So much to unpack from the Re-braiding Sympoisum#1:”The Split”, held on 25 March 2026, but I’ll jump-in with some explorations on Artorga as a good place to build on?

From Symposium #1 – Thank you to fellow attendee Anthony Weiss for making the connection to ARTORGA as being relevant to Re-braiding, and to Bernard Scott’s direct insights on the organisation.

(#1 assets available here: https://tinyurl.com/Cyber-AI-Rebraid  including the Video of the #1 presentations)


I’ve dug into Artorga a bit, and I found it fascinating and rich with leads to Re-braiding, and historic cybernetics in general.

In terms of Hugh and Paul’s Re-braiding timeline (available on the Re-braiding repository), Artorga seems to have been active from 1958 to ~1970, right at the overlap of Cybernetics and Symbolic AI: 

Artorga stood for the endeavour of Artificial Organisms, and broadly speaking, ARTORGA was a…

(a) Laboratory/ series of experiments …

(b) that “… sought to revise cybernetics’ disciplinary history, claiming its origins in biology rather than information theory and operations research.” (Cartelli, 2023)

(c) running from 1958 – ~1970

(d) Steered by: Oliver Wells; and an Advisory Group involving: Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, Heinz von Foerster.

(e) Producing:

• A network of interested people.

• A mainly monthly Newsletter, called ‘Communications’

• Pamphlets

• Books

• Conferences

• Products (the Drogulus)

• An ‘Investment group’

The most comprehensive review on Artorga I’ve found so far on is this reference:

Machines, Fabrics, and Models: ARTORGA and Biology’s Cybernetic Utopia, by Gregory Elias Cartelli, 2023, 29 pages. I attach a copy that someone has extracted (available online here) (also of interest to CMU’s Architecture Code Lab?)

(the full, main publication is Open Access, and is freely available here: UTOPIA COMPUTER: The “New” in Architecture, 2023, 332 pages: https://verlag.tu-berlin.de/en/produkt/978-3-7983-3270-6/ )

The other fun thing found, is a video of:

            Automatic Mechanical Self Replication (Part 1), Lionel Penrose, 1958

which really made alive for me, the Drogulus mentioned frequently in the Penrose papers and Oliver Wells communications from Artorga, and the whole pursuit of self-reproduction pursued by that early Cybernetic period.

I think this Penrose machine also speaks to Jill’s point of Cybernetics seeking general, self-reproducing behaviours, as a Cybernetic paradigm, in tension with AI’s different paradigm.

There seem to two main Archives which have Artorga material (1. Wellcome Collections > L. S. Penrose Papers > Artorga, and 2. University of Illinois Archives > Heinz von Foerster Papers > Artorga ).

If anyone else is looking at Artorga, and or can help fill in the missing copies of the Communication newsletter, then I have compiled (,what I call, ) a ‘finding-aid’ on Artorga resources: (available here: Artorga-Collections). I also attach a latest copy to this email.

There are a lot of references to other foundational archival aspects. For instance, lots of mentions to the Namur meetings that Mike mentioned; and to meetings on self-organization, which also ties in to Mike’s foundational s-o theme that he presented on.

Many copies of the Artorga Newsletter are missing – so if anybody can help with that, please do get in contact.

There is a lot more emerging from this Artorga lens, including some tensions between Cybernetics and AI from that time. It strikes me that, unless we investigate (and mitigate somehow) these tensions from the past, then we may be ‘doomed’ to repeat them? That may be for future discussions, but for now, I am enjoying the hopes and aspirations that Artorga endeavoured, as Cartelli writes: “ARTORGA was a series of experiments that sought to revise cybernetics’ disciplinary history, claiming its origins in biology rather than information theory and operations research” (Cartelli, 2023, page 213).

Thanks to Paul Pangaro and the team for organising this Re-braiding Project.

Best regards,

Rob

Robert Young

Cambridge, UK