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diff --git a/books/tecnopolitica/maciunas-learning-machines.md b/books/tecnopolitica/maciunas-learning-machines.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3d6dd0c..0000000 --- a/books/tecnopolitica/maciunas-learning-machines.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,103 +0,0 @@ -[[!meta title="Maciunas Learning Machines"]] - -[Maciunas’s Learning Machine](http://georgemaciunas.com/exhibitions/knowledge-as-art-chance-computability-and-improving-education-thomas-bayes-alan-turing-george-maciunas/george-maciunas/maciunas-learning-machine/). - -## 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. |