“The cultural obsession with the art object is slowly disappearing and being replaced by what might be called "systems consciousness." Actually, this shifts from the direct shaping of matter to a concern for organizing quantities of energy and information. Seen another way, it is a refocusing of aesthetic awareness – based on future scientific-technological evolution – on matter-energy information exchanges and away from the invention of solid artefacts. These new systems prompt us not to look at the skin of objects, but at those meaningful relations within and between their visible boundaries.”

Source: Beyond Modern Sculpture, 1968, p. 369-70

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Jack Burnham5

American art historian 1931

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969), p. 51; Opening paragraph

“Cultural systems will be treated as extensions of the power to learn, store, and transmit information, and the evolution of culture as dependent upon the biological development of these abilities and the cultural developments that actualize them. Man's increasing mastery over the natural world, with its increments of available energy use, can be seen from this point of view as one consequence of his capacity to learn, invent, borrow, store, and transmit the necessary technological and political inventions for the changes of scale involved in increasing utilization of energy. Instead of focusing attention on discontinuities — the invention of tool-making tools, the invention of agriculture, the invention of writing, and the invention of invention as a conscious pursuit—this discussion will focus on the continuities involved and on the extent to which older forms of communication, energy use, and social organization also undergo transformation in the course of cultural evolution.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 31-32

“When we practice magic we are always making connections, moving energy, identifying with other forms of being. Magic could be called the applied science that is based on an understanding of how energy makes patterns and patterns direct energy. To put it another way, at its heart is a paradox:
Consciousness shapes reality;
Reality shapes consciousness.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

Source: Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (1982), Ch. 1 : Power-Over and Power-From-WIthin, p. 13

“Systems transfer or transform materials, energy or information - and usually all three. An information system is one whose prime function is to transfer or transform information: the telephone system is an obvious example. This book concentrates on certain types of information system: those concerned with the transfer of information between specialists, mainly with reference to their work, and mainly based on documents. The focus is thus on specialised documentary information systems.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Preface; First paragraph
Information Systems (1973)

“In an isolated system, which cannot exchange energy and matter with the surroundings, this tendency is expressed in terms of a function of the macroscopic state of the system: the entropy.”

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Part 2; Cited in: Evgenii Rudnyi (2013).
Thermodynamics of Evolution (1972)

“Matter as such has been demoted from its central role, to be replaced by concepts such as organization, complexity and information.”

Paul Davies (1946) British physicist

Source: The Matter Myth: Towards 21st-century Science (1991), Ch. 1: 'The Death of Materialism', p. 9

“It seems amazing that those who advocate energy conservation haven't noticed what happens: As soon as some energy is freed up by conservation, the technological world-system gobbles it up and demands more. No matter how much energy is provided, the system always expands rapidly until it is using all available energy, and then it demands still more.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

Source: Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015), p. 56

“There are two fundamental ways of (re-)engineering information systems. The “formal driven” approach is based on the goal of developing and implementing a technical correct running system. The “content driven” approach is based on the goal of developing and implementing an organizational correct running system. By using reference models, content and technology can be combined in a new way”

August-Wilhelm Scheer (1941) German business theorist

Source: ARIS architecture and reference models for business process management (2000), p. 376.

“Our economy, society, and culture are built on interests, values, institutions, and systems of representation that, by and large, limit collective creativity, confiscate the harvest of information technology, and deviate our energy into self-destructive confrontation. This state of affairs must not be.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: End of Millennium, 1998, p. 379

“Technological systems are socially produced. Social production is culturally informed. The Internet is no exception.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 2, The Culture of the Internet, p. 36

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Jack Burnham5

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