ASC•2026
CONVERSATIONAL
CONFLUENCES
ONLINE EVENT
HOSTED BY THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR CYBERNETICS
RSDX–ASC Conversational Confluences online series
August 24–27, 2026 | ONLINE
The ASC online series brings the ASC 2026 conference (August 3–7) of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), with its overarching theme of Conversational Confluences, into the context of RSD15’s Designing within a Plural World.
The two meet on shared ground as both view diversity as a source of collective learning and creativity. Drawing on the concept of confluence articulated by the Brazilian thinker and activist Nego Bispo, which grounds the ASC 2026 theme, the series explores how distinct worldviews, epistemologies, and practices can enter into meaningful dialogue while maintaining their differences and integrity. In this context, difference becomes a source of mutual appreciation rather than assimilation.
The conversations span a wide terrain: the legacy of Stafford Beer and the design of viable institutions in dialogue with Latin American experience; pluriversal and more-than-human design, where agency is shared with animals, plants, landscapes, and spirits; hybrid naturecultures at the meeting point of the biological and the digital; futures that emerge from drift and chance rather than control; encounters among Indigenous relationality, quantum systems thinking, and AI reflexivity; mapping and modelling as reflexive, situated practices; second-order epistemology as a response to algorithmic governance; and cyber-systemic traditions of gathering attention and acting amid uncertainty.
The Fazenda Colorada geoglyphs in Acre, Brazil. Photo: Diego Gurgel / Government of Acre.
Drawing on the thematic tracks of the ASC 2026 conference in Ouro Preto, Brazil
The online RSDX programme draws on the thematic tracks of the ASC 2026 conference in Ouro Preto, Brazil (August 3–7, 2026), continuing and extending the conversations they open:
Track 1: Viable Confluences — 100 Years of Stafford Beer in Conversation with Latin America celebrates the centenary of Stafford Beer’s birth and discusses how his vision of freedom, viability, and autonomy continues to resonate within Latin American experiences of social, ecological, and institutional transformation.
Track 2: Pluriversal More-than-Human Design draws on pluriversal design frameworks and explores how a cybernetic approach facilitates more-than-human co-creation of living systems.
Track 3: Hybrid Matters brings cybernetic principles into conversation with posthumanism and new materialism, using the hybrid garden as laboratory and metaphor for biodigital convergence.
Track 4: Futuribles — Ἀκυβέρνητος (Akybérnētos): Drifting Ecologies-as-Cosmologies draws on Roy Ascott’s “futuribles” and explores futures emerging from drift, noise, and syncretic encounters resonant with Indigenous cosmopolitical practices.
Track 5: Entangled Confluences — Designing Relational Futures through Indigenous Wisdom, Quantum Theory, and AI Reflexivity fosters dialogue among Indigenous land-based relationality, quantum systems thinking, and AI reflexivity as tributaries of a single river of systemic meaning-making.
Track 6: Competing Cartographies — Mapping as Practice of Recursive Becoming is grounded in intimacy and reciprocal conversation rather than surveillance and unilateral observation; this track reframes mapping and modelling cybernetically.
Track 7: Epistemology After the Algorithm — A Second-Order Cybernetic Intervention examines the emancipatory potential of second-order cybernetics as a response to ongoing processes that declare the neutrality of algorithmic systems to withdraw agency from humans.
Track 8: Cyber-Systemic Confluences — Gathering the Dispersed, Refocusing the Distracted draws on Vilém Flusser and engages cyber-systemic practices as ways of refining attention, welcoming problems, and acting reflexively under uncertainty.
A detail of Mestre Ataíde’s nave-ceiling painting, Church of São Francisco de Assis, Ouro Preto, Brazil, 1801–1812. Original photograph by Sabrycads, CC BY-SA 4.0; digitally mirrored and cropped.
the programme
ASC•2026 online sessions include invited talks, research presentations, and workshops, including both independent contributions and continuations of conversations initiated at the ASC conference in Brazil.
the confluence
Conversational Confluences marks the fifth year in which the American Society for Cybernetics and the Systemic Design Association have co-designed programming that explores the convergences and divergences between their respective disciplines and communities.
the conversations
For ASC•2026 participants, the conversations continue to explore a wide terrain, including the legacy of Stafford Beer, pluriversal design, futures, quantum systems thinking, and acting amid uncertainty. For RSD15 participants, the conversations begin an exploration encompassing pluralism, epistemic justice, and intercultural collaboration. Together, we ask how multiple approaches can coexist, challenge one another, and contribute to addressing complex social and ecological challenges.
August 3–7, 2026 | Ouro Preto, Brazil
August 24–27, 2026 | RSDX ONLINE
Confluence as co-existence
Confluence, as articulated by Brazilian thinker and activist Nego Bispo, provides a framework for reflecting on how diverse worldviews, practices, and epistemologies can coexist without losing their distinct identities. Rather than assimilation or homogenization, confluence is about mutual amplification, where differences are not obstacles but sources of strength. Like rivers merging to become stronger, this coming together creates new, more resilient possibilities of coexistence. Rooted in decolonial and counter-hegemonic struggles, the concept invites us to imagine collaborations that foster plurality and the emergence of new systems of living and knowing. Building on this understanding, the ASC 2026 meeting seeks to explore how cybernetics can participate in such confluences — through encounters and experiments that bring it into dialogue with art, design, technology, ecology, and situated knowledge.
