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juke boxes,” goes to the heart of the matter. It was not clear what Musicolour
was. It did not it well into the usual classification of material objects. It had
something to do with music, but it wasn't a musical instrument. It drove a
light show, but it wasn't just lighting. It was an object, but a pretty ugly one,
not an art object in itself. One could say that Musicolour was itself an undis-
ciplined machine, incommensurable with conventional forms of entertain-
ment, and the different modes of presentation and venue that Pask and his
friends explored in the 1950s have to be seen as a form of experimentation,
trying to find Musicolour a niche in the world. In the end, as we have seen, the
world proved recalcitrant, and, like that other odd art object, Gysin's Dreama-
chine, Musicolour was a commercial failure. Mention of the Dreamachine
perhaps reminds us that in the later sixties light shows of all sorts—not all
using strobes, and some very reminiscent of Musicolour displays—were de
rigueur. But by that time Musicolour had been forgotten and Pask had moved
on to other projects. One can only wonder what the Grateful Dead might have
got out of one of Pask's devices.
And finally, Pask himself. One should probably understand the boy who
built bombs and said that school taught him to be a gangster as someone who
enjoyed a lack of discipline—not as someone forced into the margins of so-
ciety, but who sought them out. No doubt for Pask much of the attraction of
Musicolour and cybernetics in general lay in their undisciplined marginality.
And this, in turn, helps us to understand his post-Cambridge career, based
in a private company, System Research, free from any demands, except that
of somehow improvising a living. Now we can pick up the historical thread
again.
Training Machines
Pask did not lose interest in adaptive machinery after Musicolour, but he
had the idea of putting it to a different and more prosaic use, returning to his
formative interest in learning. In the mid-1950s, “there was great demand in
the commercial world for keyboard operators, both for punch card machines
and typing,” and Pask set out to construct an adaptive keyboard trainer. He
later recalled that the “first Self Adaptive Keyboard Trainer (SAKI) was con-
structed in 1956 by myself and prototyped by Robin McKinnon-Wood and me”
(Pask 1982, 69; see fig. 7.5). This was displayed at the Inventors and Patentees
Exhibition at the Horticultural Hall in London, a meeting also regularly fre-
quented by one Christopher Bailey, technical director of the Solartron Elec-
tronic Group, who had “from time to time, made valuable contacts with the
