Direct quote that captures the essence.

Notes

Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in the human, the animal, and the machine, or simply the study of the flow of information, messages, and signals between human, animal, and machine systems. Wiener developed the field when studying feedback mechanisms in steam engines-a field engineered by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865—but it was not until Wiener implemented these feedback studies with mathematician Claude Shannon’s information theory, or mathematical theory of communication, that he was able to conceptualize all systems in terms of information. That is, all communication and cultural processes could be analyzed, viewed, and understood in terms of data and pattern formation. All humans, animals, and machines were herein treated “equally”: as media technologies capable of analyzing, storing, transmitting, and processing information. The new common denominator-information-was both radical and problematic.

Meanwhile, as amateurs and technophiles were remixing “authentic” 1960s cool, these automated hypercolors and stylized interfaces were further distantiated from their technical-material base, which became increasingly difficult to understand and obfuscated from end users. That is to say, sophisticated software learned to conceal its growing complexity behind a simple and transparent user-friendly façade, also known as the “Web 2.0 look,” marked by soft rounded edges and big, happy bubble letters. How did such a dramatic gap emerge between these luminous electronic colors growing brighter, bolder, and more visible on screens and in public spaces-and their corresponding abstraction, complexity, and obfuscation in machine code? How and why did the interface become more “transparent” just as computing became more opaque? And moreover, how is this fundamental disparity between the machine code and the screen interface reflected in contemporary media art and design?

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![[Chromatic Algorithms by Carolyn Kane.pdf]]

Kane, Carolyn L., Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014).