The Matrix that Embeds, Maturana and Von Foerster American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2026-09-21 | The Matrix that Embeds, Maturana and Von Foerster
Learning to Learn: More Than a Machine at The Brooklyn Children’s Museum American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2025-06-08 | 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.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: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.
AMC Series #1: Circular Currents: Feedback, Intelligence, Emergent Systems - Day 2 American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2025-05-20 | Two-day virtual event where three guest speakers, art historian Charissa N. Terranova, and media artists Ken Rinaldo, and Joost Rekveld, presented their work at the intersection of art, media, and cybernetics and expanded conversations into topics of circularity, feedback, feedforward, hybrid ecologies, and material agency in a panel discussion.
AMC Series #1: Circular Currents: Feedback, Intelligence, Emergent Systems - Day 1 American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2025-05-20 | Two-day virtual event where three guest speakers, art historian Charissa N. Terranova, and media artists Ken Rinaldo, and Joost Rekveld, presented their work at the intersection of art, media, and cybernetics and expanded conversations into topics of circularity, feedback, feedforward, hybrid ecologies, and material agency in a panel discussion.
AMC Series #1: Art, Cybernetics, and Education: Conversations with Roy Ascott American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2025-05-20 | Conversation with artist, theorist, and educator, Roy Ascott, whose visionary integration of cybernetics into art and pedagogy has influenced contemporary and telematic art practice and thought as well as generations of students. In this conversation, we will trace the evolution of his ideas—from Constructivist beginnings to cybernetic behaviorist systems, and the distributed intelligence of telematic networks—while also reflecting on his radical approaches to education, including the influential Groundcourse. Ascott will share insights from his global educational engagements in Europe, the United States, and China as well as speculate on the future of art and education in an evolving technological landscape.Participants Bios:Roy Ascott (born 1934) is a British artist and theorist known for his work in cybernetic art and his focus on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. He is considered a pioneer of media art and has been influential in the development of interactive computer art, electronic art, and telematic art. He is also the recipient of the first Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for Visionary Pioneers of Media Art.Ascott’s work has been shown internationally including Shanghai Biennale, Venice Biennale, Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul Brazil, European Media Festival, INDAF 2010 Korea, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris,and is in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery, London and other notable collections. Roy Ascott is widely seen as a radical innovator in arts education and research, having occupied leading academic roles in Europe, Australia, Brazil, Canada, USA and UNESCO. He is the founding President of the Planetary Collegium, an international network for doctoral research. In 2012, Roy Ascott became DeTao Master of Technoetic Arts at the DeTao Masters Academy, to promote the development of teaching and research in art, science, technology and consciousness in China. Since 2017, he has also been the Chief Specialist of the Visual Art Innovation Institute at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He is the founding editor of the research journal Technoetic Arts, an honorary editor of Leonardo Journal, and author of the book Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, University of California Press.
Pluriversal Ecologies: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and More-than-Human Design American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2025-04-26 | A conversation on the role of human subjectivity in understanding more-than-human lifeworlds.Can human cognition and sensitivity truly perceive and meaningfully engage with nonhuman’s lifeworlds? And if so, to what extent are they necessary or even desirable?In this session, Annan Zuo shares his journey into cybernetics through a series of interwoven design-research projects on empathy, intersubjectivity, and more-than-human ecologies with their multitude of lifeworlds. From architectural explorations of multispecies care in the Satoyama landscapes of Kyoto, to sound-based experiments that construct auditory loops with a more-than-human Umwelt, and theoretical work on enactive biosemiotic domains, Annan’s work explores the role of human subjectivity in sensing, interpreting, and relating to other-than-human forms of life.A persistent question recurs throughout Annan’s work: If the (full) understanding of the other—whether human or nonhuman—is ultimately unattainable, how can we conceive intersubjectivity? Can empathetic engagement serve not as a means of comprehension, but as a mode of attunement, co-presence, and ethical responsiveness?Annan Zuo will be joined by Claudia Westermann and Frederick Steier in a conversational exploration of the resonances between cybernetic theory, empathy, and more-than-human design. Drawing on key ideas from Gregory Bateson and Humberto Maturana, the discussion will explore how systems thinking and pluralist ecologies might accommodate subjectivity, empathetic entanglement, and communicative gaps between species.The session will be conversational and participatory. Audience members are warmly invited to join the discussion as it unfolds around empathy, intersubjectivity, and languaging as ways of shaping pluralist ecologies.-Participants Bios (text formatting allowed, e.g., bold, links, images):Annan ZuoAnnan Zuo is a more-than-human researcher and architectural designer. He holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (RIBA, Part 2) from the University of Cambridge and currently works at Foster + Partners in London. In October 2025, he will begin a PhD in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on post-phenomenology, intersubjectivity, more-than-human architecture, landscape recovery, empathy, and care. Annan’s design work has been featured at international and cross-disciplinary exhibitions. He is the recipient of the 2024 BioDesign Challenge Grand Prize and was nominated for both the RIBA Bronze and Silver Medals.Frederick SteierFrederick Steier is Professor in the School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University, and Emeritus at the University of South Florida, where he directed Interdisciplinary Studies Programs. His work centres on systemic approaches to social and ecological systems, with a focus on whole systems design and multi-level learning. He edited Gregory Bateson: Essays for an Ecology of Ideas (2005) and co-edited Mary Catherine Bateson: Compositions in Living Cybernetics and Humberto Maturana: Reflections on Bringing Forth Worlds (both 2023). He has led participatory research in diverse settings, including NASA and MOSI. In 2019, he received the Norbert Wiener Award from the American Society for Cybernetics. In 1985, he was named a King Olav V Fellow by the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Claudia Westermann Claudia Westermann is a researcher, artist and licensed architect, and a senior associate professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. She is a member of the German Chamber of Architects, Vice President of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), and managing co-editor of the journal Technoetic Arts. Informed by second-order cybernetics, Claudia Westermann's research and practice actualise in interdisciplinary projects concerned with the ecologies, poetics, technologies and philosophies of art and design. Claudia Westermann's projects have been shown in many prestigious exhibitions. She received the Margaret Mead Prize from the American Society for Cybernetics in 2024.
