Miller Medina, Jessica Eden: Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile (2006)

Abstract
This article presents a history of ‘Project Cybersyn’, an early computer network developed in Chile during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) to regulate the growing social property area and manage the transition of Chile’s economy from capitalism to socialism. Under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, often lauded as the ‘ father of management cybernetics ’, an interdisciplinary Chilean team designed cybernetic models of factories within the nationalised sector and created a network for the rapid transmission of economic data between the government and the factory floor. The article describes the construction of this unorthodox system, examines how its structure reflected the socialist ideology of the Allende government, and documents the contributions of this technology to the Allende administration.

Published in Journal of Latin American Studies 38, pp. 571–606, Cambridge University Press, 2006

Related articles

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Related: Eden Medina: Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (2011)
Related: The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile, 1964-1973 (Dissertation thesis, by Medina and Eden, 2005, PDF)

MIT Comparative Media Studies student theses (2001-2008)

AMANDA FINKELBERG
Space, Place, and Database: Digital Cartography in the Network Age (2007)
This paper addresses the changes in cartography since digitization and widespread popular dissemination. Cybercartography, an emergent system of maps, mapmaking tools, and mapmakers, forces a rethinking of spatial representations. The implicit distinction in digital media enables a new type of map user or neo-geographer that creates layers of expressions based on subjective experience. This paper argues that the neogeographer signifies a new cartographic behavior that affords a complex subjectivity. This behavior is further exhibited in the practice of navigable maps and virtual globes which lead the way to a paradigmatic change in the way we represent and interact with space. It is divided into three parts: Part I addresses the role of digitization in maps and lays out framework and vocabulary. Part II examines layers of spatial representations in historical context. Part III opens room for future study in the quickly developing inhabitable cartographic spaces of virtual globes and virtual worlds.
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KAREN VERSCHOOREN
.art: situating internet art in the modern museum (2007)
This thesis provides a critical analysis of the relation between Internet art and the traditional institution for contemporary art in the North American and West-European regions. Thirteen years after its inception as an art form, the Internet art world finds itself in a developmental stage and its relation to the traditional institution for contemporary art is accordingly. Through an elaborate discussion of the key players, institutions and discourses on aesthetics, economics and exhibition methodologies, this sociological analysis of the past and current situation hopes to offer a solid ground for extrapolation and predictions for Internet art’s future as an art world in its relation to the traditional art institutions.
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STEPHANIE DAVENPORT
Experiments in Corporate Collaboration: The Case of the Ars Electronica FutureLab (2003)
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SOPHIE ORMEROD
The Medium Still Isn’t the Message: Revisiting the Link Between Communication Technologies and Political Liberalization (2002)
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More theses

Grant D. Taylor: The Machine That Made Science Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art 1963-1989 (2004)

“This thesis represents an historical account of the reception and criticism of computer art from its emergence in 1963 to its crisis in 1989, when aesthetic and ideological differences polarise and eventually fragment the art form. Throughout its history, static-pictorial computer art has been extensively maligned. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and often hostile response. In locating the destabilising forces that affect and shape computer art, this thesis identifies a complex interplay of ideological and discursive forces that influence the way computer art has been and is received by the mainstream artworld and the cultural community at large. One of the central factors that contributed to computer art’s marginality was its emergence in that precarious zone between science and art, at a time when the perceived division between the humanistic and scientific cultures was reaching its apogee. The polarising force inherent in the “two cultures” debate framed much of the prejudice towards early computer art. For many of its critics, computer art was the product of the same discursive assumptions, methodologies and vocabulary as science. Moreover, it invested heavily in the metaphors and mythologies of science, especially logic and mathematics. This close relationship with science continued as computer art looked to scientific disciplines and emergent techno-science paradigms for inspiration and insight. While recourse to science was a major impediment to computer art’s acceptance by the artworld orthodoxy, it was the sustained hostility towards the computer that persistently wore away at the computer art enterprise. The anticomputer response came from several sources, both humanist and anti-humanist. The first originated with mainstream critics whose strong humanist tendencies led them to reproach computerised art for its mechanical sterility. A comparison with aesthetically and theoretically similar art forms of the era reveals that the criticism of computer art is motivated by the romantic fear that a computerised surrogate had replaced the artist. Such usurpation undermined some of the keystones of modern Western art, such as notions of artistic “genius” and “creativity”. Any attempt to rationalise the human creative faculty, as many of the scientists and technologists were claiming to do, would for the humanist critics have transgressed what they considered the primordial mystique of art. Criticism of computer art also came from other quarters. Dystopianism gained popularity in the 1970s within the reactive counter-culture and avant-garde movements. Influenced by the pessimistic and cynical sentiment of anti-humanist writings, many within the arts viewed the computer as an emblem of rationalisation, a powerful instrument in the overall subordination of the individual to the emerging technocracy.” (Abstract)

Ph.D. Thesis
Landscape and Visual Arts, The Faculty of Architecture, The University of Western Australia, 2004
via MediaArtHistories

PDFs (updated on 2016-2-17)