There is a narrow border between destruction and prosperity, between positive and negative feedback, says Péter Érdi. Érdi is a computational neuroscientist at Kalamazoo College. He has written a book called, Feedback: How to Destroy or Save the World. When Kalamazoo College art professor Tom Rice got his hands on the book written by his colleague, he realized the patterns he created in his artwork reflected negative and positive feedback in some manner.
Érdi uses the thermostat as an example of negative feedback. With a gap between the setting of the thermostat and actual room temperature, the thermostat operates by sending a signal to either cool or heat the room. It operates by detecting an error through that gap.
The narrow border between positive and negative feedback is what determines destruction or prosperity, Erdi writes. It can be a line between growth or existential risk.
Tom Rice, in reading Érdi’s book, has tried to bring that pattern of feedback into patterns in his artwork.
“I’m trying to do some thing in my studio that mimic or replicate that through certain kinds of modeling that I’m doing in terms of an analog model,” he says. “Most of these things are done through computational types of things, but I’m doing it visually.”
Hungarian-born Peter Érdi has written dozens of publications, including two other books, Ranking: The Hidden Rules of the Social Game We All Play and Repair: When and How to Improve Broken Objects, Ourselves and Our Society, which have received international acclaim.
Tom Rice is a multi-media artist working in drawing, painting, video and performance. His work has been exhibited at the Fire House Art Center, University of Wisconsin, South Bend Regional Museum of Art, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, the Lansing Art Gallery, the Arkansas Arts Center, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and the Kresge Art Museum.
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