Próximos Eventos

Cybernetics is not only an ephemeral and contingent event in intellectual history, but rather it meant firstly to be a new science of machines, which breaks away from the mechanism of the 17th century, that is why Norbert Wiener in his 1948 Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in Machine and Animals could claim that cybernetic machines overcome the dichotomy between the biological Bergsonian time and the mechanical Newtonian time; secondly, a universal discipline, it is able to unify all other scientific disciplines, and later also disciplines of the social sciences, demonstrated by the so-called Second Order Cybernetics; thirdly the latest development of Western philosophy, which led to Martin Heidegger’s claim that cybernetics marks the end or completion of Western philosophy.

Today cybernetics has already been absorbed in almost all engineering disciplines as well as in art and humanities, and realized what it has promised as a universal method. The significance of cybernetics remains to be questioned and taken beyond what has been characterized as control and surveillance. More than ever, we are living in an epoch of cybernetics, however, we still fall prey to the dichotomy of nature and culture without understanding the significance and the limits of cybernetics. Cybernetics brought forward a digital earth, where one finds the end of nature and the beginning of ecology. We, moderns, are alcoholics, who failed to get out of the positive feedback of progress, like what Nietzsche describes in the Gay Science, the pursuit of the infinite leads to the realization that nothing is more frightening than the infinite. A new recursive epistemology in the sense of Gregory Bateson, which inherits cybernetic thinking while seeking to overcome its intoxication, is needed for the program of re-orientation.

This research program titled “Cybernetics for the 21st Century” aims to firstly reconstruct the history of cybernetics, from the perspectives of different geographical locations, political projects and philosophical reflections; and secondly to ask what might be the contribution of the cybernetic movement to the new form of thinking that is urgently needed to understand and reorient our digital earth.

Cybernetics for the 21st Century Symposia

The first edition of the program consists of eight lectures and two symposia with the presentation of philosophers, historians of science, and sociologists, including Andrew Pickering, Katherine Hayles, Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, David Maulén de los Reyes, Michal Krzykawski, Mathieu Triclot, Daisuke Harashima. The program is hosted by Yuk Hui and organised by Jianru Wu.

Jointly presented by: Media Lab of Guangdong Times Museum, Research Network for Philosophy and Technology, and Hanart Forum

Online Symposia: January 10-11, 2023 at Hanart Forum, Hong Kong

Cybernetics for the 21st Century Symposium (I)

January 10, 8-10pm (GMT+8)

Theme: Locality and Epistemology

Guests: Andrew Pickering, Slava Gerovitch, David Maulén de los Reyes, Michal Krzykawski

Host and Discussant: Yuk Hui

Symposia will be livestreamed with simultaneous translation.

Registration

Cybernetics for the 21st Century Symposium (II)

January 11, 9–11pm (GMT+8)

Theme: Politics and Artificial Life

Guests: Katherine Hayles, Brunella Antomarini, Daisuke Harashima

Host and Discussant: Yuk Hui

Symposia will be livestreamed with simultaneous translation.

Registration

Lectures uploaded: October 28th – December 16th, 2022

All eight lectures with both English and Chinese subtitles could be found online.

Local Futures – Technophany, Launch Event

Could Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics be a useful tool for thinking about the particularity of a Latin American technological thinking? Approaching the fragmentary possibilities of Latin American techniques, which are linked by a shared territory and history yet not unified by them, is a strategy for reevaluating the effects of technological imperialism. This process has, nevertheless, no intention of homogenizing languages, mythologies, religions, cultures, ontologies and technics themselves. We rather aim to direct ourselves towards futures, which from the viewpoint of inclusion, we haven’t been able to imagine yet.

In this event we’ll have a conversation around the question of a possible latinoamerican cosmotechnics with some of the authors of Technophany’s first special issue ‚Local Futures / Futuros Locales‘.

