Humans Thinking Like Machines - Incidental Media Art in the Swedish Welfare State

In 1966, a group of Tanzanian exchange students in Sweden were treated to an unusual performance of early computer music. An IBM 1403 line printer, originally intended to print out forms and records for civic registration and tax collection, played them a rickety version of “Mungu Ibariki Afrika” (God Bless Africa), then recently selected as the national anthem of Tanzania. Through archival research as well as personal interviews I’ve tried to map out the different actors and background contexts of this story. What is emerging is a network of early everyday media art taking place within the walls of workplaces for public and business administration. This is a kind of everyday creativity that is quite startling, given that it hails from the “mainframe” era of computers, before the ubiquity of today’s networked digital environments or even the advent of “personal computing”.

“Humans thinking like machines” is a case-study of a curious meeting between state administration and early media arts. The story could easily be played out in cybernetic terms, as a way to talk about creativity in emergence and appropriation. However, I’ve chosen to focus on a colonisation-computerisation nexus as the driving point of the analysis, given the migration of contexts, technologies and people involved. The argument follows Ngugu’s concept of the “decolonisation of mind” but places this in an everyday context where thinking machines and humans thinking like machines produces situations of communication beyond idealistic particularizations of art and activism, but nevertheless with the necessary function of establishing an autonomous position for speaking in otherwise oppressive institutional contexts.

Kristoffer Gansing, PhD candidate in Media- and Communication Science at the Univ. of Malmö, School of Arts and Communication K3, Sweden. Currently researching with the tv-tv collective in Copenhagen on the interface between analogue and digital alternative media cultures. Also co-curator of the media archaeological festival The Art of the Overhead.

www.overheads.org