Kybernetes

Cybernetic narrative: Modes of circularity, feedback and perception in new media

artworks
Eser Selen,
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44,8/9
Cybernetic narrative
Modes of circularity, feedback and perception
in new media artworks
1380 Eser Selen
Department of Communication Design,
Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how second-order cybernetics (von Foerster, 2002)
functions in new media artworks, specifically through information, system and user. While formulating
the relationship between new media artworks and the discourses surrounding cybernetics the paper
analyzes Popp’s (2006) Bit.Fall, Wojtowicz’s (2007) Elsewhere News and Zeren Göktan’s (2013) The
Counter, as exemplars of alternative methods of narration. This study further argues that these new
media artworks employ a cybernetic narrative via modes of “circularity,” “feedback,” and “perception.”
Design/methodology/approach – This paper offers a theoretical approach to new media art
and cybernetics in order to analyze three select works. Since the works mentioned have diverse takes
on the presented concepts each is discussed and analyzed in their frame of production in relation
to cybernetics and new media standpoints.
Findings – It is significant that these three artists attempt to invert the quotidian into the concept
of new media while cybernetics facilitates their interactive art installations. The fully functioning
circularity in these works breaks down the linear narrative structure while regenerating a non-linear
narrative together with the flow of information, utilization of the systems and the user interaction.
In these works narrative functions as a tool for interaction, which is cybernetically generated by the
user (human) and the systems (machine).
Originality/value – New media artworks at least suggest a possibility of observing contemporary art
and its history in the making if not generating it altogether through cybernetic modes of “circularity,”
“feedback” and “perception.” The experience of these artworks for each user differs depending on their
choice to either reject or become immersed in the work. The possible sensoria, however, may still be
betrayed by the mind’s willingness to cooperate or at times by the ability to perceive.
Keywords Internet, Creativity, Art, Design, Narratives, Cybernetics
Paper type Conceptual paper

Introduction
Cyberculture has been proposed as an alternative to challenge the structurality
of dichotomies (or binary oppositions such as culture/nature, presence/absence,
man/woman, etc.), specifically through the integration of digital interactive multimedia
as a tool, which “explicitly poses the question of the end of logocentrism, the destitution
of the supremacy of discourse over other modes of communication” (Packer and
Jordan, 2001, p. 373). Cyberculture, according to new media artist and theorist Lev
Manovich (2001) is also concerned with producing a network with the presented data,
while new media utilizes (cultural) data, old and new, and puts them to use through
computing. Although Alan Turing registered the first viable interaction between
human and machine “against the Cartesian chasm” (Winston, 2002, p. 154), the digital
differentiation of information still relies on the Cartesian notion of the split between
Kybernetes mind and body in evaluating information through binary codes of ones and zeros.
Vol. 44 No. 8/9, 2015
pp. 1380-1387
© Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0368-492X
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and generous
DOI 10.1108/K-11-2014-0235 comments and suggestions.
 In the case of new media artworks, what is experienced as art in relation to their spatial, Cybernetic
tactile, textual, visual and audial components? These elements are re-crafted in binary narrative
decisions (yes/no) since codes written using binary systems can enable a variety of
decisions at the meaning level of interaction. While keeping the sensorial affect intact
for the most part, in many interactive and non-linear works, the network of choices
moves beyond the binary as a system of codes.
Being the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine” 1381
(Wiener, 1965), cybernetics has direct links to the processes of cybercultural formations
while also fulfilling its promise of involving “more than the concept of feedback” and
containing “more than a simple analogy between man and machines” (Apter, 1969,
p. 262). Following Wiener’s definition, Patrick Lichty (2000) suggests that cybernetics
“refers to any self-regulating system that is set up by a stimulus and response through
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continuous feedback” (p. 352). In addition, cybernetics is rather a vast and developing
construct with many disciplines and areas within its domain; its modes of operation
such as circularity, feedback and perception could suggest a generative perspective to
evaluate binary oppositions, with which cyberculture currently struggles (Hayles, 1999;
Jenkins, 2006).
In relation to the formal, functional and narrative components of new media
artwork, this study aims to address such questions as: how could new media artworks
inform cybernetics? What can cybernetics offer in the reception of new media
artworks? As a preliminary answer, I propose that new media artworks at least suggest
a possibility of observing contemporary art and its history in the making, if not
generating it altogether, through cybernetic modes. I illustrate my proposition with
artworks drawn from the work of three contemporary artists, which employ cybernetic
interaction enabled via the user Julius Popp’s (2006) Bit.Fall, Wojtowicz’s (2007);
Elsewhere News, and Zeren Göktan’s (2013) The Counter.

