott, RheinholdMartin, Brian Larkin, Ste an Andriopoulus, and Alexander Galloway. I wasalso given subvention assistance as a result o the seminar rom the Warner

Publication Fund at Columbia, or which I am very grate ul.In 20102013 I was a beneciary o a unique programThe Poiesis Proj-

ecto the Institute or Public Knowledge at New York University, spon-sored by the Stifung/Herbert Quandt and Gerda Hankel Stifung. I givethanks to these foundations and to for their support. I worked throughoutthe period with a wonder ul group; I am particularly thank ul to Ash Amin,Saskia Sassen, Jesse LeCavalier and Nerea Calvillo or sharing their thoughtsand practices with me.

Lorraine Daston and the Max Planck Institute or the History o Sciencein Berlin also deserve special credit or supporting this project by providingspace and time (always at a limit) or writing and research. Raine also pro-vided an incredible environment or ostering discussion and thought. I havenever been in a better space or encouraging scholarship than in her abtei-lung at the Planck. I had the good ortune o being in residence there twice,the rst time during the year 2001 as a graduate student, the second time in2009 or my sabbatical. Other members o the Planck were also invaluable ascolleagues and readersJosh Berson, Rebecca Lemov, Henning Schmidgen,Susanne Bauer, and John Carson were generous in commenting upon andsupporting my work.

I would also especially like to thank the people I have been closest toover the years and who have continually mentored and supported my workas riends and colleagues: Joseph Dumit, Natasha Myers, Patricia Clough,Jonathan Bellar, Michelle Murphy, Hannah Landaecker, Jim Bono, Wendy HuiKyong Chun, Luciana Parisi, Nina Wake ord, Celia Lury, Thomas LaMarre,Michael Fisch, Martha Poon, and Dooeun Choi.

I also want to thank the members o the Instrument group, o which I ama member, and which is part o the A regate Architecture and Theory col-


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS _ix

lective: Zeynep elik Alexander, John May, Michael Ousman, John Harwood,Matthew Hunter, and Lucia Allais have given input on parts o this project.

A number o archivists have also helped me. David Hertsgaard and Gene-vieve Fong at the Eames Office have been very generous. Heidi Coleman at the

Noguchi Archive and Museum assisted me greatly with the collections there.I also want to thank the Smithsonian Archive o American Art, the Libraryo Congress, the American Philosophical Society, Archives and SpecialCollections, Harvard University Archives, the Corporate Archives, ImreKepes and Juliet K.Stone, and the Archigram Archives.

At Duke University Press, I want to thank Ken Wissoker, whose guidance,support, and assistance have been invaluable to realizing this project, andElizabeth Ault and Sara Leone, who have both done so much to help ensure

that this book comes to ruition. Finally, I want to thank my amily, Mor-dechai, Atara, Galia, Iris, and Talwithout them I would never have started,much less completed, this book.


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_Speculating on Sense

This book is about the historical construction o vision and cognition in thesecond hal o the twentieth century. It posits that our orms o attention, ob-servation, and truth are situated, contingent, and contested and that the wayswe are trained, and train ourselves, to observe, document, record, and analyze

the world are deeply historical in character. The narrative traces the impact ocybernetics and the communication sciences afer World War on the socialand human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning. It documents a radicalshif in attitudes to recording and displaying in ormation that produced newforms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management andanalysis o data; what I label a communicative objectivity. Furthermore, thebook argues that historical changes in how we manage and train perceptionand dene reason and intelligence are also trans ormations in governmen-

tality. My intent is to denaturalize and historically situate assumptions aboutthe value o data, our regular obsession with visualization, and our almostoverwhelming belie that we are in the midst o a digital-media-driven crisiso attention that can only be responded to through recourse to intensi yingmedia consumption.

To begin to interrogate this past and its attendant stakes, I would like tooffer an example in the present. I want to open with the largest private realestate development on earth. One hours drive southwest rom Seoul, the newcity o Songdo is being built rom scratch on land reclaimed rom the ocean(g. .1). It is a masterpiece o engineering, literally emerging rom a pre-viously nonexistent territory. Beneath this newly grafed land lies a massivein rastructure o conduits containing ber optic cables. Three eet wide, thesetunnels are ar larger than in most western European and American cities.They are largely empty spaces waiting, in theory, to provide some o the high-est bandwidth on earth. To the eye o a New Yorker this is a strange landscapeo inhuman proportions. Nowhere in the United States are there constructionsites even approximating this size.

Part o the newly established Incheon Free Economic Zone ( ), Songdois one o three developmentsthe other two go by the labels logistics and


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PROLOGUE _3

regard or the specic locale, these products are the latest obsession in urbanplanning. They are massive commodities.

Songdo is a special class o such spatial products. The citys major distin-guishing eature is that it is designed to provide ubiquitous physical com-

puting in rastructure. Marketed as a smart city, it is sold as the next rontierin computing an entire territory whose sole mandate is to produce inter-active data elds that, like the natural resources o another era, will be mined

or wealth and produce the in rastructure or a new way o li e. Ciscos stra-tegic planners envision the world as inter ace, an entire sensory environmentwhere human actions and reactions, rom eye movements to body move-ments, can be traced, tracked, and responded to in the name o consumersatis action and work efficiency (whatever these terms may denote, and they

are always ill dened and malleable, as are, perhaps not incidentally, intelli-gence or smartness). Every wall, room, and space is a conduit to a meeting,a building, a lab, or a hospital in another place. The developers thus envisionan inter ace-lled li e, where the currency o the realm is human attention atits very nervous, maybe even molecular, level. (Engineers speak candidly otrans orming the laws o South Korea to allow the construction o medicalgrade networks to allow genetic and other data to ow rom labs in the hometo medical sites in order to acilitate the proli eration o home-health care ser-

vices.) Accompanying the provision o computing in rastructure, the SouthKorean government also offers tax incentives to global high-tech and biotech-nology companies to build research and development acilities that leveragethe data structures and bandwidth o the location. Samsungs biotech divisionhas already relocated, along with , a major steel rening conglomerate,

/ e-book storage and web sales, Ciscos urban management divi-sion, and numerous other companies.

As some o the citys more enthusiastic proponents write, as ar as play-ing God. . . . New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Braslia 50years ago. . . . It has been hailed since conception as the experimental proto-type city o tomorrow. A green city, it was -certied rom the get-go, de-signed to emit a third o the greenhouse gases o a typical metropolis its size.. . . And its supposed to be a smart city studded with chips talking to oneanother. The article goes on to address the role o Cisco in the project andtheir plans to wire every square inch with synapses. The developers, nan-ciers, and media boosters o this city argue or a speculative space ahead o itstime that operates at the synaptic level o its inhabitants, linking the manage-ment o li e at a global and ecological level to the very modulation o nerves.


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4_PROLOGUE

The government and the corporations developing this space hope to create

value around this systemic (human, machine, and even environmental) atten-tive capacity. They speak o monetizing bandwidth, implying that terms likein ormation and communication can be seamlessly translated into rates obits transmitted and into the amount o attentive, even synaptic, time con-sumers dedicate to unspecied applications in business, medicine, and edu-cation. This is a landscape where bandwidth and sustainability are antasizedas organizing li e through a proli eration o inter aces to the point o ubiquity(g. .2). What constitutes intelligence and smartness is now linked to thesensorial capacity or eedback between the users and the environment: band-width and li e inextricably correlated or both prot and survival.

Songdo arguably demonstrates a historical change in how we apply ideas ocognition, intelligence, eedback, and communication into our built environ-ments, economies, and politics. It is a city that is antasized as being about re-organizing bodies, down to the synaptic level, and reorienting them into globaldata clouds or populations with other similarly reorganized nervous systemsglobally. These populations are not directly linked back to individual bodiesbut are a lomerations o nervous stimulation; compartmentalized units oan individuals attentive, even nervous, energy and credit. Furthermore, itis imagined as a sel -regulating organism, using crowdsourcing and sensory

. .2_Bandwidth = Life. Image of control room in Songdo, monitoringenvironmental data, traffic movement, security cameras, and emergency responsesystems. Image: author, September 1, 2013. As the marketers explain: life in theIncheon Free Economic Zone is peaceful and abundant with parks and broad fields ofgreen covering more than 30 percent of the city. There is a new city waste incineratingfacility, a treated sewage recycling system and other systems, which work beyondeyeshot. Incheon Free Economic Zone marketing materials, July 2012.