Acting with the World: The Choreography of Agency American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2025-03-29 | Conversation to explore an unfamiliar but important pattern of environmental action attuned to the agency of nature and wicked problems.In the Anthropocene our actions are coming home to roost. Global warming, species extinctions, and environmental disasters are the dark side of our mastery of nature. In his forthcoming book, Acting with the World, Andrew Pickering identifies a different pattern of being and doing that can evade this dark side, a pattern that he calls acting-with the world. In contrast to our usual practice of acting on the world, acting-with foregrounds nonhuman agency and aims to attune our practices to the propensities of nature. The book explores examples of acting-with from around the globe, including flood control on the Mississippi River, ecosystem restoration on the Colorado River, the Room for the River project and rewilding in the Netherlands, natural farming in Japan, Aboriginal fire techniques in Australia, and Amazonian shamanism. Pickering argues that acting-with intimately and gracefully plugs us into nature, undercuts the Anthropocene from below, and offers a constructive approach to addressing otherwise intractable wicked problems.Branching from these detailed examples with explicit histories and outcomes, our conversation will explore the relationships between wicked problems and Cybernetics, with its unique epistemology and consequent practices. What principles are inherent in acting-with that may be collected into a methodology or meta-methodology with value for scholars and practitioners focused on wicked problems? We invite the audience to join the recursion from examples through principles for acting-with in a range of wicked problems facing our 21st-century lives.
Cybernetics and Political Organisation American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2025-02-02 | Explores cybernetic themes from Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal and how old debates on political organisation connect to cybernetics.This talk will pick up on and develop some of the cybernetic themes in Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021). Of special interest will be the ways in which certain cybernetic insights are foreshadowed by thinkers such as Lenin and Gramsci, and, conversely, how they shed new light on old and recent political debatesParticipants Bios:Rodrigo Nunes is a senior lecturer in political theory and organisation at the University of Essex. He is the author, among others, of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021) and The View from Brazil: Far Right and Neoliberalism in a World in Transition (Verso, forthcoming).
AI-Generated Art: Steering Through Noisy Channels American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-11-19 | Two artists talk of complementary work in AI art, in relation to steering and to society.Eryk Salvaggio: AI-produced images are now amongst the search results for famous artworks, and historical events — introduce noise into the communication network of the Internet. What is a cybernetic understanding of generative artificial intelligence systems, such as diffusion models? How might cybernetics introduce a more appropriate set of metaphors than those proposed by Silicon Valley’s vision of “what humans do?” Two speakers versed in cybernetics and AI image generation systems contrast the often inflexible “AI” view of the human, limited by pattern finding and constraint, with the cybernetic view of discovering and even inventing a relationship with the world. What is the potential of cybernetics in grappling with this “noise in the channel” of AI generated media?Mark Sullivan: For some time now, my decade long involvement with AI has turned to generating images and creating sounds, to finding ways to counteract the built-in biases of AI platforms and gain agency, to explore creative and critical approaches to image generation, including ways to reflect on the processes of AI image construction, and their social context, and to go beyond the generic and stereotypical tendencies of existing platforms. Deliberately working with widely used platforms to demonstrate how they can be pushed into directions that they were not designed to go, the exploration leads to futurisms, to imagining the mythical and the ancient, and to searching for ways art can reveal what AI is doing in its substance.Participants Bios:Eryk Salvaggio (cyberneticforests.com) is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into datasets for AI training: a practice designed to expose ideologies of tech and to confront the gaps between datasets and the worlds they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the national level. He holds an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and an MSc in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University.Mark Sullivan is a composer, photographer, curator, and educator. Over the last three decades, he has worked with scores of young people on how to use media to create imaginative and incisive creative works, performances, presentations, and exhibits. As the Creative Director of the CoLab Studio, the museum's innovation area, dedicated to public engagement with science and art, he has guided seven exhibitions, including one touching on many issues related to water, one on climate change and global warming, one on food and global inequality, and one for this spring on Afrofuturism and Techno. For quite a while, he has also been exploring generative AI art, and how to bring transparency and agency to it.
Natural Drift; a Simple Theory with Substantive Consequences American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-07-13 | Natural drift replaces reductionist ideas as the spontaneous process that applies to the evolution of living beings and their medium, including us and our cultures.Ideas about evolution are dominated by a reductionist, “genecentric” ideology, according to which organisms are envisaged as phenotypic envelopes for genes. This is analogous to dualistic-spiritualist doctrines that consider the human body as the “incarnation” of an immaterial soul. Such ideas deny the systemic-dynamic constitution of living as well as entailing the ascription of several vitalistic suppositions such as “function,” “information” and “program” -- all of which lack operational meaning in the biological context. In this seminar I will elucidate an alternative view on evolution, namely natural drift, that I originally developed with Humberto Maturana. This view is based on the systemic nature of living which presupposes only that living beings are discrete dynamic systems that constitute themselves through their continuous interactions with their environment in a manner that conserves both their organization and their structural correspondence (adaptation) with their medium. This minimal theory has maximal consequences for the understanding of the historical changes of all living beings and their medium, inclusive of ourselves and the cultures that are part of our naturally drifting medium.Participants Bios:Jorge Mpodozis is a Full Professor in the Department of Biology of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Chile, where he regularly teaches courses on Evolution, Neuroethology, Neuroanatomy, Evolution and Development, Neurosciences, and occasionally Philosophy of Biology. His research activities focus on Systems Neuroscience, specifically the development and evolution of sensory systems in amniotes, using anatomical and physiological approaches. He has directed numerous research projects in these areas and has graduated as a tutor to numerous Master's and Doctoral students at the University of Chile. He also maintains an active interest in epistemology and conceptual biology.
ASC60 Towards a Typology of Circularities, Ben Sweeting and Jon Goodbun American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-06-26 | ...
ASC60 Quantum Social Learning: A model for cultural transformation using quantum entanglement American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-06-26 | R. Eva King, Fred Steier
ASC60 Colloquies Design and Tech Jean and Paul American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-06-26 | ...
ASC60 Archiving Archiving Presentation - Introduction to Archives - Bethany G. Anderson American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-06-25 | ...