Cybernetics’ vision
Manovich considers new media to be “the mix between older cultural conventions for
data representation, access and manipulation and newer conventions of data
representation, access and manipulation” (Manovich, 2002, p. 19). While “access” and
“manipulation” are the keywords of many mediatic scenarios, media theorist Marshall
McLuhan (2001) argues that media above all is accessory and manipulative. His widely
cited motto “medium is the message” (McLuhan, 2001, p. 9) suggests that the message
occupies at least an equal significance to its medium and how the message is delivered.
McLuhan’s re-evaluation of medium and Manovich’s definition of new media
communicates with British artist and theorist Roy Ascott’s (2003) vision of art which is
a form of behavior when “software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere.
Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure” (quoted in
Shanken, 2003, p. 157). As a speeded-up representational practice, Ascott’s vision also
resonates in the formation and practices of new media art which introduces us to
technological advances while integrating cybernetics to artistic expression. While the
narrative or the content of new media artworks almost always dissolves into the
systems, rethinking these works in relation to cybernetics could bring content to
surface when experiencing the work. In describing first-order cybernetics Heinz von
Foerster (2002) suggests that the “underlying circularity of processes of emergence,
of manifestation, of structurization, of organization, etc., become explicit” (p. 301),
referring to the way we become aware that circular processes are in the things we
observe. When put in use or into function, awareness of circular processes allows us to
 K ascend into second-order cybernetics as we question the purpose while reflecting on the
44,8/9 observation. Although it serves or achieves different purposes in systems regarding
circularity, feedback and perception, the transitionality between first- and second-order
cybernetics opens up a space for analysis in a work of new media art in observing,
perceiving or experiencing systems.