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PROLOGUE _5

data to administer the city and limit (in theory) the necessity or human, orgovernmental, intervention. Songdos speculators who are banking on the bigdata sets to be collated rom such spaces no longer deal with consumers asindividual subjects but rather as recombinable units o attention, behavior,

and credit. This orm o political economy is ofen labeled biopolitics ormaking li e its object and subject o concern, and it produces a range o new

orms o administration, management, and productivity.The antasy o managing li e itsel by bandwidth, and the ofen unques-

tioned assumption that data presents stability, wealth, and sensorial pleasureis not solely the privy o real estate speculators. Today big data is regularlytouted as the solution to economic, social, political, and ecological problems;a new resource to extract in a world increasingly understood as resource con-

strained.This ubiquitous data that is so valuable, even without a set re erent or

value, is also ofen explicitly labeled beauti ul. In the pamphlets o tech-nology corporations touting the virtues o a smart planet and in prominenttextbooks in computer science and blogs by computer research groups, storiesabound about elegant data solutions. These narratives come with labels suchas Beauti ul Data and Beauti ul Evidence. Opening with the premise thatthe web today is above all about the collection o personal data, many data

visualization sites and textbooks urge the designers, engineers, and program-mers o our uture to address the important aesthetic component o makingthis data use ul, which is to say, beauti ul. But data is not always beauti ul.It must be crafed and mined to make it valuable and beauti ul. Despite theseeming naturalness o data and its virtues, there ore, there is nothing auto-matic, obvious, or predetermined about our embrace o data as wealth. Thereis, in act, an aesthetic crafing to this knowledge, a per ormance necessary toproduce value.

These discourses o data, beauty, and smartness should, there ore,present us with numerous critical historical questions o gravity, such as: howdid space become sentient and smart? How did knowledge come to be aboutdata analysis, perhaps even in real time, not discovery? How did data becomebeauti ul? How did sustainability and environment come to replace struc-ture, class, and politics in the discourses of urban planning, corporate market-ing, and governmental policy? To summarize, how did perception, understoodas a capacity to consume bandwidth, come to reorganize li e itsel ?

There is much at stake in these questions. In tying the management o theuture o li e so tightly to computation and digital media, Songdo is a par-

ticular instantiation o how emerging in rastructures o knowledge and per-


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6_PROLOGUE

ception are involved in the re ormulation o population and in the trans or-

mation, i not disappearance, o space and territory. But these cities are alsomassive prototypes, not-yet-realized instantiations o utures that may or maynot come to pass. Part o rethinking these utures is renegotiating their past.

The philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin was among the mostprominent thinkers to realize that a history o perception can trans orm the

uture. Architecture, he once wrote, in his essay on art in the age o mechani-cal reproduction, has always represented the prototype o a work o art thereception o which is consummated by a collectivity in a state o distraction.The laws o its reception are most instructive. For Benjamin architecturewas the spatial key to a temporal problemhow to denaturalize the presentand thus reimagine the uture? The laws o reception stipulated by Benjamin,however, can no longer be received, as they hide inside protocols, storagebanks, and algorithms. The terms attention and distraction are inadequateto describe a sensorium now understood as innitely extendable.

I have opened, there ore, with this example that is seemingly distant romany history o cybernetics, visuality, or reason because it demonstrates thecomplexity and urgency o interrogating this present and its biopolitical ratio-nalities. But Songdo is a disposable architecture, whose material mani esta-tions are banal and constantly mutating. The city is not a space ull o top

. .3_ Visible : demonstration control room, Tomorrow City, Songdo. Image: author,July 4, 2012. Ubiquitous : smart ubiquitous home prototype; the table and the walls

are all projection- responsive interfaces, along with sensors for environmental controland telemedicine, at SK Telcom U (for ubiquitous) products showroom, Seoul.Image: author, July 3, 2012. Smart : smart pole, with sensors installed for movementdetection, Internet wi- fi hotspot, surveillance cameras and sensors linked to police,fire, and hospital for emergencies, and smart LED screens. The poles play music topassersby, provide direct- to- consumer advertising, and enhance, according to


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PROLOGUE _7

architectural names and monumental eatures. What it is ull o is screens and

inter aces. Apartments come replete with sur aces that allow users to engagewith building management systems and import telemedical and other data.The urban landscape is ull o screens, and vast control rooms monitorthe cities activities, even though human intervention is rarely necessary (g.

.3). Big data and visualization are key concerns to planners and engineers at-tempting to use the data generated rom these systems or better planning and

or sale. As Keller Easterling notes, digital capitalism is sneaky, contagious,and ofen costumed in its material mani estations (see g. .3). To begincontemplating what it even means to see or to think in such a space, whereevery inter ace is only a conduit into ongoing interactions, demands placing ahistory o design, planning, and aesthetics alongside a history o knowledge,communication, and science. This book will do so by tracing the historical re-lationship between cybernetics, vision, knowledge, and power, culminatingin contemporary concerns with biopolitics. It will draw a map beginning withearly cybernetic ideas developed at in the late 1940s in the work o mathe-matician Norbert Wiener concerning vision, perception, and representation. Iwill trace the inuence o these ideas on American designers and urban plan-ners who re ormulated design education and practice in the 1950s. The bookthen turns to the cybernetic impact on social and human sciences, particularly

the designers, Emotional Happiness. Image: Nerea Calvillo, July 2, 2012, DigitalMedia City, South Korea. Cute : bunnies in the petting zoo in the central park.

Songdo possesses some curious, almost farcical, features. There is, for example, asmall zoo with large rabbits for children in the middle of a park that planners argueis based on Central Park in New York. This curious set of elements, somewhattouching, almost cute, also idiosyncratic and darkly humorous, are the interfaces toour present. Image: author, July 4, 2012.


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8_PROLOGUE

psychology, political science, and organizational management. The narrativevacillates between on the one hand examining attitudes to visualization, mea-surement, and cognition in the communication and human sciences and onthe other hand examining attitudes to vision and attention in design practice.

A central ocus o this narrative is to demonstrate how ideas about humansense perception are intimately linked to a trans ormation in the denition ointelligence and rationality; and that it is precisely this merger between visionand the re ormulation o reason that underpins contemporary biopolitics. Myinterest is in giving equal weight to both the histories o art and design and thehistories o science and technology, in order to examine how each coproducesthe other, and to offer an account o how aestheticand epistemological dis-courses combine to re ormulate power and population simultaneously. This is

a history o our contemporary in rastructures o sense and knowledge.


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_Dreams for Our Perceptual Present

There is a long history linking utopian ideals o technology and calculationwith governance, o which Songdo and its sister smart cities are but thelatest additions. For example, New Atlantis, written in 1624 by the Englishphilosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, posited an ideal space governed

by education, inductive reason, and empirical experimentation as a scien-tic practice. This utopia was invented to address the trans ormations in reli-gion, knowledge, and power in the England o his day and to encourage hisideals o natural philosophy and governance. In the late eighteenth century,the British social re ormer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham presented anideal architecturethe panopticon (g. .1)to demonstrate his ideal o alink between visuality, the rational and calculated management o space, anddemocratic government. Bentham posited a per ectly organized space where

power could be wielded without orce as part o a utopian reconceptualiza-tion o politics.Modern utopias have also ofen reected the media, technology, and sci-

entic methods o their time. The amous French architect Le Corbusier, orexample, imagined cities o tomorrow in 1923 (g. .1) that would be per ectlystatistically managed, showcase the latest technologies, and eliminate disorga-nization and could be built and replicated through systemic, machine- likeprinciples and the application o care ul statistical social science. Le Corbusierinvented a method o proportions that allowed his designs to be implementedat different scales rom individual homes to entire cities. His plans wenton to shape the uture o cities like Braslia and Chandigarh and to dene the

uture o public housing globally in the postwar years. According to the archi-tectural historian Robert Fishman, Le Corbusier imagined that the industri-alist and engineer had built the per ectly rationalized mode o production,and there ore architecture and planning had to provide a city that re ractedand advanced modern technology and capital in the early to mid- twentiethcentury.