Date: Dec. 15th, 10:30 -12:30h (Mexico City) / 15 de Diciembre, 10:30 – 12:30, CDMX

Venue: Room E, Coordinación de Investigación, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico City

Speakers:

Online

Hugo Esquinca
Joel White
Renzo Filinich Orozco
Javier Blanco
Emma Baizabal

Present

Ana María Guzmán Olmos
Francisco Barrón
Alan Díaz
Eduardo Makoszay
Francisca Zalaquett

Cybernetics for the 21st Century
Lectures and Symposium

Cybernetics is not only an ephemeral and contingent event in intellectual history, but rather it presents itself firstly as a new science of machines, which breaks away from the mechanism of the 17th century, that is also the reason for which Norbert Wiener in his 1948 Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in Machine and Animals could claim that cybernetic machines can live a Bergsonian time, namely a biological, creative and irreversible time, in contradistinction to the Newtonian time, which is mechanical, repetitive and reversible; secondly, as a universal discipline, which is able to unify all other scientific disciplines, and later also disciplines of the social sciences, exemplified by the work of Niklas Luhmann, Heinz von Foerster, Maturana and Varela, later called the Second Order Cybernetics; thirdly as a philosophy, or more precisely the latest development of Western philosophy, that which led to Martin Heidegger’s claim that cybernetics marks the end or completion of Western philosophy and metaphysics.

Today we don’t often hear the term cybernetics in universities, and Heidegger’s assertion that cybernetics marks the end of philosophy may sound reactionary since philosophy departments continue to exist, but cybernetics is no longer in the syllabus of university disciplines. The truth is that cybernetics has already been absorbed in almost all engineering disciplines as well as subjects of art and humanities, notably art, media studies and philosophy of technology, and therefore it has realized what it has promised as a universal method; The significance of cybernetics remains to be questioned and taken far beyond what has been characterized as Californian Ideology and its reminiscence. McLuhan said in an interview in the 1970s that the launch of the Sputnik marks the end of nature and the beginning of ecology. With the later image of the whole earth taken from the satellite in the 1960s, the earth became a veritable artifice, or a spaceship in the sense of Buckminister Fuller. It was also at this turning point that the relation between human, nature, and technology entered a new epoch.

This new epoch is where we are living, and more than ever, we are living in an epoch of cybernetics, however, we still easily fall prey to a dichotomy of nature and culture without really understanding the significance and the limits of cybernetics. We, moderns, are alcoholics, who failed to get out of the positive feedback of progress, like what Nietzsche describes in the Gay Science, the pursuit of the infinite leads to the realization that nothing is more frightening than the infinite.  A new recursive epistemology in the sense of Gregory Bateson, which inherits cybernetic thinking while seeking to overcome its intoxication, is needed for the program of re-orientation. This new program can only set off from cybernetics and it can only survive by going beyond cybernetics.

This two years public research program of the Times Museum Media Lab titled “Cybernetics for the 21st Century” aims to firstly reconstruct the history of cybernetics, from the perspectives of different geographical locations, political projects and philosophical reflections; and secondly to ask what might be the contribution of the cybernetic movement to the new form of thinking that is urgently needed to understand and reorient our digital earth. The first edition of the program consists of eight lectures and two symposiums with the presentation of philosophers, historians of science, and sociologists, including Andrew Pickering, Katherine Hayles, Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, David Maulén de los Reyes, Michal Krzykawski, Mathieu Triclot, Daisuke Harashima. The program is hosted by Yuk Hui and curated by Jianru Wu.

Host:  Media Lab of Guangdong Times Museum, Research Network for Philosophy and Technology

Co-Organizer: Hanart Forum

The launch of the program is made possible by the support of M Art Foundation

Supported Networks: Research Center for Science and Human Imagination, Southern University of Science and Technology; CUHK (Shen Zhen) University Arts Centre; Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society (AIRS)

Supported Media: thepaper.cn, The Thinker, LEAP

Supported by Guangdong Times Museum

Special thanks to Times China

Time: October 28th – December 16th, 2022

Lectures will be screening on Lecture Series | Medialab

Speakers and Lectures

October 28th
Andrew Pickering

Andrew Pickering is now Professor Emeritus of sociology and philosophy at the University of Exeter, UK. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and universities including MIT, Princeton, and Durham. He is a leading figure in science and technology studies and has published widely on the history, sociology and philosophy of science, technology and mathematics. His writings have been translated into many languages, including Chinese translations of his books Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, Science as Practice and Culture and The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. His most recent book is The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. He is now working on cybernetic relations with nature and cybernetic art.

