The Epistemological Contributions of
Latin America to Cybernetics

The iconic hexagonal Operations Room of Project Cybersyn, with its futuristic white chairs and data displays made of a complex setup of slide projectors, has become something of a techno-political icon—a retro-futuristic symbol of what might have been. While there has been extensive and valuable research on Project Cybersyn,¹ its fetishisation has obscured a far richer history of cybernetics in Latin America. This history extends well beyond Chile's most famous experiment, revealing a regional engagement with technology—an original intellectual project that sought to integrate technology with local socio-political contexts in ways that remain remarkably relevant today.

Recent developments have reminded us that the relationship between technological capacity and economic power is more contingent than often assumed. When the Chinese AI company DeepSeek demonstrated performance comparable to ChatGPT or Claude at a fraction of the cost, it echoed a historical pattern that Latin American cybernetic pioneers had also relied on decades earlier: that massive hardware is not as critical to developing technology that will benefit society as dominant narratives suggest.

What distinguished Latin American approaches to cybernetics was their distinct epistemological foundations. These were not merely applications of Western ideas transplanted into tropical soil, but original thoughts that integrated technology to respond to local contexts and socio-political conditions. As we will briefly depict, this can be seen in the Argentine computer pioneer Manuel Sadosky’s Marxist-influenced vision of computation as a tool for liberation and autonomy;² or in the Italo-Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro’s notion of computer art as a tool for social transformation and democratisation of artistic production and circulation;³ as well as in the case of Bariloche Foundation’s Latin American World Model, which proposed an alternative development path to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) “Limits to Growth” report.⁴

Argentinian Manuel Sadosky (1914–2005) was a pivotal figure in the development of computation. In 1960, Sadosky founded the Institute of Calculus [Instituto de Cálculo] at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), which is known for having acquired the country’s first mainframe computer for education—a Ferranti Mercury affectionately called “Clementina.” According to Sadosky, the Institute of Calculus fulfilled a triple mission: research, higher education, and service. The service aspect was a novelty at the time, as it was not usually considered a part of university practice, however, it made it possible to solve problems requiring many calculus and operational research techniques in Argentinian companies such as Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), the National Development Council, and the Naval Hydrographic Service. The Institute of Calculus also created a number of research groups, such as Numerical Calculus, Programming, Mathematical Economy, Statistics, Electronic Laboratory, and Linguistics, as well as one dedicated to creating a model of the Argentine economy. It also introduced the first computer science degree in Latin America, the “Computador Científico” [“Scientific Computer” degree]. When Sadosky resigned from the Institute in the wake of the “Night of the Long Batons” on July 29, 1966—a coup involving the expulsion of professors and students from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires during Juan Carlos Onganía’s government—he was obliged to work on projects abroad. At the University of the Republic of Uruguay, Sadosky founded its first Computation Centre. Guided by Marxist theory, Sadosky believed that computing for a modern world should not be considered a means of subjugation but rather an instrument of acculturation in underdeveloped countries. Computing and automation could be projected to the needs of Latin American countries, using these techno-scientific advances as instruments of liberation, autonomy, and the freeing up of non-creative work.⁵ He stressed that large international consortiums, especially from North America, exploited Latin America’s mineral and raw resources, and in exchange sold manufacturing patents, computers, aeroplanes, and weapons or took charge of energy and transport infrastructure. In many cases, Latin American societies were tied to foreign imports and purchases with a higher value than the sale of raw materials. This produced a false sense of progress, given that it was without liberation.

Waldemar Cordeiro (1925–1973) was a central figure in Brazilian concrete art who became a pioneer of computer-generated art in Latin America.⁶ Born in Italy and having emigrated to Brazil in 1946, Cordeiro served as the principal theorist and spokesperson for Grupo Ruptura, founded in São Paulo in 1952. For Cordeiro, concrete art was not merely geometric abstraction but an algorithmic system of visual creation that aligned the “concrete” image with industrial production processes. He proposed a new visuality guided by mathematical and rational principles that broke with art as representation.⁷