I modernity had a machine or living, to quote Le Corbusiers denitiono his home design, by the 1970s architecture itsel was being envisioned as


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10_ INTRODUCTION

a machine, but a new one: a computational and articially intelligent net-work composed o intimate eedback loops between designers, users, andcomputers. One o the key sites orwarding this vision o computational en-

vironments was the Massachusetts Institute o Technology ( ) and the Media Lab. In act, was initially supposed to be involved in the Songdoproject, but there were problems in the collaboration that may have emanated

rom either capital constraints or ideological differences or both. The reasonremains obscure, or at least my in ormants re used to elaborate. Many o thechie architects o the smart-city initiatives in South Korea claim as in-spiration and model, and much o our contemporary thinking about ubiqui-tous computing and smart cities in urban planning emanated rom NicholasNegropontes Architecture Machine Group, which was started in 1967 at with unding rom major corporations and the Cybernetics Technology Divi-sion o the Advanced Research Projects Agency ( , afer 1972 ), othe U.S. Department o De ense or the purposes o integrating computersinto architecture and urban planning. Negropontes ideas were popularizedthrough the labs and a number o books introducing the idea o an architec-ture machine and later sof architecture machines in the early 1970s.

Negroponte opened his text on the architecture machine with two prem-ises. The rst was that computer-aided design cannot occur without machineintelligence and that this intelligence must be behavioral and must have asophisticated set o sensors, effectors, and processors. The undamental re-

. .1_ Jeremy Benthams Panopticon penitentiary, drawn by Willey Reveley, 1791.Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panopticon.jpg; City of Tomorrow (1923).From Le Corbusier, City of To- morrow , 173; Songdo, satellite imagery, with


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INTRODUCTION _11

organization o planning and architecture around computing did not, there-ore, begin with any set o concepts usually linked to architecture. Instead,

these mani estos opened with discussions o two elements: sensory capacity

and intelligence. For Negroponte a true architecture machine would not bea modern machine serving human needs but an integrated system that wasbased on a new type o environmental intelligence related to the regular ca-pacity to sense and respond to sensory inputs. His articles and books dis-tilled a constellation o theories about intelligence and complexity to arguethat design had to become process, a conversation, in his words, betweentwo intelligent specieshuman and machine and not a linear cause-effectinteraction. We are talking about a symbiosis that is a cohabitation of two in-telligent species, he wrote. He was not interested in computerizing design somuch as rethinking the design process itsel . This symbiosis was necessary toaddress both a human inability to deal with large-scale problemsbeyondthe protocols o architecture and planning, which were incapable o dealingwith systemic problems, emergence, or changing contextsand simulta-neously architects and planners inability to handle large amounts o specicand local data. Architecture as a machine was about design as a process thatcould mine data, nd patterns, and produce new orms o emergent growththrough eedback.

It is, there ore, not even to architecture that these original ormulations osmart and sentient design and urban planning paid debt but rather to cyber-

projected space to be reclaimed from the sea, and the outline of the projectedtopography of the official Incheon Free Economic Zone visible in white. Image:author, September 2, 2013.


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12_INTRODUCTION

netics, and to ideas of systems, behavioralism, and cognition that had emergedin the previous two decades out o work in the cognitive sciences and neuralnets. At the heart o Negropontes mani estos or computer-aided designlay the work o cyberneticians, particularly the mathematician Norbert

Wiener, the neural net pioneer Warren McCulloch, and the British cyberne-tician Gordon Pask, along with inuences rom other pioneers in computer-aided design, such as Christopher Alexander.

To begin, then, I want to start not with architecture but with cybernetics. In1953, the mathematician and cybernetician Norbert Wiener, in his mem-oir Ex-Prodigy , made a statement about diagrams that also imagined a new

uture into being, and that bears on our contemporary concerns with ubiqui-tous computing, data, and visualization. I longed, he wrote, to be a natu-

ralist as other boys longed to be policemen and locomotive engineers. I wasonly dimly aware o the way in which the age o the naturalist and explorerwas running out, leaving the mere tasks o gleaning to the next generation.Developing this theme, he would later write, even in zoology and botany, itwas diagrams o complicated structures and the problems o growth and or-ganization which excited my interest ully as much as tales o adventure anddiscovery. In a series o popular books and technical mani estos, Wienerwould go on to interrogate this problem that complexity poses. Written in a

reective moment afer World War , Wieners comments sought to mark thepassing o one age to anotherthe end o exploration and the emergence oanother type o organization.

This was no small claim. When situated in the context o his other worksabout communications theory and computing, this seemingly minute com-ment about personal memory gestured to a ervent hope: that an epistemictrans ormation involving the relations between temporality, representation,and perception was in process. Wiener indicated a desire to see an older archi-val order, adjoined to modern interests in taxonomy and ontology, renderedobsolete by another mode of thought invested in prediction, self-referentiality,and communication. Wieners words anticipate the emergence in the comingdecades o a machine design that might indeed surpass the hand or eye o thearchitect; he imagined a new orm o visualization and knowledge.

Wiener dreamed o a world where there is no unknown lef to discover,only an accumulation o records that must be recombined, analyzed, andprocessed. Wiener argued that in observing too closely and documenting toometiculously, one is unable to deduce patterns, to produce in his words aow o ideas. He wrote that i he [a student] decides to take notes at all,he has already destroyed much o his ability to grasp the argument in ight,


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INTRODUCTION _13

and at the end o the course has nothing but a mass o illegible scribble. . . .It is ar better to give up the idea o taking notes and to organize in his mindthe material as it comes to him rom the speaker. Ex-Prodigy s obsessiveimplication was this gap between thought and action, and not, as the auto-

biographical genre might lead us to expect, the need to document or accountor past experiences. This subtle shif o emphasis away rom concerns with

documentary and personal experience opens a site to excavate the historicalre ormulation o relations between vision, cognition, and communication.

Today, seated behind our personal computer monitors, constantly lo edin to data networks through our personal devices, we stare at inter aces withmultiple screens and no longer aspire to go out and explore the world. Fromthe vast cityscapes of Songdo to our everyday use of numerous mobile devices,

the environment is assumed to be an inter ace to elsewhere that will bring in-ormation to users. There is no unknown lef to discover. We have come to

assume that the world is always already fully recorded and archived; accessibleat a moments notice through the logics o computational searches. Wienerswords seemingly have been technologically realized, our relationship to his-torical time, documentation, and knowledge apparently recongured throughthe terms o communication and control. In the realms o neuroscience andthe many attention decit disorders we now cultivate as pathologies, this situa-

tion is ordained genetic. The speculation to build an architecture to harnessthis attention is at a renzy. Humanity, it seems, always sought to communi-cate through screens, always wanted to garner ever more data from more loca-tions, more immediately. It is the purpose o this work to denaturalize suchassumptions.

Wieners autobiography thus bridges late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideals o taxonomy, ontology, and archiving and post-mid-twentieth-century concepts of organization, method, and storage. He articulated a desireto see previous traditions in natural history and scientic representation re-placed by a discourse o active diagrams, processes, and complexity. AndWiener did not dream alone. His memories ound concrete expression in suchdiverse places as the new multimedia architectures o spectacular geopoliticsand the minute neural nets o the mind.

In the postwar era, throughout the social sciences, neurosciences andcognitive sciences, computer sciences, arts and design, endless ow chartsemerged producing images not o an outside world but o the patterns linkingthought to action. The social and human sciences turned to performance andvisualization as a route to innovation.