Lecture: Cybernetics in Britain

November 4th
Slava Gerovitch

Slava Gerovitch teaches history of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds two PhDs: one in philosophy of science (from the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology in Moscow) and one in history and social study of science and technology (from MIT’s Science, Technology and Society Program). He has written extensively on the history of Soviet mathematics, cybernetics, cosmonautics, and computing. He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT, 2002), which won an honorable mention for the Vucinich Book Prize for an outstanding monograph in Russian studies, Voices of the Soviet Space Program: Cosmonauts, Soldiers, and Engineers Who Took the USSR into Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Soviet Space Mythologies: Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity (University of Pittsburgh, 2015), the winner of the Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award and a finalist for the Historia Nova Prize for the best book on Russian intellectual and cultural history.

Lecture: Cybernetics Across Cultures: The Localization of the Universal

November 11th
Michal Krzykawski

Michał Krzykawski, Associate Professor in philosophy and head of the Centre for Critical Technology Studies at the University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. His research revolves around continental philosophy of science and technology, critical theory, and political economy. He is particularly interested in a dialogue between philosophical thinking, technology and science in the context of epistemological, psychosocial, and ecological issues related to the current digital transformation. He is the author of  The Other and the Common. Thirty-Five Years of French Philosophy (2017, in Polish) and co-author of Bifurcate. ‘There Is no Alternative,’ edited by Bernard Stiegler with the Internation Collective (2021).

Lecture: Cybernetics and Communism: Cybernetic Thinking in the Polish People’s Republic

November 18th
David Maulén de los Reyes

David Maulén de los Reyes teaches history of technology at the Metropolitan Technological University (UTEM). He has written about the relationships between art, science, and technology in Chile and Latin America within the processes of social change, developing a specific methodology of the sociology of symbolic production for the retrospective study of project disciplines such as design, architecture, urban planning, and engineering. He has been the curator of the third Biennial of the National Museum of Fine Arts MNBA “Situation of Chilean Contemporary Art;” the project for the new Gabriela Mistral cultural center, visualization of information “Genealogical Trajectories of Buildings for the 3rd United Nations Conference on Trade and Development UNCTAD III,” and the IFA project “Everyone is a Bauhaus. Past and future of a concept,” at ZKM. He has contributed to the platform “Is Modernity Our Antiquity?” XII Documenta in Kassel. He was co-editor of the special issue on Cybernetics in Latin America published by Springer’s AI & Society Journal, research that he has continued developing.

Lecture: Why Did Cybernetics Disappear in Latin America? An Incomplete Timeline

November 25th
Brunella Antomarini

Brunella Antomarini teaches Aesthetics and Contemporary philosophy at John Cabot University, Rome. She lives in Rome and has a pluri-disciplinary education in contemporary epistemology, aesthetics, anthropology, and post-humanism. Her current research concerns the analysis of the common functions of the organic body and the retroactive machine through an epistemological convergence of different views, such as pragmatism, cybernetics, and systems theory. Among her recent publications: Le macchine nubili (Castelvecchi, Rome, 2020). “The Xenobots as Thought-Experiment: Teleology Within the Paradigm of Natural Selection,” (Studi di Estetica No. 23, 2/2022) “Contact in Absentia: Toward a Cybertouch,” (The Covid Spectrum. Theoretical and Experiential Reflections from India and Beyond, 2021). Peirce and Cybernetics: Retroduction, Error and Auto-Poiesis in Future Thinking. (“Cognitio”, São Paulo, 2017). The Maiden Machine: Philosophy in the Age of the Unborn Woman (Edgewise, New York, 2013); Thinking Through Error. The Moving Target of Knowledge (Lexington Books Lanham, 2012).

