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Title Architecture, Media, and Technologies of the Mind, 1948-1978

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Author Nakamura, Randolph Kinsuke

Publication Date 2020

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation

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Architecture, Media, and Technologies of the Mind, 1948-1978

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction

of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

in Architecture

by

Randolph Kinsuke Nakamura

2020 © Copyright by

Randolph Kinsuke Nakamura

2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Architecture, Media, and Technologies of the Mind, 1948-1978

by

Randolph Kinsuke Nakamura

Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture

University of California, Los Angeles, 2020

Professor Sylvia Lavin, Chair

This dissertation examines the genealogy and history of the black box in architecture from the late 1940s to the late-1970s, focusing on architects, designers, and artists in the United

States. Through an examination of the work of Will Burtin, Pulsa, and Doug Michels this dissertation interrogates the architectural black box as a trope, a set of protocols and a material form of architecture where the site of media projection is transformed into a means to model and manipulate human consciousness. As a site of mediation, the architectural black box in this period became a key place of exchange between art, architecture, and technoscience.

ii The dissertation of Randolph Kinsuke Nakamura is approved.

Michael Osman

Dana Cuff

Soraya de Chadarevian

Sylvia Lavin, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles

2020

iii For my father Koichi Nakamura, 1928-2011

iv Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Committee Page iii

Dedication iv

List of Figures vi

Acknowledgements xix

Vita xxii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Will Burtin’s Integration: Architectures of Visual Reason 17

Chapter 2 Upjohn’s Brain: Exhibiting the Black Box 55

Chapter 3 Non-Media and Architectural Flickers: The Environments of Pulsa 101

Chapter 4 Dolphin Embassy: Architectures of Interlock, Cinema, and Excommunication 152

Conclusion 209

Bibliography 216

Figures 248

v List of Figures

Figure 1-1. Q-2, Semicircular presentation room view 1, rendering by Henry Dreyfuss. From

“History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft)” Records of the Ofbice of Strategic

Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 99, 1a.

Figure 1-2. Q-2, Semicircular presentation room view 2, rendering by Henry Dreyfuss. From

“History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft)” Records of the Ofbice of Strategic

Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 99, 1a.

Figure 1-3. Plan of Q-2. From “History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft),” 3.

Figure 1-4. Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Photo by Samuel H.

Gottscho.

Figure 1-5. “Theme Center - Trylon and Perisphere - Cutaway drawing of Trylon and

Perisphere” New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Figure 1-6. “Theme Center - Democracity - Model of towns and countryside” The New York

Public Library Digital Collections. 1935 - 1945.

Figure 1-7a. “Room of Our Time” by László Moholy-Nagy, as reconstructed by Kai-Uwe

vi Hemken and Jakob Gebert and installed in the KunstLichtSpiele exhibition, Kunsthalle,

Erfurt, 2009. Photo by Sabine Bielmeier.

Figure 1-7b. Detail of “Endless Belt” (left side of image) in “Room of Our Time” by László

Moholy-Nagy, as reconstructed by Kai-Uwe Hemken and Jakob Gebert and installed in

Guggenheim, New York. Photo by Gail Worley.

Figure 1-8. Sketch plan of presentation rooms for Combined Chiefs of Staff Building. Ofbice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, National Archives at College Park, MD.

Figure 1-9. Photo of main conference room in Combined Chiefs of Staff Building. From “U.S.

High Command Plans Strategy in Map-Filled Sanctum,” 73.

Figure 1-10. Top photos: main conference room; bottom photos: small conference room.

From “U.S. High Command Plans Strategy in Map-Filled Sanctum,” 74.

Figure 1-11. Plan of projection apparatus and screen. From Jacobj, “Visual Instruction and the Projection,” 258.

Figure 1-12. Page S-14 from Air Force Manual No. 20: Gunner’s Information File, Flexible

Gunnery. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of

Technology.

vii Figure 1-13. Page S-15 from Air Force Manual No. 20: Gunner’s Information File, Flexible

Gunnery.

Figure 1-14. Photo of Integration, central table and wall representing “Reality of science.”

Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester

Institute of Technology.

Figure 1-15. Photo of Integration wall representing “Reality of light, color, texture.” Photo by

Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 1-16. “Small scale model of the exhibit Integration,” 1948. Photo by Ezra Stoller.

From “Integration: The New Discipline in Design,” 230.

Figure 1-17. Designer diagram. From Integration, An Exhibition, 3.

Figure 1-18. “Will Burtin Exhibit for the A-D Galleries, drawing 1 of 4,” 1948. Drawing by

The Displayers. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester

Institute of Technology

Figure 1-19. Plan diagram. From Integration, An Exhibition, inside cover.

Figure 1-20. Photo of Integration wall representing “Reality of man.” Photo by Ezra Stoller.

viii Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of

Technology.

Figure 1-21. Photo of Integration, close-up of wall representing “Reality of light, color, texture.” Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives,

Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 1-22. Photo of Integration, center table and partial view of wall representing “Reality of space, motion, time.” Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic

Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 1-23. Photo of Integration wall representing “Reality of science.” Photo by Ezra

Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of

Technology.

