[spectre] Leonardo Electronic Almanac - Call for Papers

[Lanfranco Aceti]

Cybernetics Revisited – Towards A Third Order?, Leonardo Electronic Almanac

Senior Editors for this volume: Lanfranco Aceti and Morten Søndergaard.

Is the world ultimately unknowable – if considered as a place where
genuine novelty is always emerging? Is it possible to look at the
history of cybernetics as something that provides us with “an
imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to
the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other?”
(Andrew Pickering, 2011).

What if we explore Pickering’s arguments further and locate them into
the interactive media art field, thereby investigating the status of
cybernetics today in art, technology and science? What levels of
‘order’ and systematic communication enter into the transdisciplinary
artistic, technological and scientific set-up of present-day
cross-domain laboratories, and practice-based theoretical production
and experiments?

Von Foerster coined the idea of a ‘cybernetics of cybernetics’ as a
way to analyze the control of control and the (set-up of)
communication of communication(-systems). The question is if a ‘third
order’ cybernetics is emerging… and, if so, what would it entail?

Paper Proposals dealing with one or more of the following subjects
within this conceptual framing will be welcome:

(Norbert) Wiener Classic
Cybernetics, art and politics
Bio-cybernetics
Interactive media art – towards a ‘third order’?

500 word abstract deadline August 31, 2012

Please send proposals to: info at leoalmanac.org

http://www.leoalmanac.org/cybernetics-revisited-lea-call-for-papers/