— workshop
By the end of the 1940s cybernetics emerged from the combined fields of systems theory, information theory and engineering. The new meta-science of “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (Wiener) made it possible to describe, predict and control the performance of complex systems. The relevance of feedback systems was first described in military research programmes but soon became interesting for a number of scientific disciplines like behavioural psychology, evolutionary theory, anthropology, communications theory, and modern (war) games.
The conception of society as a system that could be modelled and controlled through information processing and feedback loops fascinated not only the cybernetics researchers but also architects, planners and designers of the time. The simple and hermetic systems of first-order cybernetics, working mainly with engineering and mathematical models, gave way to second-order cybernetics which dealt with 'open systems', or the interdependence of systems, be they social, natural or technical, including factors such as complexity and risk. Cybernetics also expanded into the late 1960s cultural moment of discontent, paranoia and movements for change, offering an epistemology that spread from the control-oriented planning of the government and the military into sectors as various as business, art and counter-cultural politics and technology.
The continuous adjustment, the permanent matching of projection and realisation of processes seemed to provide a way out of the dead-end of modernist planning whose ideology of clean solutions to clearly defined problems had become questionable. The discipline of design is an example of these tendencies. The hope of many designers was that planning itself could be understood as a process in which the changing needs of the users are adjusted to changing realities, helping to establish a truly democratic society. This euphoria about applying cybernetics was followed by a strong rejection in the 1980s when postmodern theories challenged systemic models, making the planning professions doubt whether social relations could be planned.
The 'Systems Exposed' event reconsiders the many iterations of systems theory in the context of the present, particularly focusing on thought and praxis regarding 'crisis'. The large-scale 'systems failure' of financial, political and military infrastructures of managing is quite obvious. Yet many contend that crisis is inherent to the functionality of the system of capitalism and what we are witnessing is less a systemic breakdown than a shakedown, mainly of those who are most exposed to the risk that is not only managed but created by the system.
The key cybernetics principle of feedback to describe the relationship between an agent and a system, or the system and its wider environment, allows us to consider the centrality of participation to and experience of contemporary technologies of control. Complexity, granularity and contingency are hallmarks of present-day applications of systems theory in the military, urbanist, marketing and financial domains. From managed participation to managed risk, what are the political and philosophical implications of the encounter of systems and the unknown? Further, the event is interested in evaluating the possibilities and closures of cybernetics and systems theory in the contexts of art, design, and urban planning. The visualization of systems seems to be a basic instrument in analyzing and constructing them. Thus what impact does the aesthetic of diagrams have on the development of the system it describes? What are the reciprocal impacts of representation and its object/s?
Systems: Plans
This session will explore the idea of planning and governing complex systems, inherent in cybernetics from its onset. Systems theory introduced the idea of 'governing' as management of a complex system. Participation was conceived as a method to optimise the system through feedback. Cybernetics thought of society as a self-regulating organism that could be planned and engineered for maximum harmony and efficiency, leading to the technocratic capitalism that prevails today. Diagrams were both the analytic and projective instruments that represented the reality that systems interacted with.
Systems: Problems
A 'problem' in planning theory denotes the gap between an existing situation and an imagined future situation. The second workshop will problematise systems theory and cybernetics by looking at the intrusion of political conflicts, ruptures, breaks. Participation, in this framework, would claim involvement in political decisions, initiating problems rather than solving them. Society as a field of irreconcilable conflicts poses a challenge to the 'self-regulating' dreams of systems. Can subjective and social demands exceed the parameters of the diagram?
Film programme with films by Rod Dickinson, Katerina Seda, Martin Beck, Orakel, Steve Rushton/Dexter Sinister, Lutz Dammbeck, Stephen Willats, Jef Cornelis, Karolin Meunier, a play by Samuel Beckett, and more
Jan van Eyck Academie, Annex
Jesko Fezer (architect, editor An Architektur, Berlin) will talk about the 'Design Methods' movement which regarded architecture, planning and design as scientific disciplines, and its politicisation in the 1970s.
Anthony Iles (writer and researcher associated with Mute magazine, London) researches urban regeneration and the transformation of work and consumption. His current work relates Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood's 1960s plans to site a 'Fun Palace' in the Lower Lea Valley – the current site of the 2012 London Olympics – to cybernetics, planning and architecture. 'If the Fun Palace can be considered a pre-vision of the emerging post-industrial society, we can wager the London Olympics won't be that society's crowning success. Rather, these designs represent the return, as farce, of Price's visionary dream – a plasticated world populated by unreal avatars repeating gestures rehearsed on TV. The very creation of this landscape will be underpinned by debt, exploitation and public bankruptcy. What if we think like Price and take a visionary stance towards the future? Instead of these retro-futurist projections, we could imagine what might be built out of the ruins of the financialised city after the new economy.'