ASC60 Archiving Archiving Presentation - Counter Culture, Bruno Clarke American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-06-25 | ...
ASC60: Cybernetics, so what? Questions after 50 years in the field. Paul P. and Patricia T. C. American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-06-25 | Paul Pangaro and Patricia Ticineto Clough delighted the audience with stories from the past 5 decades.Patricia Clough ran head-on into Cybernetics when she met Heinz von Foerster at the Biological Computer Laboratory in 1971. Paul Pangaro ran into Cybernetics head-on when he met Gordon Pask at MIT in 1976.So what?After lengthy careers in their own fields — Clough in media criticism, social theory, psychoanalysis, Pangaro in interaction design, organizational design, design methods — here in public they explored these questions, seeking similarities across their differences:* What did we expect at our start in Cybernetics? What did we get?* What do we still want? What would we have to do that we’ve never done before, to get it?The session comprised opening statements of 8 minutes each by Clough and Pangaro, followed by interrogation and critique from the audience, as well as short statements and engagement with others in attendance who have also experienced decades with Cybernetics.
ASC60 Day1 Opening Saturday 15 June 2024 - Friends Meeting House, Washington DC American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-06-22 | ...
Embodied Feedback: Second-Order Cybernetics and Somatics American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-03-31 | Since its inception, classic cybernetics drew on the nervous system's control of movement as a prime example of how communication and self-regulation work. Second-order cybernetics evolved to consider the nature of observing systems and how we, as observers, influence and construct our perceptions. This shift in perspective parallels the development of somatics, which considers the body as experienced from within, from physical therapy and bodywork.Unfortunately, somatics has a minimal appreciation of cybernetic circuitry and lacks a systemic framework for understanding mind-body connections, sensations, self-image, attitudes, and abilities. Conversely, cybernetics can quickly become an abstract, dissociated, intellectual endeavor.How can these approaches learn and benefit from one another?Can a second-order approach help us understand the often startling physical transformations somatics brings about?Can body-based exploration ground conceptual understanding in our lived experiences?Participants BiosParticipants:Larry Goldfarb, CFT, RSME, PhD., is a cybernetician and kinesiologist who has been practicing the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education for nearly fifty years. Dr. Goldfarb gave the keynote address at Cybernetics in the Art of Learning, the 1993 American Society for Cybernetics annual conference in Philadelphia. He has taught in universities, hospitals, dance companies, music conservatories, orchestras, and other venues around the world.Engaging and intellectually rigorous, Larry is simultaneously a fun, straightforward, and collegial teacher who enjoys nothing more than building confidence and fostering competence.Larry is a multimedia author and the founder of www.mindinmotion-online.com. He directs teacher training in the Netherlands, presents international postgraduate programs, and maintains a private practice in Santa Cruz, California.Judith (jude) Lombardi (www.judelombardi.us) is a social worker turned sociology professor turned video- ethnographer. She worked with the elderly and adolescents in residential facilities as a social worker for a decade, then she was a child/family therapist and consultant for a decade, and the following decade, she taught sociology at a local university. In recent decades she has made movies and written several papers, usually related to cybernetics. She is a local bee steward, and recently completed a graphic novel, called The Bees’s Needs, about honeybee behavior and their current needs. In her spare time she swims and plays the snare drum in a brass band.
Mind, Ecology, Enaction: Encounters between Bateson and Varela American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-02-15 | In this conversation, Evan Thompson, Bruce Clarke, and Dulmini Perera explore the relationships between Bateson and Varela's work, particularly the ways in which their work contributed to expanding our understanding of the 'mind' in the context of living. Starting from their time at Lindisfarne Association in the 1970s, a context that had multiple relationships to their intellectual projects, we will explore how they reformulated concepts such as wholes, boundaries, and recursion in their respective critiques of mainstream Western science/epistemology. The discussion would end with a focus on action. How does their expansion of the notions of 'cognition', 'mind', and consciousness' enable us to think about (design) action within the context of the present ecological crises? This event is a collaboration between the Speaker Series of the American Society of Cybernetics(ASC) and the Enacting Ecological Aesthetics(EEA) project.PowerPoint prepared by Bruce Clarke and Dulmini Perera: drive.google.com/file/d/19OVa7yPu_zr2o-BYQjTLpcwXaWJZNYT5/view?usp=sharingChat link:drive.google.com/file/d/1opo2LnFifJZ_-77LJASi7exCY_dgx_7t/view?usp=drive_link
Co-constructing preferred realities and relationships in systemic therapy American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-01-24 | Maturana’s notions of knowledge, reality, and relationship ground a therapy using questions that invite clients to draw preferred distinctions.
