Cybersyn 1973/2022
Peer reviewed artwork at ISEA 2022: Possibles, Barcelona.
Abstract
Project Cybersyn was an experiment in instituting a socialist networked economy embraced by the short-lived Salvador Allende government of Chile (1970 – 1973) and developed together with the British cybernetician Stafford Beer. For the past decade, Project Cybersyn has been a recurrent reference – a best practice from the past – in discussions around the repurposing of hegemonic technological infrastructures and their redirection towards more equitable economic and social practices. The iconic image of Project Cybersyn’s control room – with its sci-fi appearance – represents a technical and aesthetic object that alludes to negotiation, democratic decision making, and social welfare. The allure of this image is the starting point for the video which proposes that desires for post-scarcity and postcapitalist economics must grapple with the shifts in the political, economic, and technological conditions of possibility that have transpired since Project Cybersyn. To this end the control room image itself becomes a platform for alien mutations, philosophical speculations, and social commitments. What would it take to reimagine the artefactual Cybersyn for our hyper-financialized day and age? For this work, curator and researcher Bassam El Baroni and transdisciplinary architect Constantinos Miltiadis collaborated with multidisciplinary artist and animator Georgios Cherouvim, and composer and sound artist Gerriet K. Sharma to bring this question to life.
Peer reviewed artwork part of the ISEA 2022 screening programme, in collaboration with Sónar Festival: June 11-16 2016, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) and at CERC, Barcelona.
Credits
Grupo Synco is a collaboration between curator and researcher Bassam El Baroni (Aalto University, Finland) transdisciplinary architect Constantinos Miltiadis (Aalto University, Finland), multidisciplinary artist and animator Georgios Cherouvim (New York), and composer and sound artist Gerriet K. Sharma (Berlin). The group’s first co-creation is the CGI video work Cybersyn 1973/2023.
