Beyond Hardware: Jewelry for a Brave New World Published in "Ornament" 10(4) 1987 World civilization is entering a new phase: the opening of an infor- mation epoch based on computer technology operating in conjunction with communications technology [4]. The ramifications of this societal shift are broad enough and radical enough to warrant the label of "information revolution". The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century has completely transformed virtually all aspects of society, often in ways which could not have been predicted or appreciated beforehand. The primary agent for all this change has been the harnessing of mechanical motive power to amplify physical labor, thus allowing all sorts of enterprises not possible with human and animal power. These enter- prises created a new social system based on the production and con- sumption of material goods and the stratification of society. The information revolution which is dawning in the late twentieth century will affect the world certainly no less, and probably much more. After all, the basis for this revolution is the amplification of mental, rather than physical labor, and will affect our world-view in a very primary way. Emphasis in the information age is on the production and processing of information and a global, synergistic society; material values are of declining importance, being replaced by values associated with achieved goals [4]. Another aspect of this revolution is that the rate of change is already much faster than that encountered in the industrial revolution, and it is acceler- ating. We will need new institutions and methodologies to cope with this massive change, which will not just modify industrial society, but rather totally transform it. Yonjei Masuda postulates the importance of so-called quaternary industries in the information society [4]. Unlike the primary, secondary and tertiary industries, which rely on the production of goods and services, these quaternary industries are based on the pro- duction and utilization of information resources. Included in these quaternary industries is the arts industry. Although Masuda feels that the widespread availability of personal information devices will lessen the need for art, I take the opposite view, that the the information revolution will need aesthetics to help humanize massive social change, and that the pervasive use of computers and communi- cations will provide a fertile new ground for artistic developement. For instance, the combination of bionics and artificial intelligence will allow forms of aesthetic awareness that we can only guess at [1]. My contention is that all fields of creative endeavor should reexamine their precepts and methodologies in terms of post- industrial, information age values and technologies, and incorporate what is useful. As a jewelry artist, I propose a fundamentally new kind of jewelry, consonant with these new possibilities: cybernetic jewelry. Norbert Wiener, in his seminal treatment of the subject, defines cybernetics as "the science which studies the communication and the process of control in living organisms and machines" [8]. A defin- ition which I find more appealing is given by Helvey: "Cybernetics describes an intelligent activity or event which can be expressed in algorithms. Algorithms, in turn, refer to a system of instructions which describes unambiguously and accurately an interaction which is equivalent to a certain type of flux of intelligence and a sub- sequent, controlled activity." [1]. What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with jewelry? Cybernetic jewelry, as I define it, "denotes a type of electronic jewelry controlled by a software program running on a programmable computer which resides in the jewelry piece itself. This is in con- trast to classical electronic jewelry which has no such software component." [5] Since software programs are essentially ways of implementing algorithms, then the new jewelry form I am proposing is indeed cybernetic in the truest sense. Until very recently, it has been possible to characterize virtually all jewelry in terms of hardware, i.e. solid, physical materials such as gold, plastic, gemstones, etc., a mode of construction typical for artifacts of the industrial age. The advent of the single-chip, low power microcomputer allows us to redefine jewelry in terms of post- industrial, information age technology, with some rather radical con- sequences for our concepts of how jewelry can function. As possibly the most personal form of aesthetic expression, jewelry can be taken to function on several different, often overlapping levels. It might take the role of decoration, sometimes in the service of fashion, or it can be a powerful indicator of status or wealth. With its somewhat shamanistic roots in prehistory, it can be a potent vehicle for expression--both for the creator and the wearer. Jewelry has always been "bionic" in the sense of being a virtual extension of the wearer's psyche. My interests lie in the use of the jewelry medium for expressing ideas, but the arguments I will advance can be applied to other functions. My main premise is that any of these jewelry functions involve the creation and transmission of information of some kind; at the level of expressing sophisticated