I just finished my belated reading of Yuk Hui’s Recursivity and Contingency (2019). I wished I had read it before or during my PhD work, but I simply didn’t get around to it. It’s really a great and illuminating work. I myself have argued elsewhere that cybernetic thinking can be thought of much as Simondon […]
Thanks to Raphael Arar’s suggestion, I recently read Luke Munn and Liam Magee’s “Other Worlds: Using AI to Revisit Cybersyn and Rethink Economic Futures” paper (see it here). Their approach is certainly innovative and interesting. However, I couldn’t help but think of two alternative paths that could be derived from their paper. On the one […]
Also at the Semiotic Machines conference a few weeks ago, the US scholar Lisa Gitelman made a very interesting connection between early type specimens – the booklets published by type foundries both to advertise and demonstrate how to compose text with their typefaces (see Reynolds 2022) – and contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). According to […]
Last week I attended the Semiotic Machines conference here in Berlin. At the opening panel on the first day, the philosopher Beatrice Fazi said something that intrigued me and has kept me thinking ever since. She said – I’m paraphrasing from memory here – that in order to address the challenges that AI systems pose […]
Our book Frictions: Inquiries into Cybernetic Thinking and Its Attempts towards Mate[real]ization has recently been published by meson press. The open access PDF version is free, and I invite you all to download it. Similarly, print copies can be purchased online from the vendors listed on meson’s website. Please consider recommending our book to your […]
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Google saying that my Location History data would be erased soon since I haven’t used their tracking service for a while. In fact, I now think that the only reason why I stopped using that feature – which probably I never turned on myself but […]
As a continuation of an earlier post, this entry aims to explain in a little more detail my work around the notion of techno-diagrammatics and Beer’s Cybernetic Model of Contemporary Capitalism. As I expected, I discussed elements of this work in two meetings. In April, I participated in project Antikythera’s Synthetic Catallaxy workshop in Mexico […]
For some time now, I have been working with what I call techno-diagrammatics. This notion is the product of my study of an old, unpublished manuscript that Stafford Beer developed during his last visit to Chile in June-July 1973; a document in which he attempted to model the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, and which I […]
Going from November 2019 to February 2020, and taking place both in Humboldt University of Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future, the Applied Cybernetics lectures series was a project I coordinated and curated, aiming to develop an open discussion on the frictions that may have emerged when cybernetic thinking and its conceptual frameworks were […]
[This is a bilingual note. Español más abajo.] [EN] Last June 8th, I had the joy and privilege of opening the Forum on Current States of the Technological Automation organized by the Chilean publishing house, Qual Quelle. More concretely, it was an initiative put together by the philosopher Zeto Bórquez, who was not only able […]
During this summer semester 2020 (April to July/August-September), I will be teaching a seminar class for Master students at the Institute of Musicology and Media Sciences of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The class will be connected to some of the developments coming from my doctoral research on project Cybersyn, and hence it will tackle the concept […]
Why is that us, humans, want to get close/er to the machines? Last Wednesday we had the first lecture of our series on Applied Cybernetics. There, Dr. Stefan Höltgen gave a talk on the Actualization of Cybernetic Learning, through which he presented the work he and his team did restoring the MORE computer; a device […]
[This note is, for now, only available in Spanish. Entschuldigen Sie.] El pensamiento cibernético está teniendo un interesante y a la vez excitante resurgimiento en algunos campos de estudio –particularmente en aquellos, tal como era previsible, donde se busca impulsar con fuerza los desarrollos y asociaciones transdisciplinarias en torno a las tecnologías y las culturas mediales. Resurgimiento […]