The sixth in our 2005 lecture series
Figuring Minds

Wednesday, December 7
8 pm
Things That Think:
A hands-on history of physical computation devices.
by Nick Gessler [IFF-L12]

at
Telic Arts Exchange
975 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

As we move into the age of ubiquitous computing, we are in danger of forgetting how we first made things think and how things are thinking today. Computation is increasingly hidden on chips, sealed in plastic behind the stylish skins of our appliances, under the sexy high performance hoods of our automobiles, and behind the sizzling screens of our PCs, ATMs and cell phones. Information seems to have lost its materiality as, increasingly, we envision it freely floating in a global ether of wireless connectivity.

While it is a pleasure to be seduced by these sleek virtual realities, looking underneath their thin veneers is a good sanity check. In this talk, computer collector Nicholas Gessler will give us a close-up look at a variety of early technological devices - things that think - starting with the original complex computing mechanism, the Jacquard loom. We will look at mechanical and electromechanical computing modules, at the lacy handmade marvel of "core" memories, and the physically sculptural beauty of "cam" memories. Finally, we'll examine some 20th Century cryptographic machines. A real-life show-and-tell. Perhaps, as Gessler dreams, we can develop a Rube-Goldbergian aesthetic that foregrounds processes linking computation across all of its evolutionarily diverse media, moving towards an aesthetic of intermediation.