Armillary Lectures: Dulmini Perera

Dulmini Perera
On the Ecological and Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics: Thinking with Annetta Pedretti’s Practices of Repair

In this presentation, I will present a small part of my ongoing project that aims to widen the scope of conversations redefining the relationships between cybernetics, design and ecology to understand what role these fields can collectively play in the current multiple ecological crises. Supporting this approach, I have traced the work of several entangled actors, objects, and projects at and beyond Heinz von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory by reframing the story of second-order cybernetics that looked at the questions of change and transformation in living systems, i.e., self-organizing systems, as a story of ecology(not limited to reductive notions of information and computation) where design and practice were at the centre. More specifically, I will follow a thread in that story looking at Annetta Pedretti’s cybernetic-architectural experiments ranging from design writing to repairing/remaking her house at 25 Princelet Street, London’s East End. Pedretti proposes alternative ways of thinking about the complex relationship between time, transformation, implicit ordering, and recursion that are particularly helpful at present, where there are many obstacles to thinking in time, as problematic forms of a techno-modern ontology strengthen the runaway feedback between practices of making and markets.

Dulmini Perera is a lecturer and researcher at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Her research focuses on the complex systemic relations between ecological questions and questions concerning technology within the design context. She is also the principal investigator of the DFG(Germany)-AHRC(UK) funded research project Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design, where she explores the possibilities of an alternative ecological theory of action. She is part of the Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal editorial board. Her work has been published in many contexts, including the Journal of Architectural Education, Technoetic Arts, and Architecture Research Quarterly. Some of her most recent co-edited journals and books include Engaging Cosmotechnical Difference in Architecture and Urbanism (forthcoming), The Space of Technicity(2024), and All is In-formation: Architecture, Cybernetics, Ecology (2021).

ON THE LECTURE SERIES:
Armillary spheres are “models of the celestial globe constructed from rings and hoops representing the equator, the tropics, and other celestial circles, and able to revolve on its axis.” This lecture series wants to be a window onto the sphere of academic research, gazing at the different constellations drawn by doctoral dissertations within the horizon of architecture.
The course aims to invite researchers who have already obtained a Ph.D. to present their dissertations to an audience of Ph.D. candidates, providing a diverse array of examples and case studies on approaching dissertation work within the field of architecture.