Prominent designers, such as Gyorgy Kepes o , or example, would ex-


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14_INTRODUCTION

claim that the essential vision o reality presents us not with ugitive appear-ances but with elt patterns o order. Arguing or a reality that is not ugi-tive and a beauty produced out o patterns rather than essence and orms,designers, engineers, and scientists propagated a discourse o a new vision

emerging rom in ormational abundance. This vision cannot be understoodas solely concerning optics and eyes but rather, in Kepess language, a land-scape o sense produced through technologies like radar and electroniccomputers that would organize perception, and practice, in many elds.This elt order would be the source o beauty, and would trans orm data

rom being set out in terms o measured quantities to being set out in termso recreated sensed orms . . . exhibiting properties o harmony, rhythm, andproportion.

Kepess compatriot and interlocutor, the designer and inventor Buck-minster Fuller, the Cold War evangelist o a unity between art, design, andscience through cybernetics in the 1960s and 1970s, voci erously propagatedthe concept o a renaissance design scientist. In his effort to uni y the variedelds o physical, social, biological, and design practices, he labeled the veryprocess o inquiry a thing o beauty in and o itsel . It is one o our mostexciting discoveries, he wrote, that local discovery leads to a complex o

urther discoveries. Corollary to this we nd that we no sooner get a problem

solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity o additional problems ina most beauti ul payoff o hereto ore unknown, previously unrecognized, andas-yet unsolved problems. Complexity and problems, rather than solutions,became valuable. Implicitly, like Wiener, Fuller is calling or a valorization oprocess and method as material arti acts and objects, in the way that previ-ously designers conceived o architecting a building or a chair. In his standardhypertextual ashion Fuller (known to give eight-hour lectures ull o slides ina test o attention and repetition whose only goal was the inundation o data ina mimetic reper ormance o this aesthetics o in ormational overload) arguedthat such practices ostered an awareness o the processes leading to newdegrees o comprehension. This search or awareness, he continued, spon-taneously motivates the writer to describe over and over again whatto thecareless listener or readermight seem to be tiresome repetition, but to thesuccessful explorer is known to be essential mustering o operational strategies

rom which alone new thrusts o comprehension can be success ully accom-plished. Process, Fuller implies,is the site o exploration; generating in turnstrategies that are also beauti ul. His argument or an optic o process andthe beauty o method are the marks o a midcentury shif in the aesthetics andpractices o in ormation visualization. Fullers pronouncements mark the rise


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INTRODUCTION _15

o a new aesthetic and practice o truth; a valorization o analysis and patternseeking that I label communicative objectivity.

I the stereotype o the nineteenth century is that o a naturalist or in-dustrialist extracting value rom natural resources (including alienating labor

from human bodies), these citations from the preeminent designers and peda-gogues o the mid-twentieth century gesture to an aspiration and desire ordata as the site o value to emerge rom the seeming in ormational abundanceonce assumed to be the province o nature. Data, Kepes and Fuller implied,appeals to our senses and can be seen, elt, and touched with seemingly no re-lationship to its content. Behind this materialization o data as an object to bemarveled at, however, lay an aesthetic in rastructure o sensorial training anda new imaginary o vision as a channel and a capacity that was autonomous,

networked, and circulative.Such cybernetically inected attitudes also emerged in the social and

human sciences. All that is offered here, a prominent textbook in politicalscience rom the early 1960s argued, is a point o view. Men have long andofen concerned themselves with the power o governments, much as someobservers try to assess the muscle power o a horse or an athlete. Others havedescribed the laws and institutions o states, much as anatomists describe theskeleton or organs o a body. . . . [Political science must] concern itsel less

with the bones or muscles o the body politic than with its nervesits chan-nels o communication and decision. Written by one o the preeminentpolitical scientists o the time, the Yale pro essor Karl Deutsch, the book im-plied that the study o government would be a study o perception, a trainingin a point o view, to be guided by nervous diagrams. The entire book callson visual metaphors and presents ow charts o decision-making trees thatemulate those o computer programming, also emerging at the time (g. .2).Like Wieners drawings reconciling the slowness o the hand with the speed othought, so in the study of organizations would the careful mapping of processsynchronize the time o bureaucracy and the ow o in ormation.

Rather than observe closely as an anatomist, Deutsch insisted on anothertype o vision. He wrote that today we are learning in television [and othercommunications technologies] to translate any outline o a static or slow-changing thing, such as the edge o a mountain, or the edge o a human skull,or the lines o a human ace, into a sequence o rapidly-changing little dots. . . .We learn, through scanning . . . how to put together these events, which moveslowly but are strung out along a period o time, and to see them all at once.Moving beyond a dialectic opposing close observation to theoretical abstrac-tions, Deutschs image world was simultaneously empirical and abstract. Be-


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16_INTRODUCTION

tween the nearsightedness o the bureaucrat trapped in the trees or the orestand the abstracted metaphysics o the political theorists, the visual tactics o

scanning and pattern seeking might create a bridge. These diagrams pro-duced, in his words, a new scale o observation that turned discrete andnonsensical data points into coherent patterned ows.

Deutschs diagrams, which were ubiquitous during three decades o elitepedagogy in political science, linked local knowledge and global trendsthrough a methodology o scale and scanning that mimed the televisionand communication technologies whose aesthetics they invoked. The purposeof these instructional images was to teach a cadre of elite future policy-makers,analysts, and legal thinkers how to see and scan or a new object o studydecision-making processes and managerial actionsto be able to reexivelyuse data to make the world visible and knowable.

Data visualization became a democratic virtue and moral good; reason wasnow understood as algorithmic, rule-bound, denitive, and ast. The recon-guration o the eye o the technocrat came with the re ormulation o themind o the decision-maker and o the organization itsel . The rise o cogni-tion as a model or human thinking and organizational behavior and the riseo visualization as a virtue came hand in hand. Ideas o territory, population,and design were rethought in tandem with trans ormed ideas about knowl-edge, representation, and measurement in the social and human sciences. This

. .2_ Neural net diagram by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943), fromMcCulloch, Embodiments of Mind , 36; Design process flow chart, by Charles Eames,

made for the exhibition What Is Design, Muse des Arts Dcoratifs, Paris (1969).The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, Manuscript Division, box 173, folder 9, Libraryof Congress. 2013 Eames Office, LLC; Diagram of foreign policy decision- makingprocess, by Karl Deutsch, from Deutsch, Nerves of Government , appendix.


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INTRODUCTION _17

book unites these two strains o history that are so closely merged in contem-porary digital environments.

This book traces the trajectory laid out above to link design, architecture,and artistic practices with cybernetics and the human and social sciences. Ex-

cavating Wieners initial concerns about the relationship between nineteenth-century science and archiving, and his own efforts in pioneering the scienceo communication and control that he labeled cybernetics, I chart the re-lationship between contemporary obsessions with storage, visualization, andinteractivity in digital systems to previous modernist concerns with archiving,representation, and memory. Postwar design and communication sciences,believing the world to be inundated with data, produced new tactics o man-agement or which observers had to be trained and the mind reconceived. The

result o this re ormulation o vision and reason was the production o a rangeo new tactics, and imaginaries, or the management and orchestration o li e.

In my description o contemporary ubiquitous computing environmentsand data- driven sciences, I have there ore specically drawn attention tothree elements that emerge prominently in cybernetic accounts: the way con-temporary discourses on data revise epistemology, create temporalities, andproduce aesthetics. The book genealogically traces these three aspects o ourpresent that are so critical to this re ormulation o observation and knowl-

edge: rst, the reconceptualization o the archive and the document in cyber-netics and the human sciences; second, the re ormulation o perception andthe emergence o data visualization and the inter ace as central design con-cerns; and third, the redenition o consciousness as cognition in the human,cognitive, and social sciences. These three locithe re ormulation o tempo-rality and truth, the re ormulation o attention and distraction into interac-tivity, and the reconguration o reason into rationalitystructure the book.My argument is that the reconceptualization o evidence, vision, and cogni-tion are the oundations or producing new techniques o calculation, mea-surement, and administration. I seek to account or this condition that ndsitsel most graphically demonstrated in such extreme prototypes as Songdo,but can be ound more ubiquitously in our armory o electronic and graphi-cal inter aces.