Lecture: Leibniz’ Teleology, or A Pre-history of Cybernetics

December 2nd
Mathieu Triclot

Mathieu Triclot teaches philosophy at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard, France. His research belongs to the French tradition of “philosophy of technical milieux” (Simondon, Beaune, Stiegler). His first book Le moment cybernétique focused on the history of American cybernetics and the invention of the notion of information. Since the publication of Philosophie des jeux vidéo, he has participated in the development of game studies in the French-speaking world, notably by defending the perspective of play studies, centered on the phenomenological analysis of the regimes of experience with the computing machine. He has participated in numerous research projects in the field and is now focusing on the problems of a “techno-aesthetic” and the analogies between games and music or dance, focusing in particular on the relationship between gesture, computer program and image. More recently, his research focuses on the role that the notion of “technical milieux” can play in the context of design and the reform of engineering training.

Lecture: Cybernetics for the 21^st Century? Or Ontology and Politics of Information in the First Cybernetics

December 9th
Daisuke Harashima

Daisuke Harashima is a research associate of Future Robotics Organization at Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan). He writes and teaches on humanities and technics in contemporary information societies from the perspective of fundamental informatics and new cybernetics, which focuses on the differences between living beings and machines as systems, to reflect on the modern technological condition and to realize new values based on respect for life. His writings are published in books, including Critical Words: Media Theory (Filmart, 2021; co-authored, in Japanese), Autonomy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Reconstructing the Basic Concept for the Future [AI jidai no jiritsusei: Mirai no ishizue to naru gainen wo saikouchiku suru] (Keiso Shobo, 2019; co-authored, in Japanese), Frontiers of Fundamental Informatics: Can Artificial Intelligence Have Its Umwelt? [kiso jouhogaku no furonteia: jinkou chinou ha jibun no sekai wo ikirareruka?] (University of Tokyo Press, 2018; co-authored, in Japanese), and in journals including Gendai Shiso and Eureka. He is also the translator of Yuk Hui’s Recursivity and Contingency [Saikisei to Guzensei] (Seidosha, 2022; in Japanese) and Tim Ingold’s Being Alive [Ikiteirukoto: Ugoku, Shiru, Kijutsusuru] (Sayusha, 2021; co-translated, in Japanese).

Lecture: Life-in-formation: Cybernetics of Heart (Cybernetics for the 21^st Century)

December 16th
Katherine Hayles

Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. She has published eleven books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and her research has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a University of California Presidential Award, among other awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books have won numerous awards, including the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998-99 for How We Became Posthuman:  Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship for Writing Machines.   She writes on media theory, experimental fiction, literary and cultural theory, science fiction, and contemporary American fiction.  She has won two teaching awards, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton, University of Chicago as the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor, and Institute for Advanced Studies at Durham University UK, among others.  Her most recent book is Postprint:  Books and Becoming C’omputational (2021, Columbia UP).

Lecture: Detoxifying Cybernetics:  From Homeostasis to Autopoiesis and Beyond

December (time and topics to be announced)
Symposium: Cybernetics for the 21^st Century

About Media Lab

Initiated in 2019 and officially established in December 2021, the Media Lab of Guangdong Times Museum is dedicated to contemplating and exploring the languages and traditions of art from the perspective of media and technology in an era of accelerated technological development. It aims to deliver a new vision of art and technology by experimenting with the ways in which digital media build new social relationships and foster cultural imagination through rehearsals and speculations.

About Research Network for Philosophy and Technology

The Research Network for Philosophy and Technology was established in 2014 as a project to rethink the relation between philosophy and technology, and the future of this relation from global and historical perspectives. It is first of all an attempt to address the varieties of technological thought, in comparison with and also beyond the dominant Promethean discourses. It also wants to elaborate on and develop further the relevance between non-modern thoughts and modern technologies. These questions are often undermined and ignored in the established academic disciplines on technology and philosophy; this is also the reason for which this network hopes to bring together different points of views and new thinking, based on solid historical research, philosophical speculations and experiments.

About M Art Foundation

M Art Foundation (MAF) is an artist-driven organization founded to support, nurture, and realize the aspirations of leading and emerging contemporary artists pursuing concepts and practices across borders and boundaries. Acting outside of existing institutional formats but maintaining the highest quality and rigor, MAF helps artist find new possibilities in both research and production by matchmaking constellations of cutting-edge positions. We turn ideas into realities.

