THE ARTISTIC USE OF CYBERNETIC BEINGS Caroline A. Jones Caroline A. Jones is a professor of art history in the Department of Architecture at MIT and author of Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses; Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist; and The Global Work of Art. Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important. — Nam June Paik, 1966 Artificial intelligence was not what artists first wanted out of cybernetics, once Norbert Wiener’s Zhe Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society came out in 1950. The range of artists who identified themselves with cybernetics in the fifties and sixties initially had little access to “thinking machines.” Moreover, craft-minded engineers had already been making turtles, jugglers, and light-seeking robot babes, not giant brains. Using breadboards, copper wire, simple switches, and electronic sensors, artists followed cyberneticians in making sculptures and environments that simulated interactive sentience—analog movements and interfaces that had more to do with instinctive drives and postwar sexual politics than the automation of knowledge production. Now obscured by an ideology of a free-floating “intelligence” untethered by either hardware or flesh, AI has forgotten the early days of cybernetics’ uptake by artists. Those efforts are worth revisiting; they modeled relations with what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called the “machinic phylum,” having to do with how humans think and feel in bodies engaged with a physical, material, emotionally stimulating, and signaling world. Cybernetics now seems to have collapsed into an all-pervasive discourse of AI that was far from preordained. “Cybernetics,” as a word, claimed postwar newness for concepts that were easily four centuries old: notions of feedback, machine damping, biological homeostasis, logical calculation, and systems thinking that