Histories of the Present

How, then, would one begin to comprehend this trans ormation in the treat-ment o the senses as commodities, technologies, and in rastructures? Thisbook started over a decade ago, when the concepts o interactivity and his-


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tories o observation were still novel ideas. Works like Lev ManovichsLan- guage of New Media, Alexander GallowaysProtocol , and Katherine HaylessHow We Became Post-Human were read alongside an emergent concern in thehistory o science and art in histories o the body, rationality, taste, and emo-

tion. The rise o a history o observation, perception, and objectivity, writtenby gures like Jonathan Crary, Wol gang Schievelbusch, and Lorraine Dastonand Peter Galison, interested me as ully as the discussions about the natureo new media.

In the intervening time, complexes like Songdo have moved rom being atthe margins o literary critics imaginations to being built and circulated spa-tial products. As a historian grappling with the media subjects, new questionsbegan to emerge: What makes such a space easible and even seemingly natu-

ral? Are our models o sofware and hardware based on certain architectureso computing the most use ul to account or these emergent ormations? Dodiscourses o embodiment, or even materiality, account or a world wheremajor corporations are also invested in object-oriented thinking? The worldis alive with dataable objects that are also commodities and bodies or theengineers at Cisco. What types o temporal narratives, then, would be able toproduce a history o the senses and o observation and knowledge that mightchallenge the stability o the present without recourse to an imagined ahisto-

ricity o objects and matter?As Eugene Thacker and Alexander Galloway have put it in their most re-cent book, The Exploit , again and again, poetic, philosophical, and biologicalstudies ask the same question: how does this intelligent, global organizationemerge rom a myriad o local, dumb interactions? Swarms, clouds, blackboxesthe question is not unimportant, and in tracing the specic tactics and

orms that reason took in the last hal a century, I seek to situate such ques-tions. I am not answering why one would pose such a question but rather ask-ing under what conditions would it be thinkable, and even virtuous, to posesuch questions about stupidity, either rom the perspective o media theoryor engineering?

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, or example, the same phenomenaswarms, clouds, masseswere treated ar differently. There was no effort to bemorally neutral when it came to media protocols. For political theorists such asthe German-Jewish migr and prominent political theorist Hannah Arendt,such phenomena posed mortal threats to the future o life. InThe Human Con-dition, published in 1958, Arendt is concerned with a world in which speechhas lost its power to a language o mathematical symbols which . . . in no waycan be translated back into speech. This loss o a critical place or human ac-


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INTRODUCTION _19

tivities to enter the realms o representation and subjectivity she aligns withautomation, particularly the automation o computational machines. Theselosses, o labor and o language, are or her undamentally about losing con-nection and ability to act politically as individuals, not as masses. Her con-

ception o reedom is undamentally liberal, linked to the ability to representand know the world and to act as a connected but independent agent. This isa vision absolutely antagonistic to the types o affective and networked theoryofen being supported in our present. Her colleague, interlocutor, and el-low migr the prominent Frank urt School theorist Theodor Adorno, wouldwrite of the culture industries in a similar light. The masses, Adorno wrote,are not the measure but the ideology o the cultural industry. For Adorno,the culture industries turn concerns o class criticism or artistic imagination

into a routinized ormat through the dehumanizing protocols o stardom.Ironically, these protocols appeal to aura and individuality while crafing un-thinking masses. Thus, the effect o such media is anti-enlightenment. In hiswords, it impedes the development o autonomous, independent individualswho judge and decide consciously or themselves. The culture industriesare guilty o producing the masses while denying the right o the same popu-lations to gain, or Adorno, reedom and agency. Similar discourses abouthoards, swarms, and unthinking masses characterized Communism as well at

the time. From the science ction antasies o body snatching and zombies tothe characterization o brainwashing and the Chinese Army during the KoreanWar, the dominant view o Communism was as a orce against agency, render-ing individuals subservient to some common intelligence.

I call attention to these debates, however, not to account or the reality omedia but to ask about history. These commentators demonstrate that in 1948,ideas o eedback and in ormation inundation were negatively associated withtotalitarian regimes, and hardly considered virtuous. The social sciences hadonly begun to even contemplate the idea that communication was a socialvirtue, and many political theorists, cultural analysts, and popular psycholo-gists would have ound our contemporary valuation o collectivity, social net-working, and analytics terri ying. These changes in the moral value and aes-thetics assigned to different ideas are the markers o historical revisions inattitudes toward, and imaginaries o , the place o media technologies withinsocieties and the constitution o knowledge and truth. I am particularly inter-ested in the years between 1945 and the early 1970s because this is a periodwhen one can still witness debates between modern and prewar conceptionsof truth, certainty, and subjectivity and emerging ideas of communication andcybernetics.


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20_ INTRODUCTION

I ollow Deleuze, who asked in his cinema books not what is cinema butwhat is philosophy afer cinema? My question is a derivative. I ask what is it totell history under the conditions o digital media? The status o historicism isunder duress, and the organization o temporality in this text is one o eed-

back and density, not orderly linear time. I examine how reason, cognition,and sentience were redened in a manner that makes it logical and even valu-able to pose such philosophical questions, and, on a more pragmatic note, tobegin building territories, or example, based on ideals o distributed intelli-gence and a belie that space can be sentient, and smart, through (literally)so much stupidity. These are pathways that produce an albeit limited, but atleast speculative, history o concepts such as interactivity, beauti ul data,and the inter ace.

To comprehend this trans ormation in the treatment o the senses as com-modities, technologies, and in rastructures and the concomitant trans orma-tion in population and governance without recourse to technical determin-ism, I ocus, there ore, not on realized technologies but on postWorld War ideas, pedagogies, and practices o observation in cybernetics, communica-tion sciences, and their affiliated social and design sciences. Such an attitude

ollows the lead o gures such as the art historian Jonathan Crary in his his-tory o observation and media genealogists, such as Jonathan Sterne, who are

not as interested in the realized technology o recording the senses as in thepossibilities or producing media technologies.As Crary notes, observer means to con orm ones action, to comply

with, as in observing rules, codes, regulations, and practices. He continuesthat observation is more than representational practice, rather [the observer]is only an effect o an irreducibly heterogeneous system o discursive, social,technological, and institutional relations. There is no observing subject priorto this continually shifing eld. Crary wrote about the nineteenth century,but what is increasingly evident is that contemporary orms o observationand perception may not even be linked back to single bodies or unied sub-

jects. Li e here has to be considered as a set o mechanically calibrated move-ments and gestures operating at various embodied and even molecular levels.The sensory networks o train systems and smart cities are operating at mul-tiple scales. But what likens these networks to practices of an observer is thatthey operate within certain conditions o possibility, embedded in systems oconventions and limitations, and, I might add, affordances and capacities,that are historically situated. To produce this account, there ore, I insist onlinking the transformation in attitudes to perception with the reformulation ofideas o reason and cognition, because this alignment between how we know


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INTRODUCTION _21

and how we sense is critical to understanding and contesting contemporaryattitudes to intelligence, data banking, and interactivity.

Vision, Visualization, Visuality, VisibilitsOne o the curious elements o invoking terms like vision and observationin our present is that it complicates the very idea o sense perception itsel .Moreover, in that no computer actually sees the way a human being does, oneneeds to ask what it is that is being invoked with the language o vision? Asshould by now be obvious rom the opening o the book, vision in this textoperates as a holding term or multiple unctions: as a physical sense, a set opractices and discourses, and a metaphor that translates between different

mediums and different communication systems. Vision is thus a discoursethat multiplies and divides rom within.

To offer a cartography o this complicated terrain, I want to start withone o the more popular words applied to contemporary data displayvisualization. According to the , the term is not ancient but rather amodern convention, only appearing in 1883 to depict the ormation o men-tal images o things not actually present in sight. Throughout the next

ew decades, this term expanded to encompass any action or processes o

making visible. Visualization slowly mutated rom the description ohuman psychological processes to the larger terrain o rendering practicesby machines, scientic instrumentation, and numeric measures. Most impor-tant, visualization came to dene bringing that which is not already presentinto sight. Visualizations, according to current denition, make new relation-ships appear and produce new objects and spaces or action and speculation.

