GMU:Cybernetic Subjects - Ursula Damm (Georg Trogemann)

Beginning in the nineteen thirties and continuing through and after World War II, scientists developed increasingly sophisticated mechanical and electrical systems that seemed to have purpose. This intersected with research on animal cognition and early computing and led to a new perspective on mechanical, electrical, biological, and social systems, resulting in a unifying theory known as cybernetics. Although today the computer has become the driving force and steering mechanism of our civilization in an unprecedented development, the original ideas relating to cybernetics have faded from view. Cybernetics - with the computer as a means - became too much a synonym for control and domination, while at the same time almost every corner of our earth was digitally penetrated.  A kind of digital organism was created not only through governance, but also through self-organization.

Today, we are not only living with digital machines, but also with the environmental consequences of them, and we have to realize that our world is changing - in a way that we had not anticipated.

Reason enough to address this development as a culture - or unculture - by looking at the actors who are involved. And the sets of rules in the world that currently surrounds us, in which they are involved or even develop them themselves in a game of feedback and recursion.

But also by critically scrutinizing the consequences of digitalization and asking ourselves whether we can choose or invent other forms of technization? And where we have made mistakes in the past?

It is up to you - the students - to ensure that this does not develop as a project of criticism, because the aim of the project is to produce (art) works, concepts, performances and proposals for actions that develop practices out of an understanding of the environment, which unfold in their reciprocal relationships between the acting subjects - be they humans, animals, plants or machines.

Please apply with a portfolio with ursula.damm at uni-weimar.de

An excursion to Schieferpark in the first week of December is part of the module.

Literature:

• Yuk Hui: Cybernetics for the 21st Century
• Thomas Dreher: History of Computer Art
• David Maulén de los Reyes: Re-Imagining Modernization in Chile—The Active School Movement, Integral Co-op Architecture, Second-Order Cybernetics—Lessons from the Bauhaus and Beyond