.... 2012 Joint Conference of the American Society for Cybernetics and the Bateson Idea Group 9-13 July 2012 in Asilomar, California

Table of Contents

Introduction and Themes 2

Schedule 3

Venue Map 5 Supported by:

Film 6

Plenary Presenters 7

Abstracts 15

Organizers 37

An Ecology of Ideas Themes

Our ideas form, grow, and thrive in relationship. We seek to find a balance between the Ideas inspire and transform each other and their spontaneous and the planned. We intend to seed bio-cultural medium. New ones emerge conversations with various forms of presentation, unexpectedly, some persist, some change, and ranging from keynote speakers to workshops and some are lost, as if they were living. performances; all of which can be considered works The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) of art in the domain of ideas. Three particular and Bateson Idea Group (BIG) come together to themes pertain to our notion of “an ecology of ideas”: hold a conference on the relations among ideas as seen from multiple perspectives. We come from Paradigm many disciplines but have common roots including What do our current paradigms determine or enable, cybernetics, circularity, reflexivity, language, culture and what would changes to these imply? How could and systems. For many of us these roots are we guess what other things would change along enmeshed with biology, information, pattern, design, with the changes we desire? How would we art, aesthetics, ethics and more. implement a shift in an ethical and socially In a world rife with factionalism and acceptable manner? disenchantment, we will engage in conversations to integrate disciplines of knowing while taking into Recursion account our histories and considering our futures. Recursion (like its fellow concepts, self-reference We will regard both the parts and the whole that and reflexivity) is open to many interpretations arises from the relations between the parts — and depending on who you are, and the context you are thus becomes the context for all the parts. We are interested in. We are interested in both what is held concerned with the world that arises from how we in common between these different interpretations, live our ideas. and what is particular to each. We wish to explore ASC and BIG have common interests in dynamic not only the implications of acting based on how we systems of thought, wisdom and learning. We understand these ideas, but also what happens accept that there are many views and value when we proceed unaware of the differences. exploring the relationships between them, rather than in insisting that any view is “right”. Praxis Why are praxis and theory often separated; and Arising how can they better be brought together? In what In the ecology of mind ways are the ideas of cybernetics and systems ideas are alive inherently concerned with practice? Does the phrase “the paradox of praxis” evokes a resonance? Out of newness, change and dissipation Generative thinking

An ecology of ideas arises from our living language Conference Website poems by Kathleen Forsythe http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/2012

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Schedule

Monday, 09-Jul-2012 15:00 - 17:00 ASC General Business Meeting (Venue: Chapel) 18:00 - 19:00 Dinner (Venue: Crocker) 19:30 - 21:00 Nora Bateson: Welcome An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson Film and Discussion (Venue: Chapel)

Tuesday, 10-Jul-2012 09:00 - 10:00 Klaus Krippendorff (Venue: Chapel) 10:00 - 10:30 Coffee break (Venue: Crocker) 10:30 - 12:00 Poster Session (Venue: Chapel) Ricardo Barrera and Ricardo Frías Art Collings Thomas Fischer Christiane M. Herr Timothy Jachna Mark Johnson and Paul Hollins Victor MacGill August Mohr Wilf Rigter Gi TaekRyoo Vandresen, Monique 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch (Venue: Crocker) 13:00 - 14:30 Reflexivity Panel (Venue: Chapel) Paper Session A (Venue: Nautilus) Ranulph Glanville Faisal Kadri Louis Kauffman Kate Slaymaker Klaus Krippendorff Mário Vieira de Carvalho Vladimir Lefebvre Frederick Steier Stuart Umpleby 15:00 - 16:30 Reflexivity Panel cont'd (Venue: Chapel) Paper Session B (Venue: Nautilus) Ranulph Glanville Jeremy Lent Louis Kauffman Simone Mahrenholz Klaus Krippendorff Katie King Vladimir Lefebvre Frederick Steier Stuart Umpleby 17:00 - 18:00 Workshops Jeff Bloom: Teaching An Ecology of Mind (Venue: Nautilus) Erik Graffman: What is Matter? Never Mind. What is Mind? No Matter. (Venue: Chapel) 18:00 - 19:00 Dinner (Venue: Crocker) 19:30 - 21:30 ASC Performances (Venue: Chapel) Kathleen Forsythe and Madeline von Foerster: Poetry and Art Performance Susan Parenti: Unentitled for Piano and 8 Voices Jeff Glassman and Lisa Fay: Theatre Performance Paul Pangaro: Theatre Performance

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Wednesday, 11-Jul-2012 09:00 - 10:00 Terrence Deacon (Venue: Chapel) 10:00 - 10:30 Coffee break (Venue: Crocker) 10:30 - 12:00 Paper Session C (Venue: Chapel) Paper Session D (Venue: Nautilus) Colin Campbell José Cabral Ray Ison Jher Justin Vinston Daniel Rosenberg 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch (Venue: Crocker) 13:00 - 13:45 Jeremy Sherman 13:45 - 14:30 Peter Harries-Jones 15:00 - 16:30 Paper Session E (Venue: Chapel) Paper Session F (Venue: Nautilus) Dai Griffiths Ramsey Affifi Graziele Lautenschlaeger Augustus Bacigalupi Will Varey Bruce Clarke 17:00 - 18:00 Workshops Lisa Fay & Jeff Glassman: Picturing the Frame: Performing the Form (Venue: t.b.a.) Mark Johnson and Paul Hollins: Too Much Information! (Venue: Chapel) Magnus Ramage et al.: Journals in Cybernetics and Systems (Venue: Nautilus) 18:00 - 19:00 Dinner (Venue: Crocker) 19:30 - 20:15 Carol Wilder: Screening of two Films (Venue: Chapel) 20:10 - 21:30 Guiles Performance Ensemble: Theatre and Music Performance (Venue: Chapel)

Thursday, 12-Jul-2012 09:00 - 10:00 Humberto Maturana (Venue: Chapel) 10:00 - 10:30 Ximena Dávila (Venue: Chapel) 10:30 - 11:00 Coffee (Venue: Crocker) 11:00 - 12:00 Graham Barnes (Venue: Chapel) 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch (Venue: Crocker) 13:00 - 13:45 Eric Vatikiotis Bateson (Venue: Chapel) 14:15 - 16:15 Paper Session G (Venue: Chapel) Paper Session H (Venue: Nautilus) Alessandro Bellafiore Kathleen Forsythe Philip Baron Sebastian Gaggero Ely Dorsey Maria do Céu Rueff Magnus Ramage Marilyn Wedge 16:30 - 18:00 Paper Session I (Venue: Chapel) Paper Session J (Venue Nautilus) Anthony Chaney Hernando Gutierrez-Prieto Lance Nizami Andreas Hieronymi Judith Lombardi Elio Porto 18:00 - 21:30 Closing dinner (Venue: Seascape Room)

Friday, 13-Jul-2012 09:00 - 10:00 Rex Weyler (Venue: Chapel) 10:00 - 10:30 Debora Hammond (Venue: Chapel) 10:30 - 11:00 Coffee (Venue: Crocker) 11:00 - 11:45 Stephen Nachmanovitch (Venue: Chapel) 11:45 - 12:00 Pille Bunnell: Closing (Venue: Chapel) 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch

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Venue Map

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Film

An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson Film and Discussion Nora Bateson Time: Mon, 7:30pm - 9pm Venue: Chapel

An Ecology of Mind is a film portrait of Gregory Bateson, celebrated anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, systems theorist, and filmmaker, produced and directed by his daughter, Nora Bateson. The film includes footage from Bateson’s own films shot in the 1930s in Bali (with Margaret Mead) and New Guinea, along with photographs, filmed lectures, and interviews. His youngest child, Nora, depicts him as a man who studied the interrelationships of the complex systems in which we live with a depth motivated by scientific rigor and caring integrity. Through contemporary interviews, along with his own words, Bateson’s way of thinking points us in the direction of insight and creativity in the ways we deal with the challenges confronting the human race and the natural world. This film hopes to inspire its audience to see our lives within a larger system – glistening with symmetry, play, and metaphor. It is presented as an invitation to ask the kinds of questions that could help thread the world back together from the inside.

Nora Bateson Biography

Nora Bateson is the writer, director and producer of the award-winning documentary An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father Gregory Bateson’s way of thinking. Nora has been a filmmaker, lecturer, and writer in many capacities and calls herself an interloper as she travels between conversations in different disciplines and with different audiences. She has developed curricula for schools in Northern California, and produced and directed award winning multimedia projects on intercultural understanding. Currently Nora is traveling around the world with the film holding conversations and seminars with international change-makers, ecologists, anthropologists, psychologists, designers, and IT people. Utilizing the film as a tool to introduce some of her father’s thinking tools, Nora is engaged in giving her audiences a lens through which to see the world that effects not only the way we see the world, but how we interact with it. In addition to hosting discussions at film festivals from Brazil to Budapest, she is currently writing a book about the practical application of systems thinking and complexity theory in everyday life. “The task she took on was hardly easy. Pinning Bateson down takes a fair amount of effort. Coming up with a simple definition of, say, systems theory is one thing. Doing so in a way that educates the average filmgoer without making her film feel like a mere academic exercise is something else entirely. Yet Nora Bateson manages to do so by always keeping the man she knew at the center. “ Dan Webster, NPR

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Plenary Presenters

Graham Barnes meeting of systems experts, including Governor Jerry Brown of California, to celebrate Gregory Speaker Bateson’s centennial. The focus of this intensive Time: Thurs, 11am - 12noon three-day seminar was on trust and the cybernetics Venue: Chapel of leadership, and it brought together, on the island Early in his career Graham Barnes, with a of Brijuni, elected leaders of the countries of the foundation grant, founded Fellowship for Racial and former Yugoslav republics for a dialogue on Economic Equality, an organization that helped democracy and regional cooperation. What made integrate people of color into the leadership of these seminars unique was the focus on the segregated white institutions. The success ofthis practical application of cybernetics to politics and work led to an invitation to work with the largest the everyday practice of democracy. Graham’s military posts of the U.S. Army. During this period expertise in cybernetics was demonstrated in his he founded Southeast Institute in Chapel Hill, NC, PhD dissertation at Royal Melbourne Institute of designed a therapist training program for Technology. Earlier he was awarded a graduate traditionally African-American universities under a degree in theology by Harvard University Divinity grand from the Lilly Endowment, Inc, and also led in School. He was given the Eric Berne Memorial developing the experimental Master of Arts program Award in 2005 for his cybernetic study of the role of in clinical psychology and psychotherapy at theory in psychotherapy. He is a Fellow of the Southeast Institute. More than twenty students American Society for Cybernetics and is included in completed the experimental two-year program, the Marquis Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in first graduate program in psychotherapy in the Medicine and Healthcare. He lives in Stockholm United States. Accrediting Associations where he practices cybernetics and psychotherapy, recommended the program to universities as a works with young leaders, consults and writes. model of excellence for the education of Drottninggatan 73c, SE-111 36 Stockholm; +46 70 psychotherapists. In Chapel Hill he was also adjunct 582 2021; e-mail: [email protected] lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry of the www.inform.se University of North Carolina and lecturer in the School of Public Health.His first lecture tour of Sweden, in the mid-1970s, was motivated by a Ximena Dávila desire to find out about how Swedes democratically Escuela Matriztica de Santiago managed their companies and other organizations Speaker and themselves. He arrived in Sweden in 1983 and Time: Thurs, 10am - 10:30am was naturalized in 1996. In Sweden and Norway he Venue: Chapel has had long-term assignments with companies What is in the substratum of our thinking, doing and such as Pharmacia, Norsk Hydro, and Swedbank. feeling? How to think the thinking we think? How do He began teaching group therapy in Belgrade in the we feel what we feel? 1970s. As a result of his teaching in Zagreb, a From the moment that we are born we school for the cybernetics of psychotherapy was transform ourselves with others, immersed in established in the Department of Psychiatry of the cultural conversations that fragment our world. We Faculty of Medicine of the University of Zagreb grow up thinking that there is an inside and an where he has been a guest lecturer since 1990. outside; there is an independent reality; cause and This school has led in the education of effect; duality of non-related opposites; psychotherapists in Slovenia as well as in Croatia. independence between subject and object; mind As a direct result of the social commitments of this and body separated in a painful fragmentation. In school and of Graham’s teaching and guidance, a the end, we live a co-existence of dualities and foundation was established to promote democracy fragmentations in our daily living. It is in that place- in Croatia and cooperation between leaders and non-place, in that time-non-time that the happening citizens in the republics of the former Yugoslavia. of unitary epistemology can be seen. How? One of the first activities of the foundation was to We all have been born in the implicit trust, give intellectual support to StepeMesic, the first given our biological structure, that there will be a president of Croatia to promote democracy, seeking world that will receive us with loving tenderness. to end the oppressive and corrupt policies and However, this is not always the case. In this practices of his predecessor. Graham assisted the fragmented manner of living all possibility of foundation to organize a series of annual seminars coherence with the natural world and the relational on the theme of all people living together worlds is broken. So nowadays, we try to live and to cooperatively. In 2004 the foundation organized a live together, in a manner that may give us signs of

