Cybernetic Studio

The Cybernetic Studio is a creative research space at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics. Artists, engineers, computer scientists, environmentalists, researchers and organisations come together here to make things (and break things), and to work out how technology can be designed and built for safe, sustainable futures.

Material practice has been part of cybernetics from the very beginning. The field is full of objects built to think with: Wiener’s hearing glove, Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises, Ashby’s homeostat, and Beer and Pask’s fungoid “whisper” systems. The Studio carries that tradition forward.

Welcome to the Cybernetic Studio, where creativity, computation and curiosity converge.

Cybernetics is about steering: navigating complex systems of people, technologies and environments. In a world of rapid technological change, that means helping humanity chart a course toward safe, sustainable and equitable futures.

The Studio is our experimental space for exploring what responsible innovation really looks like. It is where we prototype ideas, test assumptions and make the invisible visible. Our Human-Scale AI philosophy invites us to slow down and look closer, bringing the workings of computation within human reach so that people can shape it with care and intention.

Together, we can build technologies, and futures, that keep humanity and the planet at the centre.

Dr Ben Swift

Human-Scale AI is the theme for the Studio’s 2025/2026 activities. We interact with computational devices more than ever, and understand their workings less than ever. Miniaturisation has been so successful that you can no longer look at a computer in action and see anything of what it is doing. Large language models widen the gap again: now we can talk to our machines, and they can answer back, but the fluency hides an enormous amount of arithmetic that we never see.

The Studio’s wager is that this computation can be slowed down and blown up until it returns to human scale. The claim is grounded in cybernetics’ long history of hands-on experimentation, in the “mangle of practice” where knowledge gets made by building things. Human sense perception is extraordinary. Bring AI within its range, and we can turn all of it on the problem, looking and listening our way toward an understanding that abstraction usually denies us.

None of this will let you see the matrix scrolling in neon-green-on-black, and that was never the goal. Even a glimpse of computation at human scale helps us orient to the way it flows around and through us when we cannot see it at all. By making and using human-scale AI systems, we get better at deciding when to take part, when to abstain, and how to keep computation working in everyone’s interest at every scale.

The Studio’s work takes the form of objects, installations, activities and tools: things you can stand in front of, take part in, or read. Each one makes some part of a modern AI system, or the way it is used, legible at human scale.

Perceptron Apparatus

An abacus for deep learning

Neon Perceptron

Rosenblatt’s perceptron, rebuilt in light

LLMs Unplugged

Language models you can hold

LLM Brainscan

One pixel per parameter

Slop Salon

Six AI artists, one constitution

APS AI Transparency Tracker

Marking the government’s AI homework

The Studio gathers its work in a print publication too, embedded below.