70. Whittaker (2003, 47) includes a select discography of Eno's music. One can access short extracts from Eno's recordings via a link at www.inmotionmagazine .com/eno1.html. According to Eno, David Bowie listed Brain of the Firmas a "desert island book," presumably for BBC radio's never-ending Desert Island Discsseries (Whittaker 2003, 51). Eno (1996a) reproduces Eno's diary for 1995, together with a selection of his short essays which I draw on below. Stewart Brand, whom we encountered in the previous chapter in connection with Bateson, features frequently in this diary as an email correspondent. Eno explains his current connection to Brand via GBN, the Global Business Network, "a futures scenario development group" (on which see Turner 2006), closing a loop between Eno and Beer's world of management consultancy.
71. The essay was published with the title "Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts" in 1976 in Studio Internationaland is reprinted as "The Great Learning" in Eno (1996a, 333–44). I thank Henning Schmidgen for providing me with a copy of this. Since we were just discussing Beer on Eastern spirituality and philosophy, it is relevant to note that the essay focuses on a 1967 piece by Cornelius Cardew called The Great Learning,which is based on Confucian texts. The essay ends on an explicitly ontological note very reminiscent of Beer: "As the variety of the environment magnifies in both time and space and as the structures that were thought to describe the operation of the world become progressively more unworkable, other concepts of organization must become current. These concepts will base themselves on the assumption of change rather than stasis and on the assumption of probability rather than certainty. I believe that contemporary art is giving us the feel for this outlook" (Eno 1996a, 344).
72. This is almost the same phrasing as in the Studio Internationalessay, which cites p. 69 of the first edition of Brain of the Firm(Eno 1996a, 339). Eno's essay begins with a discussion of the cybernetic notion of variety, citing Ashby's An Introduction to Cybernetics(Eno 1996a, 334–35).
73. Both of these pieces are discussed in historical context in Pinch and Trocco (2002, 37).
74. Another short essay makes it clear that Eno was using software called Koan from a company called Sseyo (Eno 1996a, 330–32).
75. Needless to say, feedback figured in much the same way in the history of the electric guitar. The solid body of the electric guitar was originally conceived as a way to minimize feedback effects, but as the sixties drew on, rock guitarists, most notably Jimi Hendrix, learned how to make music from loops running through loudspeakers and guitar pickups (McSwain 2002). One could thus see performances such as Hendrix's rendering of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Woodstock festival—almost entirely constituted from feedback effects— as themselves cybernetic ontological theater. Unlike Eno, Hendrix did not, I think, read Beer.We should see his explorations of what a guitar can do as part of the performative experimentalism of the sixties that echoed the cybernetic ontology.
76. And having found a desirable configuration, they sometimes had to struggle to hold onto it. "Brian Eno had to leave a little note on his VCS3 synthesiser telling his technician, 'Don't service this part. Don't change this'—he preferred the sound the ring modulator produced when it was 'broken' " (Pinch and Trocco 2002, 223).
77. Eno: "So I wanted the Staffordian approach to do two things: to pitch me into aesthetic areas beyond where my taste would normally take me. That's one of the things you find working with systems, that they throw up configurations that you couldn't have thought of. I wanted the system to confront me with novelty; but I did also want to say 'I prefer this part of it to that part, this part doesn't make sense, that part does.' . . . The systemic approach . . . is certainly very good at imagination expanding" (Whittaker 2003, 59).Wolframnow markets CA-generated sounds as ringing tones for cellphones: tones.wolfram.com/ generate/.
