Re: nettime The Whole Earth -- Conference (Berlin, HKW 21/22 June
John: Anyway, Mark, get the catalog and listen to the podcasts that Nina gave the addresses of... it's well worth your time. Thanks, I did. Unfortunately, it's all in German (including the translation of Fred's speech), except for his interview -- which I recommend. Maybe Diana/Pit have the English original of the speech? I helped Fred with Counterculture and have staying in touch. I did not help him with the new Democratic Surround book (due out in Nov.) but I've discussed it with him and, correctly, he focuses on Gregory Bateson and *not* Wiener in terms of the cybernetics aspect of all this. As it turns out, Wiener *refused* to work with Bateson (and his then-wife Margaret Mead and Social Psychologist Kurt Lewin), which he specifically mentions in the Introduction to his 1948 Cybernetics -- for the reasons that he lays out in his 1950 The Human Use of Human Beings (where he doesn't mention Bateson or Mead). Wiener wanted *NOTHING* to do with the controlling humans aspect of cybernetics -- quite deliberately. That was BATESON and others from the Cybernetics Group and the later Society for General Systems Research! The HKW fellow who interviews Fred doesn't seem to know about any of this, perhaps in part because Richard Barbrook has been ducking my attempts to *correct* what he has written and what seems to be taken-for-granted in the Cybersalon circles in London. Like the drunk who looks for his car keys under the streetlamp, they have been looking in the *wrong* place because that's where the light is. At the heart of the relationship between LSD and cybernetics -- both of which were/are used as technologies to PURIFY a corrupt humanity -- is Stewart Brand. He was both a protege of Bateson, as well as his publicist (partly through John Brockman in New York) as well as the publicist for LSD (particularly at the Trips Festivals). It was Brand who famously said (something like), If you really want to change humanity, then electronics will be much more powerful than LSD. He's the one who took the hippies and got them online. Not much of a leap there on Fred's part (with some help, of course). If you do watch the interview, notice how the interviewer never brings up LSD and how Fred reluctantly mentions it in his answer about where the idea of Whole Earth came from. Did the exhibit deal with LSD at all . . . ?? I'm thinking that the next step to this exhibition would be a wide creative exploration of (open/living/general) systems theory from Bertalanffy to Church, Miller, Odum, Simms, etc etc and all those who were outside the cybernetics/cold war systems context. Great idea! However, like LSD, you really can't remove any of this from that dominant Cold War context. Unless they were threatened with prosecution, as was Wiener, forcing him into retirement, then ALL of these characters were involved in the same matrix of funding, motivation and outcomes. Thanks for the pointer to Leslie's book. As you might recall, I've brought up Christopher Simpson's Science of Coercion, as well a number of more recent works on the role of the CIA and, those who were really setting the crucial social-science research agenda in the 1950s/60s, the FOUNDATIONS, on the list. Mark # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Whole Earth -- Conference (Berlin, HKW 21/22 June
Hi Mark -- a few comments: I was instantly intrigued when I saw this show was up at HKW, and I did make the show but had to depart Berlin right before the conference (after breakfast with Barack and Michelle @ the Reichstag)... If this was mentioned on nettime (considering that it was once the primary topic of this list), I missed it -- did anyone from this collective attend and do they wish to offer a report? I spent an hour with Pit and Diana at HKW, and they did podcast the whole thing, worth listening to, as Fred et al gave a good talk. (I downloaded the podcasts, but have misplaced the URLs -- maybe someone could re-post them? Pit??) (thanks Nina!!) This past spring I had my Meaning of Information Technology students consume the last chapter of the Cyberculture to Counterculture book -- though it was quite deep history to them, and quite abstract in that sense -- it was hard for them to grasp. From eco-psychedelia to Internet neoliberalism: The CONFERENCE will revolve around questions of the legacy of the California counterculture. How did ...snip... of the Anthropocene, are being negotiated, updated, or ??? in some cases ??? forgotten. Yeah, anyway, the show was quite good, imho, a bit hard to picture what it looked like, if you had not been immersed in that cultural situation as we were. I came into possession of a Whole Earth Catalog via my brother who was, for a time, the editor of a radical student paper out of UCSD, and a member of the Weather Underground. He's 13 years older than I, and in 1968, when the first Whole Earth Catalog came out, I was just 10. A few years later when the really big one came out, 400 pages or so, I had a copy, and pored over it for many