Presentation
To speak “Biological Computer Laboratory” (BCL) also speaks “Heinz von Foerster.”To invoke von Foerster also invokes the BCL community that he gathered through his unerring identification of original thinkers and his unparalleled clarity about second-order cybernetics. Having chosen well his lab's collaborators, von Foerster contributed seminal thinking that became foundations and superstructures for theoreticians great and small of the generations that followed. What contributions to cybernetics were rooted in the BCL?
What insights did von Foerster himself offer, such that his collaborators could stand tall on his shoulders and see more? With the benefit of twenty-five years of personal hindsight, the speaker will analyze the published outcomes of the BCL and conjure a picture of von Foerster's influence on collaborators such as Gordon Pask and Humberto Maturana. A post hoc construction drawn from personal relationshipswith the protagonists, the talk will offer a unification of major threads of cybernetics, its concepts of memory, organizationa lclosure and circularity, and show how von Foerster is inextricably woven in.
—Paul Pangaro, Vienna, November 2003
