short descriptions
Our studio will prototype a cybernetic workshop in which participants explore new modes of conversation through prototyping – experimenting, improvising, and playing with alternate forms as means of interaction, observation, and feedback. Participants can expect to journey toward a destination determined only by the continuous adaptation of their traces in sound, gesture, and visual mark-making. This studio's (adaptable) goal is to provide participants with expanded vocabularies of prototyping for use in diverse settings and travels.
So much of today’s tech is controlling what we see and distorting the world we share. Yet ‘Today’s AI’ could be shifted toward our organic, biological roots — for example, by designing analog interactional frameworks based on novelty and choice, transparency and conversation. We can create and collect design patterns and working prototypes, from across the worlds of art and media, technology and history, that can inspire designers, students, and entrepreneurs to bring about positive change in the tech we use every day. Read more
Through resonance, works of art and design are centering. In openness to expansion, they grant agency. They create closure and consummation, but never stasis. They are circular. Join us to explore how Gordon Pask’s ‘conversation’ as aesthetic experience initiates ontogenetic resilience.
Via an excursion to Chinese Gardens and an installation that involves mushrooms making electronic music, we will introduce what could be called ‘technologies for floating.’ Becoming comfortable with ‘floating’ is what every embedded observer/agent needs to learn. It is essential for ‘conversation’ in the Paskian sense. How could we conceive of ‘technologies for floating’ to assist with learning to float? Performing as ‘radiant circles’ such technologies - we argue - would help us to actualise a cybernetic approach to ontogenetic resilience.
The aim of the workshop is to develop - for particular situations - ideas for the design of ‘technologies for floating’ that foster a sense of openness to the permutations of the systems we are embedded in.
Sustaining healthy communities in the midst of compound complexity: Given the ‘compound complexity’ of climate change and interrelated ‘wicked problems,’ what forms of learning and innovation promote healthy human communities in sustainable ecosystems? Following Bateson’s insight that preservation provokes change, join us to discuss the limits to growth model, a Polynesian atoll, Louisiana farmers markets, and examples from participants.
Art as steersmanship. As Maxine Green showed, art looks at openings to alternative realities, makes the petrified world speak, sing, and dance, creates places for perceiving the unexplored, and thinking of things as if they could be otherwise. Join a discussion of intimations of more desirable and multisensory social orders