The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC)

The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC)

The American Society for Cybernetics has arranged a conference with the title: "Cybernetics praxis and the praxis of cybernetics". It is to be held at the UBC Conference Center May 26-28, 2001, in Vancouver, Canada.

The Society has already posted a call for abstracts for the event and the conference co-ordinators, Pille Bunnel and Kathleen Forsythe, have sent the following description of the conference theme and its aims:

Cybernetics is a way of understanding, not a collection of facts. Thus it is a discipline in which we explore how it is that we do what we do through our participation in whatever we do. Cybernetics incorporates ideas from many other disiciplines, and the concepts of cybernetics are subsumed within other disciplines, such as biology, management, information sciences, ecology,education, healthcare, therapy, art, architecture, music, and many others. Indeed, the practical application of cybernetics lies in a wide variety of domains.

This conference will explore the "praxis" of cybernetics, that is,its application in any domain. Equally important, it will also explore the cybernetics of praxis, that is that the awareness of how we do what we do modulates our activity in any domain. This is a conference for the practical and for the visionary. As such we envision it as an event of interest for the practical visionary and the reflective practitioner. We could say that we are concerned with the heart and soul of what we do.

Readers are invited to take a look at the ASC Web site for further information and discussion: http://www.asc-cybernetics.org

The conference organisers can be contacted on: e-mail: pille@interchange.ubc.ca Tel: (604)732-9864; Fax: (604) 732-9834; Address: 2366 W 18th Avenue,Vancouver, British Columbia, V6L-IA8, Canada.