The Cybernetic Brain
Page 11
From here one can trace the cultural trajectory of flicker in several directions. Burroughs both referred to flicker in his writing and built it into his prose style in his "cut-up" experiments (Geiger 2003, 52–53).72 Gysin and Sommerville published essays on and construction details f or their Dream Machine in the journal Olympiain February 1962 (Geiger 2003, 62). Timothy Leary, ex-Harvard psychologist and acid guru, was one of the Beats' suppliers of drugs and learned from them of flicker, which he began to discuss, along with Grey Walter, in his own writings.73 Gysin displayed Dream Machines as art objects in a series of exhibitions and argued that they marked a break into a new kind of art that should displace all that had gone before: "What is art? What is color? What is vision? These old questions demand new answers when, in the light of the Dream Machine, one sees all ancient and modern abstract art with eyes closed" (Gysin quoted by Geiger 2003, 62).74
Figure 3.13.Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine. Source: Geiger 2003, 50. (Copyright © John Geiger from Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint. Photograph copyright © 2000 by Harold Chapman.)
Gysin was also taken with the idea of the Dream Machine as a drug-free point of access to transcendental states, and had plans to develop it as a commercial proposition, something to replace the television in people's living rooms, but all his efforts in that direction failed (Geiger 2003, 66 & passim). And in the end, the flicker technology that entered popular culture was not the cheap Dream Machine but the hi-tech strobe light.75As Geiger puts it (2003, 82–83): "By 1968 . . . stroboscopic lights were flashing everywhere. They . . . had been taken up by the drug culture. Ken Kesey featured strobe lights in his 'Acid Tests'—parties where he served guests LSD-laced Kool-Aid to the music of the Grateful Dead. . . . Tom Wolfe wrote in The Electric Kool- Aid Acid Test:'The strobe has certain magical properties in the world of acid heads. At certain speeds stroboscopic lights are so synched in with the pattern of brain waves that they can throw epileptics into a seizure. Heads discovered that strobes could project them into many of the sensations of an LSD experience without taking LSD.' " Flicker, then, was an axis along which Walter's cybernetics played into the distinctive culture of the high 1960s.76 And Walter himself was happy to claim a share of the credit. In a 1968 talk he remarked, "Illusory experiences produced by flashing lights . . . nowadays are used as a standard method of stimulation in some subcultures. I should be paid a royalty because I was the first to describe these effects" (quoted by Geiger 2003, 83).
This is as far as I can take the story of flicker and the sixties, and the key points to note are, first, that this cultural crossover from Walter's cybernetics to the drug culture and the Beats indeed took place and, second, that the crossover is easy to understand ontologically.77 In different ways, the sixties and cybernetics shared an interest in the performative brain, with technologies of the decentered self as a point of exchange. The sixties were the heroic era of explorations of consciousness, and flicker joined a whole armory of such sixties technologies: psychedelic drugs, as already mentioned, meditation, sensory deprivation tanks, as pioneered by John Lilly (1972), and even trepanning.78 In the next section we can take a quick look at yet another such technology: biofeedback. For now, three remarks are in order.
First, just as I conceive of cybernetics as ontology in action, playing out the sort of inquiries that one might associate with a performative understanding of the brain, one can equally see the sixties as a form of ontological theater staging the same concerns, not in brain science but in unconventional forms of daily life.
Second, I want to emphasize the sheer oddity of Gysin's Dream Machines, their discordant relation to everyday objects and the traditions in which they are embedded. In the field of art, it is probably sufficient to quote Gysin himself, who justifiably described the Dream Machine as "the first artwork in history made to be viewed with closed eyes" (Geiger 2003, 54). As a commercial proposition, the Dream Machine was just as problematic. In December 1964, Gysin showed a version to representatives from Columbia Records, Pocketbooks, and Random House, and "all present were soon trying to understand what they had and how to market it. Was it something that could be sold in book form with cut-outs, or was it something that could be sold with LPs? Columbia Records' advertising director Alvin Goldstein suggested the Dream Machine would make a great lamp. Someone said they could be used in window displays" (Geiger 2003, 69). In its unclassifiability, the Dream machine exemplifies in the realm of material technology my thesis that ontology makes a difference.
