Print and Cognition at the Biological Computer Lab, 1958–1976

This paper will be the first to explore the role of zines, drawn illustrations, and cartoons in the contributions of Heinz von Foerster’s Biological Computer Lab (BCL), an influential cybernetics research effort active in the U.S. state of Illinois from 1958-1976. Known as the birthplace of “second-order cybernetics,” and a haven for such influential figures such as Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela, the BCL relied on heavily illustrated zines, distributed by hand and mail, as its primary knowledge infrastructure. Meticulously numbered and catalogued as a single series, and advertised via order forms across other countercultural venues, these hundreds of publications range in size from brief eight-page pamphlets to the ambitious 500-page Cybernetics of Cybernetics, a pre-hypertext illustrated book built around a branching tree structure of narrative and knowledge. Given the centrality of print, sequence, and mechanical reproduction to these knowledge artifacts, as well as their reliance on medieval-like illustrative marginalia and visual one-panel cartoons, this corpus bears analysis through a comics lens. Viewed as such, the BCL publications can take their place alongside the lab’s scientific experiments and proto-computers as visual and cognitive machines, participating in a broader moment of excitement about the potential of the printed book as a cognitive and social technology, and the drawn picture-text as a unit of symbolic computation. Given the importance of the BCL’s research to the history of computational neural networks, recovery of the role of the printed image in the lab’s work also stands to inform contemporary conversations about the materialities of cognition in generative AI.