Gordon Pask: Heinz von Foerster’s Self Organization, the Progenitor of Conversation and Interaction Theories (1996)

“Over more than three decades Heinz von Foerster and I have collaborated and worked together as well as in separate laboratories. This contribution gives a terse account of work which we have done together and which is relevant to Heinz’ prescient notion of self organization and its many arborizations. In the course of doing so it spells out some of the history associated with cybernetics to which both Heinz and I adhere.” (Abstract)

The last paper Gordon Pask wrote before his death in 1996.

Published in Systems Research 13(3), pp. 349-362, 1996

Keywords
concept, conversation (theory), interaction (of actors theory), observer, P-individual, self-organization, spin

PDF (updated on 2020-4-17)

Andrew Pickering: The Science of the Unknowable: Stafford Beer’s Cybernetic Informatics (2006)

This essay derives from a larger project exploring the history of cybernetics in Britain in and after World War II. The project focusses on the work of four British cyberneticians—Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask; here author focuses on Stafford Beer, the founder of the field he called management cybernetics, and his work in informatics.

includes:
Cybernetics and New Ontologies:
An interview session with Andrew Pickering
by Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen

Published by The Centre for STS Studies, Aarhus 2006.

PDF (updated on 2013-6-24, via R)

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

PDF
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)