My research:
• studies the history of technolgy in Latin America, especially in Chile.
• investigates how political ideologies contributed to the design and development of new technologies and technological systems.
• explores how information technologies shape, contribute to, and undermine forms of governance.
• documents the relationship of history, memory, and technology.

•I am preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled Cybernetic Socialism. The book expands on two chapters of my dissertation "The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile, 1964-1973" (MIT, 2005) and my 2006 article "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile."

Cybernetic Socialism details the history of Project Cybersyn (or el Sistema Synco in Spanish), an experimental computer network based on cybernetic principles. It was established by Chile's Popular Unity government during the early 1970s with the intention of providing a real-time, decentralized form of economic analysis in the nationalized sector of the Chilean economy.

This photo depicts the Cybersyn Opsroom - the control center envisioned by British cybernetician Stafford Beer and constructed in Santiago between 1971-1973.  (Photo taken from Stafford Beer's Platform for Change).

•My most recent article, "Big Blue in the Bottomless Pit: The Early Years of IBM Chile," uses Chile as a South American case study to explore how IBM created and benefitted from its global corporate culture.

(image used with permission from IBM Chile)

•In 2005, I designed an installation on the Cybersyn history that appeared at the ZKM Center for Digital Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany from March-October. The installation was part of the larger exhibit "Making Things Public" curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Here you can see an overhead shot of the Opsroom installation. I authored an accompanying catalog entry on the installation, which appears in the edited volume Making Things Public (MIT Press, 2005).

(Photo taken from http://www.zkm.de).

•Investigating ways to intergrate the history and social studies of computing in the informatics and computer science curriculum constitutes an ongoing interest of mine. I have published articles on this topic for the Computer Research Association and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE). I presented a paper on this subject at the 2005 United Nations World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia.

• In 2005, I presented a conference paper on the history of the Citroën Yagán, a Chilean "automobile for the people" designed by the French car maker during the socialist government of Salvador Allende. The paper illustrated how Chile's political history contributed to the manufacture of this unique automobile. It argued that the re-evaluation and reframing of the Allende period in recent years resulted in the rediscovery of and nostalgia for the Yagán -- a car often dubbed the "ugliest automobile in history." Here you can see a picture of my father-in-law in the driver's seat of the Yagán.

•In 2004, I wrote an article on the Chilean free software movement and the challenges it faced in an economy driven by the private sector.