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Yuk Hui (ed)
Cybernetics for the 21st Century
Ralf Baecker
Cybernetic Imaginaries
Swiss artist collective Fragmentin premieres G80 (2023), a Mudac-commissioned interactive installation, within the London Design Biennale “Global Game” exhibition at Somerset House. A console interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game” of equitable resource distribution, G80 challenges notions of total control and technocracy. 80 correlated sliders invite negotiation of societal values—freedom, GDP, ecology etc.—and taunt viewers with a motorized choreography when left alone.
“Cognitive assemblages are collectivities—not exclusively human, not exclusively organic—through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate.”
As part of its research into early cybernetics, architecture, and 1960s socialism, Berlin’s Zentrum für Netzkunst looks into Czechoslovakia’s 1967 plans for a “happy city.” Run by computers and featuring an underground delivery system, Etarea was a never-realized vision for a 350,000-strong community near Prague. “Its goal was a more balanced way of life through cybernetics and automation,” writes urbanist Maroš Krivý. “It should provide a sense of home and belonging, otherwise lost in the rapidly transforming socialist society.”
“Who’s the spacesuit behind the wheel?”—“That’s the Kybernaut, of course.”
From Chile’s Cybersyn to the AMLO in East Berlin—with “Calculating Control,” Zentrum für Netzkunst launches an exhibition and symposium that explores the links between 1960s socialism and cybernetics in the context of today’s network society. Taking over the former lobby of Berlin’s Haus der Statistik, works by Suzanne Treister, Roland Kayn, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeld, and others invite site-specific reflection: in the 1970s, the high-rise at Alexanderplatz housed a data center that helped steer the former GDR’s central planning using mainframes and cybernetics.
In his Quanta guest column “How Claude Shannon Invented the Future,” Stanford Professor of Engineering David Tse relates how the American mathematician’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” birthed information theory. “Shannon’s genius lay in his observation that the key to communication is uncertainty,” writes Tse. His concept of the information ‘bit’ (short for binary digit) as the “basic unit of uncertainty” introduced probabilistic data modelling and signal processing, heralding the coming of the Information Age.
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