many hours. days... As a nascent foray into what became a deep involvement in the mail art network, I recall sending to a majority of the addresses in the catalog for more information, brochures, etc... It all made a deep impression, though one which was quite foreign to my family milieu (with my father there at MIT's Lincoln Lab, @ the Pentagon, etc). It definitely was a counter to the culture that I was a part of as far as my teenage mind could measure. I'm thinking that the next step to this exhibition would be a wide creative exploration of (open/living/general) systems theory from Bertalanffy to Church, Miller, Odum, Simms, etc etc and all those who were outside the cybernetics/cold war systems context. At any rate, the show was dense on textual and media content, well choreographed, enjoyable, informative, and again left me wondering what it 'looked like' to a 20-30-something German academic media artist. SO, maybe there are some attendees near to that profile on nettime who would care to reflect on it... I didn't take any notes, though I suspect that the catalog will give a good account of the shows actual content. I was impressed by the show -- and would be interested in hearing from the curators where the original idea to do such a project came from! Turner's somewhat radical connecting of Stewart Brand and the WEC/WELL, the counterculture generally to Wiener's Cold War cybernetics seems very intuitive and not as radical as it may appear on the surface. I especially appreciated his point how applied systems theory (taking the form of operations analysis, systems analysis, etc), is one formative basis for the corporate development of contemporary social computing (i.e., the corporate RD management structures of Silicon Valley). This for me is a powerful conceptual step in decoding the 'effects' and the pervasiveness of the military-industrial structure within Amurikan society. It is my belief that the US system is still, to a large degree, dependent on that M-I-(Academic) Complex framework for its socio-economic-political structural integrity. It's only less visible in these recent years, but no less powerful a determinant. Unfortunately most Amurikans do not make the connection with surveillance, drones-in-the-neighborhood, security, paranoia, etc as symptoms of a defensive (and of course many times offensive) imperial military state. Another book which gives some useful threads with the development of the MIA complex of which Silicon Valley is only one manifestation is: Leslie, S.W., 1993. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Anyway, Mark, get the catalog and listen to the podcasts that Nina gave the addresses of... it's well worth your time. Cheers, John -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD ensconced on the Western Slope of Colorado http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering
nettime The Whole Earth -- Conference (Berlin, HKW 21/22 June 2013)
Folks: If this was mentioned on nettime (considering that it was once the primary topic of this list), I missed it -- did anyone from this collective attend and do they wish to offer a report? http://hkw.de/en/programm/2013/the_whole_earth/veranstaltungen_83124/veranst altungsdetail_90739.php From eco-psychedelia to Internet neoliberalism: The CONFERENCE will revolve around questions of the legacy of the California counterculture. How did some of its concepts become global principles of new capitalistic ???frontiers??? ? Roundtable discussions will explore the historical sources of, and connections between, discursive and political issues such as the ecological movement, cybernetics, anti-conformist cultures, new artistic practices that dissolve boundaries, and the transformations in these areas right up to the globalist network capitalism of the 1990s. Thus, the conference investigates the background conditions of the discourses that today, in the framework of the Anthropocene, are being negotiated, updated, or ??? in some cases ??? forgotten. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY P.S. The event appears to keynoted by Fred Turner, whose upcoming book The Democratic Surround I have mentioned in numerous nettime posts. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The Whole Earth -- Conference (Berlin, HKW 21/22 June
Hi Mark, the lectures are online as videos meanwhile [1]http://hkw.de/de/programm/2013/anthropozaen/multimedia_anthropozaen/ video_anthropozaen/video_anthropozaen.php as well as some extra Audio material that reboot.fm did https://soundcloud.com/rebootfm/sets/the-whole-earth-im-ther what about all the question marks embedding the term 'frontier'? best N Gesendet: Freitag, 19. Juli 2013 um 14:26 Uhr Von: newme...@aol.com An: nettim...@kein.org Betreff: nettime The Whole Earth -- Conference (Berlin, HKW 21/22 June 2013) Folks: If this was mentioned on nettime (considering that it was once the primary topic of this list), I missed it -- did anyone from this collective attend and do they wish to offer a report? ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
