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)

Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman: Dark Hero of the Information Age. In Search Of Norbert Wiener–Father of Cybernetics (2004)

In the middle of the last century, Norbert Wiener–ex-child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician–founded the science of cybernetics, igniting the information-age explosion of computers, automation, and global telecommunications. Wiener was the first to articulate the modern notion of “feedback,” and his ideas informed the work of computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, and anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. His best-selling book, Cybernetics, catapulted him into the public spotlight, as did his chilling visions of the future and his ardent social activism. So why is his work virtually unknown today? And what, in fact, is his legacy? In this book, award-winning journalists Conway and Siegelman set out to rescue Wiener’s genius from obscurity and to explore the many ways in which his groundbreaking ideas continue to shape our lives.

Publisher Basic Books, 2004
ISBN 0738203688, 9780738203683
423 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)

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)