Finally, I should return to the question of the social transmission of cybernetics. Just as we saw earlier in the history of robotics, flicker's crossover from cybernetics to the Beats took place via a popular book, The Living Brain, and thus outside any disciplined form of social transmission. The focus of Walter's book is resolutely on the human brain; it is not a book about art or living-room furniture. But Gysin read "half a sentence," and "I said, 'Oh, wow, that's it!' " (quoted in Geiger 2003, 49). Although not evident in the story of the Walter-Brooks connection in robotics, a corollary of the chancy mode in which cybernetics was transmitted was, as I said earlier, the opportunity for wild mutation—the transmutation of brain science into art objects and psychedelic replacements for the TV.
Biofeedback and New Music
THE SOUNDS THAT ARE "ALLOWED TO BE THEMSELVES" IN LUCIER'S WORK HAVE ALWAYS HAD A MYSTERIOUSLY "EXPRESSIVE" QUALITY. SOMETIMES I THINK IT IS INARTICULATE NATURE SPEAKING TO US HERE.
JAMES TENNEY,"THE ELOQUENT VOICE OF NATURE" (1995)
"Biofeedback" refers to another set of technologies of the nonmodern self, techniques for reading out "autonomous" bodily parameters such as brain rhythms and displaying them to subjects, thus making them potentially subject to purposeful intervention. Shipton's flicker-feedback circuit might be described as such a device, except that there was no choice in the matter: the circuit locked onto the subject's brainwaves and fed them back as flicker whether the subject liked it or not. Walter describes a more voluntary biofeedback arrangement in The Living Brain (1953, 240). The onset of sleep and anger is marked by an increase in low-frequency theta rhythms in the brain, and Walter imagines an EEG setup in which this increase flashes a light or rings a bell: "Worn by hard-driving motorists, theta warning-sets would probably save more lives than do motor horns, and they might assist self-knowledge and self-control."79 In the 1960s, biofeedback came to refer to a species of selftraining, in which subjects learned to control aspects of their EEG spectrum (without ever being able to articulate how they did it).80
We could follow the history of biofeedback in several directions. Going back to our earlier clinical concerns, Jim Robbins (2000) offers a popular account of the history of biofeedback in psychiatry and of present-day uses in the treatment of a whole range of disorders including epilepsy, learning disabilities, autism, and PTSD.81 He notes, however, that biofeedback was also taken up by the sixties counterculture in pursuit of alpha-wave-dominated states that had become identified with transcendental experiences (fig. 3.14). The first meeting of biofeedback professionals took place at Snowmass, Colorado, in 1968, and the attendees were "a mixture of uptight scientific types . . . and people barefooted, wearing white robes, with long hair. It attracted the heads to a tremendous extent" (Robbins 2000, 65, quoting Joe Kamiya, a pioneer in the scientific exploration of biofeedback). David Rorvik (1970) elaborates on this in much the same terms as were applied to flicker: "Now, with the dawning of the cybernetic seventies, it is not too surprising that LSD and the other hallucinogens of the sixties are about to be eclipsed, in a sense, by an electronic successor: BFT. Bio-Feedback Training, or 'electronic yoga' as it has been called, puts you in touch with inner space, just like LSD but, unlike acid, leaves you in full control of your senses. And, unlike meditation, it doesn't take years of sitting on mountaintops to master. . . . There are those who believe that biofeedback training may not only illuminate the myri
ad workings of the mind but may even fling open the doors to entirely new kinds of experience, extending the inner dimensions of the emergent cybernetic man" (1970, 175–76).