Organization : Anne Alombert (Université Paris 8, Laboratoire d’études et de recherches sur les logiques contemporaines de la philosophie), Chiara Giaccardi and Mauro Magatti (Universita Cattolica Milano, Centre for the Anthropology of Religion and Cultural Change), Gaël Giraud (Georgetown University, Environmental Justice Program), Michał Krzykawski (University of Silesia in Katowice, Centre for Critical Technology Studies), Yuk Hui (City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative Media), Mark Swilling (Stellenbosch University, Sustainability Institute), Daniel Ross.

Contacts : anne.alombert@univ-paris8.fr / michal.krzykawski@us.edu.pl

The Anthropocene is a new geological epoch in which human disturbances are having an impact, not only on the biosphere, but on the whole Earth, understood as a complex system (Hamilton 2014; Hamilton, Grinevald 2015). Confronted with the Anthropocene, modern humans, who have through their exosomatic (and now hyper-industrial) activities transformed and harmed the biosphere, are certainly no longer “masters and possessors of nature” as famously described by Descartes: on the contrary, it is now the technosphere itself, as a planetary network of technical systems, that seems to occupy the driver’s seat, and on many interrelated scales.

In Bifurcate: “There is No Alternative”, a book edited by philosopher Bernard Stiegler with the Internation Collective (2021), it is claimed that the Anthropocene can be termed an Entropocene, as it corresponds to increasing rates of entropy production in all its forms: thermodynamic entropy (the degradation of energy), biological entropy (the reduction of biodiversity), informational entropy (the reduction of knowledge to information, the incalculable to the calculable, which incidentally gives rise to negative effects that can themselves be defined as psychic and social entropies). Departing from the opposition between technological humankind and nature, Stiegler’s diagnosis encourages us to reconsider the relationship between various phenomena found in the technosphere: on the one hand, the depletion of resources, the destruction of ecosystems and the reduction of biodiversity under the effect of extractivist capitalism based on the exploitation of fossil fuels; on the other hand, the disruption of institutions, the destruction of cultures and the reduction of noodiversity under the effect of computational capitalism based on the exploitation of data.

In such a context, the challenges of achieving ecological and technological transitions can no longer be addressed separately. Instead, a transversal approach to these overlapping phenomena is required: different modes of understanding must be brought together, beyond the rift between “hard” and “soft” sciences, in order to bring the question of entropy into focus in the context of the Anthropocene-cum-Entropocene. Since the beginning of the 20th century, “that eminently abstract concept of entropy” has proved to be problematic and posed many theoretical difficulties: from thermodynamics in physics, as well as in biology, information theory and economics, and up to complex systems science, a series of misunderstandings seems to have shaped the interpretation and understanding of this concept. Given our current situation, an interscientific understanding of entropy should be adopted, aiming at a reconsideration of its meaning and significance, not only from a thermodynamic viewpoint grounded in physics, but also in relation to perspectives emerging from ecology, theoretical biology, anthropology, technology, sociology, economics and political theory.

This seminar series seeks to encourage an interscientific debate on entropy with the aim of :

1. shedding new light on the underlying epistemic issues related to the interpretation of this concept,
2. offering a transdisciplinary understanding of the multidimensional ecological
3. opening new perspectives for the future of/in the “entropocenic”

PROVISIONAL PROGRAM
 

The seminar will take place online one’s a month at 4 pm (CET).

