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mance. At this stage . . . the performer conceives the machine as an extension
of himself, rather than as a detached or disassociated entity.
In this sense, Musicolour was, for Pask, an early venture into the experimen-
tal psychology of learning and adaptation which led eventually to his 1964
PhD in psychology. I am not going to try to follow this scientific work here,
since there was nothing especially cybernetic about it, but we should bear
it in mind in the later discussion of Pask's work on training and teaching
machines.
Musicolour and ontology
Musicolour was literally a theatrical object; we can also read it as another
piece of ontological theater, in the usual double sense. It staged and dra-
matized the generic form of the cybernetic ontology; at the same time, it
exemplified how one might go on, now in the world of theater and aesthetics,
if one subscribed to that ontology. Thus, a Musicolour performance staged
the encounter of two exceedingly complex systems—the human performer
and the machine (we can come back to the latter)—each having its own en-
dogenous dynamics but nevertheless capable of consequential performative
interaction with the other in a dance of agency. The human performance cer-
tainly affected the output of the machine, but not in a linear and predictable
fashion, so the output of the machine fed back to influence the continuing
human performance, and so on around the loop and through the duration of
the performance. We are reminded here, as in the case of Beer's cybernetics,
of the symmetric version of Ashby's multihomeostat setups, and, like Beer's
work and Bateson and Laing's, Pask's cybernetic career was characterized by
this symmetric vision.
Beyond this basic observation, we can note that as ontological theater a
Musicolour performance undercut any familiar dualist distinction between
the human and the nonhuman. The human did not control the performance,
nor did the machine. As Pask put it, the performer “trained the machine and
it played a game with him. In this sense, the system acted as an extension of
the performer with which he could cooperate to achieve effects that he could
not achieve on his own” (1971, 78). A Musicolour performance was thus a
joint product of a human-machine assemblage. Ontologically, the invitation,
as usual, is to think of the world like that—at least the segments that concern
us humans, and by analogical extension to the multiplicity of nonhuman el-
ements. This again takes us back to questions of power, which will surface
