Cybernetics Image Library
Cybernetics Image Library
Chaski (Saskia Knowles)
21: The Discipline of Organizing by Robert J. Glushko
Image credits:
- Cybernetics Simplified by Arthur Porter
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The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
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Signal : communication tools for the information age by Kevin Kelly
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Literary machines : The report on, and of, project Xanadu concerning word processing, electronic publishing, hypertext, thinkertoys, tomorrow's intellectual revolution, and certain other topics including knowledge, education and freedom by Theodor Holm Nelson
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Think Before You Think : Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing by Stafford Beer
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Cybernetic revolutionaries : technology and politics in Allende's Chile by Eden Medina
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Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age by Alberto Melucci
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The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour by Stephen Willats
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Visions of the future by Clifford A. Pickover
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The way things work book of the computer : an illustrated encyclopedia of information science, cybernetics, and data processing by C. Van Amerongen
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The hidden dimension by Edward Twitchell Hall
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Radical Software, Volume I, Number 4 by -
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Counting on computers : the new tool for restaurant management by Jack B. Levine
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JODI: Computing 101B by Michael J. Connor
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Pattern (Context Architecture) by Andrea Gleiniger
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Introduction to data processing by F. Robert Crawford
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001: Pattern Synthesis: Lectures in Pattern Theory Volume 1 (Applied Mathematical Sciences 18) by U. Grenander
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The hidden dimension by Edward Twitchell Hall
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The Body as a medium of expression : essays based on a course of lectures given at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London by Jonathan Benthall
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Debates in the digital humanities 2016 by Matthew K. Gold
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The Discipline of Organizing by Robert J. Glushko
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Platform for change; a message from Stafford Beer by Stafford Beer
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Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press) by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
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Gamer theory by McKenzie Wark
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TR No. 5: Discrete Two Dimensional Property Detectors, Douglas H. Taylor, April 15, 1962 by Douglas H. Taylor
- Visions of the future by Clifford A. Pickover
From the time I was young I’ve been collecting and documenting things, creating various kinds of containers for what I collect. The Cybernetics Image Library is one such container: an archive, the infrastructure that sustains it, and a record of an ongoing practice.
The Image Library is an open, living archive where visitors can browse and contribute images of all kinds—diagrams, photographs, schematics, graphic elements, and other fragments—each linked to a record in the Cybernetics Library catalog. The catalog includes over 2,000 materials including books, zines, publications, technical manuals, software artifacts, and other ephemera. Topics range from anthropology, systems and communication theory to early countercultural computing publications, many of which emerged from feminist, radical, and underground publishing circles.
Over the past year, I’ve been working as a member of the Cybernetics Library to develop tools for enriching and navigating the collection. Since the Library only permits browsing, I built the Image Library to extend access to the material beyond its physical form, and establish clear links between images and their sources.
The front end consists of a form to upload images and connect them to their resource in the catalog, along with an interface to access the archive. This interface is a tool to hold and relate what I’ve already gathered, but it also continues to grow and evolve. Navigating via search or filtering the content with thematic tags, users encounter latent associations and traverse relationships within the growing dataset of images. Patterns emerge in the visual topology through its shifting arrangements and subsets.
Images inherit their tags and collections from the metadata of the resource they’re linked to in the library catalog. Labels—i.e., image, arrow, diagram, grid, text, and figure—enable filtering at the visual level. I devised the labels by noting recurring visual and structural elements in the images. They're meant to be porous, overlapping categories that foreground relation.
Shaping and sustaining containers for decentralized and collective knowledge-keeping feels more important than ever right now. This came together slowly, with the support of other people, and continues to be a grounding and generative place to return to. The rhythms of this communal work have given me a sense of conviviality and a deeper understanding of knowledge-tending as something interpersonal and embodied. Counter to extractive, solitary, text-dominant ways of knowing, this archive picks up a cybernetic impulse toward visual, relational, and feedback-driven forms of understanding.
The Cybernetics Image Library is open and continually in process. Neither its form nor its content is fixed, similar to how I’ve come to understand the Cybernetics Library itself as a shifting social form that is configurable and responsive to patterns of use.
In this ongoing, co-constitutive process, the Cybernetics Image Library shapes and is shaped by traces of use and stewardship. It is an entry point and alternative to dominant systems of classification, but mostly a place to dwell and look around.
Visit the Cybernetics Image Library
Below are a selection of images from the archive.
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The Image Library is an open, living archive where visitors can browse and contribute images of all kinds—diagrams, photographs, schematics, graphic elements, and other fragments—each linked to a record in the Cybernetics Library catalog. The catalog includes over 2,000 materials including books, zines, publications, technical manuals, software artifacts, and other ephemera. Topics range from anthropology, systems and communication theory to early countercultural computing publications, many of which emerged from feminist, radical, and underground publishing circles.
Over the past year, I’ve been working as a member of the Cybernetics Library to develop tools for enriching and navigating the collection. Since the Library only permits browsing, I built the Image Library to extend access to the material beyond its physical form, and establish clear links between images and their sources.
The front end consists of a form to upload images and connect them to their resource in the catalog, along with an interface to access the archive. This interface is a tool to hold and relate what I’ve already gathered, but it also continues to grow and evolve. Navigating via search or filtering the content with thematic tags, users encounter latent associations and traverse relationships within the growing dataset of images. Patterns emerge in the visual topology through its shifting arrangements and subsets.
Images inherit their tags and collections from the metadata of the resource they’re linked to in the library catalog. Labels—i.e., image, arrow, diagram, grid, text, and figure—enable filtering at the visual level. I devised the labels by noting recurring visual and structural elements in the images. They're meant to be porous, overlapping categories that foreground relation.
Shaping and sustaining containers for decentralized and collective knowledge-keeping feels more important than ever right now. This came together slowly, with the support of other people, and continues to be a grounding and generative place to return to. The rhythms of this communal work have given me a sense of conviviality and a deeper understanding of knowledge-tending as something interpersonal and embodied. Counter to extractive, solitary, text-dominant ways of knowing, this archive picks up a cybernetic impulse toward visual, relational, and feedback-driven forms of understanding.
The Cybernetics Image Library is open and continually in process. Neither its form nor its content is fixed, similar to how I’ve come to understand the Cybernetics Library itself as a shifting social form that is configurable and responsive to patterns of use.
In this ongoing, co-constitutive process, the Cybernetics Image Library shapes and is shaped by traces of use and stewardship. It is an entry point and alternative to dominant systems of classification, but mostly a place to dwell and look around.
Visit the Cybernetics Image Library
Below are a selection of images from the archive.