George Maciunas
Learning Machine
Maciunas was an exceptional learning machine. During his studies (art, graphic design, and architecture at Cooper Union, architecture and musicology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University) he also occupied himself with languages, logic, psychology, and phsyiology. His broad range of interests and his universal approach required appropriate forms of knowledge management so as to keep stock of his wide-ranging material. The diagram form lent itself to ordering facts, reducing complexities, and profferring meaning. His diagrammatic summaries of his proposals for improvements came much later though, with the “Learning Machine”, in 1969.