Cybernetics for the 21st CenturyCybernetics for the 21st CenturyLectures and Symposium

Cybernetics for the 21st Century – Research Network for Philosophy and Technology | 技術與哲學研究網絡

Videos here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaLE95M4BamLJwvwUQhL9MQ

Host:  Media Lab of Guangdong Times Museum, Research Network for Philosophy and Technology

Co-Organizer: Hanart Forum

The launch of the program is made possible by the support of M Art Foundation

Supported Networks: Research Center for Science and Human Imagination, Southern University of Science and Technology; CUHK (Shen Zhen) University Arts Centre; Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society (AIRS)

Supported Media: thepaper.cn, The Thinker, LEAP

Supported by Guangdong Times Museum

Special thanks to Times China

Time: October 28th – December 16th, 2022

Lectures will be screening on Lecture Series | Medialab

October 28th
Andrew Pickering

Lecture: Cybernetics in Britain

November 4th
Slava Gerovitch

Lecture: Cybernetics Across Cultures: The Localization of the Universal

November 11th
Michal Krzykawski

Lecture: Cybernetics and Communism: Cybernetic Thinking in the Polish People’s Republic

November 18th
David Maulén de los Reyes

Lecture: Why Did Cybernetics Disappear in Latin America? An Incomplete Timeline

November 25th
Brunella Antomarini

Lecture: Leibniz’ Teleology, or A Pre-history of Cybernetics

December 2nd
Mathieu Triclot

Lecture: Cybernetics for the 21^st Century? Or Ontology and Politics of Information in the First Cybernetics

December 9th
Daisuke Harashima

Lecture: Life-in-formation: Cybernetics of Heart (Cybernetics for the 21^st Century)

December 16th
Katherine Hayles

Lecture: Detoxifying Cybernetics:  From Homeostasis to Autopoiesis and Beyond

December (time and topics to be announced)
Symposium: Cybernetics for the 21^st Century

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Art, Technology and Philosophy Symposium (II)
Cybernetics for the 21st Century

Cybernetics is not only an ephemeral and contingent event in intellectual history, but rather it presents itself firstly as a new science of machines, which breaks away from the mechanism of the 17th century, that is also the reason for which Norbert Wiener in his 1948 Cybernetics: or the Control or Communication in Machine and Animals could claim that cybernetic machines can live a Bergsonian time, namely a biological, creative and irreversible time, in contradistinction to the Newtonian time, which is mechanical, repetitive and reversible; secondly, as a universal discipline, which is able to unify all other scientific disciplines, and later also disciplines of the social sciences, exemplified by the work of Niklas Luhmann, Heinz von Foerster, Maturana and Varela, later called the Second Order Cybernetics; thirdly as a philosophy, or more precisely the latest development of Western philosophy, that which led to Martin Heidegger’s claim that cybernetics marks the end or completion of Western philosophy and metaphysics.

Today we don’t often hear the term cybernetics in universities, and Heidegger’s assertion that cybernetics marks the end of philosophy may sound reactionary since philosophy departments continue to exist, but cybernetics is no longer in the syllabus of university disciplines. The truth is that cybernetics has already been absorbed in almost all engineering disciplines as well as subjects of art and humanities, notably art, media studies and philosophy of technology, and therefore it has realized what it has promised as a universal method; The significance of cybernetics remains to be questioned and taken far beyond what has been characterized as Californian Ideology and its reminiscence. McLuhan said in an interview in the 1970s that the launch of the Sputnik marks the end of nature and the beginning of ecology. With the later image of the whole earth taken from the satellite in the 1960s, the earth became a veritable artifice, or a spaceship in the sense of Buckminister Fuller. It was also at this turning point that the relation between human, nature, and technology entered a new epoch.

This new epoch is where we are living, and more than ever, we are living in an epoch of cybernetics, however, we still easily fall prey to a dichotomy of nature and culture without really understanding the significance and the limits of cybernetics. We, moderns, are alcoholics, who failed to get out of the positive feedback of progress, like what Nietzsche describes in the Gay Science, the pursuit of the infinite leads to the realization that nothing is more frightening than the infinite. A new recursive epistemology in the sense of Gregory Bateson, which inherits cybernetic thinking while seeking to overcome its intoxication, is needed for the program of re-orientation. This new program can only set off from cybernetics and it can only survive by going beyond cybernetics.

This two years public research program of the Times Museum Media Lab titled “Cybernetics for the 21st Century” aims to firstly reconstruct the history of cybernetics, from the perspectives of different geographical locations, political projects and philosophical reflections; and secondly to ask what might be the contribution of the cybernetic movement to the new form of thinking that is urgently needed to understand and reorient our digital earth. The first edition of the program consists of eight lectures and two symposiums with the presentation of philosophers, historians of science, and sociologists, including Andrew Pickering, Katherine Hayles, Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, David Maulén de los Reyes, Michal Krzykawski, Mathieu Triclot, Daisuke Harashima. The program is hosted by Yuk Hui and curated by Jianru Wu.

Host: Media Lab of Guangdong Times Museum, Research Network for Philosophy and Technology
Co-Organizer: Hanart Forum
The launch of the program is made possible by the support of M Art Foundation

https://medialab.timesmuseum.org/en/lectures