“Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine.” — Norbert Wiener
The Cybernetics Conference will take up the subject of information and agency; bringing scholars, technicians, activists, and artists in dialogue to consider the ways informatic systems shape social organization.
How does the circulation of media materialize as social behavior? Cybernetics, the discipline Nam June Paik once described as the “exploration of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences,” offers a powerful framework for reasoning about the complexities of human–machine interaction.
This conference will ask how individuals and coalitions might develop strategies for situating themselves as effective agents of change within today’s complex information ecosystem. How might we move beyond a cybernetics of accelerated growth, and toward systems of interrelation predicated on cybernetic equilibria?