In 1968, Cordeiro sought out Giorgio Moscati, a physicist at the University of São Paulo who had recently acquired an IBM System/360 Model 44 computer. This collaboration proved foundational for computer art in Brazil. Their first work, Beabá (1968), was a text-generating program that created Portuguese-like letter combinations based on statistical probabilities extracted from dictionary analysis. The program generated six-letter “words” alternating vowels and consonants, with probability distributions matching those found in Portuguese—a computational exploration of linguistic structure directly connected to concrete poetry’s investigations of the sign’s materiality. Their second collaboration, Derivadas de uma Imagem (1969), exemplified the technical constraints of early computing. Cordeiro painstakingly digitised a photograph of an embracing couple by assigning grayscale values to a grid of 10,976 individual points. The transformation of this humanistic subject through successive derivatives became a meditation on how information systems process—and potentially degrade—human meaning, a concern with particular resonance under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Cordeiro’s vision culminated in Arteônica: The Creative Use of Electronic Media in the Arts (1971), held at FAAP in São Paulo. The neologism combined “art” and “electronics,” encapsulating his belief that merging artistic expression with electronic technologies could transform society. The exhibition catalogue featured approximately 85 artists from 17 countries, demonstrating Cordeiro’s remarkable ability to establish global networks despite organising during one of the dictatorship’s most repressive phases. Close to Max Bense’s information aesthetics,⁸ Cordeiro nonetheless envisioned art as information that could reach wider audiences, using cybernetics to understand media’s semiotic structure and ideological function. He argued that electronic reproduction would liberate art from physical galleries, allowing it to reach audiences across geographic and economic boundaries—directly challenging the elitist art market’s emphasis on unique objects. For Cordeiro, computer art represented both technical innovation and political possibility.⁹

The Bariloche Foundation, established in 1963, was an initiative by Argentine scientists to establish a unique academic organisation in Argentina’s Patagonia region. It was the brainchild of Carlos Mallmann, a mathematical physicist who directed the Bariloche Atomic Centre and the Balseiro Institute but harboured broader concerns about society and the use of cybernetics in the social sciences to develop simulations. The Limits to Growth, produced by Dennis and Donella Meadows using the system dynamics technique created by Jay Forrester of MIT for the Club of Rome, was a computer simulation exploring interactions between population growth, resource depletion, pollution, and economic development.¹⁰ The report “objectively” demonstrated that exponential growth and rising consumption would inevitably cause planetary catastrophe. The authors recommended halting economic and population growth to achieve equilibrium.

Such reports generated international debate, and in 1970, members of the Bariloche Foundation participated in an event in Rio de Janeiro, jointly sponsored by the Club of Rome and the Instituto Universitario de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, to analyse the report’s results. The main criticism was that The Limits to Growth predicted an “ecological apocalypse” from a developed-world perspective, ignoring that two-thirds of the world’s population already experienced crises involving scarce resources, inadequate housing, and starvation. Additionally, policies oriented towards “global equilibrium” would perpetuate rather than address existing global inequities.

In 1972, the Bariloche Foundation responded with the Latin American World Model (LAWM). Led by geologist Amílcar O. Herrera with Hugo Scolnik handling modelling and mathematics, the LAWM offered a disruptive, emancipatory proposal addressing global inequality. It questioned MIT’s variables as disconnected from developing countries’ realities, arguing that physical limits were mainly due to social and political factors, making “perfect stability” unfeasible. The LAWM’s central argument was that underdeveloped societies could not emerge from their “backward” state by following industrialised countries’ development patterns, instead proposing a model promoting basic human needs satisfaction and full human development without wasting resources. While valued as an alternative development model, the LAWM received criticism for oversimplifying variables and its “political idealism.” Michael Hopkins stressed that Bariloche Foundation’s intervention helped make basic human needs central to UN development thinking.¹¹ Despite its sophistication and pioneering the sustainable development discussion, the LAWM was eventually forgotten—possibly because it originated in Latin America and was mistakenly seen as merely an anecdotal or region-specific case. 

These three diverse contributions to the history of cybernetics that emerged from Latin America challenge persistent biases about where technological innovation can originate, demonstrating that nations often labelled as “underdeveloped” can make pioneering contributions that are frequently overlooked in terms of their global potential to contribute to planetary society. 

