ASC Speaker Series
The ASC’s Speaker Series has evolved into a cornerstone of the ASC’s ongoing commitment to foster cybernetic discourse. Our past sessions have presented emerging research and applications in a variety of conversational formats with the aim to advance cybernetic understanding and foster interdisciplinary connections among researchers, students, and practitioners.
The Speaker Series Working Group aims to facilitate thoughtful exchanges between established scholars and emerging voices who articulate connections to cybernetic values. As the ASC has been influential in the development of what is known today as second-order cybernetics, a key focus of the Speakers Series has been on second-order positions, which recognize the observer’s role in knowledge construction.
Events typically occur on the third Sunday of each month at 12:00 EDT, providing a regular opportunity for the global cybernetics community to connect. They may include short presentations, but the focus of the events is on creating space for meaningful dialogue and intellectual exchange.
Browse our upcoming events below or explore our archive of past sessions, such as the ongoing 2025 Season #5 series, which is examining a broad spectrum of cybernetic applications—from artificial intelligence and artistic practice to political organization and more-than-human design. To propose a presentation or inquire about hosting a session, please contact the working group at wg-speaker-series@asc-cybernetics.org.
Upcoming Events
6.4.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.
Past Events
Season #6: Emergent Territories
6.1. What is a Laboratory, that Cybernetics need escape it?
How might we incubate Cybernetics as a living response to today’s wicked challenges?
Can a laboratory instigate a world-wide experiment?
6.2. The Appropriation of Autopoiesis in Architecture
In his talk, Guillermo Sanchez Sotes will examine the merits of the cross-disciplinary appropriation of the theory of autopoiesis in Patrik Schumacher’s The Autopoiesis of Architecture.
6.3. Animaspace: Conversations with Robots as Existential and Ethical Inquiry
In this talk, Angelina Kozhevnikova (Animaspace) will share how her artistic practice constructs conversations between humans and robots through continuous co-regulation, where both become part of a joint cognitive system unfolding across time, space, and embodied presence.
Season #5: Fresh Eyes / New Voices
5.1. AI-Generated Art: Steering Through Noisy Channels
Two artists talk of complementary work in AI art, in relation to steering and to society.
5.2. Cybernetics and Political Organisation
Explores cybernetic themes from Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal and how old debates on political organisation connect to cybernetics.
5.3. Acting with the World: The Choreography of Agency
Conversation to explore an unfamiliar but important pattern of environmental action attuned to the agency of nature and wicked problems.
5.4. Pluriversal Ecologies: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and More-than-Human Design
A conversation on the role of human subjectivity in understanding more-than-human lifeworlds.
5.5. Learning to Learn: More Than a Machine at The Brooklyn Children’s Museum
Merve Sahin in conversation with Dulmini Perera: join us in exploring Gordon Pask’s CASTE implementation in the design of Edwin Schlossberg’s Learning Environment at The Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
Season #4: Cybernetics Salons
4.1. #NewMacy: Finding New Trails in Pursuit of Resilience
#NewMacy returns to the ASC Series to present its current project, Colloquies for Transgenerational Collaboration, and to offer glimpses of new / emerging conversations from our group
4.2. Feedback Loop(s) of Transdisciplinary Practice
Art, design, sociotechnical systems, and organizational strategies
4.3. What we usually don’t understand about language, and why this matters.
Our misconception of language and its role in human evolution may have dire consequences for both humanity and the ecosphere.
4.4. Co-constructing preferred realities and relationships in systemic therapy
Maturana’s notions of knowledge, reality, and relationship ground a therapy using questions that invite clients to draw preferred distinctions.
4.5. Mind, Ecology, Enaction: Encounters between Bateson and Varela
In conversation with Dulmini Perera, Evan Thompson, and Bruce Clarke, explore the relationships between Bateson and Varela’s work.
4.6. Embodied Feedback: Second-Order Cybernetics and Somatics
Unraveling parallels between classic cybernetics, second-order cybernetics, and somatics.