What we usually don’t understand about language, and why this matters. American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-01-24 | Our misconception of language and its role in human evolution may have dire consequences for both humanity and the ecosphere. We are usually unaware that language imposes constraints on how we perceive, think and act. What language enables is clearly apparent: all the cultures, technologies and designs we humans have created are grounded in our ability to coordinate with each other as we plan, organize, act and create, and evaluate what we have done. What language constrains and hides is far more difficult to see, yet there are clues in our experiences. In this section, hosted by Pille Bunnell, Alexander Kravchenko will present his work that explores how a systems-theory approach helps us to arrive at a holistic view of language as our existential domain in which we arise as observers.Participants Bios:ALEXANDER KRAVCHENKO is Professor of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Baikal State University (BSU). Recently, he has developed a new curriculum for the BA program in TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) offered by BSU and is trying, with the help of his colleagues, to apply Maturana’s ideas about language and cognition in training would-be teachers capable of seeing language in new light and developing more effective skills in teaching a foreign language. He is the author of Sign, Meaning, Knowledge (2003), Biology of Cognition and Linguistic Analysis (2008), and the editor of Cognitive Dynamics in Linguistic Interactions (2012). His latest book (published in Russian) is Rediscovering Language: A New Agenda for Linguistics (2021).Event Chat:drive.google.com/file/d/1RR3QwfwqTYfATCAy_yCAIKScWiaLr3GO/view?usp=sharing
Feedback Loop(s) of Transdisciplinary Practice American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2024-01-23 | Art, design, sociotechnical systems, organizational strategies.Raphael Arar discusses projects at the intersection of art, design, and sociotechnical systems, highlighting their influence on organizational strategies. He concludes by introducing a framework for this kind of transdisciplinary practice, underscoring its significance in shaping organizational perspectives.Participants Bios:Raphael Arar works at the nexus of complex systems, transdisciplinary design and arts-based research. His work highlights the social, political and economic implications of technological acceleration and human-to-machine interaction. Raphael currently leads Design at One Project, an organization that seeks to co-design, implement and scale new forms of economics and governance that are equitable, ecological and effective. He also serves as a Board Member at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology and serves on the steering committee of the Beyond Academia track of the Participatory Design Conference. Previously, he led design for learners at Khan Academy, tackled ethical platforms of AI at IBM Research, taught media theory at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and designed over a hundred iOS apps with Apple.His artwork has been shown at museums, conferences, festivals and galleries internationally, including the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Moscow Museum of Applied Art, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Gamble House Museum, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Science Gallery, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and Athens Video Art Festival. Notable commissions include Dublab, Noema Magazine, Goethe Institut, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Intel Labs, and IBM Research. His design work has been featured in publications including TED, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, FastCompany, Wired and others.Papers / Links:twitter.com/rararinstagram.com/rararrarar.comMeeting chat:docs.google.com/document/d/1ROXCymHXgw06vrkGxy3PM9Hz8NSUA6szJvwFHn6q67k/edit?usp=sharing
#NewMacy: Finding New Trails in Pursuit of Resilience American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2023-09-24 | Cybernetics Salons: The 4th ASC Speakers Series presents #NewMacy: Finding New Trails in Pursuit of Resilience.#NewMacy returns to the ASC Series to present its current project, Colloquies for Transgenerational Collaboration, and to offer glimpses of new / emerging conversations from our group. Resounding throughout our work is an awareness of both the complexity of the wicked challenges of our world(s) and the possibility for poetic(s) in our living — leading us to pursue this inquiry: Can we mitigate the challenges to the systems in which and with which we live, in order to foster resilience, empathy, and creativity? Conversations since the inception of #NewMacy in March 2020, in over 100 bi-weekly video meetings and multi-session conference engagements (RSD10 2021, ISSS 2022, RSD11 2022), could not predict our current topic flow or the focused Colloquies sessions taking place at Carnegie Mellon University and online, part of RSD12 in October 2023.Join us for an always-collaborative, frequently-optimistic, and sometimes-unexpected reflection upon #NewMacy's work over the last year and engagement with #NewMacy members about our activities in an ever-changing present.Participants:Kate Doyle, Paul Pangaro, Carlos Castellanos, Damian Chapman, Mack Giancola, Diane Levings, jude lombardi, Patricia Machado, Eve Pinsker, Larry Richards, Eryk Salvaggio, Fred Steier, Mark Sullivan, Shantanu Tilak, Claudia Westermann
Speakers Series S3#9: Sustainable Self-governance in business and societies: the VSM in Action American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2023-06-10 | Dr Angela Espinosa presents her book about the ‘viability and sustainability approach,’ inspired in the VSM.Stafford Beer was well ahead his time when he invented the Viable System Model (VSM) to better manage organisational complexity. Nowadays, the increased socio-ecological and political turbulence demands better complexity management skills from businesses and societies. Organisations need to be viable and sustainable, which requires of them to develop adaptive and self-governance capabilities. In this webinar I will introduce my recent book, about the ‘viability and sustainability approach,’ inspired in the VSM. It clarifies some aspects of the original VSM theory, by focusing on the way it may inspire better approaches to sustainable self-governance. It also introduces the ‘Self-Transformation Methodology’, to support implementation of the VSM in developing sustainable self-governance in businesses and societies. It illustrates the power of this approach through story telling over a range of applications in different places and contexts; and concludes with a reflection on future paths for future developments of the VSM theory. Participants Bios:Dr. Angela Espinosa is an international leader developing Stafford Beer’s theory of Organisational Cybernetics. Angela worked closely with Beer, and when he passed away, she co-founded and still leads the Metaphorum, an NGO to develop his legacy. She is an Emeritus Fellow at Hull University - Centre for Systems Studies, a Fellow of the Cybernetics Society, and an invited Professor at several Universities in Latin America and Europe. She has published extensively on organisations and societies’ viability and sustainability and has got several international research awards. Her 2023 book, ‘Sustainable Self-governance in business and societies: the Viable System Model in Action’ from Routledge, summarises her approach and applications.Allenna Leonard has been a member of ASC since being introduced to it by her professor, Barry Clemson. She worked with Stafford Beer applying his Viable System Model and facilitating his Team Syntegrity process which has recently completed its first all on-line event. She is currently serving as president of the Metaphorum organization founded to continue his work and is affiliated with the Cwarel Isaf Institute, established by Malik Management for the same purpose.
ASC Speakers Series Season 3#8: Enacting Cybernetics American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2023-05-08 | A conversation about conversations as a forum for social transformation.On December 18, 2022, as a part of the ASC Speaker Series, Jude Lombardi presented on the topic “One Possible Model for Designing social Transformation”. The presentation has served as a provocation for several conversations, including conversations on the concept of conversation, which is the central focus of this event. This presentation will include an eight-minute video (see link below), as a provocation for exploring some of the ideas we -- and hopefully you -- associate with a cybernetic conversation. Such concepts include: recursive reflections, radical change, information, communication, technology, agency, provocative perturbations, disagreement, conflict, asynchronicity, listening for understanding, circularity of needs and their necessities, peace as a need, love as a fundamental, generosity, desires, improvisation, zero-time, performance, and zero-time cybernetics. In recent years some in cybernetics have claimed that cybernetics is enacted in conversation – that is, conversation is the acting of cybernetics in everyday life. We invite participants attending this event to consider how these ideas are related to their cybernetics and how they might be relevant in everyday interactions. We would like to focus on “legitimate” questions – questions that do not (yet) have accepted answers. So, do you have cybernetic explanations that you find currently unsatisfactory? Consider “undecidable” questions – questions only we can decide, questions of desire and beyond desire, the desirable.