7 a thread that unifies our existence; as Bateson contrast, I propose a measure that captures the would say, the pattern that connects us. degree of convolutedness or recursive infolding of Along with Humberto Maturana we have dynamical relationships upon themselves that developed, over the past 12 years, a experiential- results in distinguishable emergent levels of explicative proposal that reveals that the guideline temporally asymmetric system attractor dynamics; that connects us exists, and that it has been present i.e. discrete nested inversions of orthograde within each one of us through our biological human dynamical tendencies. origin, and this pattern is love. Loving as living A system with greater dynamical depth than beings in the continuous conservation of living in another consists in a greater number of nested unity with our niche; loving as a fundament of the emergent dynamical levels. Thus a thermodynamic unitary epistemology of all knowing and the pattern system has less dynamical depth than a that connects all, living together in well-being. morphodynamic (e.g. self-organizing)system has Ximena Dávila will be co-presenting with less dynamical depth than a teleodynamic (e.g. her colleague Humberto Maturana. Through her living or mental) system, and so forth. Dynamical work with individual and family counselling she has depth can provide a precise and systematic account developed the ambience of “liberating conversations” of the fundamental difference between computation as reflexive conversations for the recovery of self (low dynamical depth) and cognition (high love and self respect in the face of cultural pain. dynamical depth), or inorganic chemistry (low This has brought her to realize that human living, dynamical depth) and living chemistry (high since its origin in the ancestral family is intrinsically dynamical depth). Systems with low dynamical both biological and cultural. Dávila has a vast depth may consist of many more components and experience with corporations in Chile, wherein she interrelationships between these components than guides conversational investigations on topics such systems with high dynamical depth. Dynamical as “The sense of the Human Being in organizations” depth is essential to explain the degree of agency, and “Toward a Co-inspirational management.” behavioral autonomy, internal coherence, semiotic Furthermore, she has participated in numerous capacity, and sentience of a system whereas conferences, seminars, congresses, workshops, mereological, componential, or information theoretic short courses, reflective circles, symposia and measures of complexity provide no insight into reflective meetings in different academic and these phenomena. business settings. Professor Deacon’s research has combined human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with Terrence W. Deacon the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. His work extends from laboratory-based Department of Anthropology, U.C. Berkeley cellular-molecular neurobiology to the study of Speaker semiotic processes underlying animal and human Time: Wed, 9am - 10am communication, especially language. Many of these Venue: Chapel interests are explored in his 1997 book, The Complex (adjective) — etymology: from com- “with” Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language + plex from plectere orplicare “to weave, braid, and the Brain (W. W. Norton). twine, fold.” His neurobiological research is focused on Why are computers so radically different determining the nature of the human divergence than brains in terms of the presence or absence of from typical primate brain anatomy, the cellular- intrinsic phenomenology? The difference is one of molecular mechanisms producing this difference, complexity, but not complexity in mere numbers of and the correlations between these anatomical elements, interactions, operations per time and differences and special human cognitive abilities, space, or even logical depth. The difference is particularly language. In pursuit of these questions dynamical. he has used a variety of laboratory approaches In better agreement with the etymological including the tracing of axonal connections, derivation of ‘complexity’ than the contemporary quantitative analysis of regions of different species colloquial definition, I propose a measure of the brains, and cross-species fetal neural complexity of a system that is largely orthogonal to transplantation. The goal is to identify elements of what can be collectively described as mereological, the developmental genetic mechanisms that compositional, or information theoretic conceptions distinguish human brains from other ape brains, to of complexity. These latter measures are based on aid the study of the cognitive consequences of some means of quantifying numbers of human brain evolution. distinguishable and analytically irreducible His theoretical interests include the study of components and their interrelationships, or some evolution-like processes at many levels, including quantification of the analytic difficulty or their role in embryonic development, neural signal computational size of a system’s description. In

8 processing, language change, and social processes, studied art in California, Germany and Austria, and and how these different processes interact and currently resides in New York City. Website: depend on each other. Currently, his theoretical http://www.madelinevonfoerster.com. interests have focused on the problem of explaining emergent phenomena, such as characterize such apparently unprecedented transitions as the origin Jeff Glassman and Lisa Fay of life, the evolution of language, the nature of information, and the generation of conscious Theatre experience by brains. This is fueled by a career- Time: Tuesday evening long interest in the ideas of the late 19th-century Venue: Chapel American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce and Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman have been making his theory of semiosis. His new book, Incomplete densely packed compositions for theatre together Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (W. W. as a duo since 1991, touring nationally and Norton, 2012), explores the relationship between internationally, and appearing frequently at ASC thermodynamic, self-organizing, evolutionary and conferences. The duo is known for applying semiotic processes and provides a new technical complex composed structures to ordinary daily conception of information that explains both its human behavior and originating the performance representational and normative properties. techniques required for these compositions to manifest in the medium of live theatre – embodied composition. Each performed theatre piece builds a Kathleen Forsythe and Madeline compositional technique into portrayals of daily life; von Foerster twists, reversals, sudden juxtapositions and transformations induce cracks in the veneer of Poetry and Art Performance consistency. In order to handle complexity, graphic Time: Tuesday evening notations and scores accompany the development Venue: Chapel of their work. The results, ranging from humorous An artist, published poet and writer, Kathleen and disarming to mesmerizing and disorienting, Forsythe has a lived commitment to imagination and arise as metaphors for social processes. Theatre innovation as antidotes to war and conflict. Kathleen offers itself as a shared social stomping ground. Forsythe is one of the first knowledge architects in With this frame, Fay and Glassman work to make the world and combines her knowledge in explicit the implicit relationship between second- cybernetics and systemic thinking to generate order cybernetics and live theatre. practical strategies and projects that open new directions for the civil society. Most recently she has been involved with the development of the award winning SelfDesign Learning Community, a unique Guiles Performance Ensemble online learning environment and Class 1 Theatre and Music independent school. With her colleagues at Time: Wed, 8:10pm SelfDesign, she is a 2006 award winner of the Venue: Chapel Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence. We (Arun Chandra, Ben Kapp, Ben Michaelis, Kate Her current orientation is to work with families with Slaymaker and Justin Vinson) are a group of children on the Autistic Spectrum. At this venue she composers who want to make audacious will be reading poetry inspired by the paintings of extrapolations socially significant by performance. Madeline von Foerster. Over the past few years, we have been meeting Madeline von Foerster (who will not be able irregularly to discuss papers and books on to attend) is the granddaughter of Heinz von cybernetics. From these discussions, we have Foerster. Through her application of the techniques created compositions in sound and theater, which of the Flemish masters to modern subject matter we have presented in Olympia. Cybernetics is for us she challenges the ironic detachment of much both a starting point for composition, and a domain contemporary art in favor of intimacy, knowledge, of exploration. Working towards performances and connection. Although linked stylistically to the allows us to maintain a set of social links. Offering past, her paintings are passionately relevant to the performances to audiences allows us to observe present, as such timely themes as deforestation, their as-yet-unknown consequences: both the endangered species, and war find expression in her pieces on the audiences and the audiences on the work. Madeline’s artworks are in collections around pieces. With this in mind we are offering a short set the world and have been featured in numerous of theatrical and musical compositions. publications. She was named as one the “Top Contemporary Surrealists” by Art and Antiques magazine. Born in San Francisco, von Foerster

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Debora Hammond Peter Harries-Jones Organization Development, Sonoma State Department of Anthropology, York University, University Ontario Speaker Speaker Time: Fri, 10am - 10:30am Time: Wed, 1:45pm - 2:30pm Venue: Chapel Venue: Chapel One of the foundational concepts in the emergence In my last presentation to the ASC, I dealt with four of systems thinking is the recognition of non-linear ways in which Gregory Bateson altered arguments or circular causality. This address will explore the of cybernetic notions of information circuits in order significance of recursive processes in human to achieve an epistemology of meaningful systems, particularly in terms of the challenges to communication. Pickering’s recent study of British decision making in an increasingly complex, fast- cybernetics, The Cybernetic Brain now adds a fifth paced and globally interconnected world. alteration, the notion of homeostasis. In Pickering’s Foundational work informing this inquiry will include view Bateson, together with Ronnie Laing, helped James G. Miller’s concept of the “decider,” change the ‘black box’ approach to homeostasis responsible for navigating the input, processing and typical of the earlier days of cybernetics, through output of matter, energy, and information; as well as showing how feedback emerges from performance his interest in the phenomenon of “information input and returns reciprocally to performance in overload.” Further inspiration is drawn from ‘performatively adapting systems’ (Pickering). Einstein’s oft-quoted remark that insanity is doing Bateson and Laing made this understanding the the same thing over and over, and expecting root of all their therapeutic intervention which different results, which is echoed to some extent in invoked , at the same time, a duty to care. Kenneth Boulding’s caution against sub- My concern in this paper is transfer this frame of optimization, i.e. finding the very best way to do enquiry to the most recent conditions of ecological something that shouldn’t be done at all. The human destruction, or in the words of Polly Higgins, species has thrived because of its tremendous ‘Ecocide.’ Higgins wishes to create enforceable, capacity for learning and innovation. More than any legally binding mechanisms in national and other species, we have apparently succeeded in international law to hold account perpetrators of overcoming the evolutionary imperative to adapt to long term, severe damage to the environment: in our environment, instead dramatically altering the short to place ecocide alongside the international environment to suit our own needs and desires. And conventions on genocide. In so doing, the law would yet, we seem to have reached a crossroads, which create a ‘duty to care’ about ecosystems that would calls for a new kind of learning. If we heed this call it clearly hold corporate managers responsible for may provide an opportunity for the emergence of a system destruction. Higgins brings together some new phase in human evolution. This further iteration hopeful signs, models for possible expansion to in the human experiment will require both serious international law, among them the Philippine reflection on our current situation and incorporating Constitution which Section 16 Article II states: “The that understanding into the calculations of our future State shall protect and advance the right of people course. to a balanced and healthful ecology in accord with Debora Hammond has been teaching in the the rhythm and harmony of nature.” Hutchins School of Liberal Studies since 1996. She Nevertheless this paper claims that Higgins completed her doctoral work in the history of will require (1) acceptable definitions of an science at the University of California at Berkeley, ecosystem’s sentience in order to define ‘ecocide’ focusing on the history of systems thinking. She has and replace the currently acceptable notion of been particularly interested in finding ways to ecosystem-as-commodity (2) acceptable models of nurture more participatory, co-creative approaches dynamic balance (feedback models) which address, to decision making. Her teaching in the Hutchins in publicly understandable terms, the major School, which emphasizes student-centered characteristics of ‘performatively adapting systems” interactive learning, is an active embodiment of this and duty to care (3) mapping devices, iconography, orientation. In addition to teaching undergraduate and diagrams – not merely numbers – to support (2). courses on healthcare, monetary systems, and food To support this discussion I will draw on examples systems, she works with graduate students in the from my last ten years with Biosemiotics especially Action for a Viable Future MA program, and is with Bateson’s contributions to that sub-branch of actively involved in the local community on food science. policy and sustainability. She has recently taken Peter Harries-Jones was born in Oxford, over as Director of Sonoma State’s MA Program in England. He attended secondary school in both Organization Development. England and the United States and universities in the United States, South Africa, and Oxford where

10 he obtained his doctorate. Subsequently he was a organizing discourses that define, play with, and research officer in the Institute for Social Studies, construct their own realities. A discourse that claims Zambia where he introduced together with his universal truths is condemned to be blind to the research group the subject of social networks into constitutive use of language in performing agency anthropology. He taught in the University of Wales, and to the constructedness of its reality. Swansea; University of Khartoum, Sudan; and York Cybernetics has a history of pursuing a University, Ontario, Canada. Until the 1980s he was variety of recursive constructions, which encourage a specialist in the field of African Studies. not only self-reflection but also the liberation from Subsequently he developed an interest in confining social constructions whether through communication studies, systems theory and ecology. therapy, innovation, or revolution. When Margaret This research culminated in an intellectual Mead called for a cybernetics of cybernetics, she biography on Gregory Bateson’s ‘ecological insisted that cyberneticians address the inevitable epistemology’ drawn from the Bateson Santa Cruz politics in which they work. When Gregory Bateson archives, entitled A Recursive Vision: Ecological argued against the ecological blindness of Understanding and Gregory Bateson (1995). He conscious purpose, he envisioned a cybernetics was one of the first attendees of the “Gatherings in that does not fall prey to and instead provides a Biosemiotics’ and co-edited the internet journal radical alternative to traditional scientific theorizing. I SEED together with Edwina Taborsky which suggest that moving human agency into the center published some of the first contributions from of the discourse of cybernetics continues these and biosemiotics. That experience introduced him to other still unfinished projects and presents many of the current members of that group. He is cybernetics as the practice of reflexivity in the social currently researching a second book on Bateson domain. covering his earlier years in anthropology (drawn Klaus Krippendorff is the Gregory Bateson from the Library of Congress archives) and the Professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at Bateson legacy in Biosemiotics, where Bateson the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School shares ‘founder’ status along with C. S. Peirce and for Communication. He holds a Ph.D. in Jacob von Uexküll. communication from the University of Illinois, where he studied with W. Ross Ashby, and a graduate degree in design from the avant-garde, now defunct, Klaus Krippendorff Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Gregory Bateson Professor for Cybernetics, Science, the International Communication Language, and Culture – Emeritus Association, the East-West Center in Hawaii, and Speaker Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. He is a Time: Tues, 9am - 10am Past President of the International Communication Venue: Chapel Association, founder of the International Federation I hope to continue Gregory Bateson’s intellectual of Communication Associations, and active in the path towards a critical, socially active, and culturally American Society for Cybernetics. Krippendorff has sensitive cybernetics that needs, however, to shed published over 100 journal articles and several some of its current constraints. Along this journey, I books on communication, social science will enlist Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on language, methodology, system theory, cybernetics, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s writing on dialogue, and Richard design. Among his books are The Analysis of Rorty’s epistemology to claim the obvious, that Communication Content (co-ed.); Information cybernetics and human agency arises in discourse Theory; Content Analysis (translated into several (i.e. institutionally constrained conversations) which languages); Communication and Control in Society create, as all discourses do, their own artifacts. (ed.); A Dictionary of Cybernetics; Design in the Age One of the constraints that I wish to of Information (ed.); The Semantic Turn: A New overcome is the individualism enshrined in the Foundation for Design; The Content Analysis notion of the observer and radical constructivism. Reader (co-ed.); and On Communicating, Another is the naturalist preoccupation with Otherness, Meaning, and Information. He is understanding and description at the expense of currently exploring the role of language in the social human agency. I suggest that searching for construction of selves, others, and social foundations in biology, cognitive science, organizations; issues of conceptual entrapment and mathematics, and various holisms leaves little emancipation; the human use of cyberspace; and space for human agency and makes it difficult for the design of future technologies. cyberneticians to engage larger social constructions – family, social organization, technology, economics, legal and political systems, or terrorism. To me, biology, cognitive science and mathematics are self-

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Humberto Maturana Stephen Nachmanovitch Escuela Matriztica de Santiago Music Speaker Time: Fri, 11am - 11:45am Time: Thurs, 9am - 10am Venue: Chapel Venue: Chapel Stephen Nachmanovitch performs and teaches Who are we? From where do we do what we do? internationally as an improvisational violinist, and at How do we do what we do? These are fundamental the intersections of music, dance, theater, and questions in every reflection about the nature of our multimedia arts. He is the author of Free Play: existence that have been answered in different Improvisation in Life and Art (Penguin, 1990). Born manners at different moments of the history of in 1950, he studied at Harvard and the University of humanity. In each case the reflections have California, where he earned a Ph.D. in the History of necessarily been realized from basic notions whose Consciousness for an exploration of William Blake. acceptance have determined the nature of the His mentor was the anthropologist and philosopher answer. At the same time, those basic notions were Gregory Bateson. He has taught and lectured accepted a priori as evident conditions of the widely in the United States and abroad on creativity cultural present in which they appeared, or they and the spiritual underpinnings of art. In the 1970’s were fundamented, if there were doubts, with some he was a pioneer in free improvisation on violin, other more basic notions that were also accepted a viola and electric violin. He has presented master priori. For this occasion, I will not make a historic classes and workshops at many conservatories and reflection but I will refer to the biological fundaments universities, and has had numerous appearances of all cognitive statements. In this process I will on radio, television, and at music and theater specially consider the operation of the nervous festivals. He has collaborated with other artists in system in its continuous generation of changes of media including music, dance, theater, and film, and internal relations of activity. I will refer to the has developed programs melding art, music, operation of the living beings in their continuous literature, and computer technology. He has generation of them selves in their molecular published articles in a variety of fields since 1966, autopoiesis, which altogether constitute the closed and has created computer software including The system that generates all the worlds that a living World Music Menu and Visual Music Tone Painter. being lives in its operation as a totality in the He lives with his wife and two sons in Charlottesville, organism-niche unity in which it exists. Virginia. He is currently performing, recording, In this process, I will reveal that we human teaching, and doing new writing about Bateson and beings through our operating in languaging and about improvisation. www.freeplay.com. conversation are generators of everything, even of our own existence in what myself and Ximena Paul Pangaro Dávila refer to as Fundamental Relativity. Humberto Maturana Romesín was born in Theatre Santiago, Chile. He studied medicine at Universidad Time: Tuesday evening de Chile, neurophysiology and anatomy at Venue: Chapel University College of London, and Biology at Paul Pangaro presents a multi-persona composition Harvard where he received a PhD in 1958. He on the notion of recursion. Pangaro is a software continued at MIT where he worked with the designer, performer and entrepreneur. He has been neurophysiology of vision. After returning to Chile, in an active member of the ASC since the 1980s and 1965 he worked with colleagues to found the is currently chair of the trustees and an ASC fellow. Science Faculty at the University of Chile; of which In the Interaction Design program at the School of he is now Professor Emeritus. In 2000 Maturana Visual Arts in New York City he teaches a course on and Ximena Dávila co-founded the Matriztic School the cybernetics of design, co-developed and co- of Santiago (http:// matriztica.cl/eng). Maturana is taught with Hugh Dubberly at Stanford University for the recipient of several national and international six years. Active in musical theatre and cabaret for awards including the Chilean National Science much of his career, his recent professional Award for his research on perception and his publications and presentations have focused on approach to the biology of cognition. He has been “designing for conversation”. His Ph.D. with Gordon bestowed with Honorary Doctorates by Belgium, Pask included the development of personalized Spain and Chile in recognition of his vast body of hypermedia environments, including authoring, an scientific work concerning living (autopoiesis), extension of THOUGHTSTICKER. His new venture, language and cognition (biology of language and General Cybernetics Inc., develops conversation cognition) and humanness (biology of love). Most software to increase velocity of insight and reliability recently he and Ximena Dávila have developed the of agreement. biological-cultural Matrix of Human Living.

