Web radio rwm.macba.cat interviewed Matthew Fuller published on the 11th of August 2017. In this extract of the interview, Fuller speaks about different ways to think about the idea of the 'black box'.

Link to the interview (starts at 6m10s): rwm.macba.cat/en/extra/matthew-fuller-deleted/capsula

"The black box in contemporary science and technology studies is a term that is used to describe an entity within which we cannot know what is happening. We have to accept [it] as a stable, standard object that is internally unknowable, but externally we can inspect its functions.

The black box as a term comes from cybernetics. In W. Ross Ashby's work, where he describes the black box as a form of jargon that comes from electronic engineers. So in WWII there is an enourmous production of electronic gadgets that would be developed for things like submarines, battleships, aircrafts and so on. Because they were produced so rapidly and [because of the fact] that they were partially experimental, they weren't documented, they didn't had a great user interface -- often it would just a series of switches around a grey metal box. These objects were finished while the war was ongoing. If one was presented with one of these objects as an electronic engineer, you would have to work out what this thing was. There were various routines of providing with input and seeing what its output was. And by mapping the input to the output, with the various changes that were introduced by different forms of input, voltage levels for instance and the turning of different switches, one could see what this thing was. And at least make some kind of educated guess.

So the black box in cybernetic sense is always a dynamic object. Something which very different from a static and slightly oppressive object in technology studies. For Ashby the black box is always something that requires inquiry. [Something] that involves a dynamic relation between the experimental subject that is testing what the box is, and the function of the box itself. This is a different position in a sense.

What I'm interested in is perhaps to move away from a simply critical position that says oke, these things are black boxes we can't know them, they oppress us, and they govern our actions. It may indeed be true in some cases. But in other cases it is possible to come to them with an experimental frame of mind and to work with concatenations of input and output to see what happens. The more black boxes that are joint together, the more contingent, the more unstable perhaps the arrangement would be. Depending on particular characteristics.

The question of the black box in contemporary society is something that i think we can experiment with.

It think it relates to also the question of what the human is. If you think of Freud, the account of the human from Darwin, from Marx to Nietzsche. The question of what the human is is always subject of experiment, subject of question, and subject of a kind of renewed sense of a cascade of multiplicities that are involved in the human. Which are always partially knowable and partially unknowable and chaotic in form. Which is a fantastic place to be."