Enacting Cybernetics American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2023-04-19 | Montage created for the April 2023 Speakers Series event.
S3#5 - FRICTIONS, FICTIONS American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2023-01-28 | In this session, I will look at the complex ways cybernetics, design and fictions interrelate around questions of ecological complexity and modern technology.Gregory Bateson reminded us that living systems of all kinds share stories. Through his explorations of the complexity of living systems, primarily in terms of communication and learning, he pointed out how stories extend the patterns acquired within different learning contexts. Such a framework invites us to rethink how stories of design are entangled in problematic stories around modernity, technology, and progress. More specifically, I will focus on several questions, turning to the story of cybernetics' encounter with design practices and my own practice story. In what ways would a rethink of the idea of 'fictioning' enable ways to reconsider the question of the 'transcontextual,' often left out in design's well-meaning attempts to mitigate problems in selected contexts, thereby mobilising technologies that paradoxically reinforce specific underlying causes of the crisis? Would such an approach enable a different way of engaging 'the plural,' given that 'gathering the plural' is not a given and the politics of democratic participation or choice remains problematic in many contexts? How would such a project enable working within and against the runaway aspects of uncritical uses of technologies that gain accelerating power?A short presentation would follow by a dialogue with Dr.Frederick Steier.Participants Bios:Dulmini Perera is a lecturer and researcher at Bauhaus University Weimar. She works at the intersection of design theory and systems/cybernetics research. Her current DFG funded research focuses on the complex relations between ecological questions and questions concerning technology. She experiments with playful contra-practices that enable better ways of engaging the multiple entangled crises of the present. Presentation: drive.google.com/file/d/1mEguwpqrkD7FDuvtkIo9hLX-RYtxhS6G/view?usp=share_link
One Possible Model for Designing social Transformation American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2023-01-07 | This presentation is a multimedia systemic model embracing fundamental cybernetic concepts, notions and ideas when exploring social Transformations by an interactorliving a variety of micro and or macro domains. Question: How might I you me we create a better world -- or maybe even -- a new society? A fundamental premise of this presentation is nested in the triadic relationship between observers, the language they use, and the society they generate by the languaging as such. This is my starting point. Over the years, even decades, I have witnessed many including myself voice our longings for cybernetic models that might provoke transformative shifts in our thinking and doing in the societies we generate and create. In her 2011 acceptance letter upon receiving the Norbert Wiener Medal, Mary Catherine Bateson called out to the ASC community to meet the need for cybernetic approaches for solving the many interconnecting problems we face. As she stated in her letter, “Who else is going to do it?” During this multimedia presentation, with help from Diane Levings, I will offer one possible model for attempting to do just that. I will present a “wholistic” model for designing and acting in ways that might create and possibly generate, social Transformation and a new society. Models are not true or false, they are more or less useful. -- Stafford Beer This systemic model is based in a variety of circularities for thinking, designing, acting and performing. It is based in 30 years of dialogue, conversations and discourse with myself and others, many of which I met through my associations with the ASC. Mentors and collogues alike, whose words, ideas and insights will be explored. I have been attending ASC meetings since 1992 as a videographer. During my presentation I will share several short video vignettes relevant to the cybernetic concepts I present. This includes footage of many first generation second-cyberneticians, as well as current members of the ASC and cybernetic communities. I will present for 45 minutes and in the remaining 45 minutes explore with members of the audience how this model might fit with what they are tending to now.“Cybernetic Challenge,” available at jude lombardi’s youtube page: youtube.com/watch?v=8KVivC2ch5E“Herbert Brun on social Transformations 1994”, available at jude lombardi’s youtube page:youtube.com/watch?v=2qa6gRmN3IE&t=766s“One Possible Formula for Designing social Transformations,” available at judelombardi’s youtube page: atyoutube.com/watch?v=pU3iS3ZWU2s&t=1s
In search of an erotic framework for Cybernetics American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2023-01-07 | Inspired on the circularity of desire, an erotic approach to Cybernetics may bring new insights on concepts such as the observer, control, black box and automation.Inspired on the circularity of desire, an erotic approach may bring new insights on concepts such as the observer, control and black box.Links:drive.google.com/file/d/14yz6mNYqW_R80ksntBuMYOeSlM52hBbP/view?usp=share_linkresearchgate.net/profile/Jose-Cabral-Filho
Beyond the Distinction Between 1st Order and 2nd Order Cybernetics American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2022-10-30 | This is an interactive panel discussion that asks the questions: Has the distinction between 1st and 2nd order cybernetics run its course, now sufficiently embedded in our cybernetic practice and thought to move on? That is, is the practice of cybernetics self-aware, explicitly embedding responsibility (and, at least implicitly, ethical considerations) when doing whatever we do? Even if not yet sufficient, should we nudge ourselves in new directions anyway? What’s next?
