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Figure 3.12.
feedback-controlled flicker. Source: v. J. walter and w. g. walter,
“The Central Effects of Rhythmic Sensory Stimulation,”
Electroencephalography and
Clinical neurophysiology
, 1
(1949), 57-86, p. 84, fig. 18.
(in an entirely nonvoluntary, nonmodern fashion), while the technology ex-
plored the space of brain performance. I suggested earlier that the tortoise
was unsatisfactory as ontological theater inasmuch as its world was largely
passive and unresponsive, and I therefore want to note that feedback flicker
offers us a more symmetric ontological spectacle, lively on both sides—a
dance of agency between the human and the nonhuman. What acted in these
experiments was genuinely a cyborg, a lively, decentered combination of hu-
man and machine.
We can come back to this below in a discussion of the history of bio-
feedback, and at a more general level in the following chapter on Ashby's
cybernetics.
Flicker and the Sixties
Walter and his colleagues experimented with strobes not only on laboratory
subjects but also on themselves, and (Walter 1953, 101) “we all noticed a pe-
culiar effect . . . a vivid illusion of moving patterns whenever one closed one's
eyes and allowed the flicker to shine through the eyelids. The illusion . . . takes
a variety of forms. Usually it is a sort of pulsating check or mosaic, often in
