From Ecology Of Mind To Ecology Of ‘Self’Or: From cybernetics to chaosophy and transversality.
Anna Harris, Morten C. Lervig

A column in three parts:
How a young and curious high school student came to understand the complexity and interdependency of vegetal and other life. How a scientist, at home in a wide variety of disciplines, went out to understand the ‘pattern that connects’. And while Gregory Bateson was trying to dissect the alcoholic ‘self’ he unraveled a new cybernetic epistemology in which ‘information’ is the key operant of a new idea of the ‘self’. How a French radical psychotherapist who, throughout his entire working life, had been engaged with schizophrenics, set out to understand how subjectivity is produced and thus how the idea of normality is reproduced within the traditional psychoanalytical practice and theory. In the quest of Felix Guattari to overcome this enslavement he set out to radicalize psycho-analysis by combining cybernetics, semiotics, and ethnology; working towards an polemical approach to the notion of what is ‘human’. This concern with the ‘quality of subjectivity’ is what holds together art and ecology. WILLEM VAN WEELDEN has a background in social philosophy and visual art. He is committed to new media from 1990 onwards and has published on this topic in various magazines and catalogues. He was involved in numerous new media projects as a creative director and coach. Currently his focus is on writing and teaching.