While the language o vision perseveres, it is important not to assume adirect correlation between vision as a sense and visualization as an object andpractice. Married initially to psychology, and now digital computation andalgorithmic logic, the substrate and content o this practice has ofen had littleto do with human sense perception or the optic system. Moreover, with therise o emphasis on haptic interactions and interactivity, visualizations alsoofen take multisensorial modes. Vision cannot be taken, there ore, as an iso-lated orm o perception, but rather must be understood as inseparable romother senses.

In the present, visualization is most ofen understood not only as a pro-cess but also an object, a subject and discipline, a vocation, a market, and anepistemology. For example, , one o the major contemporary makers odata visualization sofware and enterprise solutions, on their website states


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22_ INTRODUCTION

that visualization is the practice o making complex data (also not dened inthis case) dynamic, universal, and valuable. The website enjoins utureclients to believe that visualization sofware allows previously invisible re-lationships in market or other data to become visible and operable. The

prime gure behind the smart city and now smart planet mandate, ,repeats this denition in discussing analytics and visualization: organizationsare overwhelmed with data. On a smarter planet, the most success ul organi-zations can turn this data into valuable insights about customers, operations,even pricing . . . or business optimization by enabling rapid, in ormed andcondent decisions and actions. Visualization, then insists, is part omaking data actionable through representation while also acilitating the on-going analysis o data. Repeating the assumption o an overwhelming data

landscape, visualization is understood to offer a map or action. At the sametime visualization and analytics, comprehending and analyzing, are viewed asan integrated process.

Visualization, both marketing manuals and studies o digital images sug-gest, is the language or the act o translation between a complex world and ahuman observer. Visualizations are about making the inhuman, that whichis beyond or outside sensory recognition, relatable to the human being. Onemight understand visualization in this context as the ormulation o an

interaction between different scales and agentshuman, network, global,nonhuman.Visualization is also about temporal scales. For example, and as-

sume that data only becomes valuable, or a site o action, once it is crafed intothe realm o appearances. However, the realm o the image and the space odata are not in the same time. As in the nineteenth- century denitions, whenvisualization was solely about mental images and thus not synchronous withthe world, in our present a visualization is understood as being out o timeand space, nonsynchronic with the event it is depicting, translating, compre-hending, and guiding.

This nonsynchronicity preoccupies our imaginings o real-time interac-tivity and data visualization, driving a constant redenition o the temporallags between collecting, analyzing, displaying, and using inter aces. Under-pinning the contemporary renzy to visualize is an implicit supposition thatcognition, and value, lags behind the workings o networks and markets. Thework o visualization is thus temporalto modulate and manage this timelapse.

As the preeminent language or negotiating our data-lled world, visual-ization invokes a specic technical and temporal condition and encourages


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24_INTRODUCTION

space to begin asking how truth and knowledge are being reconstituted in di -erent historical moments.

The history of evidence is also, for Deleuze, reading Foucault, one of vision.For Deleuze visuality is closely linked tovisibilits, or what in English I will

label visibilities. Deleuze denes this term as visualness, implying thatvision cannot only be understood in a physiological sense but must also beunderstood as a quality or operation. For Deleuze visibilities are sites o pro-duction constituting an assemblage o relationships, enunciations, episte-mologies, and properties that render agents into objects o intervention orpower. Visibilities are historically stipulated apparatuses or producing evi-dence about bodies, subjects, and now, perhaps, new modalities of population.

The philosopher John Rajchman offers an example to illustrate this difficult

idea. He reminds us o the two instances at the start o FoucaultsDisciplineand Punish and Birth of the Clinic : the care ul description o the torture othe regicide and the close detailing o the bathing cure o a hysteric. In bothcases, Rajchman writes, we have pictures not simply o what things lookedlike, but how things were made visible, how things were given to be seen, howthings were shown to knowledge or to powertwo ways in which things be-came seeable. In the case o the prison, it is a question o two ways crime wasmade visible in the body, through spectacle or through surveillance. In the

case o the clinic, it is a question o two ways o organizing the space in whichbodies and eyes meet. As this example demonstrates, visibilities are mar-ried to visuality as the historically situated conditioning infrastructure for howsubjects come to be known to power. Visibilities are accumulations of a densityo multiple strategies, discourses, and bodies in particular assemblages at spe-cic moments. Therefore, visibilities are not merely visual. Visibilities can beconstituted through a range o tactics rom the organization o spacebothhaptic and auralto the use o statistics.

Vision is thus a term that multipliesvisualization, visuality, visibilities.These multiple permutations of the term vision demonstrate that vision can-not there ore be merely about the isolated sense o vision but must also beabout what, ollowing Walter Benjamin, I would label a technical conditionand what, ollowing Foucault, makes the organization o the senses critical tounderstanding the tactics o governance and power at any historical moment.The task o the history o aesthetic orms, the lm theorist David Rodowickargues, is to understand the specic set o ormal possibilities modes oenvisioning and representing, o seeing and saying historically available todifferent cultures in different times. This study is ultimately dedicated to


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INTRODUCTION _25

comprehending just such historical trans ormations o sense and the specicconditioning o attention under particular technical conditions.

In ocusing on the relationship between epistemology and sense, I ollowthe lead o historians o science, art, and media that ocus on histories o ob-

servation, knowledge, and aesthetics. The history o science has long beenconcerned with how instrumentation, standards, and measurement tech-niques are co-produced with new ideas o perception, observation, cognition,and li e. From pharmaceutical trials and statistical instruments, to the com-plex photographic and cinematic apparatus necessary to capture, assess, andstudy the world, our idea o ourselves, and o others, is never separate romour practices o observation, documentation, and truth. As Jimena Canalesnotes in her history o a tenth o a second, a history taken rom the perspective

o measurement begins to collapse clear-cut distinctions between the mod-ern and nonmodern and makes visible the contests and heterogeneities thatproduce knowledge. Discourses concerning truth, acts, and representationdemonstrate continuities and ssures in history. More important, problems omeasurement allow us to ocus on epistemic uncertainty and desire; on siteswhere cultural and social interest is invested be ore and outside o technicalrealization.

In linking histories o the senses to those o visibility and measure, I can

also begin to account or trans ormations in governance. In act, the very ety-mology o the word cybernetics already su ests a relationship to historieso governance. Cybernetics is, in Wieners words, an emergent term derived

rom the Greekkubernetes, or steersman, the same Greek word rom whichwe eventually also derived the word governor. Cybernetics is thus a scienceo control or prediction o uture events and actions. From the start, despitedisavowals by many prominent practitioners, the ideas of communication andcontrol were applied to theorizing and reenvisioning systems, both sociologi-cal and biological. A history o cybernetics must there ore also extend to ac-count or a history o governmentality, and to how governmentality links toideals o knowledge and sense.

In his nal lectures, Foucault dened governmentality as the genesis oa political knowledge [savoir] that was to place at the center o its concernsthe notion o population and the mechanisms capable o ensuring its regu-lation. For Foucault, the particular orm o political reason that emergesthroughout the second hal o the twentieth century comes under the rubrico biopolitics and is intimately tied to data, calculation, and economy, par-ticularly neoliberal economics. He denes biopolitical governance as related


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26_ INTRODUCTION

to a new type o calculation that consists in saying and telling government:I accept, wish, plan, and calculate that all this should be lef alone. In ourpresent, this calculative rationality is certainly evident in the new smart cities,where ubiquitous computing is imagined as necessary to supplant, and dis-

place, the role o democratic government. More critically, these technical sys-tems serve a discourse of security and defenseo life, futurity, and value. It isa very thin line between the autonomous robotic systems o networked trainsand smart sensor cameras monitoring traffic ow and consumer consumptionto the more militarized drones or smart border ences that make up the land-scapes o contemporary war and security.