Becoming #NewMacy American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2022-09-26 | #NewMacy emerged in March 2020 as the pandemic of COVID became the new global wicked challenge. Lack of effective response to this latest pandemic is both enervating and catalyzing for change: how can we — from the scale of individuals and communities to nation states and societies — evolve such that we gain resilience across physical and social scales and embrace the need for change. This theme, captured in the phrase ontological resilience, is a recent thematic shift in the ever-changing present of #NewMacy. It represents our embrace of change, not for its own sake, but as a means of individual and collective, emotional and rational, survival. What has not changed is our parallel embrace of the history of transdisciplinary conversations at the birth of Cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s, those original Macy Meetings. These conversations brought scholars together across hard and soft sciences, arts and humanities, to find commonalities across systems who share purposive behavior without exclusion based on how they may be embodied in technical, biological, physical, or social systems. However, in the 21st century, transdisciplinarity is not enough. We must also embrace transglobal inclusivity and diversity, and transgenerational participation — for it is newer generations that must reap, and repair, the errors of their priors.In this condensed version of recent and upcoming experiential sessions across multiple hours and days, we will present a brief introduction to #NewMacy and enact an historical evocation of the original Macy Meetings. Thereafter we invite the audience to participate in an improvisation as if calling a 1-800-CYBERNET “toll free number” that offers Cybernetics-as-a-Service, in service [sic] of the needs of any group grappling with wicked challenges across the many pandemics of today. We end the session with an invitation to all to create a poetic expression of their experience with #NewMacy as well as to join our future conversations with topics prior and new.ParticipantsCarlos Castellanos, Damian Chapman, Kate Doyle, Xiao Fang, Mikal Giancola, Michael Lieber, TJ McLeish, Paul Pangaro, Eve Pinsker, Eryk Salvaggio, Larry Richards, Fred Steier, Mark Sullivan, Claudia Westermann
Seventy years of Family Therapy, from Bateson until now. Whats new? American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2022-03-24 | Over 70 years ago, cybernetic thinking helped create a radical shift in psychiatry when birthing a new branch of therapy called family therapy. Yet, today, this revolutionary way of understanding human healing, thinking, behavior, relations and “social” systems, floats on the margins of our mental health systems. As one family therapist from decades gone by suggested, family therapy quickly became more like a stillborn child whose fascinating ideas and practices disappeared almost as soon as they arrived. Why is that? Some say, family therapy was ahead of its time, in an attempt to understand people and their pathologies in context with the systems in which we live. We seem unable to comprehend that we do the only thing we can do in accordance with our biology and epistemology. One cannot not have an epistemology, only a bad one. – Gregory Bateson So, what have we learned after 70 years of family theories and therapies? Where do family therapists stand in regard to these issues today? What is the role of a family therapist, and in what domains? How can cybernetic ideas orient family therapists as change agents? During this conversation, held on March 20th, we explore, with a new generation of family therapists, how they shifted back to many of the original concepts associated with family therapy and cybernetics, such as Bateson’s ideas about power and inequality. We also explore more recent concepts associated with cybernetics that orient this movement, and how we might shift the structures that generate intersectional systems of oppression that perpetuate pathologies.
ASC Speakers Series - Thinking Transversally American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2022-02-26 | This talk by Cheryl Hsu proposes transversal thinking and praxis as a means to create coherence, or "wholeness", through a pluriverse of perspectives.Many of us seem to be observing a time of cultural fragmentation and ecological collapse. How might systems thinkers and designers work in the service of cultivating a sense of coherence, or wholeness, without fixing one perspective or worldview? This talk explores the generative tensions between the universal (one world) and the pluriversal (the world of many worlds) that might lead to glimpses of the transversal: the numinous moments of awareness where the “us” and “them” transform into an emerging “we”.For those who seek to revitalize human participation in symbiotic systems of living wholeness, how do we also embrace the epistemic humility of what feminist scholar Donna Haraway names as “staying with the trouble”? A transversal mindset and posture is proposed for collectively sensing the glimpses of wholeness in the warm, thick, transcontextual fields of human and more-than-human relations. This unnameable quality of wholeness that arises out of many interacting patterns in a system is borrowed from architect Christopher Alexanders’ The Timeless Way of Building (1979). The word “transversal” comes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of radically new possibilities that erupt out of the tensions and potentials held in assemblages of difference. Drawing from the speaker’s experience with emerging relational practices such as Collective Presencing, we explore the depths of communication -- seen and unseen -- that come alive when we embrace our wholeness and differences as entangled, embodied, ecological actors on this planet. In a time between worlds, how do we nurture the gaps and sanctuaries for the unfurling of new and hidden patterns, and to notice the subtle aliveness of autopoiesis? Link for the chat: drive.google.com/file/d/1q3LyM7ABVH2CE_5DPUkvbQ76gijXYVc5/view?usp=sharing
Cybernetics and the Gaia Hypothesis: A conversation with Bruce Clarke American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2022-01-19 | Bruce Clarke discusses the cybernetics of the Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.Born in 1919, trained in chemistry, biomedicine, and engineering, the British scientist James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, began his professional career in the 1940s. His systems thinking was formed in the first wave of cybernetic concepts—homeostasis, self-organization, negative feedback, self-regulation—as these were closely allied to discourses of energy and entropy connecting thermodynamics via information theory to physical definitions of living systems. For Lovelock, Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? was instrumental in forming his conception of a living planet as operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Cybernetics, as drawn from the physiological concept of homeostasis, then filled in his initial conception of the Gaian system. Lovelock’s foremost collaborator on the Gaia hypothesis, the American microbiologist and evolutionary thinker Lynn Margulis, born in 1938, one generation younger than Lovelock and starting her academic career in the 1960s, was trained in genetics and cellular systems rather than thermodynamics and classical cybernetics. However, she absorbed Lovelock’s lessons on these topics and then, stepping outside of the standard biology of her moment, she strongly endorsed Maturana and Varela’s concept of biological autopoiesis. By the 1980s she would meld Lovelock’s first-order Gaia concept to her own second-order formulation of “autopoietic Gaia.” In this talk, literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke will draw from the scientific writings of Lovelock and Margulis as well as from his forthcoming edition of their correspondence to document and discuss their cultivation of the Gaia hypothesis as a dedicated application of cybernetic systems thinking.
ASC Series: Annetta Pedretti: Weaving Language, Reflections, Memories and Stories American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-12-23 | Annetta Pedretti (1954-2018) entered the world of cybernetic thinking likely long before the term entered her lexicon and thus epistemology. As a student of Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün, and other first generation second-order cyberneticians, Pedretti constructed cybernetic ideas such as the I of language and self-reference, and a novel sense of time. Most relevant to this event is her use of cybernetics when making art while designing and restoring the house she purchased four decades ago at 25 Princelet Street in London, England. After her death in 2018, a non-profit group of progressive London architects known as Assemble acquired the house on Princlet Street and named it the HOUSE OF ANNETTA. In the spirit of Annetta Pedretti, they are designing a community center nested in “cybernetic tendencies for generating social justice.” Problem: Although the house is full of traces left of and by Annetta, members of the Assemble collective never met the woman: the architect, artivist, archivist, publisher, writer, provocateur, and bee steward. She was truly a Jane of many trades, a cybernetician. Assemble desires to know more about the person known as Annetta Pedretti. So, during this event, some ASC members who knew her will share stories about Annetta. Please join us in dialogue and hopefully conversation. Bring your questions, comments, and a story about Annetta to share. Who knows maybe Annetta will make a surprise appearance.