Figure 1-24. Photo of Will Burtin and Integration wall representing “Reality of science.”

Photo by Arnold Newman. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives,

Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 2-1. Insert from The Upjohn Company. A Moment at a Concert. Kalamazoo, Michigan:

The Upjohn Company, 1961.

Figure 2-2. From Upjohn “Brain” Exhibit_Action Sequence_13 October 1960 Will Burtin

ix Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

Figure 2-3. Page S-5 from United States Army Air Forces, Training Aids Division and Army

Air Forces Instructors School Gunner’s Information File : Flexible Gunnery.

Figure 2-4. Page S-17 from United States Army Air Forces, Training Aids Division and Army

Air Forces Instructors School Gunner’s Information File : Flexible Gunnery.

Figure 2-5. Brain scale model. Early version, c. 1960. Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin

Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

Figure 2-6. Brain scale model. Early version, c. 1960. Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin

Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

Figure 2-7. Image of the Brain c. 1960 from the Smithsonian Science Service Historical

Images Collection.

Figure 2-8. Image from back cover of A Moment at a Concert promotional booklet for

Upjohn.

Figure 2-9. The Brain on display in Upjohn’s Building 41 Warehouse in Kalamazoo,

Michigan. c. 1960. Photo from http://upjohn.net/other/brain_cell/brain_cell.htm, accessed

October 5, 2020.

x Figure 2-10. Dr. A. G. MacLeod, scientibic designer of The Brain, standing inside the centrencephalic system of the model at the AMA Convention, June 25, 1960. Photo from

Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

Figure 2-11. Photograph of The Brain at the AMA Convention, June 25, 1960. Photo from

Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

Figure 2-12. Upjohn Brain installation at AMA convention, 1960. Image from “Lighting up the Brain Waves.” Life 49, no. 8 (1960): 68.

Figure 2-13. Control panel for IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting

Machine), International Business Machines Corp., image from: https://www.moma.org/ collection/works/1491, accessed October 5, 2020.

Figure 2-14. Diagram (big. 3) from Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 143.

Figure 2-15. Photo of Growth and Form exhibition. From Richard Hamilton, 2014, 25.

Figure 2-16. Photo of Growth and Form exhibition. From Richard Hamilton, 2014, 24.

Figure 2-17. Image of interior of Palazzo del Lavoro, from “E.I.L.: Momenti Di Uno

Spettacolo, Prima Dell’apertura.” Domus 380, no. 7 (1961): 1–18.

xi Figure 2-18. Perspective and photograph of Palazzo del Lavoro from Peter Blake, “Concrete

Parthenon.” Architectural Forum 112, no. 5 (1960): 122-25.

Figure 2-19. Map from Man and Communications. Washington D.C.: Department of

Commerce, 1961.

Figure 2-20. Contact sheet image of entrance to the Upjohn Brain installation at Italia ‘61.

From Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of

Technology.

Figure 2-21. Contact sheet image of Upjohn Brain installation at Italia ‘61. Spectators shown using LecTour device. From Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives,

Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 2-22. Upjohn Brain installation at Italia ‘61. Photo by Paolo Monti from “Italia ’61 a

Torino: Immagini Della Esposizione Del Lavoro Immagini Della Mostra Delle Regioni.”

Domus 381, no. 8 (1961): 1–19.

Figure 2-23. Upjohn brain construction, 1960. Photo by Jerry Cooke. From Will Burtin

Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 2-24. Upjohn brain construction, 1960. Photo by Jerry Cooke. From Will Burtin

xii Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 3-1. Pulsa, New Haven Loft Installation, Detail of Light-sound bield, Fluorescent tubes and loud speakers activated with amplibied analogue signals stored on magnetic tape, 1967.

From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-PulsaNewHavenLoftInstallationDetailOfLight-soundField.

Figure 3-2. Pulsa, New Haven Loft Installation, Light-sound bield, Fluorescent tubes and loud speakers activated with amplibied analogue signals stored on magnetic tape, 1967

From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-PulsaNewHavenLoftInstallationLight- soundFieldFlorescentTubes.

Figure 3-3. Pulsa Installation – Research Studio – New Haven – 1967-1968, in Crosby, Pulsa

Installations 1967 - 1969, n.p. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution-

Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/

CrosbyPulsa.

Figure 3-4. Pulsa Loft New Haven, CT Fluorescent Patterns, 1967. From David Rumsey/

Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/

Image-PulsaLoftNewHavenCtFluorescentPatterns1967.

Figure 3-5. Pulsa Loft with Participants New Haven, CT, 1967. From David Rumsey/Pulsa

xiii Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-

PulsaLoftWithParticipantsNewHavenCt1967.

Figure 3-6. Pulsa Loft Installation New Haven CT with People Interacting, 1967. From David

Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/ details/Image-PulsaLoftIstallationNewHavenCtWithPeopleInteracting1967.

Figure 3-7. Pulsa invitation to Project Argus light and sound event, Yale School of Art and

Architecture, May 1968. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International,

Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-

PulsaInvitationToProjectArgusLightAndSoundEventYaleSchoolOf.

Figure 3-8. Elevation and plan of Project Argus from Smith, “The Revolution in Interior

Design: The Bold New Poly-Expanded Mega Decoration,” 152.

