Making Effective Decisions: Machine Learning and the Ecogame in 1970

TL;DR

This paper explores Ecogame, a 1970 art project that used early machine learning and cybernetic principles to demonstrate participatory, democratic digital art, serving as a historical precursor to modern AI-driven art.

Contribution

It presents Ecogame as an innovative fusion of cybernetics, art, and early machine learning, highlighting its role as a historical precedent for human-centered AI art.

Findings

Ecogame integrated visual art with cybernetic concepts.

It demonstrated early use of machine learning over networks.

The project suggested behavior impacts the entire system.

Abstract

This paper considers Ecogame, an innovative art project of 1970, whose creators believed in a positive vision of a technological future; an understanding, posited on cybernetics, of a future that could be participatory via digital means, and therefore more democratised. Using simulation and early machine learning techniques over a live network, Ecogame combined the power of visual art with cybernetic concepts of adaptation, feedback, and control to propose that behaviour had implications for the total system. It provides an historical precedent for contemporary AI-driven art about using AI in a more human-centred way.