78. Whittaker is paraphrasing Eno fromthe sleeve notes of Music for Airports(1978), a "manifesto" for ambient music: "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting" (Eno 1996a, 295, 296). Eno connects the substance and mode of production of ambient music with an emergent style of consumption. "In 1978 I released the first record which described itself as AmbientMusic, a name I invented to describe an emerging musical style. It happened like this. In the early seventies, more and more people were changing the way they were listening to music. Records and audio had been around long enough for some of the novelty to wear off, and people were wanting to make quite particular and sophisticated choices about what they played in their homes and workplaces, what kind of sonic mood they surrounded themselves with. The manifestation of this shift was a movement away from the assumptions that still dominated record-making at the time—that people had short attention spans and wanted a lot of action and variety, clear rhythms and song structures and, most of all, voices. To the contrary, I was noticing that my friends and I were making and exchanging long cassettes of music chosen for its stillness, homogeneity, lack of surprises and, most of all, lack of variety. We wanted to use music in a different way—as part of the ambience of our lives—and we wanted it to be continuous, a surrounding" (Eno 1996a, 293).
79. This variation is a degree of magnitude greater than the inevitable variation between performances of a traditional piece of music. One might think of improvisational jazz as being in the same space as ambient and generative music, and there is something right about this. Generative music, however, stages an overt decenteringof composition between the musician and the dynamic system with which he or she interacts in way that jazz does not.
80. Other artists in Eno's pantheon include Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, and Christian Wolff, all of whom were "inventing systems that produced music" (Whittaker 2003, 57). Another musical admirer of Beer is Robert Fripp, guitarist and founder of the band King Crimson (see his letters reproduced in Whittaker 2003, 52). There are significant echoes of Beer's spirituality in this list: Cage was deeply engaged with Zen Buddhism, and Fripp "has also been involved with running J. G. Bennett's International Society for Continuous Education in Sherborne, which is based on the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff" (Whittaker 2003, 47). Cage (1991, 2): "I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication. . . . I determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it than communication. I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation. I became less disturbed and went back to work."
81. Eno: "Now that's a total break from theWestern classical idea. . . . So you forego the thing that composers usually do which is design music in detail, so that you're no longer exactly the architect of a piece of work but more the designer of a musical ecosystem. You put a few things in place and see how they react or what they do to each other" (Whittaker 2003, 57). This reference to ecosystems reminds us of another shift in power relations. As the above examples make clear, Eno is interested in music generated by a multiplicity of agents, humans and machines. In the Studio Internationalessay he begins by discussing the traditional hierarchical structure of an orchestra, running from the conductor and the leader down to rank-and-file musicians, and emphasizes that this produces a structured listening experience—some elements of the music are deliberately foregrounded for the audience; others constitute the background against which the foreground stands out. This arrangement depends on skilled musicians, who can be relied upon to produce a certain kind of sound, and, importantly, "it operates accurately and predictably for one class of task but it is not adaptive.It is not self-stabilizing and does not easily assimilate change or novel environmental conditions" (Eno 1996a, 342; my emphasis). The music dominates its environment, one can say, or else the performance is a failure. We can then note that the compositional systems describ
ed by Eno flatten out the performative space, with all of the contributing elements of the musicgenerating system interacting symmetrically with one another. In this essay, Eno is also at pains to evoke the ways in which the specific character of the environment in which it is performed serves to influence any particular rendering of Cardew's The Great Learning.The resonant frequencies of the room, for example, pull the performers toward certain frequencies rather than others (338). This connection between organizational form and adaptability is, as we have seen, also classically Beerian, though Eno's geometries are that of neither the VSM nor syntegration.
Notes to Chapter 7
1. Biographical information on Pask can be found in two festschrifts: Glanville (1993) and Glanville and Scott (2001a). In this section I also draw on unpublished biographical writings on Pask by his wife, Elizabeth (E. Pask n.d.); I thank Amanda Heitler for showing me these notes and her own, and for permission to quote fromthem (email fromA.Heitler, 2May 2003).More broadly, I am very grateful to the late Elizabeth Pask, Amanda Heitler, Peter Cariani, Paul Pangaro, Ranulph Glanville, Bernard Scott, Jasia Reichardt, Yolanda Sonnabend, and John Frazer for conversations and email messages about Pask. Glanville commented in detail on drafts of this chapter, but the errors remain mine. Pangaro has an extensive collection of Pask's writings, cataloged at pangaro.com/Pask-Archive/;AmandaHeitler hasanextensive but disorganized collection of Pask's papers. For videoclips of Pask in the sixties and seventies, see cyberneticians.com/index.html#pan.
