[ recap ]

Last week we looked at Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening.

[ thoughts ]

Earlier this month at Ars Electronica in Linz, Jue Wang presented The Unseen Realm, an installation in which looking changes what you see.

A wearable eye tracker maps the viewer's gaze onto a simulation of 64,000 astronomical bodies while also shaping projected geological textures from an abandoned quarry in China.

It sounds pretty complicated, but seventy years earlier, Gordon Pask, a cybernetician interested in feedback between people and machines, was exploring the other half of that: what happens when the system's response changes the performer?

Built with Robin McKinnon-Wood in 1953, Musicolour listened to a musician through a microphone and produced changing arrangements of coloured light. A performer could discover what made the lights respond and repeat it for a while, until repeated input stopped producing the same output and they had to change the performance to bring the visual response back.

Musicolour is interesting because the machine eventually produced something unexpected: the musician changed the system, its response altered the next decision, and that decision returned as new input.

[ creativity ]

More than twenty years later, architect Cedric Price and John Frazer carried a similar idea into Generator, an unbuilt project for the White Oak Plantation on the Georgia–Florida border.

Price imagined a kit of 150 recombinable cubes that visitors could rearrange. Frazer proposed fitting the pieces with sensors and using a program to track their positions.

He also gave the system a way to interfere. If Generator went unchanged for long enough, the computer would begin suggesting arrangements nobody requested.

John Frazer called this the "boredom program", and explained the principle to Price by saying: "If you kick a system, the very least that you would expect it to do is kick you back."

A tool can respond without changing much about what we do next. Musicolour and Generator were designed so the response could alter the conditions of the next move.

The same idea has resurfaced this month in a different field. A September editorial in Nature Machine Intelligence describes new work using cybernetics, alongside other approaches, to develop artificial systems that can adapt.

Much of our work with machines is still turn-taking: we ask, receive something, judge it and ask again.

Pask would ask what the response changes in us?

[ making ]

There's a useful creative method inside Musicolour: when something that works starts becoming automatic, change one condition before the choice disappears from view.

Repetition is part of how we form style and taste.

Try adding a "boredom rule" to something you are making.

When a solution works often enough that you stop considering alternatives, change one variable.

On a photoshoot, move closer than you normally would. In a draft, notice the sentence structure you keep reaching for and make the next thought find another route. The exercise makes a habit visible while you still have a chance to choose it.

Musicolour did this by withdrawing the response its performer had learned to expect, forcing the musician to pay attention again.

[ sign off ]

Stay the one doing the seeing.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

See you next Sunday.