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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’?

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

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