2. I thank Malcolm Nicolson for bringing Pain's article to my attention. Gar's self-experimentation takes us back to the realm of strange performances and altered states, but now in a military context. For an account of parallel protocybernetic wartime research in Germany, see Borck (2000). One of the characters in Grey Walter's novel (1956a) sounds a lot like Gar.
3. See the previous chapter for the establishment of the Brunel department.
4. On the interactions of these three, see E. Pask (1993),McKinnon-Wood (1993), and Glanville (1996).
5. System Research endured until the early 1980s, the Thatcher years (B. Scott 1982, 486): "The non-profit organisation, System Research Ltd, no longer exists. Pask continues to write, teach and consult, based partly in London (the Architectural Association) and Holland (the University of Amsterdam). The research team is dispersed: Kallikourdis has returned to Athens, Bailey is a successful entrepreneur in microelectronics, Lewis has long been with the Open University, Mallen with the Royal College of Art, Richards is a commercial systems analyst, Scott is currently a teacher of mathematics. The whereabouts of others is unknown. One thing is certain, all who passed through System Research Ltd were deeply affected by their time there. Its spirit lives on in other conversations." After the demise of System Research Pask was left to improvise his career even more than hitherto. Pask (1982), for example, lists the Architecture Association as his primary affiliation but also mentions the Department of Cybernetics at Brunel University, Concordia University,Montreal, the Institute for Applied System Research, in the Netherlands, and System Research Developments, in Britain.
6. S. Beer (2001, 551): "People started telling me colourful stories about Gordon when he was still at Cambridge and rather precocious to be a legend.Maybe he was still there when we first met. At any rate, our truly collaborative friendship lasted through the 1950s. We remained close for the rest of his life." S. Beer (2001, 552), speaking of the early 1950s: "Gordon was driving. And he was conversing in his usual lively fashion. This meant he was looking intently at me, and waving his expressive hands undermy nose. It follows that he was steering the car with his elbows, intuition and a large slice of luck. It was, I confess, the last time that I drove with him. Hair-raising stories about his driving followed his reputation around for years, until he finally gave up."
7. In the early 1990s, Pask also worked on a novel, Adventures with Professor Flaxman-Low(Choudhury 1993). The book was never published, but some background information and audiofiles of extracts can be found at www.justcontract .org/flax.htm. The extracts are read by Pask's assistant and later collaborator, Nick Green, and I thank him for telephone conversations and email messages about Pask and the spiritualist dimension of cybernetics more generally. Pask's novel was modelled on a series of Flaxman Low stories by E. and H. Heron that appeared in Pearson's Monthly Magazinein 1898 and 1899 (vols. 5 and 7), some of which are available at gaslight.mtroyal.ca/prchdmen.htm. Pask's hero, like his predecessor, was a spiritual detective, exploring spirit phenomena like hauntings in a materialist vein reminiscent of the Society for PsychicalResearch (see chap. 3, n. 62). " 'I hold,' Mr. Flaxman Low, the eminent psychologist, was saying, 'that there are no other laws in what we term the realm of the supernatural but those which are the projections or extensions of natural laws' " (The Story of Konnor Old House,1899, gaslight.mtroyal.ca/flaxmnXJ.htm).
8. Grey Walter was interested in the neurophysiology of synesthesia, which he understood in terms of electrical spillovers from one region of the brain to another (a less drastic form of epilepsy) and explored using sophisticated EEG apparatus (discussed at length in Walter 1953). With synesthesia we are back in the realm of altered states and strange performances, but Pask did not thematize this fact, so I will not pursue it further here, except to note that this is another aspect of Walter's work that interested William Burroughs (chap. 3), and synesthesia has often been associated with a mystical spirituality in art (Tuchman 1986). I thank Jan Pieterse for alerting me to the latter connection.
