Blackboard Notes (1967) was the flip side of Diagram Boxes and Analogue Structures (Catalogue, Molton Gallery exhibition, London 1963): two faces of the same cybernetic coin. The issues addressed were chance and change, being and behaviour, process and participation. It was about writing the future, and auto-catalysing the present. In both cases, I was looking for ways of mapping thoughts in writing that would parallel the way I was mapping thoughts with visual structures in wood and glass. My analogue artwork at that time was transformable through the physical participation of the viewer (pre-visioning the promise of cybernetics, only later to be realised with access to digital media). The gestural space of the Notes and the formal connectivity of the Diagram were employed to initiate a kind of semantic flow that purely linear writing or fixed visual form could not accommodate. (Roy Ascott)
