What Machines Demand: Ink Blots and Purposeful Circuits

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Place: Alexander Library Pane Room, 169 College Avenue, College Avenue Campus

Information: info@cca.rutgers.edu or 732-932-8426

Evidence and Explanation in the Arts and Sciences: Distinguished Lecture Series

Long before Rorschach, ink blots were a training device for the imagination, a parlor game where people could share with each other all that they saw in the mysterious prints. By the late 19th century, the blots had become a specific test of the faculty of the imagination--the way the recollection of number series tested for the faculty of memory. Hermann Rorschach changed that, transforming the prints into a probe of the unconscious ways we perceive the world. I want to know what had to be assumed about the self for this test to take the form it did. And conversely, once the test became one of the great master metaphors of our time, how does it shape the way we understand our selves? The focus will then shift to Norbert Wiener's electro-mechanical feedback-designed anti-aircraft gun to probe the origins of cybernetics and to explore the nature of the self demanded by the objects of this new science. What is, after all, intention--the very fabric of the will-based self that for so long dominated "das Ich," and how did Wiener aim to replace intentionality with machinic loops?