SEEK RESEARCH ... orange highlights are my highlights......

"Seek had a video camera that observed changing patterns of blocks in a large enclosure. The blocks were moved around by gerbils."

Image and Text from: http://www.cyberneticians.com/slideshow/seek2.html


"As a final example, Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group (precursor to the MIT Media Lab, which Negroponte now directs) submitted "Seek," a computer-controlled robotic environment that, at least in theory, cybernetically reconfigured itself in response to the behavior of the gerbils that inhabited it. I interpret Seek as an early example of "intelligent architecture," a growing concern of the design community internationally.[11] By synthesizing cybernetics, aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics, Software emphasized the process of audience interaction with "control and communication techniques," encouraging the "public" to "personally respond" and ascribe meaning to experience. In so doing, Software questioned the intrinsic significance of objects and implied that meaning emerges from perception in what Burnham (quoting Barthes) later identified as "syntagmatic" and "systematic" contexts."
(Burnham, 1971. The Structure of Art, pp. 19-27)

text from: http://variantmedia.co.nz/journal1.html


"First displayed in 1970 at Software, an exhibition of artistic uses of computer technology, Seek was a Plexiglas-encased, computer-controlled environment inhabited by gerbils, whose primary activity consisted of rearranging a group of small blocks. Once the arrangement was disrupted, a computer-controlled robotic arm rebuilt the block configurations in a manner its programmers believed followed the gerbil's objectives. The designers, however, did not successfully anticipate the reactions of the animals, who often outwitted the computer and created total disarray."

text from: http://www.facsimilemagazine.com/2009/10/index.html


Seek was a work by Nicholas Negroponte for a exhibition titled SOFTWARE in 1970. It observed some gerbils in a artificial environment which was monitored by a computer and controlled by a robotic arm. The robotic arm re-made the original set up of the artificial environment when the gerbils moved blocks which made the environment. The gerbils were closely watched, both by the computer and by the audience. this is a system and network.