Part 2 - Emerging Topics for #NewMacy Meeting #3 American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-11-01 | #NewMacy Meeting #3 aimed to move closer to action-oriented intentions. The conversations were based on the emerging themes around creating alternatives to “the pandemic of today’s AI.”In part 2, the discussion expanded to all attendees.→ See part 1 youtu.be/9NpxnQuzbjk
Part 1 - Emerging Topics for #NewMacy Meeting #3 American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-11-01 | #NewMacy Meeting #3 aimed to move closer to action-oriented intentions. The conversations were based on the emerging themes around creating alternatives to “the pandemic of today’s AI.”In Part 1, group discussions explored the following themes1. Disciplines2. Sustainability3. Conversation Machines4. Integrative Approach→ Continue to part 2 youtu.be/s-1t6uprc8s
ASC Series: New Books in Cybernetics Spotlight #1 American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-10-19 | As part of the ongoing podcast series, New Books in Systems and Cybernetics, Tom Scholte interviews Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson about his book, The Nature of the Machine and the Collapse of Cybernetics: a philosophical exploration of the theoretical causes behind the collapse of classical cybernetics, as well as the lessons this history holds for the future of humanity. About the book:This book is a philosophical exploration of the theoretical causes behind the collapse of classical cybernetics, as well as the lesson that this episode can provide to current emergent technologies. Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson advances the idea that the cybernetic understanding of the nature of a machine entails ontological and epistemological consequences that created both material and theoretical conundrums. However, he proposes that given our current state of materials research, scientific practices, and research tools, there might be a way for cybernetics to flourish this time.The book starts with a historical and theoretical articulation of cybernetics in order to proceed with a philosophical explanation of its collapse―emphasizing the work of Alan Turing, Ross Ashby and John von Neumann. Subsequently, Malapi-Nelson unveils the common metaphysical signature shared between cybernetics and emergent technologies, identifying this signature as transhumanist in nature. Finally, avenues of research that may allow these disruptive technologies to circumvent the cybernetic fate are indicated. It is proposed that emerging technologies ultimately entail an affirmation of humanity.
Speakers Series Season 2#1: Urgent Questions in response to “Today’s AI” — #NewMacy Meetings #2 American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-10-18 | What forms of human-machine interactivity would move us away from the ills of “Today’s AI”? How do we create organic frameworks for AI that are based in human and ecological values? There is no question that widespread AI software has negative effects. Manipulation of our attention and political sentiment, spread of bias, loss of privacy, and encouragement toward addictive behaviors are only a few widely acknowledged examples. With 2.8 billion people active on social media and 4 billion touched by digital devices, these manifestations of “Today’s AI” demand response.Our goal is to bring about the integration of today’s digital AI technologies with “analogic” frameworks—that is, humane, organic, open-ended, resonant, and socially-animated interactivity. Our plan is to create new design patterns and working prototypes that present vivid examples to designers, entrepreneurs, teachers, students, legislators—to promote inspiring alternatives to technologies to “Today’s AI.’ Our hope is to transform the marketplace that dispenses harmful algorithms of “Today’s AI” and to make a better world of interactions with digital machines.To succeed we must bring together voices across all disciplines, geographies, and generations. Please join us.
Speakers Series #7: Partial Memories of Mary Catherine Bateson - Nora & Sevanne American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-06-24 | “The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives changed meaning to what preceded it.” -- Mary Catherine Bateson December 8, 1939 – January 2, 2021During this event participants will be invited to share their memories of Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson, a life-long honorary member of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). It is our hope that each of you have a Mary Catherine Bateson story to share with us.In addition to being an Honorary Life Fellow of the ASC, Mary Catherine served as a trustee and, in 2011, was awarded the Norbert Wiener Medal for her outstanding contributions to the field of cybernetics. In her acceptance letter she emphasized the contributions she thought cybernetic thinking could offer that might generate a new kind of common-sense in our engagements.In addition to her work as a mother, professor, anthropologist and author, Mary Catherine Bateson participated and presented at ASC conferences regularly. During this event we will view a video vignette from one of her presentations at the 2014 ASC 5Oth Anniversary Conference. She speaks about observing and other cybernetic fundamentals as well as her desire for ASC’s future. So get your story ready and join us on June 20th when we share our partial memories of Mary Catherine Bateson as they relate to her ideas about systems thinking and cybernetics.Participants Bios: Sevanne Kassarjian brings the tools of improvisation and her 20 years on the professional stage to bear on a wide range of themes in her practice, including a set of unique communicating skills, embracing uncertainty and creating learning spaces for a variety of organizations. She partnered with her mother, Mary Catherine Bateson, to create workshops that marry cultural anthropology tools with acting and improvisation techniques. Her passion for exploring ways in which the stage frees people to create and discover new ways of understanding and navigating their world is core to her work. She also leads a global team of designers and facilitators in co-creating solutions with a diverse portfolio of clients at Performance of a Lifetime. Sevanne now has the honor of managing the literary rights of her mother, Mary Catherine Bateson, her grandmother, Margaret Mead and her grandmother's partner and colleague Ruth Benedict.Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Her work asks the question “How can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?.” Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings a variety of disciplines, science, technologies, and the arts together in an effort to explore patterns that connect to an ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.Judith (jude) Lombardi is a social worker turned sociology professor turned video-ethnographer and documentarian. She taught sociology at a university in Baltimore, Maryland and in 1992, with video camera in hand, attended her first ASC conference. Over the last 29 years jude has recorded and edited into movies a variety of ASC events, including several presentations by Dr. Bateson. She constructed and produced the “Gentrification (k)NOT Movie,” which she presents in various settings in an effort to provoke conversations about gentrification and how we might prevent it from happening during the revitalization of a neighborhood. She is currently working on a documentary featuring Annetta Pedretti entitled,” The I of Language, turning Objects into rhythms.” Jude is also a honeybee steward of an apiary in Baltimore Maryland.
Mary Catherine Bateson presents... ASC Speakers Series #7 Partial Memories American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-06-08 | This 15 minute excerpt from Mary Catherine Bateson's 2014 presentation at the ASC conference in Washington DC, was created specifically for the ASC's Speakers Series #7. In part i Mary Catherine Bateson tells the story of Bobby. In part ii she offers a few cybernetic fundamentals for the audience to consider. And in part iii she articulates her desire for the ASC organization in the future.
