Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

As part of the Art + Research Center’s pilot semester, “New Social Abstractions,” writer Ana Teixeira Pinto will deliver a public lecture on cybernetics at ICA Miami. To learn more, or enroll in workshops conducted by Ana Teixeira Pinto, please visit icamiami.org/arc.

From the artist: “The nexus between communication and control–whose reaches span the NSA, credit rating agencies, health insurance providers, or the sorting algorithms used by Google or Instagram—was first articulated by behaviorism, cybernetics and information theory. By conflating financial, social and political systems with the nervous system,¹ cybernetics was also the first discipline to forge an identity between information and life. These are the epistemic materials from which, our planetary fusion of surveillance and spectacle is made of, and we will briefly try to narrate their pre-history.”

_{1: Orit Halpern, The Smart Mandate, in Nervous Systems-Quantified Life and the Social Question, Spector Books, 2015, 223}

Address

About Ana Teixeira Pinto

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer from Lisbon currently living in Berlin. She is a lecturer at the UdK (Universität der Kunste) Berlin and her writings have appeared in publications such as e-flux journal, Art-Agenda, Mousse, Frieze/de, Domus, Inaesthetics, Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst.