Thinking inside out: Cybernetics and Viable Utopias

In the organizer's words:

In the joint lecture series "thinking inside out" by ZKM and HfG, we invite international guests from the fields of philosophy, literature and art to an open exchange with university members, ZKM staff and the people of Karlsruhe.

The talk by José-Carlos Mariátegui deals with the lesser-known travels and collaborations of the British cyberneticist Stafford Beer in Latin America, which go beyond the famous Cybersyn project in Chile. Beer's work traversed a complex business and political terrain that began in the 1960s through his company SIGMA and its projects with the Chilean steel industry. His ideas on real-time corporate information and control systems also influenced a relatively unknown project in the 1970s, the Centre for the Study of People's Participation (CENTRO), founded by Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro in Peru.

The talk also looks at Beer's involvement in various projects across Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s as the region gradually returned to democracy, including experiences in Mexico, Uruguay (URUCIB), Venezuela (Cybervenez) and Colombia, and how cybernetics became a language of 'viable utopias' that in some ways challenged the technocratic views of technology use prevalent in state projects.

This is more than a technical story, it is a story about how computational thinking can become a radical act of creative liberation.

Location: Medialounge