Cyber-Systemic Confluences—Gathering the dispersed, refocusing the distracted

José dos Santos Cabral Filho, Sandro Luis Schlindwein, and Mateus van Stralen

Cyber-Systemic Confluences takes up Vilém Flusser’s challenge of gathering what has become dispersed and refocusing what has become distracted. The track approaches cyber-systemic thinking as a practice of attention: a way of entering complex situations without reducing them prematurely to problems with predetermined solutions. Modelling, conversation, making, and reflection become provisional means of touching the unknown, while uncertainty and plurality remain active conditions of inquiry rather than deficiencies to be removed.

The programme ranges widely across AI-assisted design and education, systemic and participatory practice, social and ecological inquiry, collective intelligence, health-profession learning, housing and the built environment, theatre and embodiment, emotioning and languaging, technological history, and second-order ethics. Despite this diversity, the contributions share a concern with recursive relations between knowing and doing. AI can be treated as a conversational participant rather than an output generator; research and design can be understood as processes in which practitioners are changed by the situations they engage; embodied and artistic practices can expose forms of knowledge unavailable to detached observation; and collective processes can retain disagreement without forcing premature consensus.

Across these inquiries, cybernetics is less a technology of control than a discipline for noticing relations, constraints, feedback, and possibilities for transformation. The track foregrounds reflexive dialogue with human and other-than-human others, subtle and revisable modelling, and action conceived as both doing and undoing. Its image of “loosening knots” captures an important ethical orientation: intervention need not mean domination, and sometimes restraint, witnessing, or not acting may constitute the more responsive cybernetic move. The confluence is created by bringing heterogeneous practices into relation while preserving their differences and asking how attention itself can become a resource for learning and responsible action. Together, the contributions position cyber-systemic practice as a mode of careful engagement capable of connecting technical, social, ecological, artistic, and educational concerns without requiring them to become the same.