John Tonkin is a Sydney based media artist who has been working with new media since 1985. His work explores interactivity as a site for physical and mental play.
and, swapping into first person . . . I lecture within the Digital Cultures Program, at the University of Sydney and am undertaking a practice based PhD at COFA, UNSW. I am currently building a number of nervous robots that embody computational models of mind and responsive video environments that explore situated/enactive models of perception.
As a practising artist I often make diagrams in the thinking through and making of work. The current areas of interest that I am researching; including cybernetics, computational models of mind, embodied cognition, often use diagrams and flow charts to explain and illustrate concepts. At Ars Electronica in September I watched Humberto Maturana draw a series of somewhat indecipherable diagrams on an overhead projector. They showed the structural coupling between an organism and its niche. Another series of flowcharts that interest me at the moment are from attachment theory. They model affect regulation in adult romantic relationships.
I guess I’m interested in how we might diagrammatically represent minds.
Into the Diagram 