Underground Cybernetics: Noöpunk Experiments in Distributed Intelligence
Noöpunk proposes that minds are not bounded by individual organisms, but distributed across ecologies, material processes, and socio-technical networks.
Sunday, Dec 21, 2025 12:00 PM EST
Abstract
Noöpunk proposes that minds are not bounded by individual organisms, but distributed across ecologies, material processes, and socio-technical networks. From this perspective, intelligence is latent in both living and nonliving systems, activated wherever sensemaking processes discover loops of self-regulation. This talk frames noöpunk as a form of underground cybernetics: experiments in perception, feedback, and relationality carried out in rogue contexts, outside of the standardized bounds of institutions (what David Graeber once called “Dead Zones of the Imagination”). Drawing on examples from underground cultures, I argue that the messy and imaginative field cybernetics of extitutional publics can be fused with established empirical methods to forge a creative design practice of ontological discovery.
Participants Bios
Exeunt is an underground researcher and design theorist. Their work uses archival research, field investigation and applied philosophy to explore the economic and organizational patterns of extitutional spaces, both in urban and digital settings. Their major concerns include posthuman social organization, mutualist economics, direct democracy and open protocolization as features of non-institutional life.