Figure 3-9. Pulsa Installation - School of Art and Architecture – Yale University April to

September, 1968, in Crosby, Pulsa Installations 1967 - 1969, n.p. From David Rumsey/Pulsa

Group (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/CrosbyPulsa.

Figure 3-10. Photo of Experiment in Light and Sound Environment. Bill Crosby and David

Rumsey can be seen operating the electronic control system. May 10, 1968. Photo by Joel

Katz. From Katz, “Pulsa: Light as Truth,” 44-45. (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative

xiv Works 3.0, Creative Commons)

Figure 3-11. Photo of Experiment in Light and Sound Environment. May 10, 1968. Photo by

Joel Katz. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative

Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-

PulsaInstallationProjectArgusYaleSchoolOfArtAndArchitecture.

Figure 3-12. Photo of Experiment in Light and Sound Environment, from the third-bloor balcony. May 10, 1968. Photo by Joel Katz. From Katz, “Pulsa: Light as Truth,” 44-45.

(Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0, Creative Commons)

Figure 3-13. Photo of Pulsa music session, Harmony Ranch, Oxford, Connecticut, ca. 1969.

Maryanne Amacher (second from left) and Alvin Curran (center, playing horn) with members of Pulsa. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative

Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-

PulsaMusicSessionHarmonyRanchOxfordConnecticutCa.1969.

Figure 3-14. Plan and specibications of Boston Public Garden installation, reproduced in

Pulsa Boston Exhibition Announcement, Sept 1968. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group

(Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-

PulsaBostonExhibitionAnnouncementSept1968

Figure 3-15. Photo of Boston Public Garden installation, 1968. From David Rumsey/Pulsa

xv Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-

PulsaBostonDemonstrationdetailBostonPublicGarden1968.

Figure 4-1. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy by Curtis Schreier. From “Embassy to the

Dolphins,” Esquire 83, no. 3 (March 1975): 83.

Figure 4-2. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy by Curtis Schreier. From “Embassy to the

Dolphins,” Esquire 83, no. 3 (March 1975): 84.

Figure 4-3. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy by Curtis Schreier. From “Embassy to the

Dolphins,” Esquire 83, no. 3 (March 1975): 85.

Figure 4-4. Plan of Communications Research Institute, from Lilly, The Scientist: A

Metaphysical Autobiography, plate before 134.

Figure 4-5. Image from pg. 4, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug

Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-6. Image from pg. 7, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug

Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-7. Image from pg. 5, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug

Michels Architectural Papers.

xvi Figure 4-8. Image of Frequency Image Synthesizer from pg. 6, Dolphin Embassy [proposal],

1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-9. Diagram from Einhorn, “Dolphins challenge the designer,” Electronic Design 15, no. 25 (1967): 52.

Figure 4-10. Diagram showing “man-dolphin coder” and “dolphin-man coder” from

Einhorn, “Dolphins challenge the designer,” Electronic Design 15, no. 25 (1967): 61.

Figure 4-11. Image from Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug

Michels Architectural Papers. This image was taken from pg. 304 of Records of the

American-Australian ScientiWic Expedition to Arnhem Land; 2; Anthropology and Nutrition, edited by Charles P. Mountford, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960).

Figure 4-12. Illustration by Curtis Schreier, n.d. From a folder titled Dolphin Embassy - Log:

1976-1978 (Assembled 2003, unbound), Box 27, Folder 37, Doug Michels Architectural

Papers.

Figure 4-13. Dolphin Embassy plan, dated May 16, 1977. From Drawer 3, OVS Folder 19,

Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-14. Enlargement of lower right corner of bigure 4-13 showing elevation of Dolphin

xvii Embassy and camera boom protruding from roof.

Figure 4-15. Timeline from pg. 8, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11,

Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-16. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy exterior from Contact, September 1977. Doug

Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-17. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy interior from Contact, September 1977. Doug

Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-18. Scale model of Dolphin Embassy/Oceania from Contact Newsletter, March

1978. Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-19. Polaroid of Alexandra Morphett and Dolphin Embassy/Oceania scale model c.1978. From Box 5, Folder 15, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-20. Triptych illustrating stages of dolphin/human communication, Curtis Schreier.

From pg. 5, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels

Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-21. Advertisement teasing Brainwave, from pg. 2 Cinema Papers #16 [Cannes

Special], April 1978.

xviii Acknowledgements

First off I would like to thank all the members of my committee: chair Sylvia Lavin, Michael

Osman, Soraya de Chadarevian, and Dana Cuff. They all indelibly inbluenced this dissertation through their teaching, insights, and mentorship. Sylvia in particular was pivotal in this regards. This dissertation would not exist without her invitation to join the

Ph.D program way back in 2011. Her ability to inspire and critique has profoundly shaped this research in ways that I have only begun to fathom. I am grateful for her continued support and faith that this project could be brought to completion.

The research for this dissertation would not have been possible without the assistance of Amelia Hugill-Fontanel and Kari Horowicz at the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection and

Stephen James at the University of Houston Libraries, Special Collections. A special thanks to Stephen for giving me a tour of the Allen Teleport, a media room designed by Doug

Michels that had been relocated to the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design.

