Cybernetic community

cybernetic community

Baruch Gottlieb

The material practices of many contemporary artist and activist collectives are strongly oriented towards, and embedded in, local communities. At the same time the concept of community has fundamentally changed through digital communication technology. It is a common assumption that non-digital local communities are distinct from digital global communities, but in fact the two are rather mutually and dynamically related in feedback loops of technical effects and social responses. This cybridity gives new urgency to the concept of community. Now, more than ever, it produces cultural and social tendencies and needs that defy expectations, place, and time.

Our actions have effects and these effects act back upon us in a learning process. While this is an uncontroversial statement, the age of hyper automation gives us the impression that this experience is massively compounded, as in a meta-butterfly effect, a feedforward hall of mirrors, or hell of mirrors. Our actions seem to have at once too little and too much consequence. How to get the right sense of scale in today’s intensively networked environment? Community no longer seems to have continuity, but appears to be an ad hoc grouping which could just as well be otherwise. One can be a part of several ‘communities’ at once, and then just as suddenly, of several others. As a community, we act as intersections of multi-dimensional Venn diagrams where our world of associations reconfigures around us in real time.

Of course community still has a centre of gravity, its provisional situatedness. In tension with the networked context, every member of a community has its own situatedness, if only in that of their physical body or device. What happens if a social network is radically distributed, and no longer runs on a central server, as in the case of software projects like Patchwork/SecureScuttlebutt? Then the network coheres around the chief maintainers of the project.

A community is always intractably material. What we would like to examine are the relationships and tensions between the participants and the material apparatus that entertains them. The physical space of the contemporary art institute West Den Haag includes an ‘Alphabetum’ which could be called a proto-institutionality dedicated to the forms of letters (grammatography). The community around the Alphabetum coalesces around its physical space, just as a community of an online social network coalesces in its respective physical space, i.e., its servers.

The Alphabetum functions as a laboratory for cybernetic community knowledge creation, the generation of unlikely and unexpected forms of expression and exchange. Also, as it is cybernetic, it is committed to storage, archiving as a recursive practice in a kind of communal learning. The exhibitions in the Alphabetum are probes sent out into the community for responses, which are processed and built into subsequent exhibitions. Through this recursive feedback process, the Alphabetum ‘learns’ about the environment that is interested in the programme. At the same time, it is instrumented by the public to respond to their interests. This community exercise is concretized in the exhibits on display in the Alphabetum, which are subsequently curated and recontextualized by the community.