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Susan Parenti entendre’s two ideas. Sherman provides an intuitive overview to Deacon’s approach to information, both School for Designing a Society how it is different from energy and how information Theatre and Music relationships could spontaneously emerge from Time: Tuesday evening physics and chemistry. Venue: Chapel Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D., M.P.P. studied Unentitled for piano and 8 voices is an attempt to with Gregory at UC Santa Cruz in the mid ’70′s and invite a kind of self-referential turn in having the became a founding member of Terrence Deacon’s piano player speak, while playing, a bunch of Bateson-inspired Consortium on Emergent sentences that might come to generate characters, Dynamics in the late ’90s. Sherman applies Bateson who might interact to form scenes, which might to both the vast and the everyday. With the eventually create the sense that the person at the consortium he collaborates on specifying the keyboard is playing a non-speaking role: a listener. differences between energy and information and Theatrically, the keyboardist–demonstrating enumerating the steps from matter to mattering, or an antique instrument in the sci-fi museum exhibit, from natura to creatura. With Psychology Today he sitting in the street with evicted belongings, playing applies Batesonian concepts to everyday decision- the wedding reception, tuning a homeowner's piano, making in a weekly blog called “Ambigamy: Insights getting distracted by new radio in the practice studio, for the deeply romantic and deeply skeptical.” typing a company press release about downsizing Sherman also teaches psychology and rhetoric at in the steno pool–undergoes a transformation of University of San Francisco, writes two other blogs scenic context implied by the various voices. The — Mindreaders Dictionary and Soulnerd — and identity of the sitter at the keyboard becomes composes, plays bass and sings in local jazz reinterpreted by the spoken texts The voices combos. He has a masters in public policy from U.C. specified in the score of Unentitled are, in order of Berkeley and a Ph.D. in evolutionary epistemology first appearance: museum guide, Max Weber, from Union University. mover, voiceover, cop, hubbub, stenographer, expletive news, grammar news, punctuated news, metanews, News from Nowhere, piano owner. Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson Susan Parenti is a composer and playwright, University of British Columbia and teaches at the School for Designing a Society. Speaker Time: Thurs, 1pm - 1:45pm Jeremy Sherman Venue: Chapel In this talk I use several empirical and conceptual University of San Francisco topics currently central to my teaching and research Speaker to spell out an uneasy connection between Time: Wed, 1pm - 1:45pm biological coordination and human cognition and to Venue: Chapel discuss the implications this has for communicable Bateson took pains to distinguish energy from characterizations of reality. In list form, these topics information, which he defined as a “difference that include: computationally assessing spatial and makes a difference.” Odum countered that energy temporal coordination within and between also fits that definition since all energetic behavior individuals during linguistic and musical involves a difference in system X’s state causing a performance, with particular emphasis on the role of difference in system Y’s state. Are information and fluctuations in the coordination, which facilitate energy the same? Dominant approaches today short-term entrainment (as occurs when two people suggest that they are. walking side by side fall into step) and block Bateson’s “makes a difference” was a sustained synchrony, which turns out to be double entendre combining both the meaning pathological in biological systems; the applicable to energy and the colloquial meaning: predominance and probably systemic necessity of conferring practical or adaptive advantage. Fleshing what I call contentless communication, which out Bateson’s second meaning, Deacon notes that dominates so much of human interaction and has unlike energy, information is always functional for a now been canonized by the technology mediating self about or representative with respect to communication; the breakdown of recursion as a something absent. Simplifying, if energetic work is means of negotiating our link between the real world, reducible to a synchronic “change in system X where patterns that connect (á la G. Bateson) are makes change in system Y,” information is always a possible, and the navigational hazards of the diachronically evolvable multiply realizable and cognitive world of categories and distal objects ambiguous “X for Y is about Z.” For example the where such patterns are annihilated by their very text, “Makes a difference” for us evolving English- formulation. speaking selves, is ambiguously about the double

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We all think we know that learning about the world a living ecosystem, learning to harvest its bounty cannot simply be a matter of acquiring and without destroying it. Thus, part of the answer we manipulating inherently static and context-free seek is in localization, not globalization; and in name/thing-named dyads; yet this oversimplification simplification, not complexity. These changes imply too often serves as an adequate description of how a new human economics based on dynamic we approach the world. Rather, a more complex homeostasis, not on endless growth, a path and unstable approach is required that incorporates articulated by observers such as Bateson, Alice the dynamism and connection to context necessary Hamilton, Dana Meadows, Herman Daly, Howard for learning and survival. As C.S Peirce recognized Odum, and others. We can live richer, more so well, our engagement with reality is built on rewarding lives, with less stuff. We can discover the possibility, not certainty, and therefore minimally Real Wealth of this world in Nature, Family, requires probabilistic mechanisms for relating to the Community, and Creativity. world. Peirce’s triadic (actually tetradic) system for We may experience trauma as we witness iteratively constructing reality needs to be the destruction of nature. We live in an abusive reconsidered in terms of biological coordination relationship, a Batesonian “double bind.” We either where both similarity and difference inform the go insane, or we go creative. Art, metaphor, and system. poetry may help provide the necessary language of The production and perception of human relationship. Finally, we might understand Bateson’s speech are among the most complex functions that emphasis on “sacrament,” a celebration and differentiate us from less-evolved species. Building manifestation of the inherent mystery experienced on research into the visual events that supplement in relationship with larger systems that we do not speech recognition and early attempts to synthesize control. human speech, Dr. Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson has done Rex Weyler is a writer and ecologist. His extensive work on investigating the various books include Blood of the Land, an indigenous mechanical and neurological processes that history of the Americas, nominated for a Pulitzer combine to create speech, as well as on the visual Prize; and Greenpeace: The Inside Story, a finalist processing of facial movement that aids in for the BC Book Award and the Shaughnessy- comprehension. His work has crossed many Cohen Award for Political Writing. He is a co-author disciplinary lines, including biology, computer of Chop Wood, Carry Water: Finding Spirituality in science and engineering, and has drawn extensive Everyday Life. interest from a variety of organizations around the In the 1970s, Weyler was a co-founder of world. Greenpeace International and editor of the Greenpeace Chronicles. He has served on Rex Weyler campaigns to preserve wild rivers, endangered species, indigenous forest land in Argentina, and is Cofounder of Greenpeace International and writer of currently active with Tanker Free BC, protecting the the Deep Green blog on the gp website BC coast from tar sands oil tankers. Speaker He writes about ecology, economics, and Time: Fri, 9am - 10am energy in his “Deep Green” blog at Greenpeace Venue: Chapel International; he appears on The Tyee, Energy Human growth has overshot our habitat’s capacity. Bulletin, other sites, and at his own blog A growing community calls out for “sustainability,” atrexweyler.com. He is currently writing a book but struggles to identify genuine solutions. We will about “Ecology and Economy.” Weyler lives on discover in this examination that we must learn, as Cortes Island, where he cofounded the Hollyhock Gregory Bateson warned, to align the way we think education centre. with the way nature behaves. Nature appears as co- evolving systems, persistently coming into being through interactions and feedbacks. The survival Carol Wilder unit in nature is not a “species,” but a “species-in-a- Films and discussion habitat,” a relationship. It is the relationship that Time: Wed 7:30pm - 8:15pm must change. Humanity is a subsystem within a Venue: Chapel dynamic matrix of biophysical systems. Genuine Carol Wilder is Professor of Media Studies and film solutions to the human predicament will design for at The New School in New York, where from 1995- pattern and changeability within these ecological 2007 she was Associate Dean and Chair of Media systems upon which we rely. Studies and Film. From 1975-1995 she served on We will discover genuine solutions by the Communication Studies faculty at San apprenticing ourselves to nature, not by attempting Francisco State University, including as Professor to reshape nature to fulfill our desires. This and Chair. She has also served on the faculties of apprenticeship starts with a commitment to place, to Oberlin College and Emerson College. She is

14 author of a many of articles and essays on She is currently a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Her communication theory, politics and the media, and book Crossing the Street in Hanoi is forthcoming the rhetoric of the Vietnam/American war. Her film from Intellect Press/University of Chicago. Carol will Puttin’ on the Dog screened at many venues and be presenting two films: festivals. She received (with John Weakland) the . “In Honor of Gregory Bateson” February 1979. National Communication Association Golden 28 minutes. Toasts to Gregory Bateson by Jerry Anniversary Book Award for Rigor & Imagination: Brown, Heinz Von Foerster, John Weakland, Essays from the Legacy of Gregory Paul Watzlawick, and Kenneth Burke. Bateson(Praeger 1982). In 2007-2008 she was a . “Paradigmatic Conservatism” February 1979. 30 Fulbright Senior Scholar at Hanoi University, where minutes. Gregory Bateson speech, published in she created a Media Lab and lectured throughout Rigor and Imagination (Praeger, 1982). Vietnam on media education for the 21st century.

Abstracts

Recursion and Responsibility in become aware of their involvement in eductive knowing, bear a responsibility that comes with Eduction realizing that how and what they know creates Presentation (Paper Session F) relationships and changes selves. Because knowing Ramsey Affifi necessarily has relational consequences, eduction, Time: Wed, 3pm - 4:30pm unlike solipsistic inferential types, solicits us to Venue: Nautilus approach our interaction with others, of any species, According to Peirce, life comes to know through with the care and discretion of an educator. different types of inferential (though not necessarily propositional) processes, including abduction, Refinement: A Rigorous induction, and deduction. Although these terms describe ways an organism can be said to construct Description of Autonomous knowledge, they cannot describe what is Adaptive Agents inferentially unique about how multiple organisms Presentation (Paper Session F) come to know through interacting together. In such Augustus Bacigalupi cases, neither what is becoming known, nor the Institute for Augmenting Minds living beings coming to know, remain constant, and Time: Wed, 3pm - 4:30pm conventionally recognized inferential processes Venue: Nautilus become parts of recursively dynamic, meta- Many theories of mind have been proposed, yet inferential relational contexts. Thus, learning that they often ignore the physical implementation of our goes on in intersubjective interactions forms and is only proof of concept for cognition, namely formed by, but is different in kind from abstracted, embodied animal brains. Any theory and context-neutral, non-interactive, inferential types. implementation of embodied physical cognition The relationship between two living beings must account for the physical constraints that an is made possible by the capacity of each to learn environment imposes on evolving and learning from the other, each becoming something new by agents in practice. Reflection upon this praxis re- what the other becomes, with each bringing forth informs theory in a way that challenges the current latent possibilities in the other (and in themselves) paradigm of information, namely discrete and through co-constituting relationship. They can be independent binary states. Although this paradigm said to ‘educe’ knowledge in each other, and the has enabled scientific success for over half a knowledge forming process made possible through century, it is the main reason complex systems such this co-constitution can be called ‘eduction.’ In as cognition remain mysterious. This paper is eduction, knowledge is drawn out through inspired by classic information theory, but goes relationship: it interacts with its own context; it binds further to account for the distinct and inter-depen- and is binded by, shifts and is shifted by, the dent nature of information as it exists in embodied relationship between the beings who constitute it in cognitive agents. Refinement is a concept defined interaction. That these terms share etymological to empirically test for autonomous adaptive behavior. roots with ‘educate’ and ‘education’ make explicit Refinement provides the theoretical basis for the learning, intersubjectivity, and developmental understanding, creating, and testing synthetic character of life. Beings, such as humans, who can

15 autonomous agents, homologues to simple is twofold: to empower and educate consumers as biological organisms. Refinement is defined by both to their cooperation of more than the superficial internal complexity and the capacity to do work. In features of their chosen products, but rather order to internally represent their environment, all awareness of the systemic connection between all sentient agents must structurally embody the links in the production/service chain including complexity. This internal structural bias not only vested interests and resource abuses. Secondly, represents many distinct patterns, it also embodies companies can apply the model to their the inter-correlations between patterns. Internal products/services and market their responsibility complexity is a necessary pre-condition for increa- rating for the broader public’s enquiry down to the sing an agent’s chances of survival via adaptation. beginning or root of the products economic life. The However, complexity doesn’t measure how the rating can be applied as a minimum certification system dynamically achieves successive states of standard imposed by independent standardisation increased complexity. For that, a path function is bodies. End users voice their approval by required. This path function, able to measure the purchasing the products/services from transparent dynamics from state to state, is the time integral of companies that meet or achieve adequate power, i.e. work. Arbitrary degrees of internal responsibility ratings in their social and ecological complexity are not useful to the adaptive agent if practices. Companies in violation of acceptable they do not increase the agent’s autonomous social practices cannot plead ignorance as to the capacity to do increasingly useful and complex work goings on in their own or their supplier’s chain of in its environment. Complexity, although necessary, production. Companies compete in an atmosphere does not ensure that an agent’s behaviors are of total disclosure regarding social and relevant to its environment. Adaptive work potential environmental matters giving rise to a new ethic of measures this relevance. When complexity and consumerism. work increase, Refinement increases denoting increased chances for persistence. Neighbors of the ISO 26000

