Cybernetics / Art Suzanne Treister is an artist whose work from 2009 to 2011 serves as an example of what is happening at the intersection of our current technologies, the arts, and cybernetics. Treister has been a pioneer in digital art since the 1990s, inventing, for example, imaginary video games and painting screen shots from them. In her project Hexen 2.0 she looked back at the famous Macy conferences on cybernetics that between 1946 and 1953 were organized in New York by engineers and social scientists to unite the sciences and to develop a universal theory of the workings of the mind. In her project, she created thirty photo-text works about the conference attendees (which included Wiener and von Foerster), she invented tarot cards, and she made a video based on a photomontage of a “cybernetic séance.” In the “séance,” the conference participants are seen sitting at a round table, as in spiritualist séances, while certain of their statements on cybernetics are heard in an audio-collage—trational knowledge and superstition combined. She also noted that some of the participating scientists worked for the military; thus the application of cybernetics could be seen in an ambivalent way, even back then, as a tussle between pure knowledge and its use in state control. If one looks at Treister’s work about the Macy conference participants, one sees that no visual artist was included. A dialogue between artists and scientists would be fruitful in future discussions, and it is a bit astonishing that this wasn’t realized at the time, given von Foerster’s keen interest in art. He recounted in one of our conversations how his relation to the field dated back to his childhood: I grew up as a child in an artistic family. We often had visits from poets, philosophers, painters, and sculptors. Art was a part of my life. Later, I got into physics, as I was talented in this subject. But I always remained conscious of the importance of art for science. There wasn’t a great d