Sonic Acts Festival: Amsterdam: 24/2/13

The brilliant Andrew Pickering (The Cybernetic Brain) will be talking about our work with the Bodycoder at Sonic Acts this Sunday his keynote: Cybernetics and the Politics of the Dark Universe - is part of the conference day 'Ontologies of the Unknown'...we are extremely honoured, and SO pleased for the work to be recognized as operating within a larger political and ontological context...

Abstract:
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.

For physicists and cosmologists, the discovery that ninety per cent of the universe is mysterious ‘dark matter’ is a self-generated challenge—to tame the mystery and place it within the context of the known and predictable. Cyberneticians, in contrast, work with the assumption that we live in a ‘dark universe’– and that’s it, full stop. This is the source of cybernetics’ allure—an alternative and non-modern notion of what the world is like, which invites us to rethink from scratch all of the traditional academic, artistic and, certainly, political problematics.

SONIC ACTS