Doreen Mende (writer and curator, Berlin, teaches at the HfG in Karlsruhe) presents her current Ph.D. research at Goldsmiths on second-order cybernetics in relation to her curatorial practice using the Blind Spot as a methodology to deploy the exhibition complex as an unfinished system based on recursive movements and politics of drawing a distinction in space.
Emily Pethick (writer, curator and director of The Showroom, London) will introduce her research with Stephen Willats and Roy Ascott as well as the 'signal:noise' project, a collaboration between Emily, Marina Vishmidt, Steve Rushton and David Reinfurt that aims to publicise and research the influence of cybernetics and information theory on contemporary cultural life.
Steve Rushton (writer and editor, Rotterdam) opens a talk on Lacan's lecture on cybernetics, set against a text by Gregory Bateson.
Rod Dickinson (artist, London and Utrecht) will present his new collaboration with Steve Rushton about media feedback called “Media Burn” and his remake project “The Game of War”.
Axel Wieder (writer, director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart) will present the project ‘Social Diagrams' which investigated the dynamics of social interaction and questioned the meaning of design practice within the functionality of social relations.
The event is organised by Nina Støttrup Larsen, Karolin Meunier, Andreas Müller, and Marina Vishmidt, with the support of the Jan van Eyck Academie.
A reader will be available at the event, but we compiled a Suggested Reading list below (thank you to Steve Rushton for filling out our many omissions)
Christopher Alexander, /Notes on the Synthesis of Form/
Roy Ascott, /Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness/
W. Ross Ashby, /Introduction to Cybernetics/, at
_http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf_
Autopoiesis:_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis_
Paul Barker, 'Non-Plan Revisited: or The Real Way Cities Grow', in /Journal of Design History/
Gregory Bateson, /Steps to an Ecology of Mind/, Chicago, 1972
Jean Baudrillard, /Simulacra and Simulation/, Michigan Press, 1994
(French original 1981)
Stafford Beer, /Designing Freedom/
Claire Bishop, ed. /Participation/
Manfred E.Clynes and Nathan S.Kline, 'Cyborgs and Space',
/_Astronautics,_/ Sept. 1960
Mark Crinson, 'In the Bowels of the Fun Palace', at
_http://www.metamute.org/en/In-the-Bowels-of-the-Fun-Palace_
Conversation Theory Made Simple:_http://www.pangaro.com/published/cyb-and-con.html_
The Cybersyn Project (Allende-era cybernetics experiment):
_http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/home.html_
Cybernetics: _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_
Felix Guattari, 'Capital as the Integral of Power Formations',
_http://noolbyun.net/bbs/zboard.php?id=archive&page=1&sn1=&divpage=1&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&select_arrange=name&desc=desc&no=14
<http://noolbyun.net/bbs/zboard.php?id=archive&page=1&sn1=&divpage=1&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&select_arrange=name&desc=desc&no=14>_
Gilles Deleuze, 'Postscript on Control Societies', in /Negotiations/,
Columbia University, 1995
N. Katerine Hayles, /My Mother Was a Computer/, Chicago Press, 2005
Brian Holmes, 'Filming the World Laboratory'
_http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/filming-the-world-laboratory/_
Constance de Jong, '/Joan Jonas//:/ Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll', Arts Magazine, vol. 47, no. 5, March 1973, pp. 27 – 29
Jacques Lacan, 'Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics', /The Seminar of Jaques Lacan, Book 2,/ W.W. Norton & Company, 1988 (1955)
John Mullarkey, 'Thinking in Diagrams', in /Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline/
Gordon Pask, 'Cybernetics', entry in /Encyclopaedia Britannica/ 1972 ; on The Cybernetics Society website, _http://www.cybsoc.org/gcyb.htm_
Mark Poster,/ /'Foucault and Databases', in /The Mode of Information, Poststructuralism and Social Context/, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990
/Radical Software /archive: _http://www.radicalsoftware.org/_
Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, 'Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning', _http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_Theory_of_Planning.pdf_
Edward A. Shanken, editor's preface to /Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness,/ by Roy Ascott, available at _http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8867/8867.pre.php_ ;
other essays by Shanken at _http://artexetra.com/_
B.F. Skinner, /Walden Two/, New York Macmillian, 1967 (1948)
Gauti Sigthorsson, 'Leibniz Sends an Email', _The International Journal
of Technology, _
Soviet Cybernetics: _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bogdanov_
David Tomas, /Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk/, 1995
Fred Turner,/ From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Stewart Brand and the
Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism/, Chicago, 2008
Norbert Wiener, /Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine/, 1948
Norbert Wiener, /The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and
Society/, Da Capo, [1950], revised edition, 1954
Stephen Willats,/ Speculative Modelling with Diagrams/, Casco, 2007