"The Construction of Change" by Roy Ascott

-1964
-Ascott was reevaluating art with Weiner's cybernetics in mind
-Frank Popper makes a distinction between interaction and participation in art theory

Participation: involvement on the intellectual and behavioral level

Interaction: The artist stimulates a two-way interaction between the object and the viewer through which the viewers' questions are answered by the work itself

-"All are is, in some sense, didactic: every artist is, in some way, setting out to instruct. For, by instruction, we mean to give direction, and that is precisely what all great art does."

-"Symbollically, [the artist] takes on responsibility for absolute power and freedom to shape and create his world."

-"Cybernetic method may be characterised by a tendency to exteriorise its concepts in some solid form; to produce models in hardware of the natural or artificial system it is discussing. It is concerned with what things do, how they do them, and with the process within which they behave. It takes a dynamic view of life not unlike that of the artist."

The bulk of this article is concerned with the changes brought about by the widespread use of cybernetic technology; changes in the how we operate and interact with and within our environment. While this idea isn't very different from anything we've discussed thus far, it's interesting that this is the first we've read that proposes that artists actually utilize this kind of technology. Ascott foresaw how cybernetics could change the human condition and, as early as 1964, asserted that artists should be all over this.
And they should. Many of the technologies we've been exposed to thus far are presented primarily from an engineering standpoint, and while it is important to understand why a certain engineer came to a specific conclusion, it is also important to explore other capabilities of that technology beyond original intention. This is one of the things I really enjoyed about visiting Eyebeam. We just started looking at augmented reality technology a matter of months ago in class, and now, artists are using it for their own creative purposes. The speed at which we operate socially is absolutely phenomenal, and to know that we're in a time in which it doesn't take hundreds of years for an aesthetic style to spread just floors me.