1382
User’s experience and creativity
With regard to some contemporary artworks the individual’s experience of a work
becomes a way of reminiscing about the self, or a sense of the subjectification of self,
and this in turn engenders an awareness of one’s own body as the viewer. Some
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new media artworks also make sense in this way. The works present the significance of
becoming a channel that binds the individual through a certain experience in the form
of feedback, using advanced representation techniques and technologies via systems.
In various contexts, new media promises “exteroceptivity”[1] (Merleau-Ponty, 2005,
p. 87). This concept suggests suggesting that perception is the most intricate sensory
register through which we can know of our embodied experiences, irrespective of the
physical-biological body, allowing the user to generate her experiences without the
limitations of corporeality (Hansen, 2006). In doing so, new media has also introduced
us to a term: the user, which relatively governs a total sum of what audience, performer,
spectator, visitor and viewer signifies in the “older” forms of works of art. For instance,
video art, a genre that is in close proximity to new media art, has also been challenging
the presentia/absentia binary; synthesizing the real and the represented time from the
viewer’s experience ( Jones, 1998).
In new media artworks, however, the processes of representation (composition,
narrative, creativity, etc.) have vastly benefited from the programmability of
technological systems, since the user, the database and the algorithm operate in a
cybernetic manner. Theoretically, in as much as a database can be structurally infinite
and inclined to continuous growth, an algorithm has a point of departure, a median and
an arrival. In new media, database and algorithm work collectively where the former
collects and stores the data and the latter interrelates the data with the action that is
previously programed. A non-linear narrative forms as the user’s experience
integrates the concept of duration during the art production, consumption and
documentation process.
Stemming from the non-linear narrative elements in a new media artwork,
the experience of each user and the reception of each work differ depending on the
user’s choice to either reject or become immersed in the work. While any input from
the user can change the perception, the user’s feedback cybernetically regenerates the
reception, which is different from just viewing a work. The experience of the work
begins at this juncture. In turn the experience shifts toward unification as the user
engages with the work and the split between the mind and body dissolves. The possible
sensoria, however, might also be betrayed by the mind’s willingness to cooperate or at
times its ability to perceive. “In such an environment,” Ascott writes, “meaning is not
something created by the artist, distributed through the network, and received by the
observer. Meaning is the product of interaction between the observer and the system,
the content of which is in a state of flux, of endless change and transformation” (quoted
in Packer and Jordan, 2001, p. xxxi). Significantly, the receptions of new media
artworks are not bound to artists’ input as creators, but the artists’ process can very
well be traced cybernetically by the user’s experience of the work.
 Narrative and the function of databases Cybernetic
In relation to the narrative component of new media, artists and designers have been narrative
focussing on “How to tell stories with these technologies?” instead of “What alternative
to narrative can this technology bring?” In a new media work, there may be a number
of database records that are linked together possibly constituting a narrative, but the
user also has to register the semantics of the elements with the logic of their connection
so that the resulting output meets the criteria of a narrative in cybernetics. Conversely, 1383
if the user reaches arbitrary elements from a database without the link, these elements
do not necessarily create a narrative in any sense at all. Through integration of new
media into artistic research, cultural data as the source of narrative has also undergone
a paradigm shift and left its course of action to syntagmatic possibilities: the database
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(Manovich, 1998, 2001). If we consider the density of databases in the landscape of new
media one asks why, then, narrative still exits in the genre and why its artists try to
find new ways of narrating.
Significantly, it is the interface’s integration with artistic practices that renders
“technical,” “formal” or “contextual” changes as a narrative. Yet this does not mean that
any arbitrary sequence of database records creates a narrative. The interface, therefore,
does not create a new method of narration; it just serves as a new indexing of classic
narrations in a database that is also subjective in relation to the user’s timeline
(Manovich, 2001). A database, however, can be designed to facilitate narrative
structures in concert with a particular program, and enables the user to register
outputs which are relational but non-narrative. Through the concept of building
environments on a database and navigating them with new technologies, new media
artists envision a sense of reality that is structured from a collection of data which
shifts the course of the absence of narration in a traditional sense: interactive narration.
This is the most common way to break traditional narration, which also involves the user
in the narration, but how does this relate to first-order and second-order cybernetics?
Works such as Bit.Fall, Elsewhere News and The Counter operate through information,
system and user while inverting the quotidian into digitally streaming media. Aiming
towards an understanding of cybernetic narrative, the following sections analyze these
three works in which the break from and the desire for the narrative can be experienced.
It is significant how display of these works molds the concept of cybernetics into new
media art installations. In most cases it is the user who facilitates the interactivity
between the database and the interface and enables new methods of narration while
empowering new forms of non-narrative production.