. 20 September 2022 – Contributory Economy in the Entropocene
– Anne Alombert and Michal Krzykawski

. 10 October 2022 – Entropy, Anti-entropy and the Living
– Giuseppe Longo

. 22 November 2022 – Supersociety and Social Generativity
– Chiara Giaccardi an Mauro Magatti

. 20 December 2023 – Challenges of Ecological Economics : Towards a Sustainable Growth ?
– Mario Giampietro and Robert Ayres (to be confirmed)

. 24 January 2023 – Flow economy and economy of the commons in the Age of Sustainability
– Gaël Giraud and Mark Swilling

. 21 February 2023 – Carbon and Silicon. Reframing the Technosphere and the Noosphere
– Dan Ross and Pieter Lemmens

. 21 March 2023 – Energetic Transition : Matter and Energy Flows in the Anthropocene
Olivier Vidal and Marina Fisher-Kovalski

. 18 April 2023 – Entropy and Information in Cybernetics and AI
Yuk Hui and David Bates

. 23 May 2023 – Economics as a « Cyborg Science » : Neoclassical Economy and Cybernetics
Philip Mirowski (to be confirmed)

. 20 June 2023 – Towards « Sustainable Selves » : Libidinal Energy and Psychic Entropy
Morten Nissen and Gerald Moore

. 11 July 2023 – Towards a Pharmacological Critique of the Capitalocene
Paolo Vignola et Sara Baranzoni

Dialogues on Philosophy and Technology Research Seminar IX

A Brief History of Digital Philosophy in 10 Expressions

Alexander R. Galloway
In dialogue with Yuk Hui

Tuesday, 1 November 2022
8pm-10pm HKT / 8am-10am EST

Online Event: Register to join via Zoom
Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/1Nn0Hw9t8

What does it mean to speak of “digital philosophy”? While often appealing to physics or computer science more than philosophy proper, digital philosophers are those who claim that the world is discrete at its most fundamental level. (The moniker “digital physics” is also sometimes used as a synonym.) Digital philosophers furnish evidence for their claim by appealing to the natural world—in, for example, the discrete spin states of subatomic particles, or the encoding capacities of DNA. Yet in this talk, we will approach digital philosophy not as a thesis about nature but as a specific decision within the act of doing philosophy. We will explore this decision through a series of simple mathemes–10 of them –including some alternative formulas that have refused or otherwise departed from the long history of digital philosophy.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021).

Conferencia en memoria de Bernard Stiegler 2022

Carl Mitcham

Filosofía política de la tecnología: Después de Leo Strauss

Apertura a cargo de Gao Shiming, Presidente de la Academia de Arte de China, Hangzhou

Moderador y ponente: Yuk Hui

Viernes, 5 de agosto de 2022

8pm-10pm HKT / 6am-8am MST

Evento en línea: Regístrese para participar a través de Zoom:  https://bit.ly/3OXgXI8

Evento en Facebook: https://fb.me/e/1FH4RsHYa 

A medida que la filosofía de la ingeniería y la tecnología ha ido surgiendo desde mediados del siglo XX, se ha ido centrando cada vez más en la ética y las cuestiones sociales, con saludables dosis de análisis conceptual, epistemológico y ontológico. Las cuestiones de filosofía política ocupan un lugar menos destacado tanto en las escuelas analíticas como en las fenomenológicas. En esta charla se cuestionarán las posibilidades de una filosofía política de la tecnología de tipo distintivo, basándose en el pensamiento de Leo Strauss, uno de los filósofos políticos más consecuentes aunque controvertidos del siglo XX. El objetivo no es tanto ampliar el extenso corpus bibliográfico que explica, interpreta y debate el sutilmente seductor corpus de Strauss como estimularse con aspectos selectivos, sin preocuparse demasiado por si mis lecturas son completamente fieles a sus intenciones. La hipótesis es que Strauss puede ayudarnos a vislumbrar algo que de otro modo faltaría en el discurso filosófico sobre la ingeniería y la tecnología.

Carl Mitcham es filósofo de ingeniería y tecnología, profesor emérito de Humanidades, Artes y Ciencias Sociales en la Colorado School of Mines y profesor internacional visitante de Filosofía de la Tecnología en la Universidad Renmin de China. El trabajo de Mitcham se centra en la filosofía y la ética de la ciencia, la tecnología y la ingeniería.