Speaker Series #6: Clarke and Clough on Varela, an Interview with Lombardi American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-05-25 | Chilean-born Francisco Varela (1946 – 2001) is particularly known for his work with Humberto Maturana on the concepts of autopoiesis, cognition, and observing. Varela is also known for extending the logics of Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form with a calculus for self-reference.During this interview with Bruno Clarke and Patricia Clough it is my hope to explore memories, interpretations, concepts and notions I now associate with the works of Francisco Varela. Many of these notions emerged during my readings of materials suggested by Clark and Clough in preparation for this interview. See attached artifacts. There is so much to explore. Concepts such as closed-organizations, information, self-referential systems, self-reference, nature, time, cognition, computation, phenomenology, post-phenomenology. Then there is the triadic relationship between perturbations, compensation and behavior. In addition, I hope we can explore the possible consequences of BIG DATA. Its constraints and possibilities in relation to our living as mutual human beings on a self-organizing earth in the 21st century. Participant’s Bio: Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, and the 2019 Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His research focuses on systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. Clarke co-edits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham University Press. Clarke's most recent book is Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota, 2020).Patricia Ticineto Clough is a professor emerita of sociology and women studies at CUNY. She is the author of a number of publication, among them, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology, Feminist Thought, and most recently The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure. She is editor of The Affective Turn; Theorizing the Social, co-editor of Beyond Biopolitics Essays in the Government of Life and Death, and co-editor of Intimacies, A New World of Relational Life. She is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she also teaches and is a member of the Training Committee at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. Judith (jude) Lombardi is a social worker turned sociology professor turned video-ethnographer and “social” documentarian. In early 1990s her deep journey into cybernetic thinking occurred while working on a PhD in Human Relations and Cybernetics. In 1992, with a video camera in hand, she attended her first ASC conference. During the past 29 years jude has recorded and edited a variety of ASC events into movies which she often shows at ASC conferences. In 2014 she was commissioned by the ASC to create the movie “Living in Cybernetics, Celebrating 50 years of the ASC.” Dr. Lombardi taught sociology at a university in Baltimore, Maryland and retired in 2011. From 2012 – 2014 she worked on a documentary movie, “The Gentrification (k)NOT Movie,” which she presents in various settings to provoke conversations about gentrification and how we might prevent it from happening during the revitalization of a neighborhood. She is currently working on a movie about the cybernetics of Annetta Pedretti, “turning objects into rhythms” and part iii of her trilogy about Ernst von Glasersfeld, his life, and his work. Jude is also a bee steward in Baltimore Maryland.
ASC Speaker Series #5: A Causal Ontology of Nature by Angus Jenkinson American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-05-02 | When considering the significance of the revolution that cybernetics brought to the meta-paradigm of science, it may be useful to re-consider the cybernetics of causality and its radical implications. During his presentation Jenkins will introduce a framework for doing so. According to Jenkins, the implications of such a model underpin practices of prediction, planning and intervention into the social and natural order. He argues that without clarity about the natural orders of causal flow and nexus, many fail to tackle major issues of our era in concert. This introduction will focus on clarifying the proposed causal orders enabling the conversation to further explore implications and responses. An interesting aspect is a potentially useful review of the notion of "second-order" in cybernetics.
ASC2020-Session 2 - How to Untangle Ourselves: Cybernetic Action for Social Change American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-04-10 | How to Untangle Ourselves: Cybernetic Action for Social Change
ASC Speakers Series #4 - Leonard and Richards on Stafford American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-03-27 | Models are not good or bad, right or wrong, only more or less useful in a given context. — Stafford BeerDuring this ASC Series event Jude Lombardi facilitated a conversation between two long-term members and past-presidents of the ASC, Allenna Leonard and Larry Richards, about the life and work of Stafford Beer.As many might know, Beer was a prolific producer of many things -- in a variety of domains. He was, according to Leonard, a “polymath—a scientist who painted, wrote poetry, taught yoga and cooked a delicious Yorkshire pudding.” Event page and links to papers: asc-cybernetics.org/asc-speaker-series-4
Everything is Broken American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-03-16 | This video was produced in conjunction with the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) Speakers Series #4: "Leonard and Richards on Stafford Beer." It includes excerpts from past ASC conferences (1995, 2011,2014) and features Ranulph Glanville (circularity), Herbert Brün (floating hierarchies), Mary Catherine Bateson (society counter-cybernetic) and Stafford Beer on structuring systems.Speakers Series #4: "Leonard and Richards on Stafford Beer."asc-cybernetics.org/asc-speaker-series-4
ASC Speaker Series #3 - Towards a Critical Cybernetics by Klaus Krippendorff American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-03-02 | Cybernetics and humans’ knowing: A present past toward a futureWhat’s solvable within one context doesn’t necessarily account for the larger social consequences. It’s affected by language.Towards a Critical CyberneticsKlaus Krippendorff will present his latest insights about how cybernetic technologies not merely mediate between members of society but tend to confine human agency. “Critical Cybernetics” is his response to the observation that people often uncritically focus either on small problems they think are solvable within the context of existing institutions, are satisfied with their own understanding and describing their observations as outsiders, and are unaware of how their language affects what they are describing. These approaches make it difficult to address the larger social consequences of what our interactions with technologies set in motion.Klaus Krippendorff is the Gregory Bateson emeritus professor for cybernetics, language, and culture at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Philadelphia. He was a student of Ross Ashby, is a long-time member of American Society for Cybernetics and has a history of applying cybernetics to social phenomena; communication in particular. Klaus has a background in design which brings him closer to seeing the social world in which we live as being constructed and constantly reconstructed, by actions that are in turn shaped by different discourses, among which the reflexive language of cybernetics is an especially potent one.
Agency, Algorithms, New Forms of Oppression and How Cybernetics Might Respond American Society for Cybernetics - ASC 2021-02-21 | Presentation by Klaus Krippendorff at the 2019 American Society of Cybernetics Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
