The Cybernetic Brain
Page 44
Figure 7.14.Logic diagram for a cybernetic theater. Source: Pask 1964b, 25, diagram 10. (Reproduced by permission of the North American Pask Archive.)
I thought this plan was totally mad when I first came across it, but when I read Littlewood's obituaries I realized that, unlike her, I still wasn't cybernetic enough (Guardian2002, 12, Richard Eyre): "She didn't disrespect writers, but she had a contempt for 'text' and the notion that what was said and done on stage could become fixed and inert. She believed in 'the chemistry of the actual event,' which included encouraging the audience to interrupt the play and the actors to reply—an active form of alienation that Brecht argued for but never practised."35 Pask's proposal indicated that in 1964 (Pask 1964b, 2)
an initial experimental system (a physical communication system) is being constructed and will be used to determine a number of unknown values required for the efficient realisation of the mechanism. The experimental system will be used informally in Theatre Workshop and will accommodate an invited audience of between 50 and 100 people. Next it is proposed to build and install a large system accommodating an audience of between 550 and 750 people and to use it for a public presentation. . . . There are many intriguing dramatic problems that can only be solved when a suitable performance has been developed and a large system is available to embody it.
I do not know whether the experimental system was ever constructed, but it is safe to say that Pask's proposal to scale it up found no backers. A shame, but it is still instructive to reflect on these ideas.
We can see the cybernetic theater as yet another manifestation of Pask's ontology of open-ended performative engagement and the aesthetic theory that went with it. The cybernetic theater would be an "aesthetically potent environment" for both actors and audience in much the same way as Musicolour and the later training and teaching machines were. The same vision will reappear below with respect to art and architecture: it was, in fact, an enduring theme that ran through all of Pask's projects. Of course, the structural elements of the play meant that plot-development would not be fully open ended; nevertheless, Pask argued that the cybernetic theater would mark a significant departure from existing theatrical practices and experience. As in the previous discussion of Musicolour, Pask was happy to acknowledge that "a [conventional] theatrical audience is not completely passive, in which respect, amongst others, it differs from a Cinema audience or a Television audience. There is a well attested but badly defined 'Feedback' whereby the actors can sense the mood of the audience (and play their parts in order to affect it)." Thus "this control system [i.e., feedback from the audience] is embedded in the organisation of any dramatic presentation," but "its adequacy may be in doubt and its effectiveness is hampered by arbitrary restrictions. To remove these restrictions would not render a dramatic presentation something other than a dramatic presentation although it might open up the possibility for a novel art form" (Pask 1964b, 4, 5). Again, then, we have here a nice example of how ontology can make a difference, now in a new form of theater.
And, following this train of thought, it is worth remarking that Pask's cybernetic theater was literally an ontological theater, too. One might think of conventional theater as staging a representational ontology, in which the audience watches a depiction of events, known already to everyone on the other side of the curtain, suggesting a vision of life more generally as the progressive exposure of a pregiven destiny. I have repeatedly argued that a different ontological moral could be extracted from cybernetic devices, but in the case of Pask's cybernetic theater no such "extraction" is necessary—within the frame of the play's structural elements, the audience was directly confronted with and participated in an unforeseeable performative becoming of human affairs. In the cybernetic theater, then, the ontology of becoming was right on the surface.36
A few further thoughts are worth pursuing. One is historical. We can note a continuity running from Pask's notion of an explicit feedback channel from audience to actors to his friend Stafford Beer's experimentation with algedometers in Chile in the early 1970s. In the previous chapter we saw that Beer's devices were prone to playful misuse, and Pask was prepared for something similar in the theater, wondering if "many people will participate in a more experimental or mischievous manner"—seeking somehow to throw the actors off balance, as had Beer's subjects. Pask remarked that "unless there are statistically well defined and concerted attempts to upset the system this should not pose a real problem," but nevertheless, "various devices have been embodied in this design to avoid 'illegal' manipulation of the response boards. We assume that 'illegal' manipulation is bound to occur either mischievously or by accident" (Pask 1964b, 15, 18).
Second, we can note that, as in all of Pask's projects, the cybernetic theater undercut existing power relations. Most obviously, the audience was given a new weight in determining the substance of each performance in real time. The role of actors was likewise elevated relative to writers and directors in their responsibility for making smooth traditions from one plot trajectory to another. And, at the same, Pask's vision entailed the integration of new social roles into theatrical performances: the interpreters who provided metainformation to the audience, the technicians who would wire up the feedback channels and maintain them, even the cyberneticians as new theorists of the whole business, quite distinct from conventional theater critics.