Beyond Cybersyn:
The Broader Connection of Stafford Beer in Latin America

At the heart of many Latin American experiments during the 1970s and 1980s was the figure of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, best known for developing the Viable System Model (VSM). This organisational framework, modelled after the human nervous system, consists of five interconnected systems: operational units with relative autonomy (System 1), coordination mechanisms preventing conflicts (System 2), operational oversight and resource optimisation (System 3), external environment scanning and adaptation planning (System 4), and overall direction-setting while maintaining organisational cohesion (System 5). A key feature of the VSM is its recursive nature—each viable system contains and is contained by other viable systems. This structure emphasises information flows and feedback mechanisms while aiming to achieve stability and maximise flexibility and adaptability at all levels without imposing rigid hierarchical control. For Beer, the failure of society was rooted in the mismatch shaped by traditional hierarchical, functionally divided, and top-down organisational structures. His concept of “The Liberty Machine” advocated for a new kind of meta-system, characterised by a networked rather than hierarchical structure, and action driven by information rather than authority.¹²

While, as already mentioned, Project Cybersyn has received significant attention in recent years, Beer’s broader involvement in Latin America remains largely unexplored. The journey can be traced from the 1970s through the lesser-known CENTRO project in Peru, and into the 1980s and 1990s when Beer was called upon by governments across the region for consultancy projects in Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Colombia.¹³

What emerges from this history is that Latin American practitioners did not maintain rigid boundaries between the domains of culture, management, and technology. Instead, they created distinctive relations that responded to the region’s own complex social and cultural conditions and needs while engaging with global technological developments. 

CENTRO: Peru’s Vision for Cybernetic Socialism

One of the most significant yet understudied cybernetic projects in Latin America was CENTRO (Centro de Estudios de Participación Popular) in Peru. Founded in 1972 by Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro—exiled from Brazil after the 1964 military coup—along with Argentine mathematician Oscar Varsavsky, CENTRO aimed to create a “Model of Cybernetic Socialism” for Peru’s revolutionary military government.

Ribeiro’s journey illustrates the pan-Latin American character of this intellectual movement. Having lived with indigenous communities in Brazil for a decade, established the Museu do Índio in Rio de Janeiro, and created the University of Brasília, Ribeiro was forced into exile but chose to remain in Latin America rather than flee to Europe or the United States. Moving from Uruguay to Venezuela to Chile and finally to Peru, he became, in his own words, “Latin American”—recognising Peru as a microcosm of the continent’s complexity, with its Andean, coastal, and Amazonian populations representing diverse cultural formations.

CENTRO’s vision departed fundamentally from conventional approaches to technology. Rather than focusing on automating work or increasing production efficiency, the project aimed at abolishing asymmetrical power structures and developing new tools for societal governance. Varsavsky developed computational models exploring societal transformation across resource availability, wealth distribution, and political viability. For Ribeiro, these experiments provided ways to visualise “viable utopias”—neither naive dreaming nor resigned acceptance of existing structures, but the belief that cybernetic principles could help identify and realise transformative social possibilities.

The influence of Beer also proved salient at CENTRO, primarily through Brazilian mathematician Carlos Senna de Figueiredo. Initially hired by Beer as a specialist in applied mathematical models for Chile’s Project Cybersyn, Senna de Figueiredo fled Santiago on September 11, 1973—the very day of the coup against Salvador Allende—arriving in Lima to join CENTRO. His arrival brought direct knowledge of the Chilean experiment to Peru.

CENTRO’s documents reveal a preliminary project for a real-time enterprise information and control system similar to Cybersyn, aimed at ensuring autonomy in decision-making at all levels of the industrial apparatus while maintaining equilibrium with state regulatory policies.¹⁴ Drawing on Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory¹⁵ and Wiener’s cybernetics¹⁶, the CENTRO team envisioned an information and control system driven by Beer’s Brain of the Firm, proposing “to implement a real-time nervous system in the economy—a continuously adaptive decision-making system that uses the computer as a logic engine and not merely as a data repository.”¹⁷ CENTRO proposed creating a study group to research and implement this project with public sector enterprises before extending it to the socially owned sector.

Carlos Eduardo de Senna Figueiredo organised presentations on Cybersyn for high-ranking Peruvian officials and authored what is possibly the world’s first published text on the Chilean project. Published by CENTRO in 1974 as part of Planificación y Participación, his essay provided detailed explanations of Beer’s Viable System Model with illustrations, flow charts, and mathematical models. With a print run of 5,000 copies—one of the highest among CENTRO publications—this text ensured that the lessons of the Chilean experiment would survive beyond the coup that destroyed it.¹⁸

URUCIB: Success in Uruguay and the Challenge of Political Sustainability

Perhaps the most successful implementation of Beer’s ideas came with URUCIB (Uruguay Cibernética), an Executive Information System designed for the Uruguayan presidency between 1986 and 1988. Coming after twelve years of civic-military dictatorship, the new democratic government of President Julio María Sanguinetti needed real-time information on critical variables to evaluate the country’s situation, detect potential problems early, and make well-informed decisions.

