This conference is designed around the exploration of understanding and acting as circularly conjoined. Acting and understanding will be given equal weight, with each framing the other. The processes of learning are a major means of moving between the two, and take place in an environment, often framed as formal or informal education. Discussion of these processes and context provide a means of relating practical proposals for interventions and theoretical debate. Read more…

Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition by Heinz von Foerster, published by Springer-Verlag 2003.

In these essays Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge..

From Being to Doing by Humberto R. Maturana and Bernhard Pörksen.

This is the English version of their 2002 book “Vom Sein zum Tun”. It provides a detailled personal history of Maturana’s Biology of Cognition.

Seconde cybernétique et complexité. Rencontres avec Heinz von Foerster edited by Evelyne Andreewsky & Robert Delorme, published by Editions l’Harmattan 2006.

contains papers from the conference “De la Cybernétique aux Systèmes Complexes. Un hommage à Heinz von Foerster”, Paris 2004, and original papers from Heinz von Foerster

An Unfinished Revolution? Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL), 1958-1976 edited by Albert Müller & Karl Müller, published by Edition Echoraum 2007.

“This is a fascinating analysis of the scientific agenda of Heinz von Foerster, clearly one of the major scientists of the twentieth century.” (J. R. Hollingsworth, Univ. Wisconsin)