Focusing on Juan Downey’s 1969 sculpture "With Energy Beyond These Walls", the lecture by Prof. Dr. Felicity D. Scott will revisit the Chilean-born artist’s electronic and cybernetic works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, reading their structurally ambivalent semantic and operational logics, and their modes of switching, as harboring a political vocation, one becoming more evident, and more urgent in the wake of the military coup of September 11, 1973. Departing from readings celebrating Downey’s works as paradigms of interactivity or as inviting “participation,” she wants to argue that they are better read as allegories of a far-reaching media-technical and political apparatus then being forged in the United States, as works modeling environmental systems as they operated as techniques of power, both upon the bodies and psyches of subjects as well as in a wider geopolitical domain.