Education has institutionalized a process that reifies cultures, ecological communities, and ultimately evolution itself. This enclosure has lessened our sensitivity to the pedagogical (eteragogical) nature of our lived relations with other people and with other living beings. By acknowledging that learning and teaching go on between species, humans can regain an eteragogical sense of the interspecies curricula within which they exist. This article explores interspecies lived curricula through a selection of ideas from ecopragmatist Anthony Weston, and cybernetician Gregory Bateson, and through lived experiences with shorebirds of Lake Ontario. Some gulls and a tern teach the author to enrich and diversify, rather than constrict, the potentiality of life. In so doing, being ecological and being educative become unified concepts. Relevance: The publication is concerned with the relational implications between humans and other species of Bateson’s cybernetic theory of learning.

Excerpt: I should like to consider communication, the second element in Wiener’s definition of Cybernetics (although I prefer the term characterisation: definition is trying to be too objective, too prescriptive). I shall consider this from the point of view of a cybernetician, not a semiotician (which I do not pretend to be).

In this column I will approach (a cybernetic interpretation of) the relationship between teaching and learning. I will do so by reference to the concepts of Friedrich Froebel, whose name will be familiar from earlier columns. I shall show that, approximately 125 years before the birth of cybernetics, Froebel was already a (second order) cybernetician in his approach to teaching and learning. Thus I shall bring out not only some concepts I believe to be central to an up-to-date cybernetic understanding of teaching and learning, but also I shall bring another person into the fold of proto-cyberneticians. I have excluded a discussion of implementation from this column. However, having made my point, I hope to return to the matter of implementation shortly.

Norbert Wiener once told Stafford that if he was the father of cybernetics, then Stafford was the father of management cybernetics. Stafford had written to Wiener after reading Cybernetics to say I think I am a cybernetician. Correspondence, invitations to conferences, meetings and friendships followed. Stafford was welcomed by many of the early pioneers and formed special bonds with his mentors, Warren McCulloch, Ross Ashby and Norbert Wiener. These bonds were important to him both for the opportunities for friendship and learning, and for the validation they gave a young man working in the British steel industry which was by no means unanimous in its support of innovation and progressive practices. Stafford himself was always eager to support other innovators, sponsoring George Spencer-Brown while he wrote Laws of Form, writing a glowing preface for Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Autopoeisis and Cognition and writing many reviews of new books in the field. In later years, he tried to follow in his mentors’ footsteps, encouraging young people as best he could with no institutional base. Obituary written by Allenna Leonard with assistance from Roger Harnden. Allenna was Stafford’s close partner who joyfully shared both his life and his work for many years. Stafford Beer was born on September 25, 1926. He died on August 23, 2002, at the age of 75.

Ranulph Glanville was a prolific writer, a magic designer, an avant-garde musician, a cybernetician of the first- and of the second-order, a philosopher in disguise, to name only a few roles. His contributions to second-order cybernetics and to areas like design, philosophy, conversation theory, methodology or games, with the tools and perspectives of his version of second-order cybernetics were collected under the title “The Black B∞x” in three volumes in edition echoraum (Glanville, 2009, 2012, 2014) and were ordered and arranged by Ranulph Glanville himself so that they allow a general and systematic overview on this very large, diverse, and impressive corpus. In this short essay I will undertake a systematic attempt to make this work more easily accessible for others, including myself, and to provide a special location for Ranulph Glanville within the research program of second-order cybernetics in particular and within the research tradition of radical constructivism in general. It will become my central thesis in this article that Ranulph Glanville’s special role and function was to provide a meta-approach to all the available research programs in radical constructivism. This framework was transcendental in nature and focused on the conditions of the possibility for observation, for communication, for language, for knowledge or for learning to emerge at all. Thus, Ranulph Glanville reserved a unique place for himself that, at the same time, turned out to be magic for his explorations and very difficult to grasp for his intellectual environment.