aesthetic concepts, the amount of infor- mation being transmitted can be quite substantial. This gives us a convenient new tool for analyzing jewelry: information theory. In terms of information theory, a jewel can be considered as a communi- cation channel which takes the concept being expressed and encodes it as a signal, and then transmits that signal to one or more receivers, which can decode and extract the message from the signal (Fig 9). It is by analyzing the nature of this communication channel that we can see the truly revolutionary potentials inherent in the application of cybernetic principles to the creation of jewelry. A critical quality of any communication channel is its bandwidth, which means roughly the amount of information that it can transmit. As we shall see, bandwidth also affects the kinds of information which the channel can transmit. For the most part, industrial-age jewelry is limited to transmitting information encoded in two or three spatial dimensions, with such attributes as line, color, tex- ture, etc. This means that the total amount of information available on the channel will be transmitted within a relatively short time, and that further attention to the signal will not result in more information being received. It may take a rather long time to decode the information from the received signal, as in highly conceptual jewelry, but this is more a function of efficient coding than of channel bandwidth. In this scheme, information tends to flow in just one direction, with only the most rudimentary provisions (e.g. rearrangement of parts) for establishing the feedback necessary for the channel to modify itself. This is typical and appropriate for the hierarchical concerns of industrial age society, where subject and object tend to have rigid relationships. Cybernetic jewelry dramatically increases communication channel band- width, most obviously by adding the dimension of time to the three dimensions of space. This means that further attention to the signal will result in more information being received. What is more, the time-dependent nature of the signal means that information of a com- pletely different kind can be encoded, as compared to the static nature of "normal" jewelry. In this regard, classical electronic jewelry falls into something of a grey zone. While it is true that the imagery in electronic jewelry is dynamic in nature, technical considerations prevent it from obtaining the rich diversity of possi- bilities which makes cybernetic jewelry such a potent channel for transmitting information. This diversity is a result of the programmable nature of cybernetic jewelry. A cybernetic jewel consists of a software program running on a computer and output to an appropriate display device, all of this being contained in some device which integrates the desired effect with the human body in a more or less pleasing way [5]. The software program is the feature which makes this new jewelry form unique. Algorithms are rules for obtaining desired results, and programs are the implementations of these rules, using logical instructions that control the operation of a computer. The computers used in cybernetic jewelry are powerful enough to execute programs which are based on very different rules, and thus produce very different results. Not only is the communication channel four-dimensional, but many aspects of that channel can be changed by altering the software controlling it. For example, consider a cybernetic jewel with two output devices, a liquid crystal display (LCD) and a miniature speaker. It would be a simple matter for the software to instruct the computer to take the information which it was transmitting through the LCD, and instead transmit it in a form compatible with the speaker. In this case, a change in nothing more than the parameters controlling the device configuration would have the drastic effect of converting the output from visual to audio, without changing the hardware in any way. It is ironic that when hardware reaches a certain level of complexity (i.e. the thousands of transistors inside a computer chip), it becomes in a sense trivial and software considerations assume a dominant role. One concept shared by all definitions of "cybernetic" is that of con- trol, which involves communication and feedback, the intermingling of subject and object. Primitive forms of feedback control date back to the governors and thermostats used to regulate the output of mechani- cal systems, but the application of modern electronic technology allows for the creation of far more subtle and effective methods of systems integration. This concept of cybernetic control is vital to the notion of a synergistic society, in which information paths are determined by goal achievement concerns, rather than hierarchical patterns of organization. Machines or societies which behave in such a fashion begin to assume the character of living organisms. The application of cybernetic control in information age jewelry forms can be readily accomplished, due to the basic nature of the computers used in their realization. Computers communicate with the "outside world" though features called input/output ports, or I/O ports, which perform exactly as the nomenclature suggests. This capability to both send and receive information