James Hankey

First step,  HD video, 2:31s. 2016

In the 1970’s the cybernetician, social scientist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggested that a passage written by Alfred Russel Wallace in a letter to Charles Darwin (in 1858) was one of the most ‘powerful things that had been said in the 19th century’. In describing natural selection as a feedback mechanism, keeping species and varieties adapted to their environment, Wallace noted:

The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow

Using this statement and the allegory of the centrifugal governor, I took a first step -in the Weather Station sphere.

This step, followed by another, and a stride, then bigger strides, took the sphere and I, rolling, mostly without control down one of the largest sand dunes in Cornwall. The First Step was an act of neglecting the governor.

This piece was commissioned by OSR Projects and supported by Back Lane West.