Poster Session The Root And Responsibility Ricardo Barrera and Ricardo Frías Model CESDES Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon Presentation (Paper Session G) Venue: Chapel Philip Baron There are tensions between development and Faculty of Electric and Electronic Engineering. growth , industrial activity and environmental University of Johannesburg, South Africa protection, use of non renewal resources and the Time: Thurs, 2:15pm - 4:15pm future of mankind, and so on. Venue: Chapel Corporate social responsibility and We are currently facing social and environmental competitiveness collide in the same way. Is it violations including environmental pollution, poor necessary a paradigm’s change of management? labour practices and unethical economic practices. All core subjects of social responsibility are crossed These unsavoury activities continue to take place by the ethic of interdependence and systemic across the globe owing to lack of awareness, approach. But at the same time we live in a socio- economic pressure and/or complacency. Isolating economic and, maybe, also a managerial crisis. the immediate “cause” does not solve the problem. Many authors suppose the actual global economic Closing the factory that exploits child labour model is obsolete, and its consequences won’t be provides a momentary solution; the violation solved by the same model, because itself is their continues and another factory exploiting child labour main cause. is established in a different area. The problem Any change in this aspect implies on one resurfaces as the nature of the system and its hand a strong restatement of what has been done in vested interests allow for the same or similar the past and its actual consequences (there are problems to manifest. Until the problem is framed in several papers and opinions about it); and on the a manner that highlights the recursive nature of the other hand, implies rethinking a concrete proposal relationships between the different stages and from the present situation that involves a revision of connections of any product/service or behaviour, a the economic model. In order to do it, we should lasting solution eludes our efforts. explore also the diverse and possible The Root and Responsibility Model consequences that can take place from such proposed in this paper addresses this inadequacy changes. We propose, as a starting point, the ISO by providing both corporate companies and 26000 as the paradigm to analyze the different consumers a responsibility rating for each step in dimensions of the problem been described above. the production/service chain. The goal of this model

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Ecology of Ideas and Ecology’s Teaching An Ecology of Mind: Ideas Teaching-Learning as Personal Presentation (Paper Session G) and Social Recursive Systems Alessandro Bellafiore Workshop Department of Communication Sciences, Faculty of Jeff Bloom Sociology, University of Urbino College of Education, Northern Arizona University Time: Thurs, 2:15pm - 4:15pm Time: Tues, 5pm - 6pm Venue: Chapel Venue: Nautilus The rise of ecological ideas has meant the entry of Education continues to remain embedded in a new population in the ideas ecosystem. A walk-on positivist and reductionist paradigms. The producing an huge change in self-representation of assumptions of these paradigms work their way human groups in relation to the rest of the existing insidiously into institutional and individual practices, world; as an unavoidable consequence, previous including those contexts that focus on complex narratives became apparently inadequate and a systems in the natural and social sciences. Over the process of innovation is therefore necessary, with past year, I have used the film, An Ecology of Mind an interesting opportunity for applying the paradigm (Bateson, 2010), as the central artifact in a of ideas evolution on a concrete and significant university Freshman Seminar. The course is topic. A change in the description of ourselves as presented in a way that is consistent with the species – with our role, our goals, our rights – and themes explored in this film and with the more the acceptance of both a set of limitations and a general notion of learning as involving complex and more inclusive concept of variance, seem to be the recursive systems. Relationships, from those two main elements; in few words, it’s the well known among participants in the course (including those switch from an anthropocentric perspective to an which characterize the classroom dynamics), to ecological one. those that comprise the natural and social worlds, It means a mutation in social institutions, serve as the material that is examined. The course and in culture, of which, in a circular dynamic, is recursive, personal, social, and open to institutions are an expression; a mutation that possibilities (as a stochastic system). present conditions and the urge of ecological issues This workshop will examine the positivist require to be quick and effective, but that institutions assumptions that typify educational systems and (firstly, the political ones) often look to be unable to undermine learning as complex systems, then perform or guide. provide perspectives on how we can work in ways Here there is the main concern in that support complexity. Participants will be translating new ideas into new conditions: provided with opportunities to share their own evaluating if ideas and culture in our society are still practices, suggest specific activities, and discuss sufficiently flexible and adaptive – in Bateson’s how teaching—learning at all levels can be opinion, the distinctive qualities of a cultural reworked as complex systems. behavior – or if, through iteration and self- confirmation, have developed some rigid features of an instinct. The Ethical Limitations of Many theories and paradigms have been developed about change and adaptive management Computational Design but, on the other hand, west societies have created Strategies a complex web of rules, laws and contracts aimed Presentation (Paper Session D) to a cultural continuous removal of variance and José Cabral unforeseen from everyday life and policies. Time: Wed, 10:30am - 12:00noon Which conditions may be obtained earlier: the ones Venue: Nautilus producing an effective evolution in ideas and Over the last decades architecture has been institutions, or those tied to a potentially dramatic characterized by a series of computational design state shift? strategies aiming at a paradigm shift in the profession by adopting operative ideas such as evolutionary, liquid, interactive, morphogenetic, parametric, emergent, etc. This paper discusses how most of these design strategies, by restricting themselves to either form-making or form-finding, end up just reenacting the old linear and deterministic perspectival paradigm that has been the basis of architectural practice since the

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Renaissance. Thus, most contemporary buildings Because of the immense complexity of an idea like are produced with an instrumental use of ‘re-enchantment of nature’ I argue it is useful to cybernetics without escaping prescriptiveness and consider it first in broad outline in relation to its determinism. This happens despite the series of opposite, the idea of the disenchantment of nature. exemplary attempts carried out by architects such This cannot be a hermetic or universally valid as Cedric Price in the 1960s, which focuses on distinction – there are very few thinkers, practically architectural indeterminacy. speaking, who could be said to be ‘purists’ of either In fact, current design and construction stripe – but it remains a meaningful delineation or process takes advantage of an intensive use of ‘map’, a general rule or tendency. cybernetic principles to expand their possible I propose, to begin, when we dream about scenarios and cope with the uncertainties of ill the enchantment or re-enchantment of nature, we defined tasks. However, this strategy faces an aim to experience ourselves as inescapably ethical limitation because they fail to take this participating in the natural whole. When, on the openness to the final segment of the design chain, other hand, I take the side of disenchantment, I the actual dwelling. Apparently, these architects emphasize the perception of myself as separate, of seem to be following Hans von Foerster’s ethical nature separated into parts, and of human beings imperative: ‘act always so as to increase the as separate from it and each other. I use the phrase number of choices’. Nevertheless, by restricting the ‘the togetherness of togetherness and separateness’ possibilities of increasing choices to their immediate in order to indicate that the positions of re- practice, they ignore that von Foerster’s dictum enchantment and disenchantment are ultimately implies reaching the greatest possible number of complementary and not only dichotomous – or that people. their dichotomy in truth takes the form of The paper concludes by discussing a few complementarity. examples of interactive architecture and similar We could say that the ultimate goal of experiments in which buildings, instead of being ‘disenchantment’ ought to be the demystification of obstacles, are thought of as occasions for every last dogmatism, including the dogmatism of expanding the number of existential possibilities. It disenchantment itself, placing the activity of is argued that this is achieved by an explicit ‘autonomous reason’ within its larger natural context adoption of second-order cybernetic principles, such rather than elevating it to a universal, trans-natural as conversation and the inclusion of the observer, to status. Reason, in light of its very own complete the design chain and to avoid the ethical disenchanting activity, is forced to accept something limitation of computational design strategies. like what Varela, Thompson and Ross have referred to in The Embodied Mind as the ‘enactivity’ of The Togetherness of cognition, that cognition is invariably embodied in a natural context. Complementarily, the ultimate form Togetherness and Separateness: of ‘re-enchantment’ is given in attention to precisely the particular differences we discover in analytical Enchantment and thought, that express in themselves the Disenchantment as mathematical and experiential structure of nature itself (not in some unknowable spirit, substance, Complementary yet Irreducible sacred balance or enchantment added to it Presentation (Paper Session C) externally). Colin J. Campbell Time: Wed, 10:30am - 12noon Venue: Chapel Gregory Bateson And The I argue that the feeling that we ought to ‘re-enchant’ Murderer nature is present and active both within ‘ecological Presentation (Paper Session I) theory’ broadly defined (e.g. in Alister McGrath’s Anthony Chaney The Re-enchantment of Nature) but also in the University of Texas at Dallas broader environmental movement and even beyond Time: Thurs, 4:30pm - 6:00pm it, in generalized ecological dreams and fears. The Venue: Chapel idea of a ‘sacred balance of nature’, a unity in which The nineteen-sixties were characterized by great we are bound but that we have disturbed is an old sensitivity to the need for change. One argument – one, but still fraught today with intense spiritual, increasingly heated after the watershed year of moral and political anxieties. It is one that seems 1968 – was where this change should be located: in almost invariably to settle into dogmatisms on all culture or in structure; in ways of thinking or in sides. collective action against the institutions of power. It was a question of praxis. During these years,

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Gregory Bateson emerged as a public intellectual presents mind expansion and alternative urging paradigmatic change in our underlying communities in a context of global environmental depictions of reality. He found a sympathetic concerns. Bateson carries out a comparable shift, audience, but also one pressed by the urgency to from ecology as a natural-scientific metadiscipline act. In a line of Blake’s he often quoted, Bateson on a par with cybernetics and specifically focused spoke directly to praxis: “He who would do good to on the interrelations of life and environment, to another must do it in Minute Particulars.” What did ecology as a traveling concept, a mobile that mean? philosophical figure for any situation of systemic Earlier in the decade, Bateson held a two- complexity and interdependence. In their own ways, year correspondence with Clarence Edward Ashley, both mark a particular cultural crest, when the a man who, for much of that period, inhabited a cell discourse of ecology—ecosystem ecology in on death row at San Quentin. The two came into particular—is joined with its sibling discourse of contact through Bateson’s role as consultant at cybernetics by thinkers crossing over from Atascadero State Hospital, where Ashley was mainstream scientific ontology to the new temporarily placed following his conviction for the epistemologies of the systems counterculture. rape and murder of a six-year-old girl. Bateson’s relationship to Ashley might serve as an example, in A Different Spin on Distinction Bateson’s own life, of doing good “in Minute Particulars.” Though he was under no professional Poster Session obligation to carry on the correspondence, Art Collings Bateson’s letters to Ashley might be described as a Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon kind of therapy by post. Yet culturalist answers to Venue: Chapel the question of praxis were vulnerable to the This paper proposes to refine the concept of criticism of structuralists on precisely this score: to ‘distinction’ as expressed in Laws of Form, the center change on ways of thinking was essentially mathematical logic work by G. Spencer-Brown. quietist, and merely therapeutic. Laws of Form played an in influential role in the Employing the critical methods of development of second order cybernetics in the intellectual history, my paper will open up the 1970s via the thought of von Foerster, Pask, central ideas contained in these letters and Maturana, Varela, and others. Laws of Form’s suggested by this relationship so as to generate influence can be attributed (in varying degrees) to discussion of these on-going questions concerning its notation – which easily admits the expression of Bateson’s thought in its historical and present-day ‘recursive’ or ‘reflective’ forms; to its recognition of contexts. the role of the observer within the system being observed; and to the intuitive appeal of the concept of distinction, both as a mathematical idea, and as a The Paradigm of Ecology ubiquitously familiar mental act. in Dune and Steps to an The paper will specifically examine three different formal approaches, each of which is based Ecology of Mind on expanding the number of logical values from the Presentation (Paper Session F) usual two to the less typical four. First, a 4-value Bruce Clarke logic co-developed by Francisco Varela and Lou Literature and Science. Texas Tech University Kauffman in the early 1980s is considered, which is Time: Wed, 3pm - 4:30pm based on interpreting the ‘extra values’ as wave Venue: Nautilus forms generated in feedback/reflexive systems. This talk will reflect on the remarkable circumstance Second, a very different interpretation of 4-value that a key statement in Gregory Bateson’s Steps to logic from a ‘modal logic’ and lattice theory an Ecology of Mind repeats nearly verbatim a perspective developed independently by logician passage from Frank Herbert’s celebrated science Nuel Belnap around the same time is considered, fiction novel Dune. Setting up this comparison so one which has extensive applications in resolving that the passage from Dune can echo meaningfully conflicts in artificial intelligence databases. These against Bateson’s text, I will offer some historical two interpretations are actually isomorphic, but and conceptual interpretations for this striking there has been little if any exploration of the resonance. Both Herbert and Bateson inherit the relationship between these approaches, especially stateside inflection on the shift in the discipline of in the bi-lattice literature. Finally, a new variation of ecology in the 20th century from a descriptive form 4-valued logic is considered, based on my own of natural history to a theoretical systems science. research. This logic is cyclic in nature, and Arriving in the vanguard of 1960s counterculture, in consequently its four values are precisely the name of the science of ecology, Herbert’s fiction analogous to the group of unitary imaginary numbers. It contains a complete copy of the

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Kauffman/Varela logic, has application to 4-state Picturing the Frame: Performing cellular automata (in particular to the system of automata called ‘recursive distinctioning’), and to the Form other interesting areas. Workshop The discussion in the paper is mathematical, Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman but its themes can and should be understood Time: Wed, 5pm - 6pm conceptually and metaphorically in relation to the Venue: t.b.a. development of an “ecology of ideas.” Following our live evening performance and taking that performance as the starting point, this A Second Order Cybernetic workshop will reveal the inner workings of the pieces that were concealed by the performing. View of Modern Capitalism Hiding reveals, obscuring makes obvious – these Presentation (Paper Session G) and other counter-intuitive, stability-seeking Ely Dorsey phenomena create the dynamic tension we name Division of Mathematics, Science & Engineering, live theatre. We will engage ideas through Bristol Community College discussion, view working scores (graphic notations Venue: Chapel used in composing our movement based theatre This paper looks at modern capitalism from a pieces) and try out ideas with our bodies second order cybernetic perspective. It reflects on (embodying ideas). the Recursion and Paradigms themes of the 2012 While our pieces are imbued with humor ASC Bateson Idea Group Joint Conference. and what seem like physical impossibilities, our Modern capitalism is prescribed as a concern is with the social implications that can be political economic system addressing the allocation drawn from the work. The material of our work is and distribution of commodities, services and decidedly small, analogue, acoustic and on a fine products linked to the well-being, survival and scale – leading to theatre pieces best seen in happiness of a population guided by the following intimate settings where the seeming impossibilities structural characteristics: are undeniably live. And as with animation, exacting . private ownership of land, capital, labor, composition and timing of each ‘frame’ is necessary information and technology; for the whole to work. This scale is not trivial – . profit and utility maximization as the sole neither in our work nor in considering social economic purposes; and phenomena. Finally, our work is meticulous while . evaluation and coordination of any economic remaining open to the surprises and insights of new activity by markets and prices. form. We make in order to know something we don’t It is hypothesized: While other systems exist with yet know. We would like that this premise be our similar characteristics, in modern capitalism, the starting point for discussion. market, redistribution and reciprocity population- economic wants and goods relations are shifted towards the dominance of the market evaluating its The Having and Proliferation of effects excluding social costs. This poses the nature Ideas: A Recent “State-Change” of modern capitalism as amoral. We examine this hypothesis in eight parts: in the Idea of the Non-Trivial from Capitalism as System, through Cybernetic Machine Epistemology and the Construction of Objects to Poster Session Cybernetics as Moral Philosophy. We show that we Thomas Fischer cannot build an economic governance model from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University the structural characteristics of modern capitalism Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon that is not free of moral contradictions. Venue: Chapel We reflect on the challenges of acquiring In the proposed paper I aim to use the Non-Trivial money and the act of living. We use tools from Machine as a paradigm to recursively explain a radical constructivism, quality management change in the idea of the Non-Trivial Machine. The engineering, general systems theory, Marxian described paradigm shift has implications regarding epistemology, and the biology of love. computability and regarding ethics in epistemological praxis, for example in the contexts of design and education. I recently wrote about the Non-Trivial Machine (NTM), a hypothetical device invented by Heinz von Foerster who contrasted it to its counterpart, his Trivial Machine (TM) (von Foerster