Figure 3.14.EEG biofeedback. The photograph ran with an article entitled "What a Sexy Brainwave" and had a caption reading, "Georgina Boyle calls up those no-worry waves." Source: Sunday Mirror (London), 12 December 1971, 22.
Here, though, I want to explore another intersection of cybernetics and the arts. If flicker was a distinctive and paradoxical contribution to the visual arts, biofeedback in turn fed into the New Music of the 1960s, usually associated with names like John Cage and David Tudor.82 The idea was simple enough. In a basic brainwave biofeedback setup, a light comes on when the subject's alpha output, say, exceeds some level, and by focusing on keeping the light lit, subjects somehow learn to boost their alpha level at will. To go from this setup to music, all that was required was to substitute sound for the visual element of the feedback circuit. The difficulty was, in the first instance, that alpha frequencies are below the range of hearing, and one solution, used from time to time, was to record brain activity to tape and then play it back in speeded-up form, thus making it audible. The drawback to such a solution was that it blocked the possibility of any real-time feedback coupling between performer and performance, and the first recognized EEG music event followed a different route. First performed live in 1965, Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer fed the EEG readout directly into loudpeakers whenever the alpha rhythms were above the threshold, generating an audible output by putting the speakers next to or in contact with "gongs, timpani, bass drums, anything that loudspeakers could vibrate sympathetically" (Lucier 1995, 50)—even a metal dustbin (fig. 3.15).83
Several points are worth noting about this style of alpha music. Most evidently, like feedback-controlled flicker, it brings us face to face with a form of decentering of the self into a technosocial apparatus. Any given performance of Music for Solo Performer was not the work of a solo performer: it was the work of a human plus EEG electrodes, amplifiers and signal analyzers, switches, loudspeakers, and sound generating devices of all sorts. Second, even with extensive biofeedback training, in such a setup the performer does not exercise absolute control over the performance. From one angle, the sounds themselves are what enable the performer to tune into the generation of alpha waves—that is the principle of biofeedback. Nevertheless, "although theoretically it [the alpha rhythm] is a continual pattern of ten hertz, it never comes out that way because it stops when your eyelids flutter or you visualise a little and it tends to drift down a bit if you get bored or sleepy" (Lucier 1995, 58). One has the sense, then, of a reciprocal and open-ended interplay between the performer and the performance, with each both stimulating and interfering with the other—a kind of reciprocal steersmanship, in the sense discussed in chapter 2. We can go into this further in chapter 6, on Brian Eno's music, and chapter 7, on Pask's cybernetic aesthetics, but I want to suggest here that biofeedback music can stand as another and very nice example of ontological theater—of an open-ended and performative interplay between agents that are not capable of dominating each other. Second, I do not need to labor the point that here again ontology makes a difference—Music for Solo Performeris self-evidently different from mainstream notions of music. As James Tenney (1995, 12) put it, "Before [the first performance of Music for a Solo Performer]no one would have thought it necessary to define the word 'music' in a way which allowed for such a manifestation; afterwards some definition could not be avoided." Third, we can note that we are once more back on the terrain of altered states (and, literally, strange performances!). Lucier speaks of a "perfectly meditative alpha state" (1995, 56), and, in this sense, the decentered quality of the musical performance hung together with a decentered, nonmodern subject position of the performer. Fourth, I want to comment on what I think of as the hylozoism of this sort of music, but to get clear on that it helps to refer to the work of another pioneer in this field, Richard Teitelbaum.
Figure 3.15.Music for solo performer. Source: A. Lucier, Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings, edited by G. Gronemeyer and R. Oehlschlägel (Köln: MusikTexte, 1995), 54.