And third, we need to think about the kind of company that Pask kept. In the 1960s, Joan Littlewood was one of the most successful directors in British theater: "She had three shows in the West End by 1963, triumph on a Lloyd Webber scale, and to incomparably higher standards" (Ezard 2002, 20). In his collaboration with Littlewood just one year later, Pask thus crossed over from the narrow world of typing trainers into one of the most lively and visible currents of British popular culture. It is therefore worth examining precisely which current he stepped into.
The key observation is that, unlike Andrew Lloyd Webber, Littlewood was an avowedly antiestablishment figure, who understood theater as one of those technologies of the self we have discussed before, aimed now at reconstituting British society. After studying at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) she moved first from London to Manchester, which brought her "closer to the counter-culture she sought," and where she worked for the BBC, the Manchester Guardian,and "small leftist agit-prop groups dedicated to taking drama to the people of the north." The Theatre Union, which she cofounded in 1936 with the folksinger Ewan McColl, "saw itself as a vanguard of theory; its productions were influenced by Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Stanislavsky disciple who was the first director of postrevolutionary Soviet drama until Stalin purged him." During World War II, her group was "often splendidly reviewed but [was] always refused grants by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the Arts Council predecessor. She and McColl were blacklisted by the BBC and by forces entertainment group ENSA as subversives." Her group renamed itself Theatre Workshop after the war and supported the early Edinburgh Fringe Festival—the alternative to the high-culture Edinburgh Festival—and rented the Theatre Royal on Angel Lane in London in 1953 for £20 a week—"a dilapidated palace of varieties reeking of cat urine"—before making its first breakthrough to the West End in 1956 with The Good Soldier Schweik(Ezard 2002, 20). "She was wholly unclubbable," wrote a fellow the ater director, "a self-educated working-class woman who defied the middleclass monopoly of theatre and its domination by metropolitan hierarchy and English gentility. She believed in realising the potential of every individual, being in favour of 'that dull working-class quality, optimism,' a necessary virtue in a life dedicated to demonstrating that political theatre wasn't always an oxymoron" (Guardian2002, Eyres).
Pask's involvement with the theater in the sixties did not, then, lead him into the high culture of the British establishment, but rather into the countercultural, antiestablishment milieu, here typified by Littlewood, that somehow succeeded, for a brief moment around that decade, in becoming a defining formation in British culture. We ha
ve examined before the ontological resonances between cybernetics and the counterculture—flicker and the Beats, Bateson and Laing's radical psychiatry, Beer and Eastern spirituality—and Pask's alignment with Littlewood should be understood in just the same way. We can return to this theme below, but we can note now that this alignment also doomed cybernetics to going down with the ship. Cybernetics has itself continued up to the present, but its visibility in popular culture declined with the overall decline of the counterculture. Littlewood herself seems to have become disgusted with the form of life that went with being a successful London theater director. "Success is going to kill us," she wrote in the mid-1960s. "Exhausted and miserable, she walked out at the crowning moment when she and Raffles had managed to buy the [Theatre Royal]. She disappeared alone to Nigeria to work on an abortive film project with the writer Wole Soyinka. She returned but never recaptured the momentum: if it meant diluting standards or becoming a full-time impresario, she did not want to" (Ezard 2002, 20).
Cybernetic Serendipity
In the 1960s the ICA, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, in London was Britain's center for new developments in art. If something exciting and important was happening in Britain or abroad, the ICA aimed to represent it to the British public.37 Conversely, a show at the ICA ratified a new movement or whatever as, indeed, exciting and important. Jasia Reichardt, who had organized the first show of British Pop Art in London, Image in Progress,at the Grabowski Gallery in 1962, joined the ICA as assistant director in 1963, where she organized a show on concrete poetry in 1965, Between Poetry and Painting(Reichardt 1971, 199). In the autumn of that year she began planning "an international exhibition exploring and demonstrating some of the relationships between technology and creativity." In 1968, "there was enough financial support for it to go ahead," and her exhibition, now called Cybernetic Serendipity,opened at the ICA on 2 August and closed on 20 October 1968 (Reichardt 1968a, 3, 5).38 The exhibition was divided into three parts (Reichardt 1968b, 5):
1. Computer-generated graphics, computer-animated films, computer-composed and -played music, and computer poems and texts
2. Cybernetic devices as works of art, cybernetic environments, remote-controlled robots and painting machines
3. Machines demonstrating the uses of computers and an environment dealing with the history of cybernetics
As one can gather from this list and from figure 7.15, "cybernetic" in Cybernetic Serendipityshould be interpreted broadly, to include almost all possible intersections between computers and the arts, including, for example, computer graphics, one of Reichardt's special interests (Reichardt 1968b). But two of our cyberneticians showed their work at the exhibition, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask.39 Beer's contribution was a futuristic-looking electromechanical device for generating random numbers as inputs to Monte Carlo simulations of steel production, SAM, the Stochastic Analogue Machine (fig. 7.16), which was described in an accompanying poem by Beer (Beer 1968b; for more details on SAM, see Beer 1994a). I want to focus here, however, on Pask's exhibit, which he called Colloquy of Mobiles (Pask 1968, 1971; see fig. 7.17).40
Figure 7.15.Norman Toyton, cartoon of computer confessional. Source: J. Reichardt (ed.) Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (London: W. & J. Mackay, 1968), 8.
