Encoding/Decoding Cybernetics is a project undertaken by Dr Sarah Ciston during her Fellowship at the Stuart Hall Archive in 2025. The mini site embedded below is a digital arts project that explores Hall’s impact on the history of communication theory, culminating in the architecture of contemporary AI models. It highlights the relevance of Hall’s ideas to our current media environment, and offers a valuable way into thinking about how we might contend critically with - and historicise - emerging technologies and new social formations.

The project is broadly interested in the question “How did words become vectors?” Not just numbers but spatialised probabilities, reducing meaning to measurable comparisons and arrows in latent space? It is interested in how the technical choices that create numerical representations come to inform large generative text outputs — and how historical developments come to inform those technical choices. Both how those historical developments are represented and historicized and their potential alternative narratives that exist in parallel, for ways they might have or might still create alternative futures. As an extension it’s asking about the current AI accelerations we see, where they require reductions in meaning making and in modes of representation of identity making, where they work to transmit and amplify power and ideology, how they do that work.

Further notes can be accessed by clicking the ‘Open embedded site in new window’ link at the bottom of this page, then ‘Tools’ > ‘Speaker View’.