I attended a conference on ‘Pervasive Media in Theatre’ this week in my home city of Bristol.
What is ‘Pervasive Media’? You may well ask, and so did we all.
I think I can finally say what it is: there is an idea out in the computing community called ‘Ubiquitous Computing’ which dreams of a future where there will be no desktop PC’s, no laptops or mobiles, rather computing will be woven into the very fabric of our society- everything will be a computer in some way and as humans we will be in constant interactive communication with this fabric. Your tea cup will know how much tea is in the cup and its temperature, and will communicate with the kettle, for example.
I became interested in the cybernetic aspects of this- the feedback loops that exist within systems and came across a mind-expanding book from 1967 called ‘The Science of Art’ by Robert E Mueller.
I cannot recommend this book enough- it’s incredible! Starting fron ideas of entropy and structure and moving through cybernetics and communication theory it somehow manages to stay full of heart and soul and tackle the big questions- what is art, who are we and how can science and art help each other?
A digression- you will find very little reference to this book and author on the internet. The book was published in 1967 and then went out of print. What is interesting is that in my local library this book is very much alive- I searched in their catalogue using the keyword ‘cybernetics’ and it immediately appeared. It was available for loan from the library store.
On Amazon this book does not exist, it is too long out of print and of no commercial value.
I always worry about our new great source of information, the internet.

http://www.andypink.co.uk