Location: Media Lounge ZKM Entrance fee: Free admission Language: English

In the joint lecture series »thinking inside out« by ZKM and HfG, we invite international guests from the fields of philosophy, literature, and art to an open exchange with university members, ZKM staff and the people of Karlsruhe.

This talk by José-Carlos Mariátegui explores British cybernetician Stafford Beer's lesser-known journeys and collaborations in Latin America beyond the famous Cybersyn project in Chile. Beer's work traversed a complex managerial and political terrain that began in the 1960s through his company SIGMA and its projects with Chile's steel industry. His ideas on real-time enterprise information and control systems also influenced a relatively unknown project in the 1970s, the Centre for the Study of People's Participation (CENTRO), founded in Peru by the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro.

The talk will also explore Beer's involvement in various projects across Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s as the region gradually returned to democracy, including experiences in Mexico, Uruguay (URUCIB), Venezuela (Cybervenez) and Colombia, and how cybernetics became a language of 'viable utopias' - somewhat challenging technocratic views on the use of technology that prevail in state-run projects.

More than a technical history, this is a story of how computational thinking can become a radical act of creative liberation.

Hosts: Constanze Fischbeck (University of Arts and Design, HfG) and Alistair Hudson (ZKM)

Biography:

José-Carlos Mariátegui (PE/UK) is a writer, curator, scholar and entrepreneur on culture and technology. He is the founder of Alta Tecnología Andina – ATA (Lima, Peru), an organization working at the intersection of art, science, technology and society in Latin America. Dr. Mariategui is an Adjunct Professor at LUISS (Rome), a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science – LSE (London), a Board Member of Future Everything (UK), a Member of the Board of Trustees (Kuratorium) of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany), and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Resident (2025). Has published in journals such as AI & Society, Third Text, The Information Society, Telos and Leonardo. His multidisciplinary research embraces media archeology, digitization, video archives and the impact of technology in memory institutions. He co-edited a special issue for AI & Society on Cybernetics in Latin America (2022) and authored an extensive research on the video art collections in Latin America for Getty’s book Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (2023). He is co-curator of ARTEONICA*: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today, at the MOLAA in Long Beach as part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide (2024-2025).