TY - JOUR

T1 - Lebende Prototypen und lebhafte Artefakte

T2 - Die (Un-)Gewissheiten der Bionik

AU - Müggenburg, Jan

N1 - ISBN 978-3-86572-591-2 Mimesen / hrsg. von Eva Johach, Jasmin Mersmann und Evke Rulffes

PY - 2011

Y1 - 2011

N2 - In the course of its current popularity Bionics is often depicted as a promising approach to design more efficient and sustainable technologies by just copying nature’s solutions. In the present article I am investigating the epistemology of Bionics in regard to its historic roots in Cybernetics and the military-industrial-academic complex of the 1960s. The paper argues that the early actors of Bionics were well aware of their discipline’s epistemic constraints and the antagonism between mimesis and abstraction. In fact, as a close look at the research practice at Heinz von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory reveals, the imitation of nature often involved a great deal of tinkering, a little bit of patching up and sometimes even a hint of trickery. – Keywords: Bionics, Cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, Biological Computer Laboratory, scientific modelling, living protypes, transfer of knowledge, NumaRete.

AB - In the course of its current popularity Bionics is often depicted as a promising approach to design more efficient and sustainable technologies by just copying nature’s solutions. In the present article I am investigating the epistemology of Bionics in regard to its historic roots in Cybernetics and the military-industrial-academic complex of the 1960s. The paper argues that the early actors of Bionics were well aware of their discipline’s epistemic constraints and the antagonism between mimesis and abstraction. In fact, as a close look at the research practice at Heinz von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory reveals, the imitation of nature often involved a great deal of tinkering, a little bit of patching up and sometimes even a hint of trickery. – Keywords: Bionics, Cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, Biological Computer Laboratory, scientific modelling, living protypes, transfer of knowledge, NumaRete.

KW - Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft

KW - Bionics

KW - NumaRete

KW - transfer of knowledge

KW - living protypes

KW - scientific modelling

KW - Biological Computer Laboratory

KW - Heinz von Foerster

KW - Cybernetics

U2 - 10.18452/6660

DO - 10.18452/6660

M3 - Zeitschriftenaufsätze

VL - 2

SP - 1

EP - 20

JO - Ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft

JF - Ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft

SN - 1868-5110

ER -