But there is a longer history to security and politics that links itsel to thecybernetic ideas o in ormation and prediction. In the 1920s the economist

Frank Knight isolated the term uncertainty. Uncertainty, unlike risk, ac-cording to Knight, has no clearly dened endpoints or values. Songdo is onepotent example o this management o uncertainty. The city serves as a vacil-lating network awaiting purposes not yet assigned and preparing or disasterso environment and ecology that have not yet been assessed or denitivelycalculated and whose temporal horizons are eternally de erred. Interview-ees I spoke with rom government and Cisco repeated the same discoursebandwidth is valuable even i its unction, and monetization, has not yet been

determined. Contemporary technical networks re ormulate governmen-tality through the production and manipulation o temporalities. Preemptionthrough the management of uncertainty supports the increased penetration ofcomputational interventions in the name o sustainability, and central to thiscapacity, as Wiener su ested rom the start, is an ability to reenvision, visu-alize, and manage data in specic ways.

One o the central themes in this book is to trace just how the historicalreorganization o vision and reason (or intelligence) that began in the mid-twentieth century re ormulated population and territory in ways that support(and sometimes contest) contemporary orms o biopolitical governance andeconomy. While the manipulation and direct monetization and materializa-tion o time as a commodity appears central to contemporary nancial andtechnical systems, this book will demonstrate that these contemporary phe-nomena are intimately linked to trans ormations in knowledge, observation,and archiving that began already in the mid-twentieth century. In the work oindividuals like Herbert Simon in business and nance, the designs o urbanplanners like Kevin Lynch at , and the rising discourses o systems andnetworks, very quickly concerns about total war and risk were eclipsed into


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28_ INTRODUCTION

or even about objectivity as dened earlier in the century. The object o thisbook is to analyze and trace this trans ormation o ideas o mechanical ob-

jectivity, or even expert authority and trained judgment, into another orm omethodological truth, that is, a truth about the strength and density o net-

works and the capacity to circulate in ormation and action.I the archive organizes the rst chapter, it is a history o the inter ace that

organizes the second. This chapter traces how cybernetic concepts trans-ormed aesthetic practice, urban planning, and engineering, business, and de-

sign education. Moving through a range o spaces rom classrooms to urbanredevelopment projects, I make a case for the reformulation of perception intointeractivity. I trace the rise o a new epistemological idealcommunicativeobjectivityemerging from the integration of design, cybernetics, and peda-

gogy in engineering and the arts.The chapter maps the work o two designers and an urban plannerthe

a orementioned designer and artist Gyorgy Kepes, the urban planner KevinLynch, and the designer Charles Eames. These three gures were central toAmerican modernism, postwar design, engineering education, and urbanplanning, and all o them engaged with cybernetics and the communicationand cognitive sciences. Their work is landmark in creating in rastructures orpostwar American li e (and perhaps empire)both attentive and physical.

In their respective projects, we can trace the reimagining o the observer asisolated but ecologically networked. This observer was linked to a new aesthet-ics of visualization and management. Interactivity as a personal mode of atten-tion became associated with environment as a discourse for managing systemsin elds ranging rom marketing to urban planning. The chapter culminateswith an examination o one site where practices in design, marketing, andmanagement recombined, in the 19641965 New York Worlds Fair, with theinnovative launch o the installation The In ormation Machine, whichadvertised the new in ormation economy. The installation propagated an aes-thetic o in ormation inundation as a virtue at the same time that New Yorkwas undergoing massive trans ormations in transportation, suburbanization,economy, and race relations. I trace how environment and psychology cameto take the place o previous sociological discussions o systems and society,while new strategies o attention emerged as both the solutions and engines

or a growing physical in rastructure o racial segregation and an emergingpostindustrial economy.

These new orms o political, perhaps biopolitical governance, were notmerely reductive and disciplinary. I also trace some o the new orms o pro-ducing and imagining urban space and human interrelationality that emerged


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INTRODUCTION _29

( or example community gardening) by viewing landscapes as ecologies opsychic and in ormational interaction. These new strategies or social inter-vention emerged even as ongoing historical problems o race, class, and gen-der could now be repressed and re ormulated through consumption and

interactivity.The third chapter explores the doppelgnger of perception in cybernetics

cognition. I designers and planners used cybernetic paradigms to rethinkvision and environment, human and social scientists used the same ideas totrans orm techniques o measurement, assessment, and calculation. Readtogether, these two chapters demonstrate how aesthetics and perception werelinked in new assemblages to revise how, to quote , we think, and how, torepeat the concepts o the engineers at Cisco, space becomes smart through

new models o sense, measure, and calculation.The chapter mirrors the rst by diachronically mapping how nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century ideas o consciousness in psychoanalysis andreason and computability in mathematics and logic were trans ormed intocognition and rationality. Starting with the conception o neural nets o thepsychiatrist and cybernetician Warren McCulloch and the logician WalterPitts, I examine how these new ideas about mind and communication enteredelds ranging rom government to economics to computing. I trace the net-

works o interchange between cybernetic ideas o mind and the work o po-litical scientists, such as the a orementioned Harvard and Yale pro essor KarlDeutsch, the organizational management, nance, and articial intelligencepioneer Herbert Simon, and a number o other human and social scientists.In turning to the re ormulation o cognition, I also expand the discussion ovision to the territory of new methods for making data and populations visibleas objects or study, surveillance, and management.

These nervous networks, while labeled rational, were also, in McCullochspsychiatrically informed language, psychotic. In the cybernetically informedhuman and social sciences, computational rationality was no longer Enlight-enment reason. What could be algorithmically dened and computed mustby logical denition be antagonistic to intuition, genius, or liberal agency. Ina curious turn, however, policy- makers and social scientists, having turnedto a nonreasonable rationality and logic to redene the behavior o subjectsand systems, repressed their discovery by valorizing data visualization as atechnique to command and control what was increasingly understood to be aworld o unknowns, chance, and unreasonable behavior. The chapter exploresthis mutual interaction between the reformulation of reason in terms of cogni-tion and rationality and the rise o new models o visualizing data and society.


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30_INTRODUCTION

Visualization, here, is a set o techniques by which to manage, calculate, andact on a world o incomplete in ormation.

While much has been written about psychosis and schizophrenia as symp-toms o contemporary in ormation economies and endemic to the nature o

capital, my analysis is not an explicit theory o psychosis or capital. Rather,I take the language that cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and social scien-tists invoked quite literally. This chapter examines what work the discourseso psychosis did in the computational and social sciences to allow new typeso knowledge to emerge, and to produce new methods or experiment, calcu-lation, and measurement. The remaining question is why it has been orgottenthat rationality was dened in terms o psychosis, not reason, throughout the1950s? A massive number o media theorists continue to insist on the endur-

ing legacy o enlightened and liberal reason in the present; these assumptionsdemand interrogation. We must ask: what is at stake in our contemporaryamnesia? While contemporary culture looks ever more requently to neuro-science, behaviorism, and data mining to predict human behavior, econo-mists, policy-makers and even the public also continue to insist on older nine-teenth- and earlier twentieth- century denitions o consciousness and choice.Politics happens in this interstice between the memory o liberal reason andthe embrace o psychotic logics. This interaction between historical orms o

reason and contemporary belie s in cognition and rationality drives the desireto produce computational approaches to intelligence, economy, and gover-nance. The political question is, however, what denes computation and ratio-nality? These questions, black-boxed in our present, were hotly debated in the1950s and early 1960s in a range o social and human sciences.

The ourth chapter completes the book in a eedback loop by linking thetrans ormations in cognition and perception with governance and ratio-nality to ask how politics and aesthetics are linked through the valorizationo beauti ul data. Examining cybernetic work on vision and cognition doneby McCulloch, the neuroscientist Jerome Lettvin, and the psychologistGeorge Miller in connection to the design practices o the prominent de-signers George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames and the pioneer computeranimator John Whitney, Sr., I make a case or the radical re ormulation o thevery tactics by which bodies, territories, and networks are governed throughmeasurement and attention. The chapter centers on changing attitudes to per-ception and cognition in the late 1950s as applied to U.S. In ormation Agency( ) propaganda and to the staging o Cold War politics. The chapter rumi-nates on the past to speculate on the inevitability and organization o contem-porary orms o war and terror.


