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throughout this chapter. In contrast to the traditional impulse to dominate
aesthetic media, the Musicolour machine thematized cooperation and reveal-
ing in Heidegger's sense. Just as we found Brian Eno “riding the algorithms”
in his music in the previous chapter, a Musicolour performer rode the inscru-
table dynamics of the machine's circuitry. That is why I said Eno should have
read Pask at the end of the previous chapter.
Second, we can note that as ontological theater Musicolour went beyond
some of the limitations of the homeostat. If the homeostat only had twenty-
five pregiven states of its uniselector, Musicolour's human component had
available an endlessly open-ended range of possibilities to explore, and, inas-
much as the machine adapted and reacted to these, so did the machine. (Of
course, unlike Ashby, Pask was not trying to build a freestanding electrome-
chanical brain—his task was much easier in this respect: he could rely on the
human performer to inject the requisite variety.) At the same time, unlike
the homeostat, a Musicolour performance had no fixed goal beyond the very
general one of achieving some synesthetic effect, and Pask made no claim to
understanding what was required for this. Instead (Pask and McKinnon-Wood
1965, 952),
other modalities (the best known, perhaps, is Disney's film “Fantasia”) have
entailed the assumption of a predetermined “synaesthetic” relation. The nov-
elty and scientific interest of this system [Musicolour] emerges from the fact
that this assumption is not made. On the contrary, we suppose that the rela-
tion which undoubtedly exists between sound (or sound pattern) and light (or
light pattern) is entirely personal and that, for a given individual, it is learned
throughout a performance. Hence the machine which translates between
sound and vision must be a malleable or “learning” device that the performer
can “train” (by varying his performance) until it assumes the characteristics of
his personally ideal translator.
The Musicolour performer had to find out what constituted a synesthetic rela-
tion between sound and light and how to achieve it. We could speak here of
a search process and the
temporal emergence of desire
—another Heideggerian
revealing—rather than of a preconceived goal that governs a performance. In
both of these senses, Musicolour constituted a much richer and more sugges-
tive act of ontological theater than the homeostat, though remaining clearly
in the homeostatic lineage.
One subtlety remains to be discussed. I just described Musicolour as one of
Beer's exceedingly complex systems. This seems evidently right to me, at least