Key words: epistemology, transcendental approaches, objects, second-order cybernetics, conversation theory, design

Ernst von Glasersfeld, *1917, studied mathematics in Zurich and Vienna, was a farmer in County Dublin during the War, and worked as a journalist in Italy from 1947. There he met the philosopher and cybernetician Silvio Ceccato who, in the beginning stages of the computer age, had gathered a team of researchers in order to carry out projects of computational linguistic analysis and automatic language translation. Ernst von Glasersfeld became a close collaborator of Ceccato’s, translated for him, and developed projects of his own. In 1966, he moved to the USA where he was made a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Georgia in 1970. Three principal research interests have made him one of the well-known founders of constructivism. He systematically scoured the history of European philosophy for varieties of epistemological skepticism and set up an ancestral gallery reaching back to the insights of the ancient skeptics of the 4th century B. C. He replaced the classical realist concept of truth by the idea of viability: theories need not and do not correspond with what is real, he says, but they must be practicable and useful, they must be viable. Finally, he introduced the work of the Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, into the constructivist debate. Jean Piaget, in his book La construction du reel chez l’enfant, constructs a model of how knowledge is created and developed through the confirmation or disappointment of expectations (or, more precisely, of particular patterns of action, so-called schemes). A model of this kind has profound consequences for the conception of learning and teaching: it eliminates the reification of information and knowledge, the conception of knowledge as a substance that can be transferred from the teacher’s head to the empty heads of students. The mechanical idea of teaching evaporates. We must face the ineluctable subjectivity of meanings and given cognitive patterns. From this perspective, the acquisition of knowledge no longer appears to be a passive reception of information but a creative activity. The upshot is that teaching someone something will only be successful if it is oriented toward the reality of that someone. Ernst von Glasersfeld is, at present, with the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts. There he works on models of teaching and learning that apply the theory of constructivism to school practice.

When anyone asked Heinz von Foerster, whom people described as the “Socrates of cybernetics,” whether he considered his work or himself constructivist, as a rule he answered with a joke. The constructivist label appeared to him to be unsuitable-a key concept for a taxonomy that would tend to divert one’s attention from an examination of his work and provide an occasion for narrow academic disputes between realists, relativists, and solipsists. Perhaps one could call him a “curiositylogist”; in any case, he was Viennese. The latter really cannot be denied. He was born in Vienna; he simply had to accept that label. Perhaps this reference to his own origins in the Vienna of the turn of the century and the reference generally to his own biography in fact provides a decisive key for understanding and classifying the work of the cybernetician Heinz von Foerster and for deciphering the principles of his inter-and transdisciplinary epistemology. As various biographical sketches note, he was raised in Vienna at the turn of the century in a world of artists and creative minds. 3 His great-grandfather, an architect, provided Vienna with its urbanistic identity. His grandmother, Marie Lang, was among the fi rst representatives of the women’s movement in central Europe. Already as a youth he had come into contact with the Bohemians of the city. After taking his high school exams, when he began to study physics in Vienna, he came into the Vienna Circle. This experience, which made it possible to combine diverse worlds of thought and perception into a stimulating panopticum, was again manifest here, in the salons of the von Foerster’s home. Heinz von Foerster’s own refl ections have only a little in common with the views of the Vienna Circle, which on the eve of an outbreak of bloody irrationalism promoted clarity of thought and decisively rejected metaphysically contaminated argumentation. The later views of Foerster have nothing more to do with the ideas of the logician Rudolf Carnap, who thought there was something like unshakable connections between symbols and the world, knowledge and reality. But as a student he became acquainted with this form of thought, and it accompanied him his entire life, providing a measure of his own intellectual position: it can be transcribed with the terms inter-and transdisciplinarity and means in the last analysis the ability to perceive the internal validity of diverse paradigms, methodologies, methods, and models, the ability to view perceptible differences primarily as enriching, and the ability then to emphasize the connections (and not primarily the differences) in discussions in transdisciplinary cooperation with other thinkers.

