Learning to Learn: More Than a Machine at The Brooklyn Children’s Museum
Sunday, May 18, 2025 12:00 PM EDT
Merve Sahin in conversation with Dulmini Perera: join us in exploring Gordon Pask’s CASTE implementation in the design of Edwin Schlossberg’s Learning Environment at The Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
Image Credits: The Learning Environment for the BCM, Basement (exhibition – upper level) plan, design conceived by Edwin Schlossberg, c. 1970, Courtesy of Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
Concurrent with the formalization of Conversation Theory, Gordon Pask and his collaborators at System Research Ltd. (SRL) created the Course Assembly System and Tutorial Environment (CASTE) in the 1970s. Pask described the experimental system as an embodiment of Conversation Theory and a model for theory of learning and cognition concerned with concepts and interactions. The Brooklyn Children’s Museum (BCM) contracted SRL to adapt CASTE for use in the museum’s Self/Environmental Learning Laboratory. This area was part of the Learning Environment conceptualized and designed by Edwin Schlossberg for the new home of the museum, which was built by the architecture firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates.
In her talk, Merve Sahin tells the history of this ambitious project, which spanned nearly four years. Despite three successive contacts between BCM and SRL, the computerized version of CASTE was never installed in the museum. Nonetheless, the collaboration between two institutions led to deeper engagement with interactive learning environments. A significant portion of these efforts was devoted to the development of the task and entailment structures, which were designed to help the teachers and children discover connections between concepts presented diagrammatically. These conceptual entailment structures were also utilized beyond the BCM and SRL project. Notably, the broader cybernetics network employed this Paskian framework in The Metabook, which was a companion glossary to Cybernetics of Cybernetics (1974). Sahin will argue that CASTE’s implementation within BCM’s Learning Environment did not necessarily need a static machine display since the overall design by Schlossberg was flexible and reflexive in its adaptation. Instead, the project and its use of CASTE was to prototype a theory of learning that could govern a research laboratory situated within the aesthetic and experimental environment of a museum aiming to rethink children’s learning.
In this event, Merve Sahin will present her research, which she has conducted over two years visiting the archives of the University of Vienna, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Dulmini Perera will moderate the conversation.
Participants Bios (text formatting allowed, e.g., bold, links, images):
Merve Sahin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Visual and Performing Arts program at the University of Texas at Dallas and Graduate Fellow at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History. She is currently writing her dissertation on systems and cybernetic art by examining the lifelong reflexive practice of three artists: Gordon Pask, Agnes Denes, and Nina Sobell. Last June, Sahin presented the paper “The History of EEG Research in Cybernetics and Artists Expression: Biological Feedback and Structural Coupling” at the 60th meeting of the American Society of Cybernetics. She has presented her research at the annual meetings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Sahin was awarded Fulbright Grant in 2018 to attend the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) where she earned an MA (2020) in art history. Her thesis, registered in the Leonardo Abstract Service (LABS), focused on the shift from painting to computation in the art practice of Harold Cohen during the 1960s-70s.
Dulmini Perera’s academic and artistic practice aims to widen the scope of the conversations redefining the relationships between cybernetics, design, technology and ecology in order to understand what role these fields can collectively play in the current ecological crisis. Some of her most recent work include publications such as Designing in the Context of Time: Why Annetta Pedretti’s cybernetic-architectural Practice at 25 Princelet Street Matters and interactive art projects such as Gregory Bateson’s Cosmos c. 1968. She is currently the associate professor for history and theory of architecture at University of Limerick Ireland.
