Technology, Design, and Memory in Chile, Columbia University Seminar on Latin America

TECHNOLOGY, DESIGN, AND MEMORY IN CHILE: THE HISTORY OF PROJECT CYBERSYN, Faculty House, Columbia University 7:00 PM

In this talk, Eden Medina, Hugo Palmarola, and Pedro Ignacio Alonso will discuss the recent exhibition they curated, How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design, that opened at the Centro Cultural La Moneda to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup. The exhibition included the first full-scale, functional reconstruction of the cybernetic operations room from Project Cybersyn, an initiative begun by the socialist government of Salvador Allende to improve the management of the Chilean economy through new data, communication, and computational capabilities. This talk will share the history of Project Cybersyn, how interpretations of this history have changed over time, and how the reconstruction of the room has furthered historical understandings of the project and its context. It will also discuss the process of reconstructing the operations room for public display, how the history of Project Cybersyn forms part of a larger story of Chile bringing together design, democracy, and socialism, and how these stories of design are shaping public memory of the Allende period fifty-years after the military coup took place.