Self-organization and novelty: Pre-configurations of emergence in early British cybernetics

Emergence appears in the literature as related to self-organization and novelty. For many authors it is the result of multiple interactions among agents within a system, which generate phenomena that could not be understood, nor anticipated, through the analysis of the elements and their behaviors in isolation. For others, emergent phenomena are related to fundamental novelty and, thus, to creativity. These two formulations of emergence can be traced back to the experimental work of some key early cybernetic experimental devices by Ross Ashby, Grey Walter and Gordon Pask. As a group, the devices illustrate the potential of both formulations of emergence and of its combination. As such, they can help with the elaboration of a framework to understand emergence in the context of interactive art and communication, both to analyze its presence in interactive systems and to design systems that aim to generate them.