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2003, pp. 310-311). I discussed my writing with This is an invitation for exploring what happens Ranulph Glanville, who himself refers to the NTM when we reflect about observing our observing that frequently in his own lecturing and writings which we distinguish as culture, in a domain of (Glanville 2003, pp. 98ff.). In this context, some reflection oriented to comprehend the role of differences became apparent in the way von language in social research studies. It is a reflexive Foerster and Glanville describe the qualities of the invitation for seeing the simplicities and complexities NTM. This became evident when Glanville about the nature of humanness that occurs in and suggested that von Foerster “may have gotten the through language, and about the conditions that the idea wrong” – a strange suggestion given that von nature of structural determined entities such as Foerster himself invented it. In the proposed paper I human beings entail for our co-existence. will offer a description of the differences between By seriously taking into account the comprehension both ways of understanding the NTM and speculate of the Observer (as the distinction of observing our about possible reasons for these differences observing) I invite this reflection in a context of apparently having escaped Glanville (and possibly awareness of three different domains; namely others). I propose to briefly introduce the TM and Observer, observing and observed I claim that the NTM as described originally by von Foerster. I these three domains constitute our experience- will then present how Glanville describes the idea, existence-action as human beings that operate as and describe the differences between von observers making distinctions. Therefore, I propose Foerster’s and Glanville’s descriptions of the NTM, to look at our human existence as languaging- as I was able to investigate them in my readings of sentient-observer beings that live in recursive von Foerster and in my readings and in my recent dynamics of continuous transformations of their exchanges with Glanville. inner feelings, emotions and doings. I am moved to make this reflection Recursion in Language and regarding the role of language in social research studies from my experience that self-consciousness Learning: What Autism Teaches about what we accept as the core elements in the configuration of the particular manner in which we to us About Praxis do things as a culture is fundamental for conserving Presentation (Paper Session H) those core elements, and consequently is what Kathleen Forsythe determines the particular manner in which a culture SelfDesign Learning Community, British Columbia is realized by the persons who constitutes it. Canada Time: Thurs, 2:15pm - 4:15pm Venue: Nautilus Reflecting Between Notions of languaging that arise from the Biology of Understanding And Acting Cognition, reveal several orders of recursion that Reflexivity Panel emerge in the process of learning to speak. What Ranulph Glanville happens when a child’s neurological structure Time: Tues, 1pm - 4:30pm differs significantly enough such that the typical Venue: Chapel patterns of language development do not follow the We live by a model that tells us we should traditional path? This presentation will present some understand in order to act. Yet babies do the ideas based on a case study of a child who does opposite: they act in order to understand. This is the not speak yet is passing through these orders of key lesson that Piaget taught us. In a more recent recursion in a longer manner than a typical child. cybernetic interpretation, acting and understanding What kind of learning environment is needed to best form a mutually dependant circularity. What is support such a child’s unique needs. Indeed, from a important is what happens between them (their bioethical perspective, how can we tailor interaction) within the mind of the agent who acts educational programs to each child’s nervous and understands. I argue this is powered by system. reflection, i.e., deep, contemplative thinking. I will

explore how this relates to Behaviours in my own Experiencing an Integrative Theory of Objects; von Foerster’s recursive eigen forms; and Schoen’s reflection in action. Finally, I Observer will bring these ideas towards Umpleby’s account of Presentation (Paper Session H) Soros’ reflexive economics. Sebastian Gaggero Dávila Escuela Matriztica de Santiago Time: Thurs, 2:15pm - 4:15pm Venue: Nautilus

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What is Matter? Never Mind. while ignoring differences among learners and the dynamic processes of teaching and learning. The What is Mind? No Matter. result is management of a surrogate system, since Workshop key interventions at the level of praxis are invisible Eric Graffman at the institutional level. This appears dysfunctional, Time: Tues, 5pm - 6pm and would be expected to lead to disuse, or Venue: Chapel evolution to another form. Its stability therefore What is the pattern which connects Gregory requires an explanation. Bateson’s large legacy, his “lonely skeleton of truth”, Bateson identified two ‘great stochastic with the best of philosophy and poetic insight? processes’: “evolutionary change and somatic The Cartesian dualism, or so-called Mind- change (including learning and thought)” and Body Problem, can seem unreal or overcome since maintains that a balance between genetic control long. But we are still plagued by it daily; whenever and somatic variation maximises the flexibility of the we read a new article on which gene determines individual. He also identifies mechanisms obesity or autism, or just where consciousness may characterised by attenuation and time lag which be located in the brain. When we strain to fathom enable the organism to “achieve by genotypic fiat the frontiers of quantum mechanics; or wonder those characteristics which the organism at the whether an allergy is mental or physical; or are given time is already achieving by the uneconomical tempted to believe in ESP and out-of-body method of somatic change”. experiences. A lesson plan is, metaphorically, a genetic We are well aware of environmental pattern (relatively fixed, and prescriptive), and the degradation, but what do we know about the lesson itself a phenotype (more variable, and in “pollution” of our minds, of our habits of thought? In interaction with the environment). Hawaii, 1969, Gregory said: “There is an ecology of It is argued that the dominant paradigm is bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and successful because sufficient ‘somatic’ flexibility is it is characteristic of the system that basic error available in the classroom, and that there is a propagates itself.” One such basic and central error sufficiently strong feedback channel from ‘somatic’ is this persistent dualism; our difficulties to assume practice to ‘genetic’ structures, enabling the latter to and keep hold of a primary unity of spirited matter, respond to changes in the educational and wider embodied mind, thoughtful passion, etc. So we environment. However there are two concerns: need all the help we can get: from an eco- a) the significance of these two factors is largely cybernetics with Bateson’s epistemological clarity, unrecognised and undocumented within the as in his six criteria of mental process or Mind; and dominant paradigm. from non-dualist phenomenology and existential b) the ubiquity of computer based educational thought, complementing the systemic view and technology enables educational managers to offering a meta-guide to therapeutic praxis. Perhaps exercise increasing control by means of: even from poetry? i. enforced use of tools and environments This workshop will proceed from a detailed ii. orchestration of learning activities by computers study of how Bateson’s definition of Mind, combined iii. use of data to extend the management of with other sources, offers an answer to “Descartes learning by targets and indicators error”. With help from the group we can move on to These concerns together threaten the ‘somatic’ examine and enact our epistemological premises; flexibility required by praxis, and reinforce the for instance with a so-called Family Constellation ‘genetically determined’ control of educational policy demonstration. and planning, forcing educational praxis to correspond more closely to the surrogate world of educational management. Largely undetected, this Constraint and Flexibility in the undermines the processes which have historically Planning and Enactment of facilitated educational praxis within the dominant paradigm. Education Presentation (Paper Session E) Dai Griffiths Time: Wed, 3pm - 4:30pm Venue: Chapel The dominant paradigm of educational management separates planning (notably curricula and lesson plans) and enactment (interactions between teacher and learners in the classroom),

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Legal Dynamics Far From commitment on the spectrum that connects the prosaic and the poetic (Bateson 1971). Creativity Equilibrium: Towards A New seems to qualify for the same class, involving connections between the prosaic and the poetic. Paradigm In Understanding Designers regularly avoid commitment to either the Legal Change prosaic or the poetic so as to allow themselves and Presentation (Paper Session J) others spaces necessary to cultivate and eventually Hernando Gutierrez-Prieto realize ideas. Quite analogously, Glasersfeld (1998) Time: Thurs, 4:30pm - 6:00pm describes mythical wisdom and rational knowledge Venue: Nautilus as incommensurable, and shows how poets are Up to now evolutionary theory and legal transplants able to make use of both realms and are experts in constitute the mainstream doctrines related to legal linking them. When conceiving rational models, change. Both of them lead to significant situation in scientists similarly need to draw on poetic which the theories seem to reach a profound limit. imagination (ibid.), although this aspect of science is Evolutionary explanations of legal change are rarely made explicit. adaptations incapable today to explain “legal Architectural education comprises both revolutions” in part because of their emphasis to poetry and science and requires students to learn to Law and economics approach. Legal transplants move in between what Bateson calls the poetic and have a great explanatory capacity but they usually prosaic realms. The prosaic aspects of architectural crashed in real praxis especially in developing education are typically taught in lecture courses, countries –like Colombia and other similar ones and whereas students learn to deal with the connection its original proposal has been continuously debated. between the prosaic and the poetic realms within The paper includes some descriptions and analysis the design studio, a form of education specific to of both from a systemic point of view. It also design related disciplines. Within the design studio, assesses the role of analogies and/or metaphors in students spend a large amount of time exploring, this discussion. testing, discussing and reflecting on ideas, in close On the other hand, descriptions of legal collaboration and dialogue with their teachers. In the change far from equilibrium (using an analogy to proposed paper, I examine the establishing of links what Prigogine described as chemical changes far between the prosaic and the poetic realms by from equilibrium and to living systems) could seem architecture students based on case studies taken more adequate to real life. This “new” from the specific context of my own practice as an conceptualization needs as a prerequisite to architectural educator in China. In this context, an determine the meaning, extent and the discussion additional aspect of interest to me which I propose of the possible application of such a concept as to examine within these case studies is the cultural “legal equilibrium”. Its multiplicity, variety and the aspect of perceiving the prosaic and the poetic. fact that it cannot be understood as a determined state are questions included in the paper. Creativity from a Systems This new approach could be useful in understanding legal revolutions as well as the Perspective permanent and systemic resistance to imported Presentation (Paper Session J) changes in normative orders without taking into Andreas Hieronymi account the system own history and dynamic values. University of St. Gallen In order to obtain a new envisioning in the current Time: Thurs, 4:30pm - 6:00pm paradigm of understanding legal change we still Venue: Nautilus lack of some intellectual tools –the most important Some processes in individuals and organizations of them being a concept of “legal equilibrium”. are called creative when something new is created that is useful or has some other kind of value. What kinds of mechanisms do creative processes have in Architectural Design Education common? To what extent do they work differently Between Poetry and Prose depending on the specific system and situation? Poster Session This presentation takes a general systems Christiane M. Herr approach using concepts from cybernetics, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University complexity theory and evolution theory in order to Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon suggest some general elements of creativity. If a Venue: Chapel complex system is to survive and develop in a Humor, schizophrenia, religion, music, dreams and changing environment, it may need to build up new poetry can be described as areas of human activity knowledge, form new skills and functions, or explore whose expressions are characterized by a non- new territory. Creativity is considered a way to

23 change the usual iteration of processes and thus best contribute to paradigm shift in these leads to new behavior. The initial starting point can circumstances? (a corollary of which is: Is the be found at cognitive, emotional or physical levels, concept of paradigm relevant to such and can proceed through either bottom-up or top- circumstances?); (ii) what constraints and down processes. However, if creative processes are possibilities does a conception of rivers as the to generate valuable long-term results, other structural coupling of two systems – the human and processes such as evaluation of successful biophysical – offer to praxis innovations that offer an behaviors and remembering them, must also be effective break with dualistic thinking and acting? included. These questions frame a proposal for a Following these theoretical questions, the systemic inquiry into forms of governance more presentation focuses on practical applications. To suited to the contemporary circumstances of what extent can a simplified systemic model of humans, and the growing recognition of the creativity be used as a framework to discuss negative impacts of the Anthropocene, which those creative processes in individuals and organizations? attending the session will be invited to join. While Theoretical elements of creativity are transferred the focus is on water systems the inquiry purpose is into recommendations for leaders and coaches to to invent ways of acting in theory-informed ways enhance creativity in their domains. This paper (i.e., praxis) that gives rise to systemic and adaptive claims that a better understanding of what enables governance at levels ranging from the international or disables creativity, explained in everyday terms, to the program or project. The presentation (or can help people to more effectively tap their creative workshop) will develop and build upon some of the potential. revealing and concealing features of Maturana’s account of structural coupling. Paradigm Shift Towards Systemic and Adaptive How Planning Meets Living Poster Session Governance: Praxis Relevant to Timothy Jachna a Structurally-Coupled Social- The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon Biophysical System? Venue: Chapel Presentation (Paper Session C) A distinction can be drawn between two broadly Ray Ison conceived types of human action in the world: Communication & Systems Department, The Open …Plans, strategies, control, top-down, University, UK; Systemic and Adaptive Governance predetermination, formal… Research Program, Monash Sustainability Institute, …Situated actions, tactics, choice, bottom-up, Monash University, Clayton, Australia spontaneity, informal… Time: Wed, 10:30am - 12noon The former type can be seen as the purview Venue: Chapel of authority and governance, the latter as the realm The prevailing paradigm in the governance of the of habitation and life. Both types of practices are at relationship between humans and the biophysical play wherever there is a community of humans. world is characterised by joint commitments to From an urbanist perspective, distinctions can be scientism and dualistic thinking. Currently drawn between different urban cultures in terms of governance, if understood as enacting cybernetic the different ways in which these two broadly processes that maintain the quality of relationships defined modes of action in the world interface with between humans and the biosphere, can be seen to one another in the formation and use of urban be failing on many fronts. Over the last 50 years, for public space.Plans propose physical and regulatory example, the governance of water catchments, or constructs with the intention of establishing basins, has been guided by commitments to platforms for the support of informal action, frames “stationarity” encompassing commitments to linear for the setting of acceptable limits of informal action, causality, prediction and extrapolation especially defenses to counter informal action, etc. Urban within disciplines such as hydrology and water citizens perform public space, using planned engineering. Momentum is now growing to address structures for their intended purposes, appropriating the limitations of this paradigm in the face of a them for other purposes, complementing them by worsening global water crisis that threatens security operating within the gaps in control structures, etc. of supply and food production as well as loss of The proposed paper will concern itself with many vital ecosystems services. the various different modalities with which these two This ‘problematique’ raises two significant types of action interface in the articulation of urban questions for praxis: (i) what form of praxis might public spaces. Cases from actual urban situations will be analyzed and juxtaposed to elucidate the