Figure 7.16.Beer's stochastic analog machine. Source: S. Beer "SAM," in J. Reichardt (ed.), Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (London: W. & J. Mackay, 1968), 12.
Figure 7.17.Photo of the Colloquy of Mobiles. Source: G. Pask, "A Comment, a Case History and a Plan," in J. Reichardt (ed.), Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphics Society, 1971), 96, fig. 40.
Like all of Pask's creations, the Colloquy was a baroque assemblage. Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a sophisticated variant of Walter's tortoises.41 As we saw in chapter 3, the tortoises were mobile, phototropic robots which in combination engaged in complex mating dances, and just the same can be said of the components of the Colloquy. Pask's robots were, in one way, somewhat less mobile than Walter's. As shown schematically in figure 7.18, the Colloquy consisted of five robots, three designated "female" and two "male," each suspended from above. Their mobility consisted principally in their ability to rotate on their axes, driven by electric motors. The males each had two "drives," designated Oand P,which built up over time (as charges on a capacitor) and were indicated by the intensity of either an orange or a puce light on the robot. These lights were reminiscent of the tortoises' running lights but were not the crucial feature of the Colloquy; much more complicated signaling was involved in the latter.
Figure 7.18.Plan of the Colloquy of Mobiles. Top, horizontal plan; bottom, vertical section taken through line L in horizontal plan; A, drive state display for male; B, main body of male, bearing "energetic" light projectors O and P; C, upper "energetic" receptors; D, lower "energetic" receptors; U, non-"energetic," intermittent signal lamp; a, female receptor for intermittent positional signal; b, vertically movable reflector of female Z, bar linkage bearing male I and male II; , drive motor; ,free coupling; , fixed coupling; , bar linkage. Source: G. Pask, "A Comment, a Case History and a Plan," in J. Reichardt (ed.), Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphics Society, 1971), 90, fig. 34.
Each male sought to "satisfy" its drives, first by locating a female while spinning on its axis (an equivalent of the tortoise's scanning mechanism) via an intermittent directional visual signal which indicated both its identity and its desire (O or P).If a female picked this up and was interested in O or Psatisfaction herself, she would respond with an identifying sound synchronized to the male light. The male receiving this would then lock onto the female (just as the tortoise locked onto a light source) and emit an intense orange or puce light from its central part (Din fig. 7.18). If this fell upon the reflector of the female (b)she would reciprocally lock onto the male and commence a scanning motion of the reflector, up and down. The object of this was to reflect the beam back onto the appropriate part of the male, D or C in figure 7.18, depending whether the drive in question was O or P.If the female was successful in doing this, the male drive would be satisfied (temporarily, until the charge on the capacitor built up again); the male would also emit a "reinforcement" sound signal, which would discharge the female's drive. The overall behavior of the setup was controlled by purpose-built electronics, which received and instigated sensory inputs and outputs from each robot and switched the motion of the robot from one basic pattern to another in accordance with flowcharts such as that shown in figure 7.19.42
Thus the basic arrangement of the Colloquy of Mobiles and the principles of their mating, but we can note some further complications. First, the males hung from a common bar (fig. 7.18), which meant that they competed for females: a male in search mode could disturb the other which had locked onto a female. This made for a more lively performance and added another dimension of interest for the viewer. Second, the males could differ in which receptor (Cor D)was the target for satisfaction of Oor Pdrives, and the females could adapt to this by remembering which direction of scanning (upward or downward) was successful for which drive for each male. And third, the Colloquy was open to human intervention. As Pask wrote before the exhibition (1971, 91),
The really interesting issue is what happens if some human beings are provided with the wherewithal to produce signs in the mobile language and are introduced into the environment. It is quite likely that they will communicate with the mobiles. . . . The mobiles produce a complex auditory and visual effect by dint of their interaction. They cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a higher level of discourse. I do not know. But I believe it may work out that way.