Las publicaciones de Mitcham incluyen el Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (con Robert Frodeman y Julie Thompson Klein, 2010), Ethics and Science: An Introduction (con Adam Briggle, 2012), y Steps Toward a Philosophy of Engineering: Ensayos histórico-filosóficos y críticos (2020). Fue miembro fundador de la Sociedad para la Filosofía y la Tecnología (1976), y formó parte del Comité de Libertad y Responsabilidad Científica de la Asociación Americana para el Avance de la Ciencia (1994-2000). Entre los galardones que ha recibido se encuentran el Premio Abbot Payson Usher de la Sociedad de Historia de la Tecnología (1973), el premio de la Red Mundial de Tecnología (WTN) por su ética (2006) y el Doctorado Honoris Causa de la Universidad Internacional Valenciana (2010).

Mitcham es también miembro del consejo asesor de la Red de Investigación en Filosofía y Tecnología.

Sobre el evento

La Conferencia en Memoria de Bernard Stiegler fue iniciada en 2021 por la Red de Investigación en Filosofía y Tecnología, exactamente un año después del fallecimiento del renombrado filósofo francés. Organizado anualmente en colaboración con la Academia de Arte de China en Hangzhou, donde Stiegler fue profesor visitante de 2015 a 2019, el evento tiene como objetivo invitar a un académico diferente cada año para presentar una conferencia que conmemore su trabajo y su legado.

Dialogues in Philosophy and Technology Research Seminar VIII

Luciana Parisi: Instrumentality and Possibility
In dialogue with Yuk Hui

Wed, 27 April 2022
9pm-11pm HKT / 9am-11am EST

Online Event: Register to join via Zoom
Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/1zV8AEyy5

In this seminar, Luciana Parisi will discuss instrumentality and possibility in relation to computational systems. The talk will be followed by a dialogue with Yuk Hui.

Instrumentality generally defines a correlation between means and ends and can be set up to question the correlation between technology and philosophy. This talk will address instrumentality in terms of the critique of instrumental reason and its legacy in contemporary discussions on intelligent automation in the context of global computational capital. By drawing on American pragmatism, this talk proposes a notion of instrumentality that refuses the equation of the medium with thinking and of the datum with the ideatum. Instrumentality can rather offer alternatives for dialogues on philosophy and technology. The crisis of transcendental reason that returns in the computational configurations of racial capitalism (the extraction/abstraction of the flesh, land, water, oil, cognitive, creative, and social labour in algorithmic rules and data infrastructures) becomes a radical possibility for hacking the equation of instrumental reason at the core of Western metaphysics. As much as the myth of Prometheus appears to intensify the global speciation of knowledge – where the gendering, racializing and sexualizing conditions of knowing are recursively repeated across culture – so too do intelligent automation falls short of fulfilling the universality of the manifest image of man: the mismatch between thoughts and means can no longer be repaired.

Luciana Parisi is a Professor at the Program in Literature and Computational Media Art and Culture at Duke University. Her research is a philosophical investigation of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She was a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and currently a co-founding member of CCB (Critical Computation Bureau). She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press). She is completing a monograph on alien epistemologies and the transformation of logical thinking in computation.

About the series

The Dialogues on Philosophy and Technology seminar series is initiated by the Cosmotechnics/Critical AI research project, supported by the City University of Hong Kong in collaboration with the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology. The series running from Fall/Spring 2021/22 features talks and workshops with leading scholars in the philosophy of technology and aims to address urgent questions on philosophy and technology today.

Andrew Feenberg: Sentido y Existencia

En diálogo con Yuk Hui

Miércoles, 16 de marzo de 2022, 6pm-8pm PST
Jueves, 17 de marzo de 2022, 9-11am HKT

Evento en línea: Regístrese para participar a través de Zoom https://bit.ly/3siwoSK
Evento en Facebook: https://fb.me/e/35lCCKiWm

Vivimos en dos mundos, un mundo objetivo de hechos y un mundo vivido en el que estamos activamente actuando con el estado de las cosas. Estos dos mundos no pueden resolverse en una sola realidad, pero se comunican constantemente. En esta charla hablaré de las interacciones entre ambos que dan forma a la ciencia y la tecnología.

