Curating’s technological unconscious: the history of cybernetics and the Gaian transformation of curation

This contribution will use the occasion and curatorial scope of the Helsinki Biennial to address what philosopher Yuk Hui and I have called the ‘cybernetisation of the exhibition’. We have described this process, which consists in the redefinition of the exhibition and the institution as an informational and communicational medium, based on a series of writings and institutional experiments taking place in the 1970s, by the likes of curators Peter Althaus, Jorge Glusberg, Pontus Hultén (to which we could have added, amongst others, philosopher Vilém Flusser). Yet, the 1970s also saw the emergence of a distinction between so-called ‘first order cybernetics’ – through which living and technological beings came to be seen as regulated by processes of ‘feedback’ – and ‘second order cybernetics’ – which considers systems as self-organising and self-reflective – the former being, broadly, the main inspiration for these curatorial and theoretical attempts at transforming museums and the exhibition-form.

I thus intend to return to this distinction between first and second order cybernetics and how we can trace prevalent curatorial logic to first order cybernetics while recent and evolving shifts in the exhibitionary complex might be linked to the second order. With regards to the Anthropocene, second order cybernetics equips us better to rethink the role of biennales and the way they can address what philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called the ‘Intrusion of Gaia’ (namely how forces of the planet and the environment gain an autonomy that exceeds human control over them). My hypothesis is that, for institutions and curating to be able to address the contemporary nexus of environmental, political, and scientific urgencies, it is necessary to rethink them through the development and model of second-order cybernetics, that is as self-organising systems themselves.

• Organisation