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there might be.” So, the cybernetic stance invites both a change in the nature
of art objects and, once more, a shift in the power relation between artist and
audience, somehow entraining the audience in their production and evolu-
tion, as we also saw in the previous chapter in the case of Brian Eno. In the
Musicolour performances at Churchill's Club, for example, “we also used the
system when people were dancing and discovered that in these circumstances
the audience can participate in the performer-machine feedback loop just be-
cause they are doing something to music and the band is responding to them”
(88), though this turned out not to be the case in the larger setting of the
Streatham Locarno.
The social Basis of Pask's Cybernetics
It is clear that the social dynamics of Pask's formative venture into cybernetics
bears much the same marks as the others discussed in earlier chapters. There
is, first of all, the undisciplined mode of transmission of cybernetics. Pask did
not train to be a cybernetician by enrolling in any disciplinary program; in-
stead, a chance meeting with Norbert Wiener served, as we saw, to crystallize
Pask's agenda, an agenda that already existed, though in a relatively formless
state. Second, as we have also seen, Pask's first project as a cybernetician was
undertaken in an undisciplined space outside any conventional institutional
structure—he built the first Musicolour machine in his rooms at Cambridge,
out of the detritus of war and a technological society. I mentioned bits of Cal-
liope organs and bomb sight computers earlier; Elizabeth Pask (n.d.) recalled
that Gordon and Harry Moore built Musicolour from “old relays and uniselec-
tors junked from post office telephone exchanges”—the same components
that Walter and Ashby used in their model brains. One could speak here of
a lack of material discipline as well as social discipline. Like our other cyber-
neticians, then, Pask's cybernetics bubbled up outside the normal channels
of society. And along with this undisciplined aspect went the protean quality
of Pask's cybernetics: Pask was entirely free to follow his own inclinations in
developing his cybernetics in a theatrical direction, a more or less unprece-
dented development.
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At the same time, this lack of disciplinary control helps
to account for another aspect of the novel form of Pask's cybernetics—his
abandonment, already in the early 1950s, of the idea that cybernetic systems
seek by definition to pursue fixed goals.
One can think along much the same lines about the fate of Musicolour
itself. Pask's recollection, quoted above, that “we . . . tried to sell it in any pos-
sible way: at one extreme as a pure art form, at the other as an attachment for