Touching narrative
In Bit.Fall (https://youtu.be/AICq53U3dl8, 2006) both the episteme and aesthetic
understanding are recharged by cybernetics through the interaction of a global and
remote user in Popp’s industrially and technologically advanced work. In the physical
installation, the setup of the industrial scale water pumps and coding is merged with
the internet as the source, the database, such that any word, which is displayed through
the installation, is momentarily the most searched for on the internet. The information
is statistically picked and downloaded from the web in real-time, and stays up for only
a few seconds. Popp (2006) claims that “[t]he link to the internet actually means a link to
the culture. This means whatever is running on the machine has current value in a
culture and is meaningful somehow. Therefore the machine is a symbol for me that
these meanings or values can change very fast”. Instead of using a projection device or
a computerized liquid screen, Popp’s use of pumped and flowing water as a transparent
 K background and an active foreground seems like an attempt to display the integration
44,8/9 of the media: old and new.
On the flowing water functioning as an information screen, a word + typeface
combination appears then disappears into another combination. The gathering of this
information is temporal. This temporality suggests that a rather complex algorithm is
in charge as the water is pumped back and forth through the machine to employ a
1384 specific typeface that may or may not visually represent the word. In Bit.Fall, narrative
appears transiently and within seconds it transforms, perhaps as an attempt to display
the in/consistency of narrative through writing with water. This movement suggests a
meta-narrative where each word is a “becoming” (Deleuze, 1997) of the word, which also
performs itself and disappears into another word. The system is devised in a manner to
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feed the production of the word. The upcoming word replaces not only the previous
word’s narrative, but also its function. The main interaction happens between the
machine and the internet, but a sense of tactility is still fostered via the display.
The idea of interactivity metonymically displaces the users’ experience of perceiving
the interface. The deliberate decision of displaying one word at a time turns the work
into both a first- and second-order cybernetic organism in transition while challenging
the narrative (human) and system (machine) divide. In Bit.Fall the viewer standing
before the installation is not the sole user of the installation, as anyone online who
actively searches on the web during its display is also a user. The way the user
interacts with the work may not be willful, or even involve any awareness, however,
Bit.Fall strongly suggests the interchangeability of the viewer/user duo through their
presence/absence in the experience of the work.

Converging narrative
Wojtowicz’s online installation Elsewhere News (http://wojtowicz.com/elsewhere,
a work-in-progress, started in 2007) is mainly an interface designed and connected to
a live data feed from Google and sourced to display the fluctuation of world events. In
the form of a cybernetic-collage, the work consists of a 3D digital model of a revolving
sphere, representing the Earth against a black background, representing space, as in a
part of the universe. The cursor gives out direct information of the major urban centers
around the world as the user runs the mouse over the sphere. The interface is designed
with tall/short and wide/narrow rectangular prisms coded by color, such as in red or
blue and a supplemental mid-grey, to aid in the perception of the three dimensionality.
Color-coding is essential to the information design in crafting narrative as the interface
is being fed information while the user’s interaction activates the digital map that is
connected to Google. Similar to their location of either end of the color spectrum,
red represents increasing or appearing and blue represents decreasing or disappearing
news or world events in connection to the cities in which the news originates at about
the time of the interaction.
Wojtowicz (2007) claims that the digital map is connected to live data from Google
and changes with the fluctuation of world events: “NewsGlobe is a visualization of
world news hotspots, […] at the time of this writing, for example, a ferry disaster in
Indonesia ensured that Surabaya was the most noticeable city on the map”. As a digital
display of the ontology of the “news” the work significantly caters to the cybernetic
mode through algorithmic possibilities within discontinuous and variable non-linear
narratives. As the news is continuously being delivered and updated, the online
installation is updated in real-time – depending on the connection speed and
information volume. The narrative is interestingly composed of the elements in the
 structure of the interface, as its design is the transmitter of the information. Elsewhere Cybernetic
News, although mediated through its interface, interaction and coding, is perhaps the narrative
most immediate display of convergence of media and culture in visual display. Similar
to Bit.Fall, the user is an integral part of the system and is also responsible for the
diversion, distribution and circulation of the news online. The user is not only the
generator of the system but also acts as facilitator in the narrative of the outcome.
1385
Counting narrative
Zeren Göktan’s (2013) The Counter Monument (www.anitsayac.com) is an online
installation with multiple storylines narrated cybernetically against time. The work
displays the overlapping worlds of binaries and the traces of “daily” events as
“evidence” in between actual and virtual space. For this work Göktan designed a web
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site adding a counter in its interface displaying the number of women murdered by
male violence in Turkey for each year going back from the year 2013, while
continuously updating the interface by uploading new data from the present. She uses
a database to feed her interface the information, and generates the database from
stories of murdered women and their names. She has been collecting this data over a
period of two years by surveying news on and off line on a daily basis. Göktan accurately
defines this online database as a virtual monument entitled, The Counter-Monument
where the murdered women are remembered by their names and stories. Each year has a
header compiled of a set of the victims’ names where the user can click on and get further
information regarding how, when and where the woman was killed.
For her 2013 exhibition entitled The Counter in Istanbul, Göktan also designed
beadwork paraphernalia composed of seven tapestries which were displayed on the
walls of the gallery and various key chains which were hung from the ceiling to
accompany the online monument. Given the purpose of her work, it is significant that
she collaborated with the male inmates of the Ümraniye Department of Corrections in
Istanbul, where all the beadwork was handcrafted by male inmates. Her tapestry
designs are inspired by Ancient Egyptians’ burial garments and she embedded QR
codes in each piece’s pattern. The QR codes act as functional gateways to her online
monument which connects the real and virtual spaces in continuum and not in
opposition. With the burial garments, key chains, a computer in the physical
installation at the gallery and a database in cyberspace, the user becomes both a
witness and an active participant of The Counter. In the work the user’s interaction is
minimal. The interaction in this work, however, is not designed to feed information for
observation within the (machine) system, but to feed information to be observed within
the (human) system. The feedback is not directly put into a database circularly, but
displayed to alter the (human) system’s perception. The Counter facilitates a kind of
awareness while circularly utilizing the internet as a platform for change. Göktan refers
to her installation as a work-in-progress which can only be finished if there is no data
left to feed into its database. She claims that, “It is a mechanism that vies for its own
demise. The monument will have fulfilled its purpose when it perishes and the women
live” (Göktan, 2013). Until then the processes of feedback work in continuum as the
work keeps displaying massive violence toward women in Turkey.