I had the privilege of presenting part of this research at the 2019 Buell Dissertation

Colloquium. Thank you to Reinhold Martin and The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the

Study of American Architecture for this opportunity. I also would like to thank Ian Lynam and David Peacock for the opportunity to present research from this dissertation as a guest critic for the fall 2017 residency at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Graphic Design program. The excellence of the bucolic fall setting paled in comparison to the superb quality of the faculty, students, and my co-guest critics Dr. Dori Tunstall and Sibylle Hagmann.

Ian Lynam deserves a special thanks as a longtime friend and collaborator. Ian’s continual support and extraordinary generosity over the years will never be forgotten.

xix Lorraine Wild, Jeff Keedy, and Louise Sandhaus, my teachers at CalArts in the early

2000s, were important inbluences on this dissertation. Lorraine’s epic, early morning lectures on the history of graphic design were crucial in showing me a path towards historical inquiry. Jeff has been a constant source of support and encouragement in writing about design and architecture. Louise gave me my birst taste of historical research when I spent a summer assisting her in doing archival research for her survey of twentieth century

California graphic design Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots.

I would like to thanks Hitoshi Abe for bringing me on as a researcher for the Future

Living project, a collaboration between Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd. and UCLA

Architecture and Urban Design. This provided crucial support during my time in the Ph.D program.

My peers and cohort in the MA/Ph.D program were a continual source of encouragement, friendship and intellectual exchange. I would like to thank Christina Gray,

Shannon Starkey, Gus Heully, Gary Fox, Jacqueline Meyer, Joe Ebert, Sarah Hearne, Deborah

Lehman Di Capua, Jia Gu, Rebecca Choi, Esra Kahveci, and Brigid Boyle.

My time working on this dissertation intersected with teaching in the MFA Design program at California College of the Arts. Many thanks to Jon Sueda for bringing me on to teach history and theory in a wonderful transdisciplinary program full of talented and ambitious designers. Teaching seminar classes and supervising MFA thesis writing for the past few years has proven once again that the student can often become the teacher. I would like to thank Miriam Hillawi Abraham, Abigayle Cosinuke, Ethan Nonomura, Winston

Struye, Mitch Greer, Annika Bastacky, Lucy Sweeney, Sophie Feller, Peixin Fu, Vivian Wang,

Colin Christy, and Jenn Jiang for their insights and skill in pressing at the the boundaries of

xx design, reshaping my thinking about what is possible at the intersection of multiple design disciplines. CCA faculty Chris Hamamoto and Mathew Kneebone provided moral support and excellent conversation in the binal stages of this dissertation.

Yasmin Khan Gibson has been a good friend and co-conspirator since we graduated from CalArts in 2005. Her support over the years has been a reassuring constant.

Andrew Kuo and Michelle Li were a reliable respite from the rigors of dissertation writing. Their hospitality and friendship will always be appreciated.

My family has been indispensable in so many ways in this long process. A big thanks to my sister Carrie who having already binished a Ph.D many years ago offered amusing anecdotes, pithy insights about academia, and counsel that I will always value. My niece

Junie has been a perpetual source of amusement and wonderment. Tom Aldrich, my brother-in-law, provided impeccable copyediting and proofreading assistance. But as they say all errors and mistakes in this dissertation are mine and mine alone.

My mother Victoria has been an immense source of support in every way conceivable.

This dissertation could not have been completed without her unblagging support and optimism. My father Koichi who passed away in 2011, did not see the completion of this dissertation, but his presence and inbluence are felt everywhere. This dissertation is dedicated to him.

xxi Vita

EDUCATION

2005, M.F.A., Graphic Design, School of Art, California Institute of the Arts

1993, B.A., Biology, Reed College

PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS

2018–2021, Adjunct 2 Professor, California College of the Arts, MFA Design

CONFERENCE PAPERS

“Exhibiting Upjohn's Brain: Man and Communications at Italia '61,” The Temple Hoyne

Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Buell Dissertation Colloquium 2019.

“The Architect as Corporation as Media: Doug Michels, Alexandra Morphett, and Universal

Technology, 1978-1980,” Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Fall Conference

2018.

INVITED TALKS

“Burtin’s Brain: Designing and Exhibiting the Black Box.” Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Graphic Design program, October 11, 2017.

xxii PUBLICATIONS

Books

(co-authored with UCLA Center for Future Living) “House of the Future, November 2015

Special Issue.” A+U (Architecture and Urbanism), No. 11 (2015): 1–149.

Journal Articles (non-refereed)

“Saarinen Speeding, the Velocities of Information.” Arredamento Mimarlik, no. 3 (2016):

100–101.

