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Pask's interest in automata and simulation will reappear below in his work
in architecture. But let me close this section with two remarks. First, follow-
ing Cariani (1993, 30), we can note that the move from chemical computers
to numerical simulation was not without its cost. The chemical computers
found their resources for developing new senses in their brute materiality;
they could find ways to reconfigure themselves that had not been designed
into them. Pask's simulated automata did not have this degree of freedom;
their relevance conditions were given in advance by the programs that ran
them. No doubt this, too, had a bearing on the erasure of the chemical com-
puters even from the consciousness of cybernetics.
Second, while one should beware of exaggeration, we can observe that cy-
bernetic controllers are back in the news again. “Brain in a Dish Flies Plane”
(Viegas 2004) is one of many media reports on a project strongly reminiscent
of Pask, Beer, and even Ashby (who, we recall, discussed the virtues of homeo-
static autopilots). In work at the University of Florida, rat neurons (in the style
of Beer's biological computers) were grown in a dish and connected into the
world via a sixty-channel multielectrode array (à la Pask). When this device
was hooked up to an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator, “over time, these stimu-
lations modify the network's response such that the neurons slowly (over the
course of 15 minutes) learn to control the aircraft. The end result is a neural
network that can fly the plane to produce relatively stable straight and level
flight.” Another version of the philosopher's apocryphal brain in a vat, though
not so apocryphal any more, and robustly connected into the world of perfor-
mance rather than seeking to represent a world of which it is not a part.
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The arts and the sixties
We have traveled a long way from Musicolour to chemical computers via typ-
ing trainers and teaching machines. For the remainder of this chapter I want
to return to Pask's work in the theater, the arts, and architecture, picking up
the story in the early 1960s (that is, in work that ran in parallel to his work on
trainers and teaching machines). I am interested in three projects in particu-
lar: Pask's plans for a cybernetic theater; his robotic artwork, the Colloquy of
Mobiles; and his contributions to architecture, beginning with the London
Fun Palace. These projects are interesting in themselves as fresh instances
of ontology in action, and they are also worth contemplating as yet more in-
stances of crossovers from cybernetics to the distinctive culture of the 1960s.
At an early stage in their careers, the Rolling Stones were apparently “roped
in” to try out the adaptive machines at System Research (Moore 2001, 770).
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