Holistic Cybernetics
Research and Practice
Where it all began
In 1948, Norbert Wiener published: 'Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine'. It is the first public usage of the term "cybernetics". It refers to the newly born field of study which since the beginning, had the goal of bringing together a most diverse group of organised studies from different disciplines. The cybernetics conferences (part of the Macy Conferences) originated breakthroughs in several fields of knowledge which include systems theory, and what later became known as cognitive science.
Between approximately 1968 and 1975, Margaret Mead, Heinz von Foerster and others developed the cybernetics of the "observing systems", which includes the observer through an iterative process. This new process-based Cybernetics includes information about the observer into information about the object observed, and deals with a quality of experience that exists in a temporal dimension, and can only be accessed as a consequence of at least two experiences, two ideas, two examples, two languages, ...
Into an Expanded Meaning
In a world increasingly dependent on digital technology, it becomes more and more limiting to associate the word 'cybernetics' only with 'machines'. Becomebecome methodology is holistic because it wants to reclaim the 'animal' element in the original book of Norbert Wiener from 1948. We continue the research on process-based trajectories developed by pioneers like Gregory Bateson, Francisco Varela, Robert Axelrod, Ilya Prigogine, Douglas Hofstadter, Roy Ascott, and many others who strived to expand the language of the hard Sciences in order to incorporate or at least bridge into the unique insight available to experiences from 'everyday life', and the fields of Arts and the Humanities.
The BecomeBecome approach to Cybernetics naturally includes an element that is transpersonal and provides a language to explore information about the individual that is only possible to access because of others. It is transdisciplinary because it provides participants from different backgrounds a language to explore information that lies beyond the reach of any single disciplinary field of studies, and at the same time connects all of them with information about the observer. The Becomebecome council of scientific researchers, artists and educators, is a syncretic community brought together by the idea that transdisciplinary projects include a quality of experience that goes beyond what is possible to access through standard curricula in academia alone.