On 29^th January 2025 I was able to pay my first visit to ZKM (Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe)since my close colleague and longtime collaborator Alistair Hudson took over as their Scientific-Artistic Chairman of the ZKM. The purpose of my visit was primarily to look at the new developments that Hudson is instigating at ZKM via their ongoing ‘Fellow Travellers – Art as a tool to change the world’ exhibition. and was to meet staff at ZKM who might want to develop further collaborations around Useful Art, Technology and Social Change.

Whilst there, it was good to see a copy of the 1999 Third Text ‘Third World Wide Web’ special edition which has my article ‘Cybersublime: Representing the unrepresentable in digital art and politics’ (a pdf of which is on the ‘Writing’ page of this website). It was even nicer for the serendipities to follow as, after twenty-seven years to re-acquaint myself with the wonderful Dr. José-Carlos Mariátegui who was presenting his paper ‘Thinking Inside Out: Cybernetics and Viable Utopias’. Another of the key reasons I’d made a visit to ZKM was to discuss the possibility of a project that would use/re-activate LJMU’s Stafford Beer archive, especially the documents, videos and records we have pertaining to his famous ‘Project Cybersyn’ – which say Beer collaborate with the Allende government in Chilie to develop a decentralised operational communication system that, ultimately, would enable Chilie to be run by it’s citizens from the ground upwards.

I’d first met José-Carlos back in 1998 in Liverpool. I’d co-written the bid to bring ISEA (The International Symposium of Electronic Arts) to Liverpool and Manchester in 1998. As part of the ‘Revolution’ symposium in Liverpool I had curated the panel ‘Mediated Nations’ which , as well as José-Carlos’s paper ‘Techno-revolution’, contained contributions from  Marguerite Byrum (John Hopkins) ‘A Manifesto for Electric Propagandists’, Dee Dee Halleck ‘Deep Dish Satellite Network’, Olga Kisseleva ‘Anticipated Future – Controller and Controlled: interchangeability’ and Hikmet Tabak who, as  Director of MED TV – gave an Introduction to MED TV before a special live edition of MED TV’s Zaningeha Med (University Med)’ broadcast. As outlined in the introduction to my Third Text paper Representing the unrepresentable in digital art and politics’ “this took the form of a discussion programme focusing on the impact of technology on cultural identity. Using phone-in, fax and e-mail interactivity, guests in Med TV’s Belgian studios (who included the programme’s producer and host Joe Cooper, Gilane Tawadros, Director of in IVA, Mustafa Rasid, specialist in Kurdish Folklore and Computer Engineering and the artist Simon Tegala) were joined, via phone, by Professor Amir Hassanpour of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilisation at the University of Toronto, and by Dee Dee Halleck and José-Carlos Mariátegui who phoned in questions from the panel session in Liverpool, UK According to the October 1998 edition of Med TV’s Sterka Med newsletter.