Over the course of the twentieth century, the concept of life has been loosened from its moorings to nature. Launched in 1958, the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provided the institutional and political context to stage the ‘liveliness’ of machines, an unprecedented and understudied development in the history of twentieth-century science. In this talk, I show how the BCL explored to serve examples from natures as templates and standards for engineering machines and computer programs. The lab’s artifice ranged from self-organizing automata to artificial sensory organs in neural networks, remarkable prefigurations of contemporary robots and computer programs from the realm of artificial intelligence. Drawing on the archives of the BCL, the personal collection of its founder, Austrian physicist and cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and oral histories, I reconstruct the lab’s working world using insights from historical epistemology and media archeology. In doing so, I examine both the historical conditions under which these machines appeared ‘lively’ and how they yielded knowledge as scientific media. The spectator-dependency of such machines, I argue, allows us to situate ‘liveliness’ as a driving force in the transition from a first-order cybernetics of communication and control to a second-order epistemology of embedded observation.
