Oswald Wiener, Introspection and Cybernetics 
Summer School 

Drawing on the exhibition A.rtificial I.ntrospection O. at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, this summer school will explore Oswald Wiener’s central approaches through the reading of primary and secondary texts and group discussions. Shortly before his death in 2021, Wiener had attempted to develop a comprehensive theory for his diverse approaches, including those on cybernetics and self-observation, but was unable to realize this. Wiener belonged to a generation of intellectuals of the 1960s whose expectations of art, language, and the humanities became increasingly disillusioned. From the late 1960s onwards, he devoted himself to cybernetics, which had emerged in the 1940s. As a partly provocative reaction to the so-called linguistic turn—which is based on the idea that the world as we perceive it and as it appears to us is linguistically constructed — former advocates of the humanities, including Wiener, increasingly turned to positivist, natural scientific, and initially also behaviorist approaches. Wiener later, however, fundamentally distanced himself from behaviorism.[1]

In the 1950s, Wiener was a member of the Vienna Group and a jazz musician; in the 1960s, he held a management position at Olivetti. After being forced to leave Austria in 1969 due to blasphemy and radical criticism of the state, he went into exile in Berlin, where he opened a restaurant and studied mathematics and computer science until 1986. Subsequently, he lived in relative seclusion in Canada and worked again in the field of artificial intelligence; from 1992 to 2004, he held the chair of Poetics and Artistic Aesthetics at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and in 2012 he moved back to Styria. It is precisely against the backdrop of this interplay that both Wiener’s conceptual constructs and his diverse body of work — such as die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, a novel (1969), Self-Observation (2015), and the volume The Theory of Thinking, published in 2023 — can be considered.

Since the dandy — who thought exclusively in aphorisms — and dandyism served as a model for Wiener, even though he repeatedly viewed and questioned them critically, Wiener cannot be seen merely as such; rather, the concept itself deserves closer examination. Fundamentally, Wiener was always concerned with exploring both consciousness and thought. Since he saw himself as having failed in his first attempt to achieve this through art, he subsequently tried to do so through cybernetics. In this endeavor, he initially thought that thought could be reconstructed in a manner similar to machines, but then realized that machines possess neither experiences nor ideas.

Oscillating between technological optimism and an increasingly strong sense of technological pessimism, Wiener foresaw the dangers of advancing technological development early on and anticipated the limitations of artificial intelligence by also critiquing human intelligence — or what is generally understood by that term. His thinking can thus be understood as interdisciplinary, oscillating between the natural sciences and the humanities.

[1] Behaviorism is one of the central learning theories — alongside cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism — that examines how humans and animals respond to environmental stimuli. Behaviorism is a psychological theory that largely excludes mental processes and instead focuses exclusively on observable behavior. Proponents of behaviorism argued that scientific psychology should analyze only measurable reactions to stimuli. It focuses exclusively on observable behavior, rather than on internal feelings and thoughts, and is based on the fundamental idea that behavior is triggered by environmental stimuli and shaped by learning. Internal processes such as thoughts, emotions, or motivation are thus disregarded, and behavior is understood as a simple stimulus-response connection. Behaviorism was founded by John B. Watson, who sought to establish psychology as an objective, measurable science. A central concept is the so-called ​“black box,” which describes the inner workings of the human mind: All unobservable mental processes are ignored, even though they actually influence behavior — such as when a person dresses warmly in the snow without their thoughts or feelings, such as feeling cold, being taken into account. In contrast to this ​“black box model” of behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism seek to understand how information is processed and structured in the mind.


PROGRAM

Day 1, 1.7.26, 10am – 6pm

10:00 – 11:25am

1. Oswald Wiener

• Klaus Kastberger im Gespräch mit Andrea Gerk, Oswald Wiener: Ein radikaler und unbestechlicher Denker, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 19.11.2021.
• Kastberger, Klaus, Oswald Wiener: Schreib-Szenen zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft, Vortrag Universität Wien, 29.10.2010, Manuskripte, Heft 189/190.
• Weibel, Peter, Laudatio für Oswald Wiener, manuskripte-Preisträger 2006, Manuskripte, Heft 174.
   

11:35am – 1:00pm

2. Early Phase: The Vienna Group, Experimental Art, Artists Without Works

• Kastberger, Klaus, Wien 1950/1960. Eine österreichische Avantgarde, 2009. In: Ecker, B., Hilger, W. (eds) Die fünfziger Jahre / The 1950s. Springer, Wien. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​1​0​0​7/978 – 3‑7091 – 0052-3_4
• Wiener, Oswald, Wozu überhaupt Kunst?, in: Wiener, Oswald, Literarische Aufsätze, Löcker Verlag, Wien 1998, S. 21 – 41.
• Nüchtern, Klaus, Dem Gulda schulde ich noch eine Watsch’n, Falter, 40/2019.