9. Two points need clarification here. First, this notion of achieving a satisfying dynamic equilibrium with some changing other runs through Pask's work, though he never gave any easily graspable description of its character and perhaps such description is not to be had. Pask (1971, 78) invokes a game metaphor: "Given a suitable design and a happy choice of visual vocabulary, the performer (being influenced by the visual display) could become involved in a close participant interaction with the system. . . . Consequently . . . themachine itself became reformulated as a game player capable of habituating at several levels, to the performer's gambits." I think of this on the model of finding an enjoyable opponent for repeated games of chess, say, or squash. One somehow knows that each game stands a good chance of being fun, though the specific details and outcome of any given game remain always to be found out. Second, my text is a drastically oversimplified account of the circuitry shown in fig. 7.2. From our perspective, the details of the circuitry and Musicolour's functioning do not matter; the important thing is simply that the machine parameters changed in a way the performer could not control. But in practice much of the work entailed in building such a machine no doubt went into finding out just what kinds of circuitry would be propitious in use. A performer could not engage with changes that were too fast or too slow on a human time scale, for example. The most accessible technical description of how Musicolour worked that I have found is in Pask andMcKinnon-Wood (1965), which mentions a "slightly more elaborate version" in which the performer had more control over the machine, being able to " 'reinforce' or 'reward' part of the machine's 'learning' process, by indicating his approval or disapproval of the prevailing characteristics on a foot switch. . . . Initially, each trigger circuit to spotlamp connection occurs with equal probablility. But any connection that meets with the performer's approval (as indicated by pressing a foot switch) becomes more likely" (955).
10. Elizabeth Pask (n.d.) added that Musicolour "was very badly affected by the wine waiters pouring the odd glass of wine down it."
11. The wiring diagram invites us to think about simulatingMusicolour on a computer, and this has been done. But such simulations leave one having to find out what the behavior of the simulated machine will be in relation to a given set of inputs.
12. See chap. 5, n. 25, on Pask's personal relationship with Laing.
13. Pask was not entirely alone in the 1950s in his interest in cybernetics and the arts. He later commented that Musicolour "has much in common with Nico
las Schöffer's artifacts which I learned about many years later" (1971, 78n2). Schöffer (1912–92) has sometimes been called the "father of cybernetic art"; a discussion of his work would lead us into the history of cybernetics in France. On Schöffer, see Burnham (1968).
14. In a story by Lucian, ca. AD 150, Eucrates tells the story of the sorcerer's apprentice. This was popularized by Disney's Fantasia(1940), which was in turn Pask's point of comparison for Musicolour. Wiener often invoked the sorcerer's apprentice in conjuring up the uncanny quality of cybernetic machines (chap. 1).
15. For the details of SAKI's construction and discussion of its functioning, see Pask (1960a, 1961, 67–70). We should note that, like Musicolour, the training machines also functioned as test beds for the experimental investigation of the interaction between humans and adaptive machines. Such investigations were the topic of Pask's 1964 PhD in psychology, which acknowledges support for experimental work from the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories of the U.S. Air Force and for "abstract model building" from the air force's Office of Scientific Research, both via the air force's European Office of Aerospace Research; "the special purpose computor [sic]and other adaptive control machines were made available for these experiments by System Research" (Pask 1964a, i).
16. This passage continues: "When Gordon took the machines to market, in the form of SAKI, . . . the engineers somehow took the cybernetic invention away. I suspect that they saw themselves as designing a machine to achieve the contentobjective (learn to type), instead of building a Paskian machine to achieve the cybernetic objective itself—to integrate the observer and the machine into a homeostatic whole. Machines such as these are not available to this day, because they are contra-paradigmatic to engineers and psychologists alike."
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