Books: Maciunas Learning Machines

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+[[!meta title="Maciunas Learning Machines"]]
+
+## Snippets
+
+    The declared aim was “to learn as if mechanically and without having to think
+    too much.” 38
+
+    [...]
+
+    The idea of the interactive user was born. George Maciunas is one of them.
+
+    [...]
+
+    This interest in graphic forms of communi- cation can in turn be traced back to
+    Maciunas’ profound aversion to books. Instead of spending hours of his time
+    reading, he preferred to learn by taking in as much informa- tion as possible
+    at a glance. This explains his fascination with diagrams, charts, maps, tables,
+    systems of coordinates, and graphs. The charting of history, moreover, was but
+    one facet of the visual information which was to preoccupy him throughout his
+    life, not just as an architect, but as a knowledge worker.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Thus the Atlas of Russian History ranks among those forms of knowledge-driven
+    visualization systems that can be grouped together under the term “operative
+    pictoriality.” 51
+
+    One key feature of “operative pictoriality” is the interaction on a map of the
+    visual and the discursive. The latter takes the form of keywords used to
+    chronicle historical events—trans- formative processes of which each map can
+    provide no more than a snapshot showing them at a certain point in time, or at
+    a particular stage in their unfolding. The Atlas of Russian His- tory is
+    remarkable for another quality as well, namely in the way it uses recurring
+    terminol- ogy. As a kind of hyperlink, this terminology facilitates navigation
+    through the Atlas, which after all works on the principle of anticipation.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The cartography ends more or less abruptly in the late nineteenth century. The
+    heroic phase of Soviet history that was to follow in the early twentieth
+    century was too complex to be contained, let alone mapped, in the traditional
+    atlas format. To a certain extent, therefore, Maciunas can be said to have
+    reached the limits of what the charting and mapping of his- tory could achieve.
+    The limit he had reached was systemic, of the kind Gregory Bateson examined in
+    his book Mind and Nature (1979): “All description, explanation, or representa-
+    tion is necessarily in some sense a mapping of derivatives from the phenomena
+    to be de- scribed onto some surface or matrix or system of coordinates. In the
+    case of an actual map, the receiving matrix is commonly a flat sheet of paper
+    of finite extent, and difficulties occur when that which is to be mapped is too
+    big or, for example, spherical. . . . Every receiving matrix,” Bateson
+    concluded, “will have its formal characteristics which will in principle be
+    distortive of the phenomena to be mapped onto it.” 59
+
+    [...]
+
+    The distortion of phenomena in the Atlas of Russian History consisted in its
+    gross simplifica- tion of complex geohistorical processes as factographic
+    fallout. To be able to capture that “hot” phase in a chronology which, owing to
+    the large number of fast-moving events that have to be taken into account, has
+    the character of “differential elements”—to borrow Claude Lévi-Strauss’
+    definition for the study of anthropology—Maciunas had no choice but to change
+    his mode of presentation. He therefore switched from two-dimensional mapping of
+    history to the historiogram, which could be expanded in three dimensions
+    without any major structural changes and thus lent itself more readily to the
+    ever greater factual density Maciunas now grappled with.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Usually, geographical maps are static representations. The snapshots of history
+    they pro- vide have no room for the dynamic dimension of historical processes.
+    The arrows Maciunas used in the Atlas of Russian History are an attempt to
+    restore a sense of dynamism. The vectors are necessary to the mental animation
+    of systems, and signify large-scale move- ments such as migrations or
+    invasions. Yet they can only ever mark out the general direc- tion, never the
+    exact route taken. It is the arrows, moreover, which lend the charts the dia-
+    grammatic character that appeals so strongly to non-cartographers such as
+    Maciunas. The rudimentary nature of the cartographic information provided on
+    the various sheets also belongs in this category. Because Maciunas dispenses
+    with a frame, a grid, and a specifica- tion of scale, the representational
+    space of his history charts tends to resemble pictures rather than maps. 61
+
+    [...]
+
+    The history of the empire was to inform maps of the empire. The political
+    function of the atlas of history was thus very similar to that of history
+    painting. Its purpose was not so much to deliver comfort and relief—which was
+    what history paintings had to do—as to nurture historical awareness. Such
+    awareness as the basis for social development, however, was to be found only at
+    the top of the learning curve that was preceded and facilitated by the
+    positivistic acquisition of facts. To para- phrase Jürgen Habermas, social
+    evolution is driven by changes in the knowledge poten- tial. 69 The historical
+    sources show a milieu which believed in the reformation—meaning the
+    improvement—of the world by education. Maciunas’ maps are of a piece with this
+    en- lightenment ideology. As an imaginative matrix, they do not deliver an
+    abstract model of history, but rather generate their own history—one whose
+    narrative strategies elude any direct empirical verification. This metahistory
+    is ideologically motivated. As the factual density increases, so the process of
+    historical change picks up speed, culminating in the Russian Revolution.
+    Maciunas’ mapping project was focused on that one event, an event which
+    exemplifies most vividly the feasibility of history, which in turn allows for
+    the idea that society can indeed be modeled.