Cybernetic Imagination Residencies 2023-2024

To illustrate how cybernetics can help us navigate major societal challenges and transformations, the ANU School of Cybernetics has established the Cybernetic Imagination Residency program, dedicated to scholarship, leadership and creating credible, hopeful and unexpected stories about the future which imagine and instigate positive change.

Stories are uniquely poised to illuminate the workings of systems and the world; they help us empathise with different perspectives and inhabit different vantage points. Stories are engaging and accessible; they transform and transcend boundaries of assumptions and invite every person to consider how they think and feel about the complex systems in which we are all embedded. It is through story that we can share our past experiences and envision hopeful futures.

Our Cybernetic Imagination Residents are inspirational and incisive storytellers, thinkers, tinkerers and creative as well as critical doers. Over a 12-month period, each Resident works closely with our students, staff and partners to craft cybernetic stories, artefacts (physical and digital), collaborations and learning experiences through convention-defying modes and media.

Their work, in whatever imaginative form it takes, becomes the centerpiece for the School’s conversations and learning opportunities with community, industry, and government. Creating these stories is a start; we will also leverage them to disrupt the inertia of the present, create space for new possibilities, and build safer futures.