The sixth in our 2005 lecture series
Figuring Minds

Wednesday, December 7
7.30pm
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
"Core memory" board from a 1960's mainframe computer.
Photo by Nicholas Gessler

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.

Close-up of core memory storage. Each "core" is a small torus of ferromagnetic iron and holds one bit of data. The cores here are 2.0 mm in diameter. Core memory, which is still used in some satellites and deep space probes, is threaded like beadwork and painstakingly made by hand, usually by women.
Photo by Nicholas Gessler.
Nicholas Gessler is a researcher at UCLA whose work focuses on the emerging field of "artificial culture" - a research enterprise that extends work which began with distributed artificial intelligence and artificial life "towards a new practice of synthetic anthrolpology". Originally trained in more traditional anthropological practices, Gessler formerly studied the indigenous culture of the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of Canada. From 1973-1988 he was director and curator of the Queen Charlotte Islands Museums. In addition to his work on social and cultural simulation, Gessler is an expert on, and avid collector of, early computational devices. His collection includes a vast eclectic array of thinking mechanisms from a mid-nineteenth century Jacquard loom to a still working module of Danny Hillis's legendary supercomputer, the Connection Machine.

For more information about his collection of "Things That Think" see his website:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/geog/gessler/collections/