“Curation, Cataloging, and Negative Capability.” Modes of Criticism 1 (2015)

GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS

2017, UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship

2015, UCLA, Collegium of University Teaching Fellows

2013–2014, UCLA, Graduate Research Mentorship

2013, UCLA, Graduate Summer Research Mentorship

2012–2013, UCLA, The Clifton Webb Fine Arts Scholarship

RESEARCH AND CURATORIAL EXPERIENCE

2012–2015, Center for Future Living (Daiwa House/UCLA), Research Fellow

2012–2013, “Everything Loose Will Land” exhibition at the MAK Center/Getty Foundation,

Researcher and co-curator

xxiii Introduction

In the preface to a 1960 edition of Precisions On the Present State of Architecture, Le

Corbusier described the computer as a “new brain of incomparable capacity,” a means of managing massive amounts of information and media.1 In a footnote on the same page, Le

Corbusier describes his own Poème électronique at the Philips Pavilion at Expo ’58 in

Brussels as “a torrent, a mass, a depth of sensations.”2 The multimedia spectacle of Poème

électronique has a relationship to this electronic “new brain,” yet Le Corbusier is reluctant to contextualize this architectural media apparatus as anything other than a kind of mass media. In his aside, Le Corbusier mentions that Poème électronique is a means of “proving something,” but what that something is remains ambiguous.3 As an avatar of postwar multimedia architecture, Poème électronique could be said to initiate a lineage of buildings conceived with the apparatus of the screen, which Olows through the pavilions of world expositions in the 1960s and arguably culminates in the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in

Osaka.4

The year 1960 began a period in which the disciplinary givens of architecture were acutely questioned and challenged. Reyner Banham, in his 1960 series of articles in The

1 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning: with an American Prologue, a Brazilian Corollary Followed by the Temperature of Paris and the Atmosphere of Moscow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), x. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 The existing literature on the Pepsi Pavilion emphasizes the political, social, and media aspects of the pavilion in the early 1970s. See Anne Collins Goodyear, “Expo ’70 as Watershed: The Politics of American Art and Technology,” in Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970, ed. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (London: V&A, 2008), 198–203. The pavilion and Expo ’70 also have been positioned as anticipating contemporary forms of surveillance and governance. See Yuriko Furuhata, “Multimedia Environments and Security Operations: Expo 70 as a Laboratory of Governance,” Grey Room 54 (2014): 56–79. Sylvia Lavin has written about the architecture of the pavilion in the context of atmospheric effects, speciOically the cloud as a mechanism for creating ecology and environment. See Sylvia Lavin, "Poof (2006)," in Flash in the Pan (London: Architectural Association, 2015), location 1782-1972, Amazon Kindle. 1 Architecture Review on the state of the architectural discipline, singled out 1960 as the year that marked a chronological divide between the two halves of the twentieth century. Before

1960 was the period of the Modern Movement and its “private mythology of Form and

Function,” while afterwards came a massive shift towards a multiplicity of styles and the challenges of new technologies that could not easily be consigned to the role of building and engineering.5 Banham’s 1960 series, which included the famous “Stocktaking” article, emphasized the fact that architecture needed to grapple with the new epistemologies of the human sciences and the computer. The problems here were twofold, in that architecture could be augmented by these new technologies but was also at risk of being replaced. As

Anthony Vidler notes, this rapprochement between architecture and technology served “to cast functionalism into a vastly expanded Oield—one that included, from Banham’s point of view, topology, perception, biology, genetics, information theory, and technology of all kinds.”6 This turn in architecture towards systems and research models based on the social sciences has been termed a “second modernism” by Arindam Dutta—a postwar modernism of systems that assumes “an entirely new frame of epistemic legitimation.”7

The 1950s and 1960s also saw the concept of the black box emerge, both as the site of an expanded Oield where artists extended their practice to include the moving image, and as a metaphor for the epistemic opacity of the human mind in the human sciences and

5 Reyner Banham, “Architecture after 1960,” The Architectural Review 127, no. 755 (1960): 9–10. 6 Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 133. 7 See Arindam Dutta, “Linguistics, Not Grammatology: Architecture’s A Prioris and Architecture’ Priorities,” in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social” Moment (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 2-69. 2 cybernetics.8 In the case of artists using the moving image, Andrew V. Uroskie notes that the black box underwent a profound transformation, from a place of cinematic projection to a site “whose liminality is both physical—embedded within the material structures of spectatorial institutions—and psychological—bound up with the problem of interiority and exteriority foundational to human subjectivity.”9 Interestingly the term black box emerged after World War II in engineering and cybernetics in reference to more technical problems of interiority and exteriority. Peter Galison notes that the MIT Radiation Laboratory during

World War II coined the term “black box” to describe the boxes that contained radar equipment. Mathematician and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener adopted the idea as a way of describing “a unit designed to perform a function before one knew how it functioned.”10

This problem of the black box also profoundly inOluenced the neurosciences, where it acted as a metaphor for the process of sensory deprivation. Sensory deprivation was a technique of isolating the human subject from all forms of sensory stimulus. This had the