24 variety of ways in which these two tendencies As these concepts, practices, and enactments mesh interface in cities, and an initial schema for at ever increasing rates, humanity will require ever- categorizing the range of possibilities will be increasing agile ethico-aesthetics. This presentation proposed. illuminates how Metamedia at the University of Oregon engages the interfacing, networking, and Cybernetics and Metadesign: transcending of disciplinary boundaries to enable flexible metadesign frameworks. Modes of Embodied, Virtual, and Hybrid Communication Time, Cybernetics and Presentation (Paper Session D) Technology: Recursive Jher Communication & Society, Institute of Cognitive & Visualisation and the Decision Sciences, Center for Advanced Overcoming of Abstraction Technology in Education, University of Oregon Poster Session Time: Wed, 10:30am - 12:00noon Mark William Johnson and Paul Hollins Venue: Nautilus Institute for Educational Cybernetics, University of This presentation draws upon cybernetics and Bolton metadesign to illustrate practices for embodied, Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon virtual, and hybrid communication. What are the Venue: Chapel patterns which connect humans, environments, and Computer technology, whilst responsible for machines? From first-order flows of information in generating huge amounts of data which can systems, to second-order embodied interactions threaten to swamp institutions and individuals, can between an observer and system (autopoiesis), to also provide rich ways of exploring and analysing hybrid third-order complex adaptive systems (virtual data. This paper concerns the ‘embeddedness’ of embodiment and embodied virtuality); what are the time in the processes of engagement with aesthetic and ethical courses that can assist in technology, as data is explored for its navigating rapidly transforming immersive meaningfulness over time and how data from such environments? Acknowledging the enactions of data explorations may itself be explored recursively. analogue and digital domains, this presentation will We call this recursive data exploration “Recursive illustrate how we can encourage sharing and Visualisation’. Drawing on techniques of ‘visual collaboration between, across, and beyond, creative analytics’ we consider whether this might provide a concepts and practices in art, science, and way to help institutions identify meaningfulness in community. Conceptual and contextual frames that complex data and consequently to steer themselves will be addressed include: more effectively. . transformations in intellectual property and identity We argue that the embeddedness of time in schemas this process is important because it overcomes the . increasing immersion into the metaverse (open essential abstraction of time in cybernetic and proprietary) mechanisms. We argue that whether a cybernetic . compelling need for re-engagements back to/with mechanism describes the recursive process of the lifeworld observation (as for example, in Von Foerster’s . three-dimensional depth-sensor based cameras conception of an Eigenform), or whether it describes and systems ‘objective’ processes of communication and control . hybridization of these environments and systems in a machine, assumptions about temporal as mirror worlds successionism and Humean causal thinking are . notions of three-dimensional printing and impossible to escape. Here there are some fabrication fundamental questions to ask: How can there be . the emergence of D.I.Y. (Do-It-Yourself) culture difference without time? How can there be and maker spaces information without difference? . practical applications: We consider these problems with some live . free/open software and print-on-demand examples of ‘recursive visualisation’ deploying . open source hardware and the Open Source interactive technologies of the real-time web and Ecology project using data drawn from ‘learning analytics’ work in . open source biology and remediation UK universities. We ask to what extent technology . movements from sustainability based dialogues to in framing an experience may overcome the thrivability based metalogues problem of the abstraction of time in thinking about . …and the emergent framing of the digital mechanisms. In particular, we consider whether the humanities… recursiveness of data exploration using technology

25 may help to reveal latent structures in data which this exploration that existing cybernetic theories of may relate to its meaningfulness. Fundamentally, meaning (e.g. Krippendorff), cognition (e.g. Von we ask whether technology will allow us to retreat Foerster, Maturana) and organisation (e.g. Beer) from the need for abstraction in thinking about may be explored and presented in a practical way mechanisms, providing instead deeply recursive which may have efficacy in implementation in experiences of group reflexivity which may in turn institutions and societies. be operationalised by institutions and societies. Hansel and Gretel for All Ages: Too Much Information! A Cybernetic Approach to a Workshop Mark William Johnson and Paul Hollins Template for Recurring Dialog Institute for Educational Cybernetics, University of Presentation (Paper Session A) Bolton Faisal Kadri Time: Wed, 5pm - 6pm Time: Tues, 1pm - 2:30pm Venue: Chapel Venue: Nautilus The purpose of this workshop on current The fable of Hansel and Gretel describes the plight developments in visualisation, real-time web apps of two children over two types of threat; harm to and alternatives to cybernetic Abstraction is to their immediate survival and pain from hunger. The introduce participants to fast-emerging varying degrees of insecurity and the two contexts transformations in internet technologies. As well as of self-preservation and feeding are evident from introducing and offering hands-on demonstrations of the flow of the story dialog, therefore an automatic these technologies, the workshop will afford an re-playing of dialog can be realized by picking opportunity to ask what these technologies might sentences from two lists; one containing sentences mean for cybernetic thinking and praxis. The in the context of self-preservation, the other in the technologies considered are: context of feeding. 1. Real-time feedback technologies using simple Self-preservation is a motivation that exists scripting languages (Javascript) and emerging in all ages; theory and Internet humor preference standards (WebSockets) – particularly with the surveys suggest that sentences in the context of NodeJS engine self-preservation have relatively constant 2. Graphical visualisation technologies which can preference with respect to age. In contrast, integrate with real-time technology sentences in the context of hunger and protection of 3. AppStore packaging technologies for simple feeding turf were found to decline with age, deployment of collaborative activity reflecting the declining need for food which is 4. Open Source hardware and its integration with highest in childhood while growing up then gradually the Real-time web falls with aging; people as they grow old will The underlying rationale for presenting these tools typically have other motivations. Same theory and is to explore the ways that technology development surveys showed that sentences in the context of and experimentation may be as important in sociosexual relationships increased in preference cybernetic investigation as theoretical abstractions. until adulthood then declined with maturity. Also, In particular, the potential of these technological sentences in parenting context, such as when initiatives for providing new ways for the collective caring for offspring, society and the environment exploration of the meaning of information, and the were found to increase in preference with age and consequent impact on collective decision-making maturity and displace attention from feeding and will be explored through discussion and sociosexual preference. Therefore in order to demonstration. construct a recursive Hansel and Gretel dialog for Technologies, whilst being the result of audience of all ages, two lists of sentences are abstractions, provide experiences which, with real- added to feeding: In sociosexual and in parenting time feedback, can be explored collectively in ways context. The self-preservation list is paired with one which are not possible with cybernetic abstractions of the remaining three; the three pairs form the alone. It is the role of technology as a bridge sentence selection sources of three stages of age: between abstraction and experience which is the Youth, adulthood and maturity. focus of the demonstrations. The single thread story of Hansel and As the constraints of life are dominated Gretel serves as template for recursive dialog, more and more by the overwhelming information adding more sentences to create alternative threads produced through technology, we consider the and unbound possibilities for plots, thereby extent to which real-time technologies may provide duplicating the story structure without repeating the a way in which experiences may be shared and narrative. explored recursively. It is in the recursive nature of

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Reflexivity, Process And Such reflective analysis of “the transcontextual syndrome” inspired feminist theorist Susan Leigh Eigenform Star, who, in a last essay before her sudden death Reflexivity Panel in 2011, defined her concept “boundary objects” as Louis H. Kauffman “organic infrastructures” that address “‘information Time: Tues, 1pm - 4:30pm and work requirements’ as perceived locally and by Venue: Chapel groups that wish to cooperate.” (Star 2010:602; Star Eigenform in the sense of Heinz von Foerster is & Griesemer 1989, Star & Ruhleder 1996, Bowker & often depicted as the result of an infinite recursion. Star 1999) In this view objects are tokens for eigenbehaviours Feminists and Bateson-style systems in the long term action of a recursion, and self- analysts should find in Star’s work an inspiration for reference occurs only in the limit of such processes. practices for “growing” boundary objects, for Self-reference is the hallmark of a reflexive domain inverting paradigms presuming that first we build or a self-observing system. On the other hand consensus and then we can cooperate. Star offers reflexive domains occur in the exchange of theories us “steps toward an ecology of infrastructure” and processes in everyday life and language, far sensitive to anomaly. “Haunting social justice” are, from such limiting processes. It is the purpose of she says, “the battles and dramas between… the this talk to give a model for the notion of a reflexive standardized and the wild.” (Star 2010:614) A domain, and to show that self-reference and recursive humor makes clear that the concept of eigenforms arise naturally in the way processes boundary object is itself a boundary object…. interact finitely. Our modelling applies directly to self-observing systems and this point of view leads Cybernetics Of Discourse to an investigation of reflexivity in science, social Reflexivity Panel science and linguistics as well as cybernetics. Klaus Krippendorff Time: Tues, 1pm - 4:30pm Growing Boundary Objects: Venue: Chapel I shall continue to elaborate on the cybernetics of Among Transcontextual discourse. To me, language use (social Feminisms communication) is the master trope of ecology: Presentation (Paper Session B) multiple species of metaphors brought selectively in Katie King interaction with one another by communities of Women’s Studies, University of Maryland human actors, who coordinate their individual Time: Tues, 3:00pm - 4:30pm experiences while co-constructing and altering Venue: Nautilus social and material worlds. Bateson had located Bateson found himself among people from a range mind in the circular flow of differences, involving of knowledge worlds as he traveled among human brains. I am less concerned with mind as a communities academic, new age, religious, artistic, category but with how a variety of social and entrepreneurial. Today we use the term phenomena, especially discourses maintain transdisciplinary to describe such movements. themselves in self-constituting linguistically (Thompson Klein 2004) How we know anything, mediated reflexive loops. Cybernetics is a Bateson famously said, means that in “the pronoun discursive phenomenon and the artifacts that we, I of course included the starfish and the cyberneticians collectively construct, I would argue, redwood forest, the segmenting egg, and the need to be conceptualized not in observational but Senate of the United States.” (Bateson 1979:4) in reflexive terms. Not surprisingly communication tangles are something he endured, analyzed, humorously told Second-Order Cybernetics stories about, and otherwise worked among reflectingly and recursively. His paradigm-altering Action: Challenges For a Multi- work on double bind theory considered carefully Skilled Cultural Agent how “both those whose life is enriched by Presentation (Paper Session E) transcontextual gifts and those who are Graziele Lautenschlaeger impoverished by transcontextual confusions are Time: Wed, 3pm - 4:30pm alike in one respect: for them there is often a Venue: Chapel ‘double take.” A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a As a multi-skilled cultural agent at SESC – the friend…is not ‘just that and nothing more.’” Social Service of Commerce – I believe that (1972:272) Second-order Cybernetics could be used to find solutions to better understand and enhance the

27 effectiveness of our everyday work. SESC is a for the scientific methodology. Mathematical Brazilian private institution, created by the methods constructed on the base of the concept of enterprise of commerce and services, it is a non- self-reflexive system are being used in psychology, profit organization with national scope. SESC’s sociology and ethics. actions are the result of solid cultural and educational projects which have promoted The Tyranny of the Prefrontal innovation and social transformation since its creation in 1946. Although it has been recognized Cortex for its efficiency in cultural action, the cultural agents Presentation (Paper Session B) of the institution deal with the sense of lack of Jeremy Lent permanence of their actions. Time: Tues, 3:00pm - 4:30pm Considering Second-order Cybernetics Venue: Nautilus principles – like recursion and the inclusion of The human prefrontal cortex (pfc) is recognized as subjectivity in the analysis process – I propose a mediating the executive function which is the review of our work flow, towards humanitarian and underlying driver of our human uniqueness: our sustainable gain. For a sustainable approach to ability to plan, conceptualize abstractions, make cultural action within the institution’s rules we ought rules, and impose meaning on experience. This to start exercising self-criticism. Through the paper asserts that the effect of this pfc-mediated analysis of the role-shifting process we are used to executive function on other aspects of human working with within SESC, in a kind of second-order consciousness has become so overwhelming that it acting, the proposal is to check what changes over may be analogized more accurately as a tyranny time from one circumstance to the next. than an executive function. As a pilot analysis, I compare how cultural The unique evolutionary expansion of the action is conducted in both the micro universe of a pfc in humans combined with the dynamics of SESC unit, and the macro organization of a bigger culture (itself a product of pfc activity) to create a event, involving all the SESC’s units in the city of positive feedback loop leading to an imbalance Sao Paulo, like the Mostra SESC de Artes. Mostra within the human psyche, both collectively and SESC de Artes is an annual event organized by the individually. Collectively, this imbalance manifests in institution, which combines actions in different forms our unsustainable use of natural resources to fuel of artistic expressions in order to promote and exponentially accelerating material growth. disseminate Contemporary Art trends. We would Individually, this tyranny refers to our unreflective like to figure out how we can build a structure to absorption of fundamental values that prioritize preserve potential and successful thoughts, projects, abstractions at the expense of other aspects of processes and knowledge – toward an ecology of human experience. ideas. Paradigm: This presentation introduces the discipline of “cognitive history,” uncovering the Self-Reflexive Systems layers of cognitive structures comprising our Reflexivity Panel modern consciousness and investigating how they Vladimir Lefebvre have evolved, through hunter-gatherer, agricultural, Time: Tues, 1pm - 4:30pm monotheistic and scientific paradigms, leading to our current unsustainable trajectory. Venue: Chapel Praxis: Acknowledging this tyranny is the I introduced the concept of self-reflexive system in first step towards achieving re-harmonization within 1965. The essence of its definition is that such our individual and collective consciousness. Another system contains the element which reflects the step involves exploring alternative root metaphors whole system and, at the same time, is influencing for the pfc’s role in human consciousness, such as on it as on the entity. At that time, this concept was “conductor” in an orchestra. The Taoist notion of not cybernetic, it was rather anti-cybernetic, wu-wei and the Buddhist conception of the self as a because it required the system to have a mental dynamically interactive process offer potential paths domain with the image of the self. Introducing the for achieving a “democracy of consciousness.” concept of self-reflexive system into scientific usage These may be integrated with findings in systems requested reconsidering the principles of biology and complexity science, to offer an constructing theories in the social sciences. In this alternative, scientifically integrated approach to field, unlike in the natural sciences, a theory about meaning that could supersede the current pfc- an object may influence this object, which destroys centered dualistic tyranny. the truth of the theory. Besides, the theory may be constructed by the object and imposed on the investigator. I have discussed these problems with Karl Popper, and he called my approach dangerous

