International Colloquium

Creativity and a Cybernetic Concept of Culture

More than 70 years after Norbert Wiener’s original framing of the term cybernetics, the overlap between living systems and technology has become ubiquitous, while the theoretical framing of technology and its attendant discourse still often remain opaque. Issues of technological saturation, infrastructural and ecological resilience and universality have become fundamental for thinking technology from the 1990s onwards, and have precipitated a necessary deconstruction of classical binaries, such as nature/culture or technology/culture. Today, the concrete existence of automated landscapes, smart cities and vast wireless internet coverage have constituted a new ground for the figure of culture. What role can theory play in the formulation of this space and how can it problematize and detail the construction of a robust technical semiotics? In what way to properly interrogate the connection between cybernetics and culture, and which questions and problems are relevant to the project of sustainable inter-species and inter-cultural cohabitation moving forward?

The colloquium will aim to explore and problematize the resonance between culture and cybernetics by bringing together academics and professionals working in the field of digital art, new media, sociology, philosophy of technology, and the wider post-humanities.

KREAS kolokvium / Panel I

Saturday, 15 October 2022, 20.00 - 21.00

The panel will feature artist talks by artists and academics working with digital tools in sound and 3D imaging technologies. Discussion follows.

Lukáš Prokop (FaVU VUT), Noemi Purkrábková (FFUK), Lenka Veselá (FaVU VUT), moderated by Vít Bohal

KREAS kolokvium / Panel II

Sunday, 16 October 2022, 20.00 - 21.00

The panel will speculatively question the position of difference and sameness on the level of culture as determined by technological means. In what ways have cybernetics kept their original meaning of “steering” capital towards a presumed end point, and how can such a sense of looming universality be rethought, resituated and repurposed? What is the potential for a cosmotechnical shift from “Western” technics, and where to find space for what Yuk Hui has termed “technodiversity” which, going into the future, might be a prerequisite for the continued sustainability of diversity and life on Earth? Discussion follows.

Louis Armand (FFUK), Václav Janoščík (AVU), Noemi Purkrábková (FFUK), Lukáš Prokop (FaVU VUT), Lenka Veselá (FaVU VUT), moderated by Vít Bohal