8 More recently the black box has been a fertile metaphor for architecture. Most famously Reyner Banham in a posthumous essay published in 1990 posited that the discipline of architecture could be seen as a black box that held a disciplinary arcana, impenetrable to outsiders. See Reyner Banham “A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture,” in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 292–99. Sylvia Lavin interprets the black box in a different sense seeing it as symptomatic of architecture that incorporated television as a structuring principle, whether it was John Lautner's Chemosphere or the installations of Achilles Castiglioni. See Sylvia Lavin, "Pop Goes the Black Box (2005),” in Flash in the Pan, location 1266-1448, Amazon Kindle. 9 Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 238. Uroskie locates the origins of expanded cinema in the early avant-garde and the lettrists of the 1940s and 1950s. He situates the work of artists using Oilm and other moving image formats, including Isidore Isou, Gil J. Wolman, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Ken Dewey, as a disruptive force that evades medium speciOicity and destabilizes conventional notions of spectatorship and criticism. Notably his critical approach is meant to redeOine the term “expanded cinema” away from associations with Gene Youngblood’s more West Coast countercultural emphasis on the transformative effects of multimedia, where it was assumed advanced technology would “midwife an imminent sociopolitical revolution.” See Uroskie, 9. 10 See Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 245-252. Galison notes that Wiener eventually applied this black box logic to the human mind itself during his development of the anti-aircraft predictor mechanism. 3 experimental therapeutic value of probing the limits of the human mind for activities such as space travel, but it was also part of Cold War practices of mind control, brainwashing, and torture.11 Neuroscientist John C. Lilly was a key Oigure in this Oield of research; Lilly invented a water-immersion technique for sensory deprivation (a clear antecedent for contemporary Oloatation tank centers) that he used for self-experimentation. Under the aegis of the National Institutes of Mental Health, this research was an outgrowth of his interest in probing mammalian brain function by using direct electrical stimuli, although inverting this practice and going from stimulation to deprivation, in order to map anatomy to function. D. Graham Burnett notes that these water-immersion experiments were entangled in Cold War logics of “accessing” or controlling enemy minds, but also provided

Lilly with a valuable tool for his concurrent research interest in interspecies communication with dolphins.12

Lilly, through his sensory deprivation research, developed a unique and extraordinarily provocative theory of the human mind. Detailed in his 1968 book Programming and

Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments, Lilly theorized that

11 For a history of the Cold War geopolitics of torture and brainwashing, see Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006). 12 For an account of Lilly’s research on sensory deprivation and interspecies communication see D. Graham Burnett, “Shots Across the Bow: Cetology and The Mind in the Waters, 1960-1975,” in The Sounding of the Whale: Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). Burnett notes that the water-immersion technique provided Lilly with “a glimpse of the dolphin’s perceptual universe.” Charlie Williams also understands Lilly’s work in this period as a reimagining of techniques of mind control for more benign therapeutic forms of self-realization. See Williams, “On ‘ModiOied Human Agents’: John Lilly and the Paranoid Style in American Neuroscience,” History of the Human Sciences 32, no. 5 (December 2019): 84–107. Lilly’s experiments in water-immersion also intersected with the research interests of the civilian space program; see John C. Lilly and Jay T. Shurley, “Experiments in Solitude in Maximum Achievable Physical Isolation with Water Suspension of Intact Healthy Persons” (Symposium, USAF Aerospace Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, 1960), in Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), 238-247. 4 the human mind was composed of various programs that could be manipulated using

“metaprograms.”13 One of the conclusions of his theories was that any pair or group of mammalian brains could achieve a uniOied state of “interlock,” a state of profound interconnectivity between minds. He understood this concept of interlock as fundamentally spatial and architectural in form, and even went as far as to custom-design a research laboratory in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. This lab had a second Oloor and balcony that was Olooded to accommodate a dolphin and human cohabitating for several weeks.14 This work would become a central inOluence on Doug Michels and Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy project, detailed in the fourth chapter of this dissertation.

Lilly provides another important link in the intellectual fabric of this dissertation. His theories are an expansion of the concept of the neural net, a model of human brain function based on the assumption that simple computational mechanisms operating in parallel at massive scale can account for all cognitive functions. The neural network was Oirst characterized by Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts in their 1943 paper “A Logical

Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” As a product of research designed to show the relevance of mathematics to the study of neurophysiology, this paper was pioneering in that it was one of the Oirst to characterize the human mind as a kind of universal computing machine. Adapting Alan Turing’s ideas about a hypothetical “logical machine” to the physiological building block of the nervous system, the neuron, Pitts and

13 See John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments [1968] (New York: Julian Press, 1987). 14 Lilly’s account of this research can be found in John C. Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967). Bruce Clarke notes that that Lilly’s understanding of interlock and interspecies communication is largely preoccupied with communication, but is almost by design meant to fail as a solipsistic cybernetics. See Bruce Clarke, “John Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, and Communication Out of Bounds,” communication +1 3, no. 1 (2014): Article 8. 5 McCulloch created a symbolic language for how neurons interact to create mental activity.15

The diagram of the Pitts and McCulloch neural network became an episteme for computer science and media technology. As historian of technology Orit Halpern notes, this was not a functional description of how neurons functioned, but a map of “methodological processes and models.”16 Halpern situates the neural network as the Gordian knot of a new epistemology emerging in the mid-twentieth century that shifted the “dominant terms for dealing with human psychology and consciousness to communication, cognition and capacities.”17 Pitts and McCulloch’s work represented a crucial step in shifting the model of the human mind from a duality of mind and body towards a machine metaphor, where the neurophysiological material of the brain could produce thought, emotions, and consciousness.18

Norbert Wiener extended this idea into his conception of cybernetics. Although ideas of prediction, feedback, and control are integral to cybernetics, this dissertation follows

