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to touch, push buttons, talk or sing into microphones and television screens, or
listen to speakers and earphones issuing sounds and information’ (Amaya cited
in Usselmann 2003: 391).
Hilde Hein claims that Cybernetic Serendipity was in keeping with the ethos
of the Exploratorium because it ‘presented the machine as an agreeable col-
laborator rather than a mere tool or a menacing enemy. The machine was,
above all, an extension of human capability and a complement to natural intel-
ligence’ (1986: 35). Yet it was this positive and optimistic view of cybernetics
which disturbed those few critics who did not give the exhibition glowing
reviews. They drew parallels with atomic science, refusing to accept the separ-
ation between scientific discovery and its social uses implicit in the exhibition’s
exclusion of the social context of the development of cybernetics (Usselmann
2003: 392). Against Cybernetic Serendipity’s presentation of cybernetics as a
‘neutral development’, a New Society article expressed the view that it is ‘an
instrument of a growing technocratic authoritarianism, which deserves the
critical resistance and not the consoling fellowship of our artists’ (cited in
Usselmann 2003: 392). As the sociologist of museums, Sharon Macdonald
(2004) argues that it was this ‘consoling fellowship’ which Oppenheimer sought
in the Exploratorium. His own involvement with his brother Robert in the
production of the atomic bomb perhaps informed his attempt to ‘present
science as a humanistic achievement like art’ and ‘to rescue science from its
tarnished public image’ (Macdonald 1998: 15–16). So one way of viewing the
attraction of Cybernetic Serendipity for the Exploratorium is that an associ-
ation with art could mend the split between the ‘two cultures’ of the arts and
sciences, and imply that science and technology are creative, rather than an
instrumental means of dominance and exploitation. But if we consider the
specific character of the exhibition and the kinds of interrelations between
art, science and technology established in Cybernetic Serendipity, we can also
see how it enabled the Exploratorium to stake a claim for a certain kind of
interactive science education as against another, emergent model.
The kind of interactivity it stood for is suggested by its title. Serendipity is a
surprisingly modern word. Between its invention in the mid-eighteenth century
and the 1950s it ‘had appeared in print probably only twenty times’, but from
then on became a well-worn term (Daston 2004a: 29). Serendipity suggested
the importance of distraction and the chance encounter. The science historian
Lorraine Daston has pointed to the links between the modern concept of seren-
dipity and the more ancient appetite of curiosity: serendipitous discoveries
happen to those with the wandering but voracious desire for novelty, with an
ability to combine ‘focused attention and peripheral intellectual vision’ (Daston
2004a: 29). In combination the words ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ suggest a par-
ticular approach to interactivity, which favours unanticipated effects. In industry