Excerpt: For a number of years, I have been thinking about what I might say if I were to give the opening address at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics. When engaged in this contemplation, a certain story persistently recurs. The story involves three prisoners on death row, each of whom is scheduled to be executed the next day. Each is asked if they have one last request. The first prisoner, a good Catholic, asks to talk with a priest. The second prisoner, a senior professor at a prestigious university (to be left unnamed), asks to give one last lecture on “What is Cybernetics? ” The third prisoner, a graduate student at the same university, pauses a second and then asks if he can be executed before the professor gives his lecture. The recurrence of this story has led me to apply a twist on the theme that dominates opening addresses. Hence, I wish to speak on “Why I am not a cybernetician (nor even a cyberneticist). ” By doing so, I am shifting attention from definitions to labels and categories – in particular, the labels I apply to others and to myself and the categories I fmd myself and others locked into as a result. I have become very sensitive to the labels that I apply to myself or that I will let others apply to me without challenge. The label “cybernetician” is one I think deserves some close scrutiny.

The article focuses on music and art projects of the British cybernetician Gordon Pask from the 1950ies to the end of the 1970ies. These projects are seen as embedded in Pask’s general scientific work. Project Musicoulour is described as a learning machine which produces light effects according to the variety of the performance of a piano player. Thus theatres and dancing halls became cybernetic laboratories. Another example of Pask’s activities in the field of art was Fun Palace, which was described as a system for encouraging the creative behaviour that is necessary in an automated society. Participation of the audience was a key element of project Fun Palace and a projected central part of it, the Cybernetic Theatre. Finally the Colloquy of Mobiles, Gordon Pask’s most famous installation which has been prepared for the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, is discussed.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to suggest a more central role for reflexive artistic practices in a clarified research agenda for second-order cybernetics (SOC). This is offered as a way to assist the field in the further development of its theoretical/methodological “core” and, subsequently, enhance its impact on the world. Design/methodology/approach – The argument begins by reviewing Karl Müller’s account of the failure of SOC to emerge as a mainstream endeavor. Then, Müller’s account is recontextualized within recent developments in SOC that are traced through the Design Cybernetics movement inspired by Ranulph Glanville. This alternate narrative frames a supposedly moribund period as a phase of continuing refinement of the field’s focus upon its “proper object of study,” namely, the observer’s mentation of/about their mentation. The implications of this renewed focus are then positioned within Larry Richard’s vision of the cybernetician, not as “scientist” per se but rather as a “craftsperson in and with time” capable of productively varying the dynamics of their daily interactions. Having centered widespread capacity building for this “craft” as a proposed research agenda for a new phase of SOC, the paper concludes by pointing to the unique and necessary role to be played by the arts in this endeavor. Personal reflections upon the author’s own artistic and theoretical activities are included throughout. Findings: The development and application of artistic methods for the enhancement of individual capacity for second-order observation is consistent with the purpose of SOC, namely, “to explain the observer to himself.” Therefore, it is in the field’s interest to more fulsomely embrace non-scientific, arts-based forms of research. Research limitations/implications – In a truly reflexive/recursive fashion, the very idea that first-person, arts-based narratives are seen, from a mainstream scientific point of view, as an insufficiently rigorous form of research is, itself, a research limitation. This highlights, perhaps ironically, the need for cybernetics to continue to pursue its own independent definitions and standards of research beyond the boundaries of mainstream science rather than limiting its own modes of inquiry in the name of “scientific legitimacy.” Practical implications: A general uptake of the view presented here would expand the horizon of what might be considered legitimate, rigorous and valuable research in the field. Social implications – The view presented here implies that many valuable contributions that SOC can make to society take place beyond the constraints of academic publication and within the realm of personal growth and social development. Originality/value – The very clearly defined and “refocused” vision of SOC in this paper can be of substantial utility in developing a more robust, distinctive and concrete research agenda across this field.

Key words: Art, research, second-order cybernetics, reflexivity, observer, eigenforms.