Cybernetics is a field of study that emerged in the mid-20th century around the work of Norbert Wiener, describing systems of communication and control in both machines and living organisms. From the Greek kybernētēs (steersman or governor), cybernetics is concerned with how systems regulate themselves through feedback, the constant loop of input, adjustment, and response that keeps them stable or helps them adapt.
Initially developed to describe radar, ballistics, and early computing, cybernetics soon became a conceptual bridge between technology, biology, and culture. It inspired visions of organisms and machines as comparable systems, each governed by feedback loops. The field shaped everything from robotics and ecology to sociology and media theory. Artists, architects, and designers also embraced it, finding in cybernetics a language for thinking about responsive environments, participatory processes, and self-organizing structures.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson was one of the most influential interpreters of cybernetics. In works like Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), Bateson used cybernetics to explore relationships between individuals, cultures, and ecosystems, arguing that “the unit of survival is organism plus environment.” His synthesis helped move cybernetics beyond machines and into the realm of ecological and cultural thought.
The themes of cybernetics are relation, adaptation, and feedback. It shifts focus from objects to systems, from static forms to dynamic processes. In art and speculative thought, cybernetics suggests that worlds are not built once and for all but continuously steered and reshaped by their participants. It remains both a technical science and a philosophical metaphor: a way of imagining how humans, machines, and ecologies interconnect in loops of information and care.
Image from The School of Forest Medicine.
