Cybernetics, Art and Ideas.

The essays in this volume deal with the relationship of the computer and the arts, especially the exploration and demonstration of connections between creativity and technology, the links between scientific or mathematical approaches, intuitions, and the more irrational and oblique urges associated with the making of music, art, and poetry. The essays, which range from Jonathan Swift's description of a "word machine" for giving the world "a complete body of all arts and sciences" to a "computerized Haiku," are composed of fiction, speculation, science fiction, aesthetic theories, sociological deductions, reports of experiments made with cybernetic environments, reports on computer-composed music, computer-generated art and texts, as well as explanations of how computers work and their role in our society. (Author/JY)