Cybernetics on the Prairie

I learned years after arriving here that my employer, the University of Illinois, was once home to one of the world's leading research centers for Cybernetics. I've since been exploring the record and impact of the now defunct Biological Computer Laboratory.

Where practitioners in other fields might be reluctant to acknowledge the aspirations to divinity implicit in their research, Cyberneticists embrace the totalizing nature of their studies, the ways in which their work implies a whole way of living and knowing. This makes the study of a Cybernetics lab an easier case for historical analysis, since we can now look at the record, and examine the connections between belief, work, and action.

I'm hoping to learn not only more about how cybernetic thought is and isn't an approach I want to embrace, but about how my home institution takes the forms that it does, for good and for ill. (We need to make sure it's working for good, obviously.)

Presently the confines of this project are determined by a commission from the State of Illinois for a new artwork in the new Institute for Genomic Biology. My proposal includes the creation of a timeline of events around the Biological Computer Lab, a reading collection of reproduced BCL publications, and a recreation of one of the lab's chief accomplishments, the Adaptive Reorganizing Automaton.

Project Update

My project on the Biological Computer Lab is inching forward. The work is admittedly sprawling in a way it only could for a locally-based project, and one created by an artist who already has tenure secured. It’s a time-sink. At present, Skot Wiedmann is making good progress on the re-ennactment of the Adaptive Reorganizing Automaton, Miriam Moore is leading the design effort for a dense, two-wall timeline mural of events related and unrelated to the BCL. I’m talking to yet a third artist about doing some drawings for the mural, and the old BCL publications are near-ready for republication and redistribution in this project’s future home, the Institute for Genomic Biology.

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More on Reflexivity, Reflectivity, and Cybernetics

That last post was distilled from a talk I gave last week about Illinois’ Biological Computer Lab - this talk is now archived online in audio and pdf form. You can find it here - scroll down to “The Biological Computer Lab: A Radical Piece of CU History”.

Beyond Cynicism: Accounting for Reflexivity

My friend Dick Keyes describes cynicism as an act of “seeing through,” of claiming to perceive the real heart of things, the true motivations behind another’s actions. The cynic proudly and selfishly presumes to know another’s heart, even in the quest for truth. In this light, critique without cynicism looks ever harder. I recently discovered some help for this problem within cybernetics.

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Local Racism, Global Politics, and a National Audience

[a version of this article was originally published in the Public-I, an independent Urbana newspaper.]

Imagine if the University of Illinois sponsored a frank and contentious discussion about race, education, war, and the responsibility of globally-minded activists toward injustices in their own backyard. Imagine if among the participants were local citizens, and not only academic workers or students. Now imagine such an event broadcast on national television, during primetime, for ninety minutes. This all happened, forty years ago.
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Cybernetics as a Rhetorical Strategy

[in response to some recent posts on Nettime and from Brian Holmes' excellent blog.]

The distinction between first-order and second-order cybernetics, and therefore possibly between a better and worse application of the cybernetic lens, invites further discussion about what that lens lends.

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Passage to Urbana

Today, on the late Heinz von Foerster’s 97th birthday, two missionaries asked me on the street whether my dog had been castrated.

Today, on Heinz von Foerster’s 97th birthday, Ricardo Uribe treated me to a gyro sandwich. I learned that before he fled Pinochet’s Chile for a post at Urbana, he helped wire the control room for Allende’s Cybersyn system.

Today, on von Foerster’s 97th birthday, I came the closest to establishing my government’s role in Heinz’s emigration from Austria.

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Unesco Confused by Facebook (1971)

“(Whereupon the experts, who, really, were only specialists, refused to vote on the proposal. Some argued that it was irrelevant to the meeting’s theme. Some argued that it would offend member states in UNESCO. This argument was flatly denied by the participating representatives of UNESCO, but to no avail.)”

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The Biological Computer Lab

I’ve been researching a history at my University that took me awhile to discover - that of Heinz Von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory. I heard of it awhile back and made note of it, but only recently found an excuse to dig in, a possible project dealing with it.

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