is matched by an equally important capability for modifying output in a defined manner for a varying input signal, and even to redefine that relationship while running. I propose, as one measure of the "intelligence" of a cybernetic system, the flexibility with which this input/output rela- tionship can be redefined. If the notion of intelligence seems a strange one to apply to jewelry, that is only because we are still accustomed to thinking about jewelry in terms appropriate to indus- trial age usage. The cybernetic jewelry of the information age will become increasingly intelligent as the evolution of computer tech- nology allows ever greater processing power in single-chip computers suitable for wearable systems. This evolution will serve to reenforce the bionic nature of the jewelry medium as an interface between the wearer and a multi-dimensional information environment. Cybernetic control involves operations more subtle than the mere tracking of external inputs, which can be efficiently accomplished by simple systems such as thermostats. Intelligent systems have the ability to monitor their own internal operations, and to incorporate that information into the feedback system, along with any external data. This capability for self-knowledge and self-modification is seen by Hofstadter as the basis for creativity [2]. Although it may seem presumptuous to speak of jewelry capable of its own creative syntheses and initiatives, there are many who feel that cybernetic technology will ultimately evolve to at least this level. And remem- ber: at the dawning of the industrial age, such now commonplace artifacts as jumbo jets and the interstate highway network would have seemed equally presumptuous. Let us set aside future-speak for the moment and deal with the real- ity of what is feasible now. I will illustrate with two jewels I have made, each using an image of a human face to deal with the issue of human values in a technological society. (Fig 1), "Modern Bride", employs two-dimensional images, and a graphic overlay technique which allows image levels to be read separately or as a composite. The communication channel defined by this piece encodes information in two spatial dimensions, along with some attributes of the third, and is static in regard to the time dimension. There is no provision for feedback from the the receiver (viewer), or from the channel itself. Information (i.e. the "meaning" of the piece) encoded and transmitted on this low-bandwidth channel would be received in the amount of time taken to visually scan the jewel, even though it might take longer to decode the signal and extract that information. Contrast this with (Fig 2&3), "Visage Mnemonique", a tiny but signif- icant step into cybernetic jewelry. The most readily apparent differ- ence, and one that is difficult to show with still photos, is that part of the image is constantly changing. This means that part of the information is encoded in the time dimension, rather than the spatial dimensions of the example above. Such encoding allows entirely new attributes, such as rhythm and frequency, to encode information in the signal; it also means that some of the spatially encoded information is presented sequentially. These two factors allow the receiver (viewer) to acquire more information on this high- bandwidth channel. This sort of time dimension encoding is not the unique province of cybernetic jewelry, however. These same effects can be easily achieved with classical electronic and, to a much lesser degree, kinetic jewelry by employing strictly hardware tech- niques. (Fig 4), "Kunstapparat", is such an electronic jewel, in which the spatial and temporal configurations of the hands is deter- mined by a hard-wired electronic circuit. The incorporation of sophisticated feedback control processes in its computer software is what makes "Visage Mnemonique" a truly cyber- netic artifact of the information era. The software in this jewel monitors the results of its own execution, and alters further exe- cution in accordance with rules stored in memory. In particular, the LCD panel in the piece contains a number of picture elements (pixels) which, taken together, yield an image of a face. The computer pro- gram is written so that a random number of pixels is visible at any given time. However, and this is most important, if the random number generator tries to turn on all pixels at once, the software voids that instruction and randomizes again to get a number of pixels less than the total (Fig 10). This forces the viewer to hold the pattern of pixels in visual memory, and finish integrating the image there, thus making the viewer (receiver) a vital part of the communication channel. Since the entire image is never displayed, it is in a very real sense "not there" without the image integrating capabilities of a human (or machine!) observer. This deep level of self-aware feed- back control is the essence of cybernetic information technology, whether in social organization or in jewelry. Bandwidth in such a system is at a maximum. The sort of feedback control loop illustrated above is utilized in virtually all computer software; the programs which control the LCD panels in (Fig 5-7) employ the same principles. This means that, rather than just loading sequences of