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INTRODUCTION _31

The book ends in interrogating the ethical and political implications omaking data beauti ul and affective. In the epilogue, we nd ourselves simul-taneously inside the gardens o s corporate headquarters in suburbanNew York and standing on hilltops in Jerusalem at the Israel Museums sculp-

ture garden, contemplating the work o another prominent midcentury artist,Isamu Noguchi, and considering the implications o a new in ormation aes-thetics that links the inside o corporations to the re ormulation o territories.Like the small rabbits and the per ormative control rooms o Songdo (g. .3),these different landscapes pressure the present and create different possibili-ties or the uture.

Taking seriously the aesthetics and methods o cybernetics, each chapter isan effort to nd patterns between elds. Each chapter holds together a series

of objects related by way of discourse and method in the interest of unearthingtheir commonalities while insisting on the irreducible differences and simulta-neous heterogeneities between them.

Why Tell History Anyway?

Technology always presents historians with con using spectacles o obsoles-cence and novelty. To my eyes, trained in urban planning and public health,

Songdo appears part science ction, part twentieth-century utopianism. Thenostalgic orms o past urban developmentsa seeming grotesque parody omodernist grids and skyscrapersis merged with the speculative landscapeo server buildings and amorphous blocks o high-tech and biotech corporateinstallations. Ciscos managers reminded me that they were well acquaintedwith Le Corbusier. Songdo, they argued, adopted the best o modern architec-ture without its utopian and ailed elements.

In act, or all its shiny newness, Songdo proclaims its historical, perhapseven already obsolete, nature as a matter o economic logic. The city plan is

ull o direct reenactments o archival orms. There is a central park basedon the one in New York with a petting zoo o large bunnies or children (g.

.3). The park is lined with communal kiosks containing books or sharing(the old paper ones, not the electronic readers). Particularly uncanny are thelarge control rooms dressed in bizarre trappings o Cold War science ctionawaiting the in usion o data rom every system in the citywater, electricity,medical, traffic, environmental. The reality is that the humans who watch thesescreens are ofen passive observers (g. .3). For the most part, these systemsrun themselves. This intelligence is not always (in act usually not) humanlycontrolled. And ofen it is stupid. Many little sensors operating in local net-


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32_ INTRODUCTION

works making minute decisions about traffic lights, water ow, and subway ex-changes are what constitute this citys smartness. One might even ask why,

under such conditions, build so many inter aces and visualize at all?This relationship between the archive and the inter ace, and between his-

torical forms of attention and ideals of intelligence, is one of the central themesof the book, and key to substantiating contemporary fantasies of visualization,logistics, and control. It is precisely the older memory o surveillance andknowledge that drives an unremitting desire to increase the penetration osensors, recording instrumentation, and analytic techniques in these territo-ries o ubiquitous computing.

Digital in rastructures, there ore, like the colonial archives depicted by theanthropologist Ann Stoler, are produced through grids o intelligibility . . .ashioned rom uncertain knowledge. These are spaces ull o disquiet and

anxieties. Songdo appears stunningly legible as a commodity. Its grids ap-pear to clearly replicate the ideal cities o the earlier twentieth century envi-sioned by collectives like the Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderneand regularly put into play in the urban redevelopment projects o the UnitedStates and Europe in the 1960s.

This is a deceptive legibility. Form does not ollow unction in Songdo.The per ectly reasoned sur ace area ratios underpinning the modern towersare ailing to produce value. The development has only lost money or the realestate developers. Engineers openly confess to never speaking to developers orurban planners, and admit that the city could take any orm desired (circles,spires, anything really the sur ace does not reect the in rastructure). At thesame time, the developers are being orced to admit that their standard strate-gies are sel -destructive. Banking on real estate while selling bandwidth, itsunclear what is actually more valuable or what is actually being purchased insuch developments.

Ironically, the unction and action o the territory may actually be one


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INTRODUCTION _33

that was envisioned in the antastical projections o such countercultural andavant-garde urban designers as those o the group Archigram in the 1960s.

The irony, o course, is that it is not the vision o the Congrs InternationauxdArchitecture Moderne ( ), so regularly linked in architectural history torationalization, abstraction, colonialism, and the decontextualization o spaceand time, that is ascendant in this situation. Rather, it is the vision o thebreakaway architectural movements, these avant-garde artists, that is realizedin the unction o this space. Songdo is less play ul than the antasized citieso the London-based avant-garde group Archigram: walking cities that wouldroam the earth transporting their workers, or the Blow-Out Village (g. .3),

described by its designers as an entire temporary city that can be inated roma hovercraf and can rove the earth. However, in many ways, Songdo is justthat: an elastic and plastic territory, innitely mobile, networked to the in or-mation economy. But this independent 1960s group, with their embrace otechnology, consumerism, and uturism, imagined a humorous but attractivemode o being. Capital has many guises, and reason, or rationalization, as wemost regularly imagine it, is rarely the one being deployed in the second halo the twentieth century.

There is an excess in these developments, somewhat like the imagined cam-ouage o the insects o the surrealist Roger Caillois, whose mimetic capaci-ties are so potent, their ability to look like the environment so per ect, thatothers o their own species cannibalize them. In this case the resemblance othe new development to modernist antasies and the most banal grids o realestate developers is almost per ectexcept the unction o monetizing space

ails. The orm, antiquated and enormous, has taken the reason o the markettoo per ectly. The developer has maximized the sur ace area ratio o saleabledevelopment, but at the cost o actually surviving.

I it is one o the most commonly held aiths in media studies that theseparation between orm and content that serves as the in rastructure or

. .3_ Prototype? model for NewSongdo City. Image: author, 2012. Ideal?

Ville Radieuse Le Corbusier (1924) from

the article AD Classics: Ville Radieuse/Le Corbusier at http://www.archdaily.com/411878/ad- classics- ville-radieuse- le-corbusier/; Real? Blow- out Village, PeterCook. Archigram Archive Archigram 1966.


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INTRODUCTION _35

and obvious orms, even within spaces and objects we think we know. I exca-vate these genealogies and reveal these absurd, conicting, and nondetermin-istic options or envisioning the uture o how we sense and live in data-lledenvironments.

I have called attention to our present because it demonstrates so potentlyhow our imaginings of the past get activated in envisioning the types of futureswe would like to build. These sites o seeming extreme speed are also sites oaccumulation and density. Their own utures are not known. While it is de-nitely possible that these in rastructures in our present are now making obso-lete the many principles of design and communication that I will lay out in thisbook, it is also true that we do not know, and only the past can even begin toallow us to reexively contemplate the present at a rate, and a scale, different

rom that being encouraged by the developers.In contemplating the historical treatment o vision and reason, the domi-

nant methodology o this book is, there ore, to mime the practices o designand cybernetics to intervene and engage with these seemingly scale-free formso calculation that underpin contemporary digital in rastructures. In our con-temporary environments we tend to assume seamless mobility in moving fromlocal to global, through inter aces like Google Earth and exible mobile terri-tories like Songdo. This mobility is, in act, a critical element o our modes o

perception in the present, a topological movement that offers the experienceo an integrated global media systema particular constellation o commu-nication theories, data, design, and navigation. However, while scale is ofendiscussed, the logic o scale is very particular and historically situated. Scale ingeography and planning ofen comes through two main approaches. On onehand, as the architect and theorist El Hadi Jazairy argues, scale is an ontologi-cal fact that organizes matter in a Russian doll structure from innitely smallto innitely large. On the other hand scale is also a method, a orm o mea-surement that serves to manage data and reach conclusions within a denedspace and time. Both o these models presume that scale is an ontologicalreality, and a stable entity to be used across locations. Events happen withinthe rame, and commensurabilities occur between different scales. Counter tothese two approaches, Jazairy su ests a denition of scale as the unfolding ofevents that produces a certain scale, which is to say an un olding that createsconditions o possibilities. Scale is plastic because it is not stable, it is a mat-ter o ongoing relations between technologies, objects, agents, subjects, andterritories. Scale bec

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Beautiful Data by Orit Halpern