2:00 – 3:50pm

3. Distancing from Art and Language: Against the Linguistic Turn, in favor of Dandy Ideology, the Dandy, and Dandyism

• Dany, Hans-Christian, Knoll, Valerie, No Dandy, No Fun. Gutaussehend in den Untergang, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2021.
• Schillinger, Jakob, Oswald Wiener on Dandyism, OCTOBER 170, Fall 2019, S. 31 – 50. © 2019 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​1​1​6​2​/​o​c​t​o​_​a​_​00368
• Kukuljevic, Alexi, Slippered Negligence: The Dandy, in: Kukuljevic, Alexi, Liquidation World – On the Art of Living Absently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017, S. 79 – 88.
   

4:10 – 6:00pm

4. Introduction to the Theory of Thought
Chapter 1 – 3, Theorie des Denkens (De Gruyter Brill, Berlin / Boston)

• Gespräch zwischen Oswald Wiener und Thomas Eder, Literatur, Sprache, Denken: Die Anfänge, S. 11 – 77.
• Gespräch zwischen Oswald Wiener und Thomas Raab, Von Maschinen zur Denkpsychologie, S. 79 – 109.
• Summary by Caro Feistritzer

Day 2, 2.7.26, 10am – 6pm

10:00 – 11:25am

5. verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (improvement of middle Europe, a novel) (Rowolth, Hamburg; Jung und Jung, Salzburg)

• Cipani, Nicola, Zur Theorie eines „, roman“: Oswald Wiener ​„verbesserung von mitteleuropa“: Ein Kommentar, Ergon Verlag, Baden-Baden, 2022, S. 7 – 48.
• Wiener, Oswald, die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman, Jung und Jung, Salzburg und Wien, 2022 (Exzerpte in der Ausstellung ansehen)
   

11:35am – 1:00pm

6. The ​“Bio-Adapter” and Virtual Reality

• Wiener, Oswald, Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie, Appendix A: Der Bio-Adapter, Springer-Verlag, Wien, 1996, S. 46 – 57.
• Der Bio-Adapter Versuch einer Rekonstruktion, https://​cfa​-gallery​.com/​e​x​h​i​b​i​t​i​o​n​s​/​b​e​r​l​i​n​-​d​e​r​-​b​i​o​-​a​d​a​pter/, (Kurztext)
• Schäfer, Armin, Der Bio-Adapter, Ein Objekt, das den Menschen zum Cyborg macht und aufzeigt, was Fiktionen sind, https://​www​.virtuelle​-lebenswel​ten​.de/​b​l​o​g​-​p​o​s​t​/​d​e​r​-​b​i​o​-​a​d​apter.

2:00 – 3:50pm

7. Turing machines, content analysis, artificial intelligence, and criticism

• Makowsky, J.A., Zen oder die Kunst eine Turing Machine zu warten, https://​janos​.cs​.tech​nion​.ac​.il/​P​U​B​/​P​U​B​L​I​S​H​E​D​/​m​a​k​o​w​s​k​y​/​w​i​e​n​e​r.pdf
• Wiener, Oswald, Probleme der Künstlichen Intelligenz, Merve Verlag, Berlin, 1990, S. 73 – 97.
   

4:10 – 6:00pm

8. Introspection and Key Concepts by Oswald Wiener

• Raab, Thomas, Selbstbeobachtung. Wozu und, wenn ja, welche? Eine Einleitung zur Denkpsychologie Oswald Wieners, in: Eder, Thomas und Raab, Tomas, Oswald Wieners Denkspsychologie, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2015, S. 7 – 56.
• Wiener, Oswald, Probleme der Künstlichen Intelligenz, Merve Verlag, Berlin, 1990, S. 7 – 41.
   

Day 3, 3.7.26, 10am – 1pm

10:00 – 11:30am

9. Excercises in introspection

• Aufgaben. Oswald Wiener u. Michael Schwarz, in: Eder, Thomas und Raab, Tomas, Oswald Wieners Denkspsychologie, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2015, S. 445 – 467.
   

12:00 – 1:00pm

10. Experimental Approaches in Contemporary Art

• Joint tour through the exhibition A.rtificial I.ntrospection O. 
   

Location:
HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark
Burgring 2, 8010 Graz, halle​-fuer​-kun​st​.at
 

Workshop Leader: Caro Feistritzer, MA
Students at Graz University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, will receive 2 ECTS credits for participating in the workshop.

Selected excerpts from English and German primary and secondary sources will be read and then discussed. In preparation for the workshop, participants are asked to visit the exhibition A.rtificial I.ntrospection O. at the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark on their own beforehand and to review the Oswald Wiener archive — which is presented here in a clear and accessible format — by reading through selected excerpts.

Opening hours, free admission: Tuesday – Sunday, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Register for the Summer School by June 24, 2026: cf@​halle-​fuer-​kunst.​at
Free admission, limited spaces available