Workshops
Foundations of Cybernetics
Before the conference begins, participants are invited to a preconference session offered by Larry Richards. The session offers an introduction to some key distinctions that cybernetics highlights. These distinctions form a set of concepts. The set of concepts create a scaffolding for cybernetics as a field of inquiry. Included are two foundational concepts for all human inquiry (distinction, system), two domains of cybernetics (relations, dynamics), four pillars/cornerstones of cybernetics, five characteristics of all systems, five stages of system evolution, and two dialectical pairs (communication/conversation, control/autonomy). The session will be interactive and will explore areas of special relevance – like cognition, language, conversation, design, decision-making, radical constructivism – as time permits.
Larry Richards is Professor Emeritus of Management and Informatics at Indiana University East. Before retiring, he served for 32 years as an administrator in three universities. He now resides in Portland, Maine, USA. His interests include the arts, technology, and society. He is a past President of the American Society for Cybernetics (1986-88) and was recipient of the ASC Norbert Wiener Medal (2007).
#NewMacy Café: Conversations on Four Potentially Controversial Issues in Modern Cybernetics
After some introductory comments, and depending on the number of attendees, this #NewMacy café-style session will divide into smaller salon-style groups to discuss one or more of four potentially controversial issues in current cybernetics. These are conceptual issues, conversations on which could contribute to a confluence of new ideas in, approaches to, or perspectives on our joint field of inquiry. The four issues proposed for conversation include: (1) treating desires as constraints and intention as an awareness of those constraints as an alternative to desires as goals and intention as a planned trajectory toward those goals (as an approach to the cybernetics of design and the design of society); (2) treating the domains of relations and dynamics (explanations/descriptions and experience/action) as non-intersecting (i.e., of different logical type) as an alternative to the search for a grand theory of everything (as a cybernetic approach to knowledge, understanding and wisdom); (3) treating a consciousness of presence as an alternative to a consciousness of purpose (as an approach to self, democracy and time); and (4) treating the cybernetician as a craftsperson in and with time as an alternative to the cybernetician as a scientist, with time as given, external and unchangeable (as an approach to cybernetics as a process involving science, art and craft). After about a half an hour, the groups will reconvene to explore implications.
Larry Richards, Professor Emeritus of Management and Informatics, Indiana University East, with other #NewMacy participants
Brain: An Interactive Table Read
In this workshop, we will stage an interactive table read of Lionel Britton’s 1930 play, Brain: A play of the whole earth. In Brain, humans participate in a collective knowledge project that is global, collaborative, and targeted at what one might call “social good.” Social good encompasses physical and mental health, relational and social wellbeing, economic justice and the resolution of broader environmental concerns.
For us, Brain functions in multiple ways. It connects to our wider interests in computing, technology, and social science more generally in times of rising fascism. Brain is a resistance narrative that explores how people might otherwise engage in a collective knowledge system based on other imperatives than capitalism. Brain, in our formulation, is a playground for dialogue between humans and the technologies they create.
Brain will feature as a key focus in the next iteration of our collaborate research project, exploring the text as a tool for AI education more broadly. In staging this table read we are asking the attendees at the conference to perform with us a crucial “pre-production” stage in our research development. In a table read all members of a production read through the core text and begin to understand the world they will create together. We aim to perform a theory of Brain and consider what such a performance enables.
Doing Conversational Confluence – in Practice
Let\\\'s think together about what “biointeraction” and “(conversational) confluences” could mean for us in our everyday lives in practical terms – and how we can use our cybernetic concepts, methods, and experiences to achieve this. We will consider where we may already be doing quite well in this regard, and where we would like to improve. And which of our cybernetic and constructivist concepts can be helpful in this endeavor.
As a scientist, I am interested in theoretical concepts; as a social worker, I am concerned with putting them into practice; as a citizen, I am interested in constructively contributing to political processes. So, in my own actions and in the actions of the people around me, it is about how we can tolerate and even use the coexistence of different worldviews, political beliefs, practices, and epistemologies—and how we can still live together constructively with people who think and act differently from us, or precisely because of this: How can we put this into practice, how can we behave, what can we ourselves contribute to successful conversational confluences?
Conversational confluences are undoubtedly possible for each of us. In the workshop, we will find this out for ourselves by working on the following questions, among others:
In which situations do confluences already emerge for us, and how do we enact them?
When do they remain difficult—and still succeed?
In which areas of our life would we like to become more capable of confluence?
If we had a well-developed concept or “practice guide” for conversational confluence, where would we apply it?
How might such a guide look?
How does cybernetics help us articulate it?
Communication, Co-Creation, Coordination: Conversations Beyond Words
Before meaningful change can occur in our social worlds, we must ask whether individuals understand themselves as active participants with real choices about how they communicate. Without a sense of agency, people perceive themselves as powerless in a random or unjust world.
This workshop intervenes at that root story of inefficacy. Drawing on Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), second-order cybernetics, and improvisational practice, it equips participants to see communication not as transmission but as co-creation. CMM holds that persons-in-conversation co-construct their social realities and are simultaneously shaped by the worlds they create, a claim resonant with Bateson, Pask, and Nachmanovitch\'s cybernetic attention to embodiment, reflexivity, and play.
Beyond verbal exchange, this workshop engages multiple modalities: movement, sound, and embodied non-verbal communication as vehicles for generating \"differences that make a difference.\" Through exercises drawn from Interplay and Spolin theater games, participants will experience and reflect on the critical moments of uncertainty and possibility within communication.
Playful, participatory, and theoretically grounded, this workshop explores how improvisation and coordination open new ways of human-being-in-the-world.
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