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February 2008,
CyberSyn in Berlin
The Transmediale.08 Conference took place in Berlin during the week of the 28th of January (www.transmediale.de). This is an annual cultural event in the German capital, which this year was focused on the intersection of the digital technology and our contemporary communications’ culture. One of the sessions was “The Chilean Network Experiment”, or the CyberSyn project of the early 1970s. The Conference overall theme was CONSPIRING, alluding to the potentials of Internet to support all kind of communications, which can be highly creative but also deceptive and the source of mal practices. One of the key technical developments of the Chilean project was a network of telex machines –Cybernet- that in October 1972 helped workers and managers alike to experience the difference between communications and information. Cybernet was a technology at hand that helped the government to respond to a damaging strike of retailers and truck owners. At the time it dawned that CyberNet could be a tool to increase their capabilities for decision making; with it their decisions could flow and reach each other in almost real time. I discuss all this in the paper “CyberSyn and the reconstruction of a holistic nature” (available as pdf file in this website. Also I’m including file with my presentation in Spanish).
Below I’m attaching photographs taken during the event and also three visual reminders of what was done in the early 70s.
Prof. Raul Espejo
respejo@syncho2.demon.co.uk
Raul Espejo (Syncho Ltd and Director of theWorld Organization for Systems and Cybernetics), Alejandra Perez (Transmediale Programme Co-curator), Fernando Flores (Senator of the Republic of Chile), Eden Medina (Moderator of the symposium “The Chilean Network Experiment: from Poetics to Systemics”) and Stephen Kovatz (Artistic Director of the Transmediale ’08 Conference)
Angel Parra singing “Lithany for a computer and a baby
about to be born”, written by him in collaboration
with Stafford Beer in 1973
Humberto Maturana and Raul Espejo at Transmediale ‘08
Eden Medina and Raul Espejo getting ready for the session
Cybernet’s geographic structure in 1971
Stafford Beer (1973) explaining how to select information
from a data base using the panel of a chair in the
Operations Room- CyberSyn Project
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