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Paidia Laboratory: feedback

Paidia Feedback Laboratory examines computer games as closed feedback systems, as servomechanisms or control chains that may or may not involve human elements. In an ongoing series of artistic experiments the feedback behaviour of games is studied and put in new contexts through modifications of hardware and software, creating an open structure of artifacts, schematics and patterns. The focus lies not on the usability of games, but rather on an archeology of interaction – determining the limits and boundaries of games in order to understand the media specific characteristics of computer games and the spaces they create.

Selected Experiments

feedback #1


TV, Playstation 2, modified controller (2x), game (Virtua Fighter)

 It is therefore convenient to analyse the controller into a series of elements with the output of each as the input of the succeeding one. The operative quantity passed from each element is called a signal. […]

R. H. Macmillan: An Introduction to the Theory of Control in Mechanical Engineering, Cambridge University Press, 1955

feedback #2

TV, Playstation 2, microfone (2x), speaker, game (Sing Star)

The block diagram is heavily used to determine transfer functions of composite systems. An exact description of the behavior of the internal system dynamics is not needed for classical design; that is, only the input/output behavior of the system is of importance.

F. L. Lewis: A Brief History of Feedback Control, in: Applied Optimal Control and Estimation, Prentice-Hall, 1992

feedback #3

TV, Playstation 2, camera, game (EyeToy Play: Wishi Washi)

feedback #4

TV, Playstation 2, camera, mirror, game (EyeToy Play: Kung Foo)

feedback #5

PC, monitor, keyboard, robotic hand, LDR, Arduino, game (decathlon)

Any system including a human element is manually controlled; […] If the human operator is replaced by a mechanism which performs the the same functions, the control is then automatic.

R. H. Macmillan: An Introduction to the Theory of Control in Mechanical Engineering, Cambridge University Press, 1955

feedback #6

Playstation 2 (2x)

feedback #7

PC, projector (2x), keyboard, mouse, game (Unreal Tournament), game (CryENGINE)

It is common practice to use a human being as one of the links in the chain of elements of a control system. He may perform a simple operation [...] or a superficially more complicated one, like steering a car; he then has to observe the difference between his car’s actual heading and the desired heading, [...] and move his steering wheel to bring them into coincidence. [...]

R. H. Macmillan: An Introduction to the Theory of Control in Mechanical Engineering, Cambridge University Press, 1955

feedback #8

PC, monitor, EEG, game (Alpha wave)

 Wireframe, 2011

acrylic glass

 

Paidia Laboratory: Feedback was shown at
Platine 2011 (Cologne, August 15th-19th)
transmediale 12 in/compatible (Berlin, 2012 Jan. 29th – Feb. 5th)

“I was walking down Granville Street […] and I was looking into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens into the kids’ eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game.“

William Gibson, author of “Neuromancer” and inventor of the term Cyberspace

William Gibson localizes the origin of Cyberspace within the feedback loop between video game players and the games they play. While the term feedback originated in radio engineering to describe feeding back of the output signal of an amplifier to the input, the meaning of the term radically shifted when classical control theory took off: Within this engineering discipline, negative feedback became the single most important method for dealing with systems of control and communication, which generally were called servomechanisms. After that shift, engineers started treating not only the electro-mechanical elements of their systems as servomechanisms, but also the human links in their control chains. This idea of „the human being as a servo“ was even more radicalized by Norbert Wiener who invented a new scientific discipline around feedback: Cybernetics. Cyberspace, in consequence, really denotes a cybernetic space, a feedback space in the loop between the living and inanimate elements of a control chain.