On why cybernetic ideas rather than algorithms attracted the attention of artists:

We now come to the relationship of immediate interest to practising artists: the use of cybernetics in the creation of works of art. Although cybernetics has been used in a technical sense in, to give the major example, programming computers using information theory to compose music, its main influence has been rather different. That is, it appears to have captured the imagination of many artists, in a general way, and so stimulated new works of art or even new types of art. (It may also have changed the attitude of the spectator to some degree.) The reasons for all this are none too clear. But one can list the following speculative reasons: the promise that cybernetics holds out of taking art seriously (as mentioned at the beginning of this article), the feeling that cybernetics is in some way bound up with exciting intellectual developments in other fields and that in some obscure way it points to the world of the future, and also possibly a feeling that a rapprochement between science and art would be beneficial to both and that cybernetics represents an ideal vehicle for such a rapprochement. None of this explains why artists have become attracted to some cybernetic ideas, like the idea of feedback, rather than other ideas. One cannot help but feel that if the idea of algorithms had been adopted by artists instead, then a quite different, more ordered, more deliberate, kind of cybernetic art would have emerged.