Halpern’s assertion that Wiener’s primary signiOicance was in his inauguration of a period where electronic mediation became a disavowal of “reality effects,” and where mediation is less concerned with the problems of reproducing a particular referent than with the

15 For an intellectual history of Pitts and McCulloch’s work, placing it in the context of efforts to introduce mathematical approaches to the study of biology in the mid-twentieth century, see Tara H. Abraham, “(Physio)Logical Circuits: The Intellectual Origins of the Mcculloch-Pitts Neural Networks,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 38, no. 1 (2002): 3–25. Abraham also recently published a critical biography on McCulloch’s life and work; see Tara H. Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 16 Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 159. 17 Ibid. 18 McCulloch was also a central Oigure in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. N. Kathryn Hayles details McCulloch’s centrality to these interdisciplinary conferences, as well as his disputes with other participants, particularly those associated with psychoanalysis. See chapters three and six of N. Kathryn Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatic, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 6 process of reproduction itself.19 In this sense, mediation becomes a “site of potential and probability,” still linked to older forms of representation but at the same time admitting entirely new forms of knowledge and temporality.20 It is this transformation in mediation from techniques of representation to techniques of process that occupies the central thesis of this dissertation. The case studies examined here trace a path away from architecture as a multimedia theater and towards architecture as a key constituent in the process of a real- time interface of the human mind with the environment. Architecture in this case becomes a passageway from human to non-human, anticipating discourses centered on the idea of

“post-human,” but also radically reshaping the so-called expanded Oield of the 1970s.

In recent architectural histories of the relationship between architecture and technology after World War II, the techniques of cybernetics, information theory, and the neurosciences have been critical in transforming architecture into a form of media.

Reinhold Martin describes the capture of much American corporate architecture in the

1950s and 1960s within an “organizational complex” that was composed of “channel Olows, patterns of patterns,” a new organic analogy that was expressed in the repetition and modularized components of the corporate architectures of Eero Saarinen, Skidmore,

Owings & Merill, and Mies van der Rohe.21 As a counterpoint and complement, Felicity D.

19 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 48-51. Halpern provocatively contextualizes Wiener’s ideas about cybernetics within Roland Barthes’s concept of the “reality effect,” where the site of mediation in the nineteenth century (literature) has certain parallels with sites of mediation in the twentieth century (computation). For Barthes, a reality effect is a paradox of representation observed in the literature of the nineteenth century where signiOiers of literary verisimilitude can only function by obliterating the original referent. See also Barthes’s original 1968 essay, “The Reality Effect” in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141-148. 20 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 51. 21 See Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 7 Scott examines the effects of electronic media and technology on an expanded Oield of architectural practice that emerged in the late 1960s, to reformulate the genealogy of postmodernism.22

It is within this historiographic condition that this dissertation argues that the concepts of the neural network were not just operationalized as the metaphorical logic of corporate architecture, as well as the media tactics of the counterculture, but became part of the protocols and material practice of architecture in a pursuit of a sense of immediacy, leading to the restructuring of architecture as a machine for manipulating, simulating, and expanding human perception.

This dissertation takes four key projects that operate outside the modalities of what

Beatriz Colomina constitutes as the “multimedia architecture” of the postwar period, which is best exempliOied by the Eameses’ work for world expositions in the 1950s and 1960s,

Glimpses of the USA in the 1959 Moscow World’s Fair pavilion, and Think for the IBM

Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.23 Both of these combinations of architecture and media were devoted to prerecorded Oilm-based media. Using complexly scripted environments of image and sound, they were essentially theatrical in scale and intent, designed to discipline and entertain audiences in a nascent culture of the information machine. The installations and projects in this dissertation show a turn away from prerecorded, image-based media, towards media assemblies that intervened in real time directly in the environment. In this way architecture became a set of protocols operating

22 See Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 23 See Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room, no. 2 (2001): 7–29. 8 between the machine ecologies of the human mind and the ecologies of the “organic” environment. Although chronologically spread out from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, the projects in this dissertation are not meant to show a linear development of these protocols, but instead are meant to show how different interfaces composed of new integrations of humans, machines, and architecture were inOluenced by computational metaphors for the function and organization of the human brain.

Paralleling the rise of the counterculture and the use of LSD as a tool in the exploration of human consciousness, architecture and design used the gallery, electronic technology, installations, and a panoply of techniques to construct new interfaces between the human mind and the environment.24 Contemporaneous with Gregory Bateson’s development of his ecological model of the human mind in the 1960s and 1970s, where the mind is “immanent in the larger system—man plus environment,” architecture and design asserted the immanence of mind in the environment through disciplinary interventions.25 These interventions were articulated through various protocols, or means of communicating between the epistemologies of science and design. These include traditional evidence of architectural practice such as correspondence, drawings, and models, but also encompass an expanded range of archival material: scripts, brochures, documentary photographs, circuit diagrams, grant proposals, and business prospectuses.

