The Biological Computer Lab (BCL) was a Cold War era research effort based at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Despite two decades of prominence as one of the university's leading research contractors, no evidence of the Lab or even its discipline remained when I arrived in 2002. That very obscurity in light of founder Heinz von Foerster's global renown led me to an ongoing investigation of this history through artworks, events, and scholarship. There I've found connections that continue to extend into every sphere, with figures such as Margaret Mead, artist William Wegman, architect Lebbeus Woods, and local activist John Lee Johnson coming into view, and influence on the founding of the internet as we know it.
I designed this timeline mural in collaboration with designer Miriam Moore, as a commission for the Illinois Capital Development Board on the occasion of the launch of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Designed according to Heinz Von Foerster’s own principles of memory, the mural tells the story of the BCL in light of the lifespans of its primary figures, as well as the lifespans of geneticists and proto-geneticists over the centuries. For each figure we learn of at least one significant publication, which is in some cases represented on the wall via a scanned cover page from Rare Book & Manuscript Library and other university collections. The wall situates these scientists and their texts in the context of a panoply of world events: empires rise and fall, government programs come and go, people earn and lose access to rights and freedoms. Examples of non-human species significant to these stories also populate the composition.
The mural’s focus on the textual continued on the opposite wall, where readers could browse a large selection of reproduced BCL zines and journals. During the BCL's heyday, these aesthetically-rich publications formed a significant component of the Lab's work, made available via mail-order through outlets such as the Whole Earth Catalog.
The Adaptive Reorganizing Automaton (or ARA), constructed in 1959, was one of the only functioning devices built by the BCL. Murray Babcock, who created the machine under the guidance of von Foerster, described the experiment as “an attempt to construct an adaptive automaton whose internal structure has a similarity to living tissue.” This progenitor of contemporary neural nets was among a few of the Lab's efforts to manifest the adaptive behavior of organisms through a functioning network of “artificial neurons.”
Though the original ARA was likely lost to a flood of Urbana's Boneyard Creek, Skot Wiedmann and I recreated this machine to create a contemporary functioning version. Working from Babcock’s dissertation, we realized an operational version using all-analog components. We approached this part of the work as a re-enactment more than a re-creation, in order to emphasize the interrogative and interpretive nature of our work.
In 2012 I created a small comic about the night von Foerster crossed paths with local activist John Lee Johnson on a live national telecast event that von Foerster had helped arrange in January 1968 on the occasion of a wave of student unrest on university campuses. A Place in Time, distributed for free through area libraries and high schools, tells the story of this broadcast, and some part of how it came to be.
In 2018 I then worked with others to stage a re-screening of the original 1968 nationally-broadcast conversation in the same space where Public Broadcast Laboratory had staged the first, fifty years prior. A conversation between contemporary student, faculty, administrative, and civic groups then followed.
With interest growing in the BCL archives, archivist-scholar Bethany Anderson then led a group of us to secure a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to pilot a digitization of one small portion of the papers, along with related correspondence from the British Library, American Philosophical Society, and more. The Cybernetics Thought Collective project also prototyped some early topic-modeling and social network analysis within the group.
FURTHER WORK:
- Hamilton, Kevin, “Where the Turtles End: Materiality in a Historic Cybernetic Experiment," Leonardo Electronic Almanac, vol. 22, issue 2 : special issue, “Cybernetics Revisited,” Aceti and Søndergaard, eds. (2019)
- Anderson, B.G., and C.J. Prom, K. Hamilton, J.A. Hutchinson, M. Sammons, A.Dolski, “The cybernetics thought collective project: Using computational methods to reveal intellectual context in archival material,” in Proceedings – 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2017 (IEEE Inc, 2018): pp.2213-2218.
- Hamilton, Kevin, “Beyond Visualization: Geneologies of Unmapped Complexity in Media Art and Technology,” 7th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology, Danube University, Austria. November 24, 2017.
- Hamilton, Kevin, "On the dedication of BCL/IGB." October 21, 2010.
- Holmes, Brian, "The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor in the Recent Past and the Distant Futures," Continental Drift. June 19, 2008.
- "Curating Local History," radio interview for Focus580, Illinois Public Media. March 15, 2013.
