Computing Outside the Feedback Loop - An Interview with Resident Artist Emma Rae Bruml Norton
Computing Outside the Feedback Loop - An Interview with Resident Artist Emma Rae Bruml Norton
February 24, 2021
On our video call in the midst of the hard, pandemic winter of 2020, Emma Rae Norton is drinking from a plain mug and seems to be seated in front of a natural, white background. She is one of those people who have found a place to do video calls that doesn’t put their physical world on display. I’m the opposite, with stacked books, a projector, and the occasional stuffed animal fair game for an inquisitive video call partner. We start talking about the materiality of technology.
Norton is obsessed with the computer mouse, our entry point into the computational world. She’s been tracking its history, starting with its birth at Doug Engelbert’s Mother of All Demos, a demonstration in 1968 of basically all the computing we now consider modern: video calling, for one, but also hypertext, collaborative document editing, and—the great connector—the mouse.
The mouse is the device that brought us humans into the loop of computing. It makes us active, responsive computer users. It provides instant feedback, and this allows us to move with the computer in ways we never did with just typing. Norton tells me, “The mouse holds us there.” When she says “there” I think she means here, at the computers we both sit at, mug in one hand, the other hand poised to reach for the mouse.
The mouse was born from the cybernetics movements. In the 1940s the cyberneticists thought to blend everything together as a set of intricate feedback loops. The weather was the same as the brain was the same as the railroad control tower; all of this can be viewed through a feedback-tinted lens. The mouse placed us humans in the same loop as the computers. Norton tells me that recently she’s been wondering, “What would it look like to compute outside of that feedback loop?” My hand itches towards the mouse. She answers her own question. “I’m not sure.”
Katy Ilonka Gero is a poet, essayist, and scientist, and is a CultureHub Resident Contributing Writer (2020–2021). Read more about their work.