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June 08, 2015

Bermuda

Drawing Footnotes from the History of Two Cultures (Jurg Lehni & Wilm Thoben, 2015)

The first of several Footnotes from the History of Two Cultures (→ see below) chalked by Jurg Lehni’s wall-mounted drawing machine OTTO over the course of the exhibition was a diagram from Silvio Ceccato’s La storia di un modello meccanico dell’uomo che traduce (“The story of a mechanical model of the man who translates”), published in the 1962 issue of Almanacco Letterario Bompiani. Dedicated to the aesthetic and linguistic potential of computers, the issue also featured work by Italian art collective Gruppo T (that endorsed the term “Arte Programmata”, programmed art), and ignited heated discussions about the death of the author, machine poetry, and the end of art. Ceccato’s chart, as re-produced by OTTO, maps possible relations between words and their contextual meaning. For example, “FIRE” relates to “POT”, “FLAME”, “TO BOIL” or “TO COOK”. To decipher context from these words, a computer would have to chose between numerous successors or predecessors. An early prototype of a neural networks of sorts, the chart investigates mechanization of poetry and language. Its creator, Silvio Ceccato, was an Italian philosopher and linguist with an interest in the mechanical translation of language and meaning. In 1956 he designed and built Adamo II, the first Italian prototype of artificial intelligence, which he had intended to reproduce man’s mental states.

→ Footnotes from the History of Two Cultures is a nod to British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. He lamented the separation of the sciences and the humanities throughout western society (and how it prevents us from solving the world’s problems) in his now famous 1959 lecture The Two Cultures.

Posted by administrator at June 8, 2015 04:44 PM

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