Benjamin Bratton: The Artificialization of Sensing, Simulating, and Recursion

Cybernetics formalized the observation of autopoietic composition and control in evolved systems: an entity's sensing of internal and external environments, the modeling of those and counterfactual simulations of future states of both entity and niche, as well as the recursive control and transformation of its present state in relation to those potentialities. "Cybernetics" discovered and gave scale-independent abstraction to these processes, ones that were only later artificialized by teleogenic intention. This artificialization of sensing, simulating and recursion emerges during the long cognitive revolution in Paleolithic cultures, extends through the histories of complex technologies, and through to the discovery and engineering of computation as a general purpose technology, including more recently, the artificialization of teleogenic intelligence itself. This talk will define the tripartite cybernetic cycle in light of its eventual artificializations - of vision, of category, of motion, of modeling, of embodiment, of cognition, etc.- in relation to contemporary theories of modular cognition and planetary sapience in order to speculate on the future of what the cybernetic vocabulary hopes to signify.
Benjamin Bratton is Director of the Antikythera program at Berggruen Institute. He is Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at the University of California, San Diego. His research spans philosophy of technology, social and political theory, computational media & infrastructure, and speculative design. He is the author of several books including The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016), The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (Verso, 2021), The Terraforming (Strelka Press, 2019), and Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution (e-flux/Sternberg Press, 2015). Visiting Professor at the European Graduate School, New York University-Shanghai, and SCI_Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture) and previously directed several think-tanks at the Strelka Institute. His current book project develops a new philosophy of the “artificial” in relation to climate change, planetary science, synthetic intelligence and the prospects of viable planetary futures.