Cybernetics, pioneered by thinkers such as Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Norbert Wiener, explores systems, feedback, and communication, illuminating patterns of control, learning, and adaptation across machines, organisms, and societies.
The American Society for Cybernetics continues the annual conference—held early August in Ouro Preto, Brazil—online from August 24 to 27. Eight sessions in all. The link takes you directly to the ASC hub. See you online!
MONDAY, AUGUST 24 | ONLINE. Following on from RSD15: São Paulo, the group discusses how Stafford Beer’s vision of freedom, viability, and autonomy continues to resonate within Latin American experiences of social, ecological, and institutional transformation.
Conversational Confluences at the ASC Conference: Abbie VanMeter talks with 8 participants about their experience and what cybernetics means to them.
SEPTEMBER 17–19, 2026 | Alliance Manchester Business School. Organised in collaboration with the World Organisation for Systems and Cybernetics, the Centre for Systems Studies (University of Hull), and the International Federation for Systems Research, with parallel events at partner organisations including the American Society of Cybernetics and the International Society of Systems Sciences.
Human Movie was screened in 2025 and can now be watched on Vimeo. The film considers AI as a filter for noise and asks what is being modelled?
AUG 24–27. ONLINE. This programme brings the ASC 2026 conference, with its overarching theme of Conversational Confluences, into the context of RSD15’s Designing within a Plural World. The two meet on shared ground as both view diversity as a source of collective learning and creativity. [RSD15.INFO]
Ray Ison: The systems community has lost a founding voice. What we carry forward is the practice of inquiry he spent a lifetime refining.
Richard David Hames in memoriam for Edgar Morin, French sociologist, philosopher, public intellectual, and theorist of complex thought. Photo Oliver Dion.
Eryk Salvaggio offers a “very light gloss” of the paper, The Market in the Model, which extends dataset critique by examining the latent diffusion model’s internal mechanisms as a neural economy.
Claudia Westermann’s editorial opens the new issue of Constructivist Foundations 20(2).
MARCH 25 | ONLINE [precedes Sir John Kay] Explore, from the origins to the present day, how we’ve arrived at the unpredictable and fast-moving theoretical, technical, and business advances that will inevitably impact the future of our society.
Exploring the relationship between scripts and life through six articles examining instruction manuals, genetic codes, algorithmic systems and AI-generated imagery. Claudia Westermann’s editorial is open access.
If Geoffrey Hinton and others agree that the greatest danger in AI is its capacity to persuade, we need to develop more resistance to every claim it makes.
Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gathering more users in less time than any product launch in history.
Much of the most intense debate in AI defaults to “you don’t even understand the technology.” But I suspect the most significant distinction is not whether we understand how a model works, but in how we interpret what the structure is doing.
A great deal of suffering arises when we act on our imaginations of the world, rather than working toward clarity. As such, it’s the role of those who care about a topic to articulate the contours of the space. AI is one such space, and debate, at the current moment, is pretty vigorous.
This is a discussion between Camila Galaz, Emma Wiseman, and Eryk Salvaggio, collaborators behind an experimental workshop linking puppetry and generative AI.
OCT 12, 2025 | ONLINE. The cybernetic takeover begins with a speculative address on language-in-action hinged on uncertainty, moves through questions of design ethics and pedagogies, and ends with organisation and modelling of viable systems. In a world where our actions create a ripple effect, we ask: how can systemic design become a living ecology that catalyses conversation?
OCT 12 2025 | ONLINE. A full day of cybernetics at RSD14. The programme includes a range of cybernetic enactments considering how effects unfold in ever-expanding time and scale through a dynamic interplay of components with wholeness emerging from relationships.
Reasoning models are part of a shift in strategy for AI companies as model developers turn to different architectures or strategies for how the models construct text. It also, some argue, allows for more complex problem solving.
By saving time, AI means designers have the option not to think about parts of the process. The decision not to decide, paradoxically, requires enormous expertise. The cultivation of that expertise comes through the experience of making decisions.
Remarks from an in-person debate, ‘L’IA en question, questions à l’IA’, a two-day event at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on May 24/25. The event focused on debates about the role of AI in contemporary society.
Eryk Salvaggio’s remarks from the Artificial Intelligence & Contemporary Creation Conference, May 24, 2025.
Heidegger’s main critique of technology is that it reduces everything to something to be used, optimized, and controlled. First order cybernetics fits perfectly into this framing. Photo: https://www.heidegger-gesellschaft.de/en/
Experimental psychologist Adam Mastroianni says “I’m trying to do something a little bit weird here.” This week, cybernetic minds, control systems, and error-driven emotions
Salvaggio: “In London, the question was a bit more pointed: How do I justify using AI as an artist, knowing the technology’s environmental impact?”
The recent re-emergence of chatter about whether AI “experiences the world” and therefore ought to have something akin to human rights. In the piece, Eryk Salvaggio argues that they don’t need them.
This book is for researchers and educators, and practitioners working to understand and achieve a better hybrid environment and who have been working in or with different types of boundaries, including technological, cultural, and physical boundaries in built environments.
Are pro- and anti-AI camps talking about the same thing when they say “useful”?
Selected papers from the 60th Anniversary Meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics, “Living Cybernetics Playing Language,” edited by Claudia Westermann.
HUMAN ITINERARY TOUR. More information, more noise. More noise, more freedom to choose. And then what? It’s the hope of the curators that this exhibition mirrors that process of sense-making: moving the visitor from overwhelm to detail, then allowing a greater view of the whole.
Signal to Noise examines the history of noise in communication technologies. It includes switchboards for telephones, computers and desktops for the Internet, and the algorithmic restructuring of the social media feed. It is an examination of evolving definitions of noise, and the struggle to keep noise out.
Justin Hendrix in conversation with four individuals who are following DOGE closely: Eryk Salvaggio, Rebecca Williams, Emily Tavoulareas, and Matthew Kirschenbaum. Podcast & transcript. (Image from Salvaggio’s film “Human Movie: Meditations on a Compression Algorithm.”)
Gaining traction in the bleakest depths of 2020, Generative AI offered something more than just a tech product. It proposed a way of reimagining the future. Having lost all hope for a democratic process in which biopolitics, climate politics, racial politics and electoral politics were exhausting us all, we turned to a hype network.
Epistemological error describes a foundational fault in ways of knowing. The error is a pervasive failing to attend to relations(hips). Mapping Gregory Bateson’s Ecologies of Mind, Part One.
Neuroscientists—Luiz Pessoa posts a recommendation on X and Sean Manion replies with a letter from 1944.