Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

The nexus between communication and control—whose reach spans the NSA, credit rating agencies, health insurance providers, and 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 that our planetary fusion of surveillance and spectacle is made from. In the seminar, 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}