The driving force behind URUCIB was Uruguayan engineer Victor Ganón, who served as project leader and whose vision and technical leadership proved pivotal to its success. Ganón hired Beer as an advisor, but it was the Uruguayan team that developed the sophisticated software and integrated the various technological components into a coherent system.¹⁹ The VSM provided a conceptual model to derive indicators and detect instabilities in real-time, but the practical implementation depended on Ganón’s team’s capacity to orchestrate an extensive system integration effort—taking into account that during those years many technologies were still being deployed in silos, including communications, computation, and data resources.

The system created a national data network incorporating cybernetic modelling and statistical techniques to detect what Beer called “incipient instabilities”—focusing on disruptive changes in microeconomic time series data to provide early warnings to the government. URUCIB featured an intuitive graphical interface controlled by an infrared keypad, displaying information on giant screens in a Management Centre located in the President’s office. The system included a statistical software called “Cyberfilter” which analysed data streams against stored expectations to detect incipient instabilities early enough for managers to take corrective action before problems materialised. Notably, the Telex system implementation represented a significant advancement over Chile’s Cybersyn machines, developed using sophisticated local electronics and programming capabilities.  

What made URUCIB particularly remarkable was that it was developed locally. Beer himself had doubted that such sophisticated software could be created in Uruguay, reflecting what might be called a “Northern mindset” that assumed people from the South could not develop “state of the art” technology. Yet this skepticism overlooked the foundations that had already been mentioned earlier: Argentine pioneer Manuel Sadosky had founded the first Computation Centre at the University of the Republic of Uruguay, establishing the technical and intellectual infrastructure that would make projects like URUCIB possible. URUCIB’s success opened the way for it to be exported to Argentina and Nicaragua, becoming the first software exported from Uruguay and marking the start of what would become one of the most flourishing software and technology development export businesses in the region.

URUCIB anticipated principles now considered fundamental to modern information management systems: real-time data monitoring, standardised taxonomies across organisations, interoperable systems, visual dashboards, and early warning detection. Yet, despite its sophistication—or perhaps because of it—URUCIB was gradually dismantled following a change in government in 1990, when new priorities and perspectives on managing government information prevailed.  

The case of URUCIB demonstrated that even successful locally developed systems could be abandoned, leaving governments increasingly dependent on software solutions from global corporations rather than tools specifically designed to address the complex demands and unique characteristics of national governance.

The pattern repeated across the region. In Mexico, Beer encountered systemic corruption so entrenched that it functioned not as an aberration but as a natural output of structural configuration—perfectly designed, as Beer observed, to produce exactly what it produced. In Venezuela, the ambitious Cybervenez Project collapsed amid economic crisis and political turmoil. In each case, the parent system—to use cybernetic language—proved unable or unwilling to create conditions for alternative models to succeed.²⁰

The Technocratic Temptation

The British sociologist Andrew Pickering has argued that the VSM was “an invention of technical experts which accorded technical experts key positions.”²¹ This critique supports the view that cybernetic approaches were aligned with the technocratic narrative that flourished during the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, emphasising market efficiency and privatisation of core public services. From this neoliberal perspective, ideas from computation and cybernetics could be applied to creating new systems to manage societies aimed at eroding states and delegating responsibility to private enterprises—making citizens into members of global digital platforms while losing the ability to ask important structural questions about how to reform society.

However, characterising Latin American cybernetics as purely technocratic overlooks several crucial aspects. The VSM’s inherent design emphasised democratic participation and local autonomy—principles that ran counter to the top-down appropriation that often occurred. The distinction is crucial: while technocracy implies rule by technical experts imposing predetermined and one-size-fits-all solutions, the Latin American view of cybernetics that we aimed to describe sought to create spaces for collective exploration, at both the technical and social levels.

What the history of cybernetics in Latin America ultimately suggests is that the potential of projects like the LAWM, Cybersyn, or CENTRO might precisely lie in the fact that they were never fully implemented. These gaps leave space for thinking of dimensions that could have been part of such systems. When a project is regarded as failed or has been dismantled, we can ask what could have been. Perhaps what we have most lost as a society is the systemic perspective itself—the ability to see organisations as information flows, to understand how structures generate outcomes, to recognise that what a system does (rather than what it claims to do) reveals its true purpose. 

This article is based on the talk “Cybernetics and Viable Utopias,” as part of the joint lecture series Thinking Inside Out organised by the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM) and Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe), January 30, 2025, https://zkm.de/en/media/videos/thinking-inside-out-cybernetics-and-viable-utopias.

