Bio-digital architecture

The concept of “Bio-Digital Architecture” is not new and it is within an area of great speculation and few well-demarcated definitions. A key factor in the definition and practice of technology is the difference 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 different 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 specific 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 illustrative 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 different from its predecessors, with “Virus Detection”—VirDet—and “Oyster 2.0” (Giacaman: 1988, 1994).