4.7. Natural Drift: a Simple Theory with Substantive Consequences
Natural drift replaces reductionist ideas as the spontaneous process that applies to the evolution of living beings and their medium, including us and our cultures.
Season #3: Cybernetics and Human’s Knowing
Performative enactments and poetic improvisations to explore #NewMacy’s cybernetic re-navigation of today’s wicked challenges.
3.2. Beyond the Distinction Between 1st Order and 2nd Order Cybernetics
Discussion of the distinction that has been a defining feature of the American Society for Cybernetics since at least 1974.
3.3. In Search of an erotic framework for Cybernetics
Inspired on the circularity of desire, an erotic approach to Cybernetics may bring new insights on concepts such as the observer, control, black box and automation.
3.4. One Possible Model For Designing Social Transformations
This presentation is a multimedia systemic model embracing fundamental cybernetic concepts, notions and ideas when exploring social Transformations by an interactor living a variety of micro and or macro domains.
In this session, Dulmini Perera looks at the complex ways cybernetics, design and fiction interrelate around questions of ecological complexity and modern technology.
3.6. Language, Evolutionary Leadership and Conscious Evolution (not recorded)
The power of language to design social systems and evolutionary leadership for a conscious evolution toward a flourishing civilization.
A conversation about conversations as a forum for social transformation.
3.8. Sustainable Self-governance in business and societies: the VSM in Action
Dr Angela Espinosa presents her book about the ‘viability and sustainability approach,’ inspired in the VSM.
Season #2: Cybernetics and Human’s Knowing
2.1. NewMacy Meeting #2: Urgent Questions in response to “Today’s AI”
What forms of human-machine interactivity would move us away from the ills of “Today’s AI”? How do we create organic frameworks for AI that are based in human and ecological values?
2.2. New Books in Cybernetics Spotlight #1
Tom Scholte interviews Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson about his book, The Nature of the Machine and the Collapse of Cybernetics
2.3. Annetta Pedretti: Weaving Language, Reflections, Memories and Stories
Recollection of Annetta Pedretti, who understood understanding and the importance of languaging when designing.
2.4. Cybernetics and the Gaia Hypothesis: A conversation with Bruce Clarke
Bruce Clarke discusses the cybernetics of the Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.
This talk by Cheryl Hsu proposes transversal thinking and praxis as a means to create coherence, or “wholeness”, through a pluriverse of perspectives.
2.6. Seventy years of Family Therapy, from Bateson until now. What’s new?
Exploration of several cybernetic ideas and concepts that emerged during the past 70 years, associated with family therapies then and now.
2.7. To Know the World: The Future of Environmental Learning (not recorded)
Why environmental learning is crucial for understanding the connected challenges of climate, migration, democracy, and human flourishing.
Season #1: Cybernetics and Human’s Knowing: A present past toward a future
1.1. Five decades of cybernetics
Jude Lombardi facilitates a conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Paul Pangaro, all three connected to cybernetics for decades.
1.2. Towards a Critical Cybernetics by Klaus Krippendorff
What’s solvable within one context doesn’t necessarily account for the larger social consequences. It’s affected by language.
1.3. Leonard and Richards on Stafford Beer
During this ASC Series event, Jude Lombardi facilitated a conversation between two long-term members and past-presidents of the ASC, Allenna Leonard and Larry Richards, about the life and work of Stafford Beer.
1.4. A Causal Ontology of Nature by Angus Jenkinson
Lecture presentation: From Determinism to Determination: Revising the Causal Ontology of Nature by Angus Jenkinson
1.5. Clarke and Clough on Varela, an Interview with Lombardi
During this interview with Bruno Clarke and Patricia Clough, Jude Lombardi explores memories, interpretations, concepts, and notions associated with the works of Francisco Varela.
1.6. Partial Memories of Mary Catherine Bateson
During this event participants were invited to share their memories of Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson, a life-long honorary member of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC).
