EXPERIMENTELLE GESTALTUNG NEUER TECHNOLOGIEN / PROF. RALF BAECKER“The art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors” (Gordon Pask about Cybernetics)
Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems—their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Cybernetics has been established as an Art/Science/Perspective in the 1940/50 mainly driven by the development of war machinery. After it’s big hype in the 1960/70s it disolved into different disciplines like computer science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy or architecture. While the core of cybernetic ideas, especially the regulating qualities of negative feedbacks, became a tool of control and enforcement; A smaller, not so well know leg of cybernetics, so called “New-Cybernetics” (by Gordon Pask) or “Second-Order Cybernetics” (by Margaret Mead and Heinz von Förster) formulated in the 1960/70s introduced cybernetics of cybernetics, looking at cybernetics from within and with cybernetics. Margaret Mead defines “cybernetics as a way of looking at things and as a language for expressing what one sees”.
In this seminar we want to take a closer look at the manifold ideas/concepts that emerged from Cybernetics, New-Cybernetics and it’s surrounding disciplines. From here we will develop projects that investigate and appropriate Cybernetic thinking in an art and design practice. Cybernetics means “process”: Cybernetic systems can’t be studied by looking at their layout or building plan, they have to be studied in action. The course will alternatate between analysis, theory and practice.
First Session Introduction into Cybernetics + New-Cybernetics
Second Session Term + Concepts (your research)
Form/Outcome: Cabinet of Curiosities / Wunderkammer link
- Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon
- The Museum Of Jurassic Technology
- Voynich_manuscript
- Codex_Seraphinianus
A collection of objects or machienes that offer a sight into an alternative technological (maybe political) world; Into the weird. Objects that perform concepts. A process and a analogy/metaphorically; An experiment
Denkbilder/Denkobjekte (Objects/machines to think with) The relationship of objects (art) to theory. Instead of having a text that is read, he text performs itself trough a object.
Third Session Form/Outcome
Possible topics are:
- Negative Feedback (Control)
- Positive Feedback (Catastrophe)
- Human Machine Interaction
- Second-order Cybernetics (Margaret Mead)
- Machine Performativity
- Autopoesis (Varela/Maturana)
- Self-Replicating Machines (John von Neumann)
- Self-Organisation (Heinz von Förster)
- Order from Noise (Heinz von Förster)
- Homeostasis (Ross Ashby)
- Non-Universal Machines (Ross Ashby)
- Interactions of Actors Theory (Gordon Pask)
- Dance of Agency (Pickering)
- Perichorese (Otto Rössler)
- Pancomputationalism
- KyperEthik (Heinz von Förster)
- Interspecies communication / xenolinguistics (John C. Lilly)
References (still growing)
- Cybernetics
- Cybernetics (Wikipedia)
- Cynernetics (Monoskop) / A bibliographical genealogy of cybernetics in the United States, France, Soviet Union, and Germany in the 1940s and 1950s, followed by a selected bibliography on its impact across the sciences.
- Macy conferences / Claus Pias: Cybernetics
- The Macy Conferences 1946–1953. The Complete Transactions
- Claus Pias: Analog, digital, and the cybernetic illusion
- Archive of Cybernetic papers
- Gordon Pask Archive (lots of his papers)
- The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive
- Heinz von Förster Archive
- Alan Turing Archive
- Biological Computer Laboratory / BCL Homepage
- Tuings letter to Ashby (19. Nov 1946)
- Classic Cybernetic Papers PDFs
- Claude Shannon: A Mathematical Theory of Communication
- Ross Ashby: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1957)
- Ross Ashby: Principles of Self-Organising Systems
- Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts:A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity (1943)
- Norbert Wiener: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
- Jerome Ysroael Lettvin and Maturana: What The Frog’s Eye Tells The Frog’s Brain (1959)
- Jerome Ysroael Lettvin: The Colors of Colored Things (1967)
- Second-order Cybernetics
- Heinz von Förster, PCL Students: Cybernetics of Cybernetics (1974)
- Self-Replication
- Pancomputationalism
- Other
- Laws of Form
First Meeting:
17.04.2017 10h (room 2.11.100)
Slack Channel
soon.
Meetings:
- 17.04.2017 (first meeting, starts at 10h)
- 24.04.2018
- 08.05.2018
- 15.05.2018
- 22.05.2018 —-
- 29.05.2018
- 05.06.2018
- 12.06.2018
- 19.06.2018
- 26.06.2018
- 03.07.2018
- 10.07.2018
