Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 AI & SOCIETY https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01405-2 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Bio-digital architecture From Protobio (1974) to Virus Detection (1989), the background of a paradigm shift David Maulén de los Reyes 1 Received: 8 September 2021 / Accepted: 10 February 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2022 Abstract The concept of “Bio-Digital Architecture” is not new and it is within an area of great speculation and few well-demarcated defnitions. A key factor in the defnition and practice of technology is the diference between its production and use. If we assume that forms of use are also technical, this distinction is intrinsic to countries based on economies without added value and their histories focused on reverting this situation. This article proposes the revision of a paradigm shift in South America that combined the sustainable “Bio Architecture” (Garciatello: 1948) background from the developmental state with a dif- ferent economic model era. Through a historical review of the sociology of symbolic production, and the development of devices and interfaces, mechanisms are proposed to recognize paradigm shifts, in a context where technological utopias are associated with the materialization of new social utopias of developing. Focused on specifc cases, this research explains the culmination of the principles of “Second-order cybernetics”, in the epistemological formulation of “Autopiesis”, and the early visualization of these principles through digital media in the experience of “Protobio” (Varela, Maturana, Uribe: 1974). Finally, this work concludes with the description of the concrete application of these principles, not in an illustra- tive way, but in the design of the electronic information architecture of the operating system, continuing with the challenge of translating the logic of the immune system into an economic, political and social context completely diferent from its predecessors, with “Virus Detection”—VirDet—and “Oyster 2.0” (Giacaman: 1988, 1994). Keywords Protobio · Virus detection · Digital bio-architecture · South America · Giacaman · Varela 1 Introduction Between 1972 and 1974, Chilean computer engineer Ricardo Uribe and biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Matu- rana developed a digital visualization of their principle of Autopoiesis, something they called Protobio (Maturana 1974). According to Varela in the foreword to the reissue of the book De máquinas y seres vivos. Autopoiesis: La Organización de lo Vivo (On machines and living beings. Autopoiesis: the organization of living systems) sixth edi- tion—(Varela 1994), the immune system of the human being does not exist solely because of reactions to pathogens, but each unit that contains it has its own operational logic. This behavior is the basis of the theory of Autopoiesis, which, since it was frst published in 1972, has infuenced a wide range of areas such as constructivism (Goolishian, 1988), second-order cybernetics (Wolfe 1995), and sociol- ogy (Seidl 2012). In the case of Protobio—First life—in 1974, the project focused on generating digital visualiza- tions of this principle. Therefore, it was not a coincidence that the University of Chile Press published simultaneously On machines and living beings translated and published the book by Frenchman Paul Idatte (Fig. 1): Nociones Funda- mentales de Cibernética (Fundamental notions of cybernet- ics) (Idatte 1972), to set up the basis for alternative models of Cybernetics. However, this progress would not have been possible without the prior direction towards a Developmental State that tried to revert the dependence on industrialized prod- ucts. The education of Uribe, Varela and Maturana took * David Maulén de los Reyes dmaulen@utem.cl 1 Architecture School, Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana UTEM, Santiago, Chile