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Paradigms and Recursions That cybernetics takes up this challenge and how to move from a cybernetic worldview to a cybernetic (Might) Generate a Praxis way of living. Presentation (Paper Session I) The pioneers of cybernetics were well Jude Lombardi ahead of their time in developing a way of looking at Time: Thurs, 4:30pm - 6:00pm the world in non-linear terms; accepting the inherent Venue: Chapel chaos and complexity in our world and looking as I will generate a multimedia presentation life in terms of flow and process. Cybernetics has (video/lecture performance) that nests the concepts the potential to assist people to make meaning from paradigm, recursion and praxis in ways that reflect an increasingly complex and unpredictable world, my cybernetic experiences for understanding these so as to better cope with the challenges before us. terms. During the presentation I will explore the A cybernetic worldview enables us to see following questions: ourselves as partners in a dynamic co-creative . How do I define the terms paradigm, recursion process that looks beyond the many dualities we and praxis according to a cybernetic way of perceive in life towards an emergent synthesis of thinking about such concepts? living in the gaps “in between”. To live by such a life . When might there be a triadic relationship (what requires courage to break away from and avoid does this mean) between the concepts paradigm, falling back into appealing old ways of being. recursions, and praxis? A cybernetic lifestyle might include embracing . How might the concepts paradigm, recursion and uncertainty, living a life that integrates our multi praxis generate a conversation about a society layered being, rethinking how we organise that I desire(s) to be an element of? ourselves and how we orient ourselves towards the In regard to recursions, I will lean on the work of future. Cybernetics can help us navigate the Heinz von Foerster in relation to Gertrude Stein’s possible pathways before us to create a better world. use of the term insistence, and turn toward Gregory Bateson when offering a distinction between the Imagination and Action: concepts recursion, repetition and redundancy. When talking about praxis, I will focus on how this Gregory Bateson’s ‘Ecology of term might relate to Humberto Maturana’s concepts Mind’ as a Challenge to about Structurally Determined Systems when living in languaging. Philosophical Epistemology As for the concept of paradigm, I turn Presentation (Paper Session B) toward Herbert and Marianne Brün for describing Simone Mahrenholz and making distinctions between the terms University of Manitoba, Dept. of Philosophy & paradigms, models, assumptions and premise. School of Art Time: Tues, 3:00pm - 4:30pm From Creation to Dynamic Co- Venue: Nautilus Professional academic philosophy is still in the creation: Developing a beginning phase of dealing productively with Cybernetic Lifestyle Gregory Bateson. In particular his claim to present an “epistemology” comprises numerous challenges, Poster Session forcing philosophy to critically reflect on several of Victor MacGill their own fundaments. Among those are deeply Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon entrenched distinctions, such as the either-or Venue: Chapel thinking-style (classical logic), science versus arts, Our experience is shaped by the worldview through logics versus aesthetics, linear causality versus which we see our world. The dominant paradigm of feedback-circularity, praxis versus theory, emotion our world today is a reductionist, linear paradigm. versus cognition, thinking versus perceiving, While having many advantages, the reductionist epistemology versus ontology, knowing versus paradigm is increasingly unable to provide the learning, and even rationality versus spirituality. necessary framework to guide life in the 21st All of these topics and relations, I want to century. The reductionist paradigm has led us claim, are holistically comprised in what Bateson towards crises in such areas as the environment, calls an “ecology of mind”. But what does that economics, health and more that may threaten our exactly mean? Its big overall impact can be roughly very existence. divided into at least two main aspects. First the idea Among the alternative perspectives that of feedback or recursion, a productive circularity have been explored to formulate a more effective that transcends the (type-theoretical) whole/part paradigm is cybernetics. We investigate how relation. Be it in temporal or in non-temporal states

29 of affairs: whatever happens or whatever is connects”. It has both technical applications and “corrected” at a particular place has a recursive and metaphorical implications that cover the gamut, holistic impact on the total of the involved features. including how we interpret our own lives. And second: this ‘systemic’ view has considerable Bateson said, “The major problems in the effects on our strategies in the face of dealing with world are the result of the difference between how problems: ecological, economical, psychological nature works and the way people think”. Huffman’s ones. If we take the (theoretical) concept of an approach suggests that a quest for maximum “ecology” as a paradigm, the theory/praxis meaning and first principles is not the way nature distinction evidently is bound to collapse – within works. This discussion will describe and explain the philosophy as well. original application of Minimum Redundancy, the The intended contribution wants to analyze coding of data according to its probability. This will and enfold the ‘gifts’ (meaning in German also be a non-mathematical description of the concept poison…) that a paradigm-shift along the lines of only. I will then stretch the basic pattern into other the Batesonian idea of “ecology” has and apply domains, some rigorous, some speculative. I them directly to innovation, problem solving and welcome participation from anyone who has tree- strategies of creativity. Using examples from structures to interpret. sciences, arts or architecture, the lecture wants to demonstrate central ‘logical’ features of an Confusing the “Confusion ecological revision of contemporary epistemology and show in a concrete manner how this can lead to Matrix”: The Paradigm of innovative forms of acting and understanding. Shannon Information Theory, What Every Cybernetician Versus its Praxis in Sensory Should Know: Huffman’s Science Presentation (Paper Session I) Minimum Redundancy as Lance Nizami Metaphor – “A Pattern that Time: Thurs, 4:30pm - 6:00pm Venue: Chapel Connects” Quantity of information flow in a system is a core Poster Session cybernetics concept. It has been used frequently in August Mohr Sensory Psychology since 1951. There, Shannon Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon Information Theory was used to calculate Venue: Chapel “information transmitted” in “absolute identification” “As the leaves are lit, so grows the tree.”Alexander experiments involving human subjects. Originally, in Pope originally said “As the twig is bent …” — a Shannon’s “system”, any symbol received classic statement about conscious purpose and (“outcome”) is among the symbols sent (“events”). man’s control over nature. But the real world works Not all symbols are received as transmitted, hence the other way around. an indirect noise measure is calculated, “information Minimum Redundancy Coding, more transmitted”, which requires knowing the confusion commonly known as Huffman Coding, is one of the matrix, a data-organizing tool, its columns labeled underpinnings of Computer Science. It is used to by “event” and its rows labeled by “outcome”. Each create a tree-structure of binary choices to matrix entry is dependent upon the frequency with represent data and that data can represent just which a particular outcome corresponds to a about anything.”Huffman Code is one of the particular event. fundamental ideas that people in computer science However, for the sensory psychologist, and data communications use all the time”, says stimulus intensities are “events”; the experimenter Stanford’s Donald E. Knuth, author of the multi- partitions the intensity continuum into ranges called volume series “The Art of Computer Programming”. “stimulus categories” and “response categories”, David Huffman, as a graduate student, such that each confusion-matrix entry represents solved a problem that had stumped minds like the frequency with which a stimulus from a stimulus Claude Shannon, the creator of the field of category falls within a particular response category. Information Theory, and thereby earned his Of course, a stimulus evokes a sensation, and the immortality in computer science. Where Shannon subject’s immediate memory of it is compared to the was trying to maximize meaning, Huffman memories of sensations learned during initial abandoned the idea. Huffman’s solution is familiarization, to make a categorization. amazingly simple and its fundamental tree- Categorizing thus introduces “false noise”, structured approach is truly a “pattern that which is only removed if categorizations can be

30 converted back to their hypothetical evoking stimuli. acquire, and degrade energy within its But sensations and categorizations are both ecosystems; and statistically distributed, and the stimulus that 3. human language, and ultimately human corresponds to a given mean categorization cannot consciousness itself, arises in origin from be known from only the latter; the relation of thermal disequilibrium. intensity to mean sensation, and of mean sensation Binarism is therefore a true gradient dissipator to mean categorization, are needed. Neither, which has remained fundamental to and consistent however, are presently knowable. This is a with human evolution across various operations and quandary, which arose because sensory stages, including non-dialectical, self-organizing, psychologists ignored an ubiquitous component of and autopoietic ones, since “the irreversibility Shannon’s “system”, the uninvolved observer, who demanded by [the] second law bespeaks a degree calculates “information transmitted”. Human sensory of causal openness” (Ulanowicz 2009). Thus, this systems, however, are within de facto observers, binary process includes development of human who cannot therefore be uninvolved, making “false meaning systems and production of languages, noise” inevitable in this experimental paradigm. thoughts, ideologies, identities, and so forth. In producing such complex operations, the binarism of Thermodynamic Disequilibrium the Local Order yields to the cycles, spirals, and roundedness of the Medial Order—whereby the as the Original Binary Logic of emphasis shifts from creation of entropy to maintenance of exergy. The Local Order also yields the ‘Local Order’ of Human to the unknown and unknowable nature of the Meaning Systems Permeative Order when the individual or collective Presentation (Paper Session J) organic system needs to recognize its fundamental L. Elio Porto interconnectedness. Time: Thurs, 4:30pm - 6:00pm Venue: Nautilus Multiple Paradigms of This article examines the emergence of human language and meaning systems through ecological Information within Cybernetics, processes and material events in the physical in Theory and Practice universe. Specifically, it 1) expands Michel Serres’ Presentation (Paper Session G) notion about thermodynamics and the origin of Magnus Ramage language; 2) connects Schneider and Kay’s ideas— Time: Thurs, 2:15pm - 4:15pm regarding reduction of solar-energetic gradients by Venue: Chapel terrestrial ecosystems—to aspects of human In previous work, I have explored the history of meaning systems; and 3) builds upon the work of cybernetics through an analysis of the way two of its the Panarchists to include human meaning systems pioneers (Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson) and language. handled the key concept of information. I have Life is contingent upon disequilibrium. Terrestrial suggested that Wiener and Bateson represent quite ecosystems acquire and degrade solar energy or its different paradigms in their treatment of information. derivatives thereby reducing the thermal gradient In this paper, I will extend the analysis of the history impressed on Earth by the Sun. Kay (1984) and of cybernetics viewed through the lens of Schneider (1988) call this “the thermodynamic information, and suggest (in line with other work on imperative of the restated second law for open the interdisciplinary concept of information) that systems.” Warm-blooded organisms (homoiotherms) multiple paradigms can be observed in the must maintain a state of thermal disequilibrium treatment of information within cybernetics. (greater heat) with respect to their environments. This analysis will be conducted through Michel Serres (1977) posited that this thermal examining the approach to information of a number difference may be the origin of language (in an of authors, including Niklas Luhmann, Ross Ashby, irreducible utterance such as “keep me warm”). I Stafford Beer and Heinz von Foerster among others, propose: and suggest that have they each have quite distinct 1. that the homoiotherm’s requisite thermal views of information, separate from those of either disequilibrium produces a “local energetic order” Wiener or Bateson. My analysis will include the characterized by the emergence of binary distinctive understanding of information within opposition as an ineluctable idea; second-order cybernetics. 2. humans efficiently use this highly stable Information is of considerable theoretical primordial idea (of duality/binarism) as an interest within a range of disciplines (both those instrument to produce entropy—i.e., to identify, shaped by cybernetics and many others) but it is

31 also of great practical impact. Therefore as well as non deterministic in that the outcome can never be examining the theoretical paradigms of information, precisely predicted or repeated. Examples will be I shall also look at the praxis of information as shown and there will be a hands-on opportunity for impacted by cybernetics, and the way that can aid participants to explore the recursion within visual our understanding of these paradigms. Cybernetic recursion using a simple set-up. treatments of information have had an impact in fields as distinct as robotics, artificial intelligence, Behavior & Experience: A Non- digital communications, information systems, psychotherapy, and management science. By Dualistic Model for the Material looking at the understanding of information in each of these fields, I will seek to deepen a sense of the and Goal of Art and Design relationship between information theory and Presentation (Paper Session D) information praxis. Daniel Rosenberg Design & Computation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Current Status of Academic Time: Wed, 10:30am - 12:00noon Journals in Cybernetics and Venue: Nautilus In this paper I explain the material and goal of art Systems and design by distinguishing between the domain of Workshop behavior and the domain of experience. Behavior Magnus Ramage corresponds to the changes of a living system’s The Open University, UK corporal postures which an observer distinguishes Time: Wed, 5pm - 6pm as actions in relation to the environment (Maturana Venue: Nautilus & Varela, 1998). Experience corresponds to the flow Kybernetes is a long-standing international journal of living specific states of neural activity in a mutual in the area of cybernetics, systems and correspondence between sensory-motor processes management science, which recently celebrated its and body/medium’s perturbations (Maturana & fortieth anniversary. It published the proceedings of Varela, 1998). While behavior is a third-person the ASC conference in 2010, and will publish the description that an external observer distinguishes, proceedings of this conference as well. The current for example stating that a person is sitting under a editor, Brian Rudall, is standing down after a long tree, experience corresponds to the first-person felt and distinguished period of service, and is being account of what is going on when sitting under a replaced by a team of three from The Open tree (Varela & Shear, 2000). University, UK – Magnus Ramage, David Chapman I argue that the current paradigms of art and Chris Bissell. This session has two purposes: and design consider behavior explicitly and 1. Magnus Ramage, the journal’s new editor-in- experience only tacitly, and that there is no clear chief, will talk about the new editorial team and correlation between the two domains. I propose a their plans for the journal; and non-dualistic model or middle ground between 2. To provide a forum for discussing the current behavior and experience to explain the material and status of academic journals in cybernetics and goal of artists and designers. While the material systems, whether they need to change and if so corresponds to what the artist/designer manipulates how. while designing (process), the goal corresponds to what the artist/designer is trying to achieve with his Stranger in a Strange Loop design (product). In the domain of behavior, the artist/designer Poster Session manipulates objects (material) in order to shape Wilf Rigter others’ actions, such as bodily postures, PowerTech, British Columbia movements or expressions (goal). In the domain of Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon experience, the artist/designer manipulates the felt Venue: Chapel perturbations of his body and his medium (material) This interactive demonstration with explore the in order to trigger particular sensations and feelings beautiful constructs that emerge from the recursive in himself and in others like him (goal). These two process of video feedback. While video feedback domains are complementary and interdependent does produce categories of pattern that have been because they cannot be explained without reference explored by others such as Douglas Hofstadter, to each other: objects are lived, sensations and there remains the opportunity to discover new feelings are distinguished as actions. The patterns and new video constructs that open the artist/designer is manipulating perturbations by door to further exploration. Unlike digital simulations these explorations using an analogue system, are

