Cybernetic Synethesia System

Hugh Jacks, Stamps School of Art & Design

Collaborators: Osman Khan, Professor, Stamps; Okyoung Noh, Stamps

Complex systems are becoming an increasingly integral part of our lives and are also becoming increasingly complex. The field of cybernetics, states that, instead of seeking to master complex systems we may seek to coexist with complex systems through sustainable reactive behavior.

Cybernetics, as a field, seeks to manage and create homeostatic systems, ones that resist entropy. In the film Industry and Photography (1979), Harun Farocki, describes a coking plant as a “massive organism” and “a creature incapable of visualizing itself, but whose individual parts seem to work together with the precision of a sleep-walker.”

Complex systems are difficult to visualize and understand how their parts work together. While common cultural understandings of systems of control are strictly hierarchical when examining complex systems, they are often without a center or a top instead they reproduce themselves by their own inertia.

This Audiovisual Installation seeks to convert the rational and technical elements found in models of complex systems into a physical space for a sensory experience where viewers can engage with an abstracted system to create an understanding of the complexity of actually existing systems and the precarity of their sustainability.