All posts filed under: cybernetics

Thinking Cybernetics

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algorithm / apparatus of capture / authority / biopolitics / call for papers / code / control / cybernetics / desiring machines / einstein / ethics / humanity / language / media / metaphysics / technology

(Matt Dixon) Thinking Cybernetics: Mapping the Intersections between Metaphysics, Technology, Biopolitics (abstract for panel) The purpose of this panel is to gather together ideas, perspectives, and questions from a diverse variety of thinkers and disciplines relating to the theory and practice of cybernetics. Our goal is to raise a series of critical questions concerning the intersection between biopolitics, metaphysics, and technology. While each paper is devoted to a specific author or authors and is generally […]

Deconstructing Cybernetics

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abstract machine / catastrophe / chaos / communication / conservatism / cybernetics / decentralization / derrida / distinction / exteriority / godel / humanity / machine / metaphysics / ontology / spencer-brown / spirit / writing

Notes on Derrida and Cybernetics Let us conjecture that the invention of the transistor — an auto-controllable circuit — indicates the attainment of a critical level of development in cybernetics, a “tipping point.” Then for writing the corresponding moment is the invention of the video camera, perhaps more precisely the photograph: now seeing is writing, literally marking. Visio-literature is the only kind that can ever exists for us today — even ancient literature is post-modern […]

Systems of Control: Derrida and Machines

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automation / control / cybernetics / derrida / history / human / machine / metaphysics / nonhuman / system

(notes for an abstract) If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts — including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory — which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, written mark, or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. […[E]ven before being determined as human… or nonhuman, the gramme — or the […]

Literary Machines: Between Drama and Artificial Intelligence

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actualization / artificial intelligence / behavior / being / cinema / cybernetics / drama / existence / image / interactivity / interface / language / one / reverie / story / theory

Insofar as it tends towards a studied negation (or counter-actualization) of our numb existence, endlessly dramatizing the existential narrative of escape, contemporary cinema conveys an intense and disturbing truth about modern reality. It is not just the easy and everyday dissociation that life is a movie, but more surprisingly, that movies have become indistinguishable from our real lives. Drama is not merely a terrifying absence, simply the dissolution of the synchrony of the One, but […]

Universal Computation and The Laws of Form

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algorithm / complexity / computation / consciousness / cybernetics / deduction / emil post / godel / hologram / hooft / information / information processing / laws of form / physics / psychoanalysis / quantum gravity / spencer-brown / string theory / structure / Turing / wolfram

Remarks on Turing and Spencer-Brown (Joseph Weissman) Introduction Computation is holographic. Information processing is a formal operation made abstract only by a reduction in the number of free variables, a projective recording which analyzes from all angles the entropy or information contained in the space. Thus, basing my results partly on Hooft’s holographic conjecture for physics (regarding the equivalence of string theory and quantum theory,) and by extending Spencer-Brown’s work on algebras of distinction (developed […]

Simondon and the Machine: Technology, Individuation, Reality

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biology / crystal / cybernetics / form / individuation / knowledge / machine / physics / psychology / Science / Mathematics / Technology / Simondon / structure / technology / tension

Fractal Effervescence (2006), David April   Simondon and the Theory of Individuation There is something eternal in a technical scheme… and it is that which is always present, and can be conserved in a thing. Gilbert Simondon Gilbert Simondon’s reformulation of information theory on the basis of a new philosophy of technology has, in comparison to earlier attempts, at least the following major advantages to its credit: – His thought introduces us to an entirely […]

Machinic Autopoesis

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abstract machine / biology / cybernetics / form / information / model / ontology / structure / system / theory

Process In Mechanism and Biological Explanation [Maturana 1970], Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela argue that machines and biological forms are very closely related — so closely, in fact, that biologists can reasonably claim living systems are machines. This is not meant merely as a pedagogical metaphor, but rather as a rigorous analogy, which emphasizes important symmetries, and even better, expresses concisely specific experimental and theoretical aims. In what sense, then, are living systems machines? A […]

Seven Machines: Theses for a Cybernetics of Ontology

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artificial intelligence / cybernetics / guattari / interface / machines / ontology / problem space

A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms… What fractal machines traverse are substantial scales. They traverse them in engendering them. But, and this should be noted, the existential coordinates that they ‘invent’ were always already there… we need to […]