Cybernetic Archives

Using the post-war science of cybernetics—the study of communication and control—as a point of departure, this talk will trace out the reformulation of observation and knowledge that occurred in a range of fields immediately after World War II. Linking design, urban planning, and artistic practices with the life, human, and social sciences, I chart the relationship between contemporary obsessions with storage, visualization, and interactivity in digital systems to previous modernist concerns with archiving, representation, and memory. The  central focus of this talk is to demonstrate the historically specific construction of vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century; and to pose questions about how genealogies of reason, computation, and sense intersect or challenge contemporary historiographical practices and theories of archiving and history.