The Department of Systems Oversight 1968-1973 (DSO) was established in 1968 in response to the tremendous social and cultural crises that emerged within Western societies during the late 1960s. The social upheaval and student riots in Paris in May 1968 and their repercussions around the world, provide a potent example of the conditions that frame the DSO. Little is known about who exactly started the DSO; what is known is that it represented a consortium of seemingly mutually exclusive interests in politics, economics and the arts.

The DSO was established as an ‘impartial’ global organization, to monitor and document how we shape and are shaped by systems. Cities were undergoing radical change through massive urban redevelopment schemes. The DSO was charged with the responsibility of ensuring the recording of future implementation and integration of local, national and international systems of all kinds and purposes.

The DSO primary aim was to locate, analyse, and produce visual artifacts that examined not only the exchange, placement, course and direction within these systems but also the motility of the (infra)structures themselves. The DSO was also invested in recording the shapes and hybrid forms that resulted from the overlay of the old and the new. Ultimately, the DSO failed and in 1973 during the onset of the energy crisis all of its branches were eventually closed.