Andrew Pickering: Varieties of Cybernetics: Ontology, Critique, Politics


SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL – THE DARK UNIVERSE Andrew Pickering: Varieties of Cybernetics: Ontology, Critique, Politics 24 February 2013 – De Balie, Amsterdam, the Netherlands --- What is the allure of cybernetics, what draws people to it? We teach our children to think of the world as a predictable place bound by laws, natural as well as man-made. Modern science reveals what the consistencies are, enabling us to control the world and refashion it to suit our own ends. Politically, this is what many want to escape. This is where cybernetics comes in. Its ontology is different. It begins from the assumption that the world is ultimately unknowable, a place of emergence and becoming that will always surprise us. Andrew Pickering (UK) is now Professor of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Exeter and currently a Senior Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), Bauhaus University, Weimar, DE. His books include Constructing Quarks; The Mangle of Practice; and most recently, The Cybernetic Brain. His current research explores questions of agency and emergence in art and environmental management.

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