32 distinguishing objects. The artist/designer is shaping for a balance between the spontaneous and the others’ actions by triggering sensations and feelings. planned, concerning the issue of praxis. Indeed, A new paradigm has to involve a non- what increasingly happens in medical praxis should dualistic model of correlations between the be brought together with theory, whereby artist/designer as a third-person (observer) and as a cybernetics has a word to say. first-person (experiencer). Art and Design are about observing and experiencing, about describing and Wallace Stevens: Complexity feeling, about behavior and experience together. and the System of Self- Leges Artis, End(ing) of Life, Reference and Compassion Poster Session Presentation (Paper Session H) GiTaek Ryoo Daegu Haany University Maria do Céu Rueff Universidade Lusíada, CEJEA/FCT, Centro de Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon Direito Biomédico da Faculdade de Direito da Venue: Chapel Universidade de Coimbra This paper proposes a work of art as a self- Time: Thurs, 2:15pm - 4:15pm organizing system, apart from the pre-modern understanding of art as representation or imitation Venue: Nautilus of nature, examining Wallace Stevens’s self- I will problematize medical performances at the end referential repetition, a metaphor-making of life, confronting them with the responses of mechanism, through the ideas of complexity and Portuguese Criminal Law. I will start from a review systems. This paper will show how his writing of literature, both in Portugal and abroad, by aesthetically embodies a changing scientific crossing the criminal doctrine with a broader, paradigm in the praxis of poetry. Steven’s poetry interdisciplinary approach, including the reveals an infinitely bifurcated self-similar structure, reconsideration of the medicine ethical tradition. an instance of fractality, in which each part of the I will place my paper in a medical law structure resembles each other and the whole. This integrative perspective, opened by authors like the fractal geometry is created by predictable periodicity German Eser (2004), who speaks about the of certain patterns intermingled with unpredictable specificity of the field characterized by a medical- variation. legal approach starting from the centre, based on a The constant movement of repetition is (medical-legal) trans-disciplinary method and taking precisely what generates the creative natural force, into account border sciences. Therefore, I will which, in turn, provides the energy of the textual consider recent developments in neuroscience. system to consistently self-organize and produce The frame of homeostasis (neurobiology of itself anew. Stevens’ strategy of making it anew is emotions) by Damasio (2003), with compassion in particularly analogous to Prigogine’s “dissipative the top, helps to clarify to which extent medical act structure,” which maintains itself far from equilibrium according to leges artis becomes the centre of the through a series of bifurcations, and which also problem. Indeed, it is within the medical act, describes the autopoietic structure of a living understood as the meeting of two autonomies – system. Stevens’ poetry organizes itself by means patient’s and doctor’s autonomies – that the of an interlocking series of self-referential compassion takes place, as a result of the metaphors that generate contextual dependencies agreement/compromise between the patient’s will of between similarities and differences of its terms. ceasing her/his life in a situation of unbearable In this way the entire network continually suffering and the doctor’s duty to relieve that ‘makes itself.’ Stevens’s poetry communicates not suffering. Compassion arises here as a through the propositional content of its utterances, “homeostasis instrument”, that is, an emotion which but by the structure of the self-referential system. is important in the regulation of life, even when we The movement of circulation or repetition, for are speaking about end(ing) of life. This new Stevens, is thus carried out “without human perspective allows us to guess a shift of paradigm meaning, / Without human feeling” and without on the ethical and social levels. reference to any totality or external reality. Stevens On the other hand, in so far as we have constructs a reality not opposed to nature but, as passed from the compassionate response in William Carlos Williams put it, “apposed to nature,” medical setting to its discussion, successively, in as it operates itself by the creative force of self- medical ethics, in the courts, and as a normative referential repetition. instrument, I claim that we are before the “transition from an automatic homeostasis to a deliberate homeostasis” (Damasio, 2003). Therefore, I seek

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Resisting Invitations idea of reflexivity as a threat to a desired objectivity, to keep the observer out of the story of knowing; on Presentation (Paper Session A) the other, we have those who embrace it as a way Kate Slaymaker of allowing the story to focus on themselves, losing Time: Tues, 1pm - 2:30pm sight of the circularity at the heart of reflexivity. Both Venue: Nautilus approaches are rooted in a non-cybernetic The intersection between that domain which I call epistemology. I propose to explore a middle ground, art and that domain which I call society is rich in rooted in extending Gregory Bateson’s ideas of potential for social change. This potential goes recursion, context, and cybernetic explanation to unrealized when a work of art fails to become input allow for an ecological reflexivity. To do this I would into a social system. like to explore what, in this context, a self-(less) Art does not effect social change simply by reflexivity might mean in social research. Such an virtue of being presented as art. No causal idea will encourage us to, paradoxically, juxtapose relationship exists between art and society. Artists the responsibility AND humility of the researcher, may intentionally enter into recursive relationships and to celebrate the “muddle” (again, from Bateson) with society. I see a social need for the tending of that this often entails. Illustrations from diverse these relationships. Cybernetics offers a language research settings will be offered. by which both artist and audience, as observers, make a difference by uttering their observations. I would like to offer the role of social change artist as a container for constraint-based behaviors Obstacles To Reflexivity Theory and strategies toward developing interfaces In Economics between art and society. One might call themself a Stuart A. Umpleby social change artist when they: Reflexivity Panel . explore the relationship between invitation and Time: Tues, 1pm - 4:30pm perturbation, Venue: Chapel . carefully craft invitations to enter into relationship The dominant model in economics is equilibrium with a work of art, theory, which is based on an analogy to . work to resist an audiences understanding, thermodynamics. The elements of the system are . offer and invite others to compose distinguishing assumed to be rational profit-maximizers with descriptions of a work of art, complete information. When the system is disturbed, . formulate responses that engage common economists assume that it will quickly return to dismissals, equilibrium.? As an alternative George Soros has . work to lower the social cost of hazarding a proposed reflexivity theory, which assumes that the guess, elements of economic systems are thinking . or invite conversation within the constructed participants. They observe, act, observe, act, and system of a work of art, so that art be input into they have biases. This view is readily accepted by society. practicing managers but not by economists. There This presentation, and accompanying paper, draws seem to be two main reasons why economists on the work of Theodor Adorno, Gregory Bateson, reject reflexivity theory. First, they are familiar with Peta Bowden, Marianne Brün, Martin Buber, Mark their current paradigm and resist change, as Enslin, Douglas Flemons, Max Horkheimer, Arthur described by Thomas Kuhn. Second, they claim that O. Lovejoy, Nel Noddings, Susan Parenti, Larry reflexivity theory would encounter logical difficulties. Richards and Francisco Varela. This paper will review the logical difficulties

anticipated, note that practical solutions have been Reflexivity, Self-(Less)- available for a long time, and discuss several Reflexivity, And Social approaches to reflexive systems, which enable formal representations. Research Reflexivity Panel Fred Steier Time: Tues, 1pm - 4:30pm Venue: Chapel Reflexivity, with its etymological roots in the “flecto” or shepherd’s staff, and as a bending-back on ourselves inherent in all of our knowing processes, has presented intriguing dilemmas for researchers. On the one hand, we have those who see the very

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Language, Culture and A recent research project has asked the open- question: How to enable generative learning for Information: Designing a large-scale systems of thinking? This paper reports on the results of that research. The study of Greener Blogsphere ‘conceptions’ is proposed as a means to ‘think Poster Session about thought’. Using principles of psychological Monique Vandresen panarchy (drawing on ecological systems theory), a Time: Tues, 10:30am - 12:00noon method for the visualization of complex thought- Venue: Chapel ecologies has been developed. In this approach One of the realities of our day and age is that as networks of conceptions are depicted as three- communication and media prosper, discourse is dimensional representations of the ecology of experienced in a lot more places. Blogs provide a thought in social systems. Essentially, this provides way for readers to examine environmental issues a means to walk around in the environment that is more completely and to form their own positions. the garden of thought. The biggest green blogs now customarily attract The development of this paradigmatic shift more readers than most environmentally oriented in epistemology generates consequential questions print magazines. The free-form exchange among of ethics and praxis. The question asked is: ‘What these bloggers and their readers has become an are the ethical implications of the proposed central part of the public dialog on environmental metonym of depiction?’ Fundamentally, when a matters. Blogs are becoming a significant form of social-system is presented with a depiction of its struggle for eco-friendly social equality and building own thought-capacities will it engage with the of identities. opportunity for learning by rejection, recognition or In this paper, five outstanding Blogs are recursion? The outcome sought is to enhance examined, using Gregory Bateson’s “The Roots of praxis by using recursion as a process of generative Ecological Crisis,” in order to evaluate this relatively reflection. new media and its role in the larger needed To prompt discussion, three categories of ecological change. The aim is to discuss a present- responses are considered: for Learning I, Learning day social phenomenon which is relevant to II and Learning III scenarios. The different concerns of social process and the desires of many cybernetic configurations generate a matrix of to change it. Blogs and traditional media can be alternatives for ethical praxis. This heuristic device analyzed as aspects of a social ecology. Suggests provides one means to consider, when presented that new social movements and their blogs are a with reflexive learning opportunities, do thought- main factor in the reordering of the development ecologies tend to contract, continue-as-is or co- debate and an important instrument on the search evolve with their environments? Suggestions are for alternatives to development. New social offered for the praxis of how the visualization of the movements using the blogosphere challenge the ecology of thought might enable adaptive and semi—democratic political culture and bring new generative learning pathways. values, perspectives, methods and strategies to the political arena (Mainwaring and Viola, 1984). Art as ‘Phantasmagoria’: Reflexive Thought-Ecologies: Between Illusion and Reification Presentation (Paper Session A) An Ethic of Praxis Mário Vieira de Carvalho Presentation (Paper Session E) Universidade Nova de Lisboa Will Varey Time: Tues, 1pm - 2:30pm School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Venue: Nautilus Murdoch University, Western Australia Stockhausen’s infamous comment that the Time: Wed, 3pm - 4:30pm destruction of the twin towers in New York in Venue: Chapel September 11, 2001, was “the greatest work of art In developing sustainability policy for large-scale that ever existed” raises crucial questions about the social systems a continuing barrier to innovation is relationship between art and politics, art and ethics, the capacity of the social system to discern its also on the very concept of “artwork”. By focusing capability for prediction. Even with the most on art as a system of communication, I argue that informed and expansive motivations, policy the particular concept of artwork that is behind decisions for sustainability are made with the Stockhausen’s aestheticizing of destruction capacities held at the time of deciding. Effectively, corresponds to the radicalization of the “organic there are limitations for the system in seeing the metaphor”, which culminates by 1950 with implications of its own actions. Stockhausen’s paradigm shift to the ideal of a self-

35 produced work of music (described in terms that are since it reduces alienation between humans and very similar avant la lettre to the concept of their work, the product of their work, and their autopoiesis, coined by Maturana). Although community (this entails a rethinking of what work is produced by human labor, the artwork should to be done). emerge and act as if it was self-produced, There are inconsistencies in a relationship “autopoietic”, like an organism, a second nature. between this alternative conception of nature and The focus of the avant-garde on the work of the current practices and aims of environmental music as a dehumanized, reified object, in this most stewardship. Drawing connections between the achieved version, has its counterpart in the Western predominant conceptions of nature, the hegemonic paradigm of artistic communication development of modern technology and the (both of “high” and mass culture) relying on devices seemingly imperative positioning of human as of “perfect illusion” and leading the spectator’s or environmental caretaker may inform a reorientation listener’s feed back only to what is represented, not to the task of environmental stewardship. to the code of representation. Throughout this paper, links will be drawn So different and opposed paradigms of connecting the writers and thinkers Paula Gunn communication are both asymmetric and Allen, Gregory Bateson, Wendell Berry, R.G. characterized by a drastic reduction of complexity, Collingwood, Douglas Flemons, Gordon Pask, and in that they either radicalize the “pure aesthetic Francisco Varela. gaze” or “pure aesthetic listening”, in terms of suppressing the structural coupling of art and life- Toward a New Paradigm of world (its values, beliefs, emotional experiences), or they potentially expose the spectator or listener to Child Mental Health manipulation, as if art had lost its autonomy as a Presentation (Paper Session H) communication system with its own code and Marilyn Wedge dissolved entirely in its social environment. Time: Thurs, 2:15pm - 4:15pm “Reification” and “illusion”, by concealing the Venue: Nautilus production process involved in the artwork, could be The theory and practice of family therapy is described as “phantasmagorias” (similarly to Marx’s indebted to Gregory Bateson for many of its most commodity fetishism). A cybernetic approach, by useful concepts: the unexpected (and often contrast, highlights the network of recursive unrecognizable) consequences of a change in a processes involving all partners (including active, family system, pathology as residing in patterns of meaning-producing-listeners/spectators) and the communication rather in individuals, metaphor as truth-content of artistic communication (claimed by the language of complex systems, and specifically both Adorno and Bateson). It may, thus, contribute family systems, and transforming the paradoxes to better bring together artistic theory and praxis. and contradictions (double binds)–present in all self- reflexive systems–into practical therapeutic tools. Designing What’s Between the I This paper examines through case examples how each of these concepts informs the and Nature practice of family therapy, and answers the question: Presentation (Paper Session C) “Is a family systems/ecological construct more Justin Vinston effective, less dangerous, and more in keeping with Time: Wed, 10:30am - 12noon nature than the current mainstream paradigm of Venue: Chapel child psychiatry?” With seven million American There is a recursive, co-creating relationship children labeled with psychiatric disorders and between the now predominant conception of nature taking potentially harmful psychiatric drugs, a more and our global social and economic institutions. A humane and respectful paradigm is urgently needed. conception of nature based on a severance Moreover, there are serious social justice between organism and environment both supports and human rights issues inherent in the current and is supported by those ideological models which model of child mental health. Poor children are four place preeminence on separation between part and times as likely to be medicated as middle class whole. children with similar problems. And children’s To design a conception of nature which human rights are violated because labeling and treats the distinction between organism and medicating them deprives them of their childhoods. environment as a recursive relationship is desirable

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Organizers

The Bateson Idea Group (BIG) Our members have come from many disciplines The Bateson Idea Group is a nonprofit organization including both natural and social sciences as well as which was formed to cultivate and engage in philosophy and the arts. They are academics and thinking as exemplified by the ideas of Gregory practitioners, and they find both a commonality and Bateson. It can be thought of as a matrix for anyone surprising inspiration in their discourse. who is using Gregory Bateson’s ideas to exchange The American Society for Cybernetics has thoughts and research. BIG offers a meeting place been holding conferences on many topics since for people who want to discuss, and create, projects 1964. Given the rich diversity of ideas that are of that fall under the wide reaching scope of “Bateson interest to members of the ASC, the set of three Ideas”. BIG welcomes all disciplines, cultures, ages, interconnected themes of Paradigm, Recursion and levels of education and all “differences that make a Praxis serves as the focus for this conference difference” to join in this process. As Gregory concerned with the “ecology” of connections among Bateson’s work has impacted many different ideas. disciplines, BIG was formed to provide ongoing educational projects that utilize and protect the Bateson materials and to assist in raising funds for Conference Organizers their maintenance. The Ecology of Ideas conference . Nora Bateson signifies the emergence and premiere of BIG as an . Pille Bunnell active nonprofit organization. Conference Committee The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) . Philip Baron The American Society for Cybernetics is concerned . Delfina Fantini with the promotion of cybernetics as basis for an . Thomas Fischer (webmaster) interdisciplinary discourse that propagates . Ranulph Glanville understanding of circular and reflexive systems, . Phillip Guddemi their designers’, actors’, observers’, and . Bob Helland investigators’ roles, and how change affects all via . Candy Herr interrelationship and interactivity. . Tim Jachna The ASC thus affirms cybernetics’ . Lance Nizami principles and values in any domain thus addressed. . Randy Whitaker

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