Teitelbaum was yet another person who had a transformative encounter with Walter's writings. In 1966, "by chance, I found a copy of W. Grey Walter's pioneering work The Living Brain in Rome. Studying it thoroughly, I was particularly interested in the sections on flicker and alpha feedback, and by descriptions of the hallucinatory experiences reported by some subjects" (Teitelbaum 1974, 55). Having learned of Lucier's work, Teitelbaum hit upon the idea of using EEG readouts to control the electronic synthesizers then being developed in the United States by Robert Moog (on which see Pinch and Trocco 2002), which led to the first performance of a work called Spacecraft by the Musica Elettronica Viva Group on a tour of Europe in autumn 1967 (Teitelbaum 1974, 57). On the experience of performing in Spacecraft,Teitelbaum recalled that (59)
the unusual sensations of body transcendence and ego-loss that occurred in this music—and in related biofeedback experiences—seemed aptly described . . . in the Jewish mystical texts of the Kabbalah: in the state of ecstacy a man "suddenly sees the shape of his self before him talking to him and he forgets his self and it is disengaged from him and he sees the shape of his self before him talking to him and predicting the future." With five musicians simultaneously engaged in the same activities—electronically mixing, inter-modulating with each other and issuing from the same loudspeakers—a process of non-ordinary communication developed, guiding individual into collective consciousness, merging the many into one.
By the slippery word "hylozoism" I want to refer to a spiritually charged awe at the performative powers of nature that seems to inhabit this quotation: the idea evident in Teitelbaum's and Lucier's work (and in the New Music of the sixties more generally) that, so to speak, it's all there in nature already, that the classically modern detour through human creativity and design is just that, a detour that we could dispense with in favor of making nature itself— here the alpha rhythms of the brain—audible (or visible).84 Let me just note for the moment that this idea goes very well with the cybernetic ontology of performative interaction. Again we can understand Teitelbaum's work as cybernetic ontological theater—an approach to music that at once conjures up the overall ontological vision and exemplifies how that vision might be distinctively instantiated and developed in real-world practice. The topic of hylozoism recurs in the following chapters in various guises, at greatest length in chapter 6, on Stafford Beer. We can pick up the related question of a distinctively cybernetic stance on design in the next chapter, on Ross Ashby.85
Figure 3.16.Still from a video of John Cage during alpha feedback. Source: Teitelbaum 1974, 68.
_ _ _ _ _
This is the end of our first close encounter with British cybernetics. In terms of material technologies, I described Walter's tortoises as specimens of ontological theater, contemplation of which helps one to grasp the performative and adaptive ontology of cybernetics, and as ontology in action, an instance of how one might proceed in brain science (and other fields) if one takes that ontology seriously. The contrast between Walter's robotics and that associated with AI illustrates my idea that ontology makes a difference—that very different practices can hang together with different understandings of what the world is like. From the tortoises we moved on to CORA, which staged for us a performative epistemology, directly geared into the performative ontology staged by the naked tortoise, and which also made the connection between Walter's cybernetics and the psychiatric milieu from which it emerged. Finally, the discussion of flicker and biofeedback touched on other lines of inquiry into the performative brain and crossovers between cybernetics and the psychedelic sixties, with the sixties, too, graspable as ontological theater and ontology in action.
At the same time, the history of Walter's cybernetics begins an exemplifi- cation of what I called the protean quality of cybernetics, with the tortoises s
panning the worlds of brain science, psychiatry, robotics, and entertainment—and we can now add to this list the Dream Machine and biofeedback setups as pivots to the wider culture and the arts. This multiplicity can be associated with the lack of any stable institutional basis for cybernetics, with first the Ratio Club and then the Namur conferences as key nexuses in Britain and Europe; and with the disorganized, undisciplined mode of cybernetic transmission and the possibilities for mutation that went with that.
Next we come to Walter's contemporary in the first generation of British cyberneticians, Ross Ashby. As we shall see, Ashby's cybernetics grew around a notion of adaptation that was different from and richer than Walter's, and it was, in fact, Ashby's vision of adaptation (shared by Gregory Bateson) that informed the work of the second generation, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask.