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ended; nevertheless, Pask argued that the cybernetic theater would mark a
significant departure from existing theatrical practices and experience. As in
the previous discussion of Musicolour, Pask was happy to acknowledge that
“a [conventional] theatrical audience is not completely passive, in which re-
spect, amongst others, it differs from a Cinema audience or a Television audi-
ence. There is a well attested but badly defined 'Feedback' whereby the actors
can sense the mood of the audience (and play their parts in order to affect it).”
Thus “this control system [i.e., feedback from the audience] is embedded in
the organisation of
any
dramatic presentation,” but “its adequacy may be in
doubt and its effectiveness is hampered by
arbitrary
restrictions. To remove
these restrictions would not render a dramatic presentation something other
than a dramatic presentation although it might open up the possibility for a
novel art form” (Pask 1964b, 4, 5). Again, then, we have here a nice example of
how ontology can make a difference, now in a new form of theater.
And, following this train of thought, it is worth remarking that Pask's cy-
bernetic theater was literally an ontological theater, too. One might think of
conventional theater as staging a representational ontology, in which the au-
dience watches a depiction of events, known already to everyone on the other
side of the curtain, suggesting a vision of life more generally as the progressive
exposure of a pregiven destiny. I have repeatedly argued that a different on-
tological moral could be extracted from cybernetic devices, but in the case of
Pask's cybernetic theater no such “extraction” is necessary—within the frame
of the play's structural elements, the audience was directly confronted with
and participated in an unforeseeable performative becoming of human af-
fairs. In the cybernetic theater, then, the ontology of becoming was right on
the surface.
36
A few further thoughts are worth pursuing. One is historical. We can note
a continuity running from Pask's notion of an explicit feedback channel from
audience to actors to his friend Stafford Beer's experimentation with alge-
dometers in Chile in the early 1970s. In the previous chapter we saw that
Beer's devices were prone to playful misuse, and Pask was prepared for some-
thing similar in the theater, wondering if “many people will participate in a
more experimental or mischievous manner”—seeking somehow to throw the
actors off balance, as had Beer's subjects. Pask remarked that “unless there
are statistically well defined and concerted attempts to upset the system this
should not pose a real problem,” but nevertheless, “various devices have been
embodied in this design to avoid 'illegal' manipulation of the response boards.
We assume that 'illegal' manipulation is bound to occur either mischievously
or by accident” (Pask 1964b, 15, 18).
