Dulmini Perera

Thermodynamic (entropic) explorations on how life forms remain themselves through time and sustain forms of autonomy negentropically, i.e., by differing their own end, has been a subject of interest for many cyberneticians. Recent discussions that connect explorations in cybernetics, ecology, and technology emerging from disciplines as diverse as philosophy of technology (Bernard Stieglar, Yuk Hui), anthropology (Thomas Hylland Ericksen, Peter Harries-Jones), Design (Frederick Steier) have foregrounded the issues related to the complex ways designed technological systems/ environments contribute to ongoing entropic processes that, in turn, result in the erasure of diversity not only at a biological and cultural level but also in terms of technological diversity. Moreover, they have pointed out how technological systems, in contributing to the erasure of the plurality of time of multiple lifeworlds (organisms, societies), also contribute to the erasure of differences in the response abilities necessary to maintain these systems’ flexibility and ecological health.

This presentation contributes to this discussion by exploring a less known aspect of the anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson’s work related to reworking Norbert Wiener’s concept of negentropy to ‘bio-entropy’. Drawing a connection between technology, ecology and time, Bateson pointed out how the discrepancy between how humans work with change through notions of an explicit order generated and propagated through modernity and an ecological order of change that is more implicit became a source of ecological error. More specifically, I will look at ideas developed through encounters with the technological and world-building experiments of Warren Brodey (a cofounder of Ecology, Tool, Toy Company) and a proponent of ‘soft technology’ and Antol Holt, mathematician and game designer, a proponent of ‘coordination technology’ who were both extremely critical of the ecosystemic issues generated by technological systems based on the modernist ‘mechy-max’ cosmology of clock time. They playfully explored ways of rethinking ‘response’ in ways that take into account the implicit and unfolding orders of plural living systems. In Brodey’s playful work inspired by his work with blind children just as much as his work with scientists such as W. S. McCulloch, responsive technologies (in the form of material with specific memory capacities interfaces, etc.) become environments that support the multiple senses of the whole body that link plural unfolding rhythms of contexts. Anatol Holt attempted to rethink what computers could do if they were organized in ways to think about time as ‘coordination time’. Holt worked with ‘Petri nets’ dealing with stochastic systems and the notion of ‘concurrency’ to show how such complex ideas could find representation in a modelling language. Working through children’s games, “Find-the-momma”, or “Pata-cake”, he described things and persons through participation-in-process, response and relationship, Holt explored the possibility of how new process languages can bring about new forms of organization. In the first part of the presentation I will present their explorations by providing glimpses into the broader challenges of thinking response-in-time, in the second part I invite the audience to conversationally explore what ‘serious time games’ could mean for our present.

First presented at the American Society of Cybernetics 60 conference, DC Arts centre, Washington, June 2024