Conclusion
It is significant that these three artists attempt to invert the quotidian into the concept
of new media cybernetics facilitated through interactive art installations. The fully
functioning cybernetics in these works not only breaks down the linear narrative
 K structure but also regenerates a non-linear narrative together with circularity, feedback
44,8/9 and perception. In these works narrative is utilized as a tool for interaction, which is
cybernetically generated by the user and the systems. Ascott’s redefinition of art as
“a cybernetic system, consisting of feedback loops that included the artist, the audience,
and the environment” (quoted in Shanken, 2003, p. 26) presents firm ground to
understand these works. Narrative appears between the action and non-action, even
1386 though the user’s experience might bypass the narrative altogether in practice.
Cybernetics sprouts between real-time network communication (circularity) and
real-time action (feedback) and its output (perception) is immediate.
Looking at new media artworks through the lens of cybernetics can, at least, suggest
the possibility of a narrative not as a directed script, but as a path to generate users’
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own experience of the work. Cybernetics also equips new media works in rebooting
binaries, which are significantly altered, but have not yet disappeared, as they are
being fed-back into a more advanced system. In this system the user’s experience not
only historicizes the action, but creates an ongoing reforming of the narration, which is
very fluid, changeable and malleable. Unlike the older forms of art, new media works
turn the user into a spectacle of a cybernetic organism: through circularity, feedback
and perception.

Note
1. In emphasizing the importance of recognizing bodies as the entity through which we expand
and emerge as subject, Meurice Merleau-Ponty writes: “Exteroceptivity demands that stimuli
be given a shape: the consciousness of the body invades the body, the soul spreads over all its
parts, and behavior overspills its central sector.” But one might reply that this “bodily
experience” is itself a “representation,” a “psychic fact” and that as such it is at the end of a
chain of physical and physiological events which alone can be ascribed to the ‘real body’
(Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p. 87).

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Further reading
Ascott, R. (1996), “Behaviourables and futuribles”, in Stiles, K. and Selz, P. (Eds), Theories of
Modern Art, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

About the author

Dr Eser Selen is a Visual Artist whose work encompasses performance art, installation and video.
She has exhibited and performed in Europe, the USA and the Middle East. Her research interests
include feminisms, performance studies, contemporary art, communication design and new
media. Her writings have been published in such journals as Gender Place and Culture, Women &
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, International Journal of the Humanities. She currently
lives in Istanbul and teaches with an Assistant Professor position at the Communication Design
Department at the Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey. Dr Eser Selen can be contacted at:
eser.selen@khas.edu.tr

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