patterns and pulling them from memory, the software can use stored rules to operate on patterns and derive other patterns from them. The image is in the rules (algo- rithms) which generate it. What, then, are the special features deriving from the algorithmic nature of cybernetic jewelry? First of all, it allows a radical redefinition of what constitutes the aesthetic/information entity that comprises the jewel. In cybernetic jewelry, this entity is determined to a large degree by software procedures, and is not bound to a particular configuration of hardware. A jewelry program could be written to run on different computers, for instance, without that being obvious from the outside. Likewise, we could greatly modify the appearance of a jewel by altering only its software, leaving the hardware level intact. Furthermore, the cybernetic nature of this jewelry form allows it to interact with its internal and external information environment in a highly sophisticated fashion. As well as the sort of self-aware, internal feedback illustrated in "Visage Mnemonique", it is possible to monitor information from a number of outside sources, such as brain waves, barometric pressure, the Dow Jones average, etc., and to use this information to alter program execution in very complex ways. With this ability to monitor its environment and to examine and alter its own functioning, cybernetic jewelry is capable of expressing concepts that are fundamentally dif- ferent from those possible using industrial age techniques. It is a form of adornment and expression truly in tune with the information epoch. I have addressed the technical aspects of cybernetic jewelry else- where [5], but I shall briefly review them here. A cybernetic jewel can best be thought of as a system which is, in turn, made up of a set of nested subsystems (Fig 8). The way in which these subsystems interact determines the nature of the jewel. The Case system is the physical container which holds the other systems and provides an interface with the body; it can also perform some information trans- mission functions. The Electronics system includes the computer,its support circuitry and power supply; this system provides the matrix for the final and most important system: the Program system. This system provides the cybernetic, feedback-controlled, multidimensional communication channel which makes this form of jewelry unique. This jewelry is obviously process-intensive in the extreme, and prac- titioners will find great temptation to indulge in technical gym- nastics, but that would miss the point. With all due respect to McLuhan, the medium is only part of the message, and it would be a shame to waste any of our newly found bandwidth. While the kind of jewelry I have presented here may seem to be some visionary product of a future age, it is not. The future is now and the information revolution has already begun. The technologies to create cybernetic jewelry are largely in place, and much useful work can be done to help humanity ease into the brave new world of the information age. References/bibliography: [1] Helvy, T. C., The Age of Information; an Interdisciplinary Study of Cybernetics, Englewood Cliffs NJ, Education Technology Publications, 1971 [2] Hofstadter, Douglas, Godel, Escher, Bach; an Eternal Golden Braid, New York, Vintage Books, 1979 [3] Krueger, Myron, Artificial Reality, Reading MA, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1983 [4] Masuda, Yonjei, The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society, Tokyo, The Institute for the Information Society, 1980 [5] Reed, Vernon, Cybernetic Jewelry: a Systems Approach, Society of North American Goldsmiths, 1986 [6] Severin, Werner J. and Tankard, James W. Jr., Communication Theories; Origins, Methods, Uses, New York, Hastings House, 1979 [7] Shannon, Claude and Weaver, Warren, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana, The University of Illinois Press, 1949 [8] Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Second Edition, Cambridge MA, The M.I.T. Press, 1948 and 1961 Glossary: 1.0 Algorithm- A set of rules for obtaining a specified result. In programming, algorithms determine the overall structure of a program. 2.0 Artificial intelligence- The branch of computer science which seeks to emulate the higher functions of the human brain, such as decision making, pattern recognition, natural language,etc. 3.0 Bionics- The study of how humans and animals function, for the purpose of applying that knowledge to designing computers and other electronic machines. 4.0 Communication channel- The medium used to transmit a signal from the transmitter to the receiver. 5.0 Feedback- The routing of part of the output of a system back into that system, usually for the purpose of altering the further genera- tion of output. 6.0 Information theory- A theory which describes signal transmission in a communication channel in terms of balancing information and redundancy to overcome noise in the channel. 7.0 Liquid crystal display (LCD)- A very low power information dis- play device which utilizes light-polarizing characteristics of an organic chemical. A flat panel which does not emit light. 8.0 Software program- A sequence of coded instructions which tells a computer to perform specific tasks in a specific order.