An extended version of this research is available as an open access article: José-Carlos Mariátegui, “Beyond Project Cybersyn: Tracing the Influence of Stafford Beer Projects and Ideas in Latin America,” in Systemic Practice and Action Research, vol. 38, no. 9 (2025), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11213-025-09717-2. This article draws on research conducted by the author on the Stafford Beer Collection at Liverpool John Moores University, the Darcy and Berta Ribeiro Archive at the University of Brasilia, and extensive interviews with participants in these historical projects.

Footnotes

1. See: Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011; Karen Benezra, “Cybersyn: A Revolution in Style,” in Latin American Modernisms and Technology, ed. María Fernández, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2018, pp. 195–220; Catalina Ossa and Enrique Rivera, Cybersyn: Sinergia Cibernética, Santiago: Ocho Libros Editores, 2008; Evgeny Morozov, “The Planning Machine: Project Cybersyn and the Origins of the Big Data Nation,” The New Yorker, October 6, 2014. ↑

2. Cecilia Berdichevsky, “The Beginning of Computer Science in Argentina — Clementina (1961–1966),” in History of Computing and Education 2, ed. John Impagliazzo, New York: Springer US, 2006. ↑

3. Arlindo Machado, “Waldemar Cordeiro: o brasileiro precursor da arte mediada por computadores." Revista Eco-Pós vol. 18, no. 1 (2015), https://revistaecopos.eco.ufrj.br/eco_pos/article/view/2392. ↑

4. José-Carlos Mariátegui, “How to Non-Organize,” E-Flux Architecture, Intensification (2025), https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/intensification/6782956/how-to-non-organize. ↑

5. Manuel Sadosky, “La computación en el mundo moderno. Realidades y perspectivas en América Latina,” in Manuel Sadosky: ciencia con conciencia en América Latina, ed. Pedro Roberto Kanof, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2021, p. 114. ↑

6. A development which was traced in the exhibition Waldemar Cordeiro. Constellations, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), 2025, https://zkm.de/en/2025/04/waldemar-cordeiro-constellations. ↑

7.  Machado, “Waldemar Cordeiro,” p. 28. ↑

8. Max Bense, Aesthetica, vol. 1–2, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1954. ↑

9. Arlindo Machado, “Waldemar Cordeiro and Arteônica,” in Waldemar Cordeiro: Fantasia Exata, ed. Analivia Cordeiro, São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2014, pp. 674–94. ↑

10. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jørgen Randers, The Limits to Growth; A Report For the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books, 1972. ↑

11. Michael J. D. Hopkins, “Planning to Meet Basic Needs in Poor Countries,” UNESCO-Sussex Meeting on LAMM National Applications, Brighton, 1977. ↑

12. Stafford Beer, “The liberty machine,” Futures, vol. 3, no. 4 (1971): p. 346, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(71)90053-X. ↑

13. José-Carlos Mariátegui, “Beyond Project Cybersyn: Tracing the Influence of Stafford Beer Projects and Ideas in Latin America,” Systemic Practice and Action Research, vol. 38, no. 2 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11213-025-09717-2. ↑

14. CENTRO, “Anteproyectos y Proyectos del CENTRO, Documento de Trabajo - junio 73-junio 74,” in Anteproyecto de un sistema de información y control de empresas en tiempo real, ed. Carlos de Senna Figueiredo, Lima: Centro de Estudios de la Participación Popular, 1973. ↑

15. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, New York: George Braziller Incorporated, 1968. ↑

16. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, New York: J. Wiley, 1948. ↑

17. Carlos Eduardo de Senna Figueiredo, “Anteproyecto de un sistema de información y control de empresas en tiempo real,” in Anteproyectos y Proyectos del CENTRO, Documento de Trabajo – junio 73–junio 74, ed. CENTRO, 1973, p. 5. ↑

18. Oscar Varsavsky, Ignacy Sachs, and Carlos de Senna Figueiredo, Planificación y Participación, Lima: Ediciones del Centro de Estudios de Participación Popular SINAMOS, 1974. ↑

19. Victor Ganón, “URUCIB: a technological revolution in post-dictatorship Uruguay 1986-88,” AI & Society, vol. 37, no. 3 (2022): pp. 1231–254. ↑

20. Mariátegui, “Beyond Project Cybersyn.” ↑

21. Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, p. 265. ↑