Andrew Feenberg es profesor emérito de la Facultad de Comunicación de la Universidad Simon Fraser, donde dirigió el Laboratorio de Comunicación y Tecnología Aplicadas. Fue director de programa en el Collège International de Philosophie de París entre 2013 y 2019. Entre sus libros se encuentran Questioning Technology, Transforming Technology, Heidegger and Marcuse, Between Reason and Experience, The Philosophy of Praxis y Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason (La vida social de la razón). Su próximo libro sobre Herbert Marcuse aparecerá en Verso este año.

Sobre la serie

La serie de seminarios Diálogos sobre Filosofía y Tecnología está iniciada por el proyecto de investigación Cosmotechnics/Critical AI, apoyado por la City University of Hong Kong en colaboración con la Research Network for Philosophy and Technology. La serie, que se desarrollará a partir de otoño/primavera de 2021/22, incluye charlas y talleres con destacados especialistas en filosofía de la tecnología y pretende abordar cuestiones urgentes sobre la filosofía y la tecnología en la actualidad.

Los próximos eventos incluyen seminarios en 2022 con Luciana Parisi (20 de abril), y Carl Mitcham (25 de mayo). Sigue nuestra página de Facebook o suscríbete a nuestro newsletter para estar al día de los próximos eventos.

Book Conversation: Discriminating Data by Wendy Chun

In dialogue with Yuk Hui

Thu 10 March 2022, 5pm PST / Fri 11 March 2022, 9am HKT

Online Event: Register to join via Zoom

Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/304BhrtRH

In this event, Wendy Chun will discuss her latest book Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press) in conversation with Yuk Hui.

In Discriminating Data, Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighbourhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data.

How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data? Chun calls for alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks and foster a more democratic big data.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor.

Henning Schmidgen: Machinic Normativity
In dialogue with Yuk Hui

Tuesday, 22 February 2022
13:00-15:00 CET / 20:00-22:00 HKT
Online Event: Register to join via Zoom
Facebook Event

In today’s society, technologies are often perceived as helpful and fruitful “modes of existence” that facilitate and improve the lives of their users. At the same time, they are often experienced as limitations and constraints imposed on us by more or less abstract bodies and powers. The use of digital technologies, in particular, is often associated with unclear rules, preconditions, and consequences that limit our capacities for self-determination – and thus also the possibility of normative action. In this situation, it is not only the critique of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and information capitalism that is appropriate and necessary. As I argue, what is also at stake is an extended reflection about “machinic normativity,” i.e., the possibility and capacity for subjective and creative use of technologies.

This talk introduces the idea of machinic normativity by referring to the philosophical tradition of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called “technological vitalism.” I will show that this tradition includes not just Deleuze and Guattari, but also philosophers and physicians such as Georges Canguilhem and Kurt Goldstein. Crucial to this tradition is a biological perspective on “technique” in which it is understood as synonymous with the possibility of shaping one’s environment. Accordingly, our answer to the question concerning technology depends crucially on actualizing this perspective.

Henning Schmidgen is Professor of Media Studies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. He studied psychology, philosophy and linguistics in Berlin and Paris. In 1996, he obtained his PhD in psychology at the Free University Berlin. From 1997 to 2011, he was postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Dept. Rheinberger) in Berlin. In 2011, he obtained the Habilitation in history of science and media studies. Between 2011 and 2014 he was professor of media aesthetics at the University of Regensburg.

Bridging the gap between media studies and the history of science, Schmidgen worked extensively on Guattari’s machines, Canguilhem’s concepts, and the problem of time in physiology, psychology, and psychoanalysis. His research is published by journals such as Isis, Configurations, and Grey Room. Among his recent books are The Helmholtz-Curves. Tracing Lost Time (2014), The Guattari Tapes (2019) and Horn, or The Counterside of Media (2022).

About the series

The Dialogues on Philosophy and Technology seminar series is initiated by the Cosmotechnics/Critical AI research project, supported by the City University of Hong Kong in collaboration with the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology. The series running from Fall/Spring 2021/22 features talks and workshops with leading scholars in the philosophy of technology and aims to address urgent questions on philosophy and technology today.

Upcoming events include seminars in 2022 with Andrew Feenberg (16 March), Luciana Parisi (20 April), and Carl Mitcham (25 May). Follow our Facebook Page or sign-up to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on upcoming events.