Maps are, by nature, a form of cybernetics: a framework that regards acts of observation as central to learning and to being. It is an art and science of observingsystems (2). The cybernetician and music composer Herbert Brün identified five stages of a system from “birth” to “death”: the stage of disorder, the experimental stage, the speculative stage, the reflective stage, and the administrative stage. The beginning of the system (disorder) has the most variety and its ending (administrative) the least; a system, according to Brün, “decays” as it looses creativity and difference (3).

2. Heinz von Foerster, “Cybernetics of Cybernetics” in Understanding Understanding (2003), 285.

3: Herbert Brün, “From Musical Ideas to Computers and Back,” in When Music Resists Meaning (2004), 183-4.





Mapmaker: Kate Doyle
Posted 5/2/2023




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