Diego Gómez-Venegas is a media researcher and media artist based in Berlin. He studies the processes of knowledge formation, the reconfiguration of power flows, and the constitution of collective wholes that media technologies may activate and set in motion.
Diego holds a PhD (Dr. phil.) in Media Studies (Medienwissenschaft) from the Humboldt University of Berlin. There he developed a media archaeo-genealogical investigation of Project Cybersyn, redrawing the technological circuits of this case in order to trace and problematize its techno-epistemological, techno-political, and techno-ontological dimensions. This work consisted mainly of in-depth archival work, supported by aspects of oral history and art research. The e-doc version of this research is available on the Open Access server of the Humboldt University and can be found here (despite the German abstract there, the document is in English).
Other writings of his on this subject are “Forgetting / Cybernetics” in History of Media Studies (Pennsylvania, 2024), “Encoding from/to the Real: On Cybersyn’s Symbolic Politics of Transmission,” in Frictions (Lüneburg, 2023), “Towards the Operative Objects of Post-Capitalism,” with Zerené and Cotoras, in APRJA (Aarhus, 2021), and “Cybersyn and the symbolic memory of paper” in Artnodes (Barcelona, 2019).
Diego’s doctoral research was supported by a scholarship of Chile’s National Agency of Research and Development (ANID, formerly CONICYT).
In late 2019 and early 2020 – just before the pandemic – Diego conceived and organized a lecture series called Applied Cybernetics, which, sponsored by the Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, took place both at the Media Theater of the Humboldt University and at the Einstein Center Digital Future. Based on this experience, in 2021 Diego began working on transforming some of the discussions that this lecture series made possible into a book. More authors were invited to participate in this project, and financial support from the Open Access Program of Humboldt University was secured. The result was the book Frictions: Inquiries into Cybernetic Thinking and Its Attempts towards Mate[real]ization, published by meson press in 2023 – the digital version of which can be downloaded here.
Previously, until February 2018, Diego was an assistant professor at the University of Chile, in Santiago. There, he taught in the undergraduate design program of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, as well as in the master program in media arts of the Faculty of the Arts. Through these appointments, he supervised more than 20 thesis projects. During this period, Diego also developed art-research projects at the intersection of media arts and experimental design; all, as a mode of inquiry into media cultures and the techno-logical apparatuses that sustain them. Examples of this are Searching for Euclid (Santiago, 2016), Informe (Santiago, 2016), Algorithmic Mediations for Agonism (Santiago, 2016), and Remoteness of Light (Reykjavík, 2015).
Diego was also the editor of the book Frictions: Inquiries into Cybernetic Thinking and Its Attempts towards Mate[real]ization (Lüneburg, 2023); responsible editor of the inaugural issue of the journal Canal: cuadernos de estudios visuales y mediales (Santiago, 2017); co-editor of the book Aciclopedia: Compendium on Form Beyond Canon (Santiago, 2017); and co-author and co-editor of the book Mediaciones Algorítmicas para el Agonismo (Santiago, 2016). Similarly, he is the translator of Mieke Bal’s “El compromiso con el mirar” for Canal 2-3 (Santiago, 2019), and the author of “Experimental Design as Archaeological Practice” in Diseña (Santiago, 2018); “La máquina abierta – una máquina odisea” in Qual Quelle (Santiago, 2018); and co-author of “Nature Ex-Novo” in Kepes (Manizales, 2017).
Diego also holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Design Media Arts from UCLA, which he achieved thanks to the support of scholarships from the Fulbright Commission and Chile’s National Commission of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT).
email: diego[at]gomezvenegas[dot]com
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5640-204X
bluesky: [at]digomezvenegas[dot]bsky[dot]social
mastodon: [at]digomezvenegas[at]mastodon[dot]social
instagram: [at]digomezvenegas