Timeline

Fri 24 September, 2021 | 14.00-16.00 CET

work meeting

#2 Decoso Meeting:

Optimum Earth? Experimentation in Soviet Cybernetics

Venue: Online

Contributors

The second Decoso Meeting explored the role of experimentation in Soviet cybernetics. The historian Diana Kurkovsky West gave an insight into her recent research and was in conversation with the architectural historian Nikolay Erofeev and the Decoso research team. Experimentation is a means and practice to remodel conceptions of truth and reality. The #02 Decoso Meeting is a moment to think through the role of experimentation in cybernetic systems: Which ‘spillover’ effects did the experimental worlds and speculative cybernetics of Soviet science generate? How has experimentation shaped creative and urban practices?

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Contributor Biographies

  • Diana Kurkovsky West

    Diana Kurkovsky West is a renowned scholar in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). She is teaching at Auburn University and is presently completing her book manuscript titled CyberSovietica: Dreaming of Big Data in the Soviet Union. Kurkovsky West has received her PhD from Princeton University and currently holds a position at Auburn University, Alabama. She was also formerly the director of the Science and Technology Studies Center at the European University at St. Petersburg.  

  • Nikolay Erofeev

    Nikolay Erofeev is an architectural historian whose work focuses on the global entanglements of socialist architecture and urban planning. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University Basel, where he continues his research on the spatial transformations of Mongolia and other Comecon countries. Erofeev received his PhD in History from the University of Oxford, in which he discussed practices of “experimental design” in Soviet mass housing. 

Related Study Material

  • Decoso Meeting #1: Video documentation

     

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