24 It is notable that architects were interviewed for an article published in 1966 on the effects of psychedelics such as mecaline, peyote, DMT, and LSD on their design practice. The measured tones of the unauthored article lead to the conclusion that psychedelics could be an aid to creativity in an instrumental sense, but did not fundamentally change thinking about architecture. See “LSD: A Design Tool?,” Progressive Architecture (August 1966): 147-53. 25 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 317. In this passage from a section titled “The Epistemology of Cybernetics,” Bateson argues that the computer is only an “arc” within a larger system that must include man and environment. He goes as far as saying that “This total system, or ensemble, may legitimately be said to show mental characteristics.” 9 These projects trace a genealogy of the human mind as both mechanism and organism, something discrete yet still intimately connected to the environment. Architecture and design did not merely reOlect changes in the science and technology of the mind, but were key agents in shaping the discourse on consciousness, cognition, and mind expansion in crucial and unrecognized ways.

Key for this dissertation is an understanding of recent media theory, particularly the work of Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and François Laruelle, where there is a turn towards examining the insufOiciency of mediation, or the proposition that there “exist modes of mediation that refuse bi-directionality, that obviate determinacy, and that dissolve devices entirely.”26 In the last two chapters in particular, these ideas are important as a means to understand works that produce effects that are immanent to perception.

Chapter Outline

The Oirst chapter, “Will Burtin’s Integration: Architectures of Visual Reason,” focuses on the work of Will Burtin in the context of his early work at the OfOice of Strategic Services (OSS).

The chapter begins by examining the history of the architecture of the situation room in the

OfOice of Strategic Services, focusing on the development of Q-2, the unbuilt 1941 architectural proposal developed by Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfus, and Walter Dorwin

Teague. Through renderings, diagrams, internal memos, and documentation of related OSS

26 Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 10. François Laruelle’s work is particularly foundational for understanding mediation as uniquely bound to a collapse of thought into environment. See François Laruelle, “The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication,” Parrhesia, no. 9 (2010): 18–22; and Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 10 situation room projects, Q-2 is seen as a speculative architecture that adopted ideas from

László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Dorner, and Walter Gropius to construct spaces for panoramic multimedia presentations based on Oield observations, data visualization, and intelligence analysis. Q-2 can also be seen as a template for a black box architecture that combined exhibition, systems of media projection, and architecture under the rubric of intelligence. This chapter shows how the theaters of intelligence visualization embedded in the parti of Q-2 were transformed into spaces designed to instrumentalize perception and consciousness.

The focus then shifts to Burtin’s brief stint in the OSS Presentation Branch from 1943 to

1945. His best-known output of this period consists of gunnery manuals for the U.S. Air

Force, which show evidence of a pre-cybernetic concept of anticipatory vision. This section examines evidence of Burtin’s contacts with other designers in the Presentation Branch— including Eero Saarinen, who ran the Special Exhibits section—who were engaged in the design of situation rooms inOluenced by the Q-2 concept.

The Oinal section of this chapter deals with Burtin’s Integration: A New Discipline for

Design, an installation at the Composing Room in 1948. Presented in a gallery for a trade magazine, Integration was one of the Oirst media rooms designed explicitly as a site of exchange between the architectural modulus of the room and the “abstracted reality of science.” The installation functioned both as a portfolio show of Burtin’s own work and a spatialized manifesto that demonstrated in situ the principles of “interrelation” between what Burtin called the four “realities” of man, light, space/time, and science. Serge

Chermayeff, writing in an introductory brochure that accompanied the 1948 exhibit, placed

Burtin in a lineage of designers that included Kepes, Moholy-Nagy, and Herbert Bayer. This

11 section positions Integration as a fulcrum between Q-2 and Burtin’s Brain installation for the Upjohn company, representing a shift from the black box as a site of epistemic analysis or “intelligence” to one where an ontology of “consciousness” became the organizing principle.

The second chapter, “Upjohn’s Brain: Exhibiting the Black Box,” examines the genealogy of the Brain installation for Upjohn pharmaceuticals in 1960. The installation was commissioned as a way for Upjohn to promote newly developed psychotropic drugs to treat depression. Burtin’s Brain installation was both an extension of Integration and a dramatically different use of the audiovisual media of design. Informed by information theory and early concepts of the brain as neural net, Burtin used available electromechanical media of the period to portray the imperceptible phenomena of a functioning human brain via a screen with backlit images that represented “consciousness.”

This simulation of the perceptual networks of the human brain is an unmasking of the black box in a literal sense, even as the techniques of representing this electromechanical model of the brain (in particular Ezra Stoller’s documentary photographs) continually re-situate it in a dark space. The design evolution of the Brain is traced from its origins as a clearly architectonic space that functioned as a conceptual model of brain function, to its Oinal iteration as a diagram of perception.

As part of the U.S. Pavilion “Man and Communications” at Italia ’61, installed in Pier

Luigi Nervi’s Labor Palace, the Brain functioned as an early demonstration comparing the human brain and the computer as analogous communication systems. This work is seen in relation to contemporaneous exhibitions and discourse by the Independent Group and

Richard Hamilton that demonstrated parallel strategies in combining art, science, and

12 information theory into systems of exhibition. The Brain was a product of the intersection of psychotropic pharmaceuticals with attempts to understand the brain as a communication device in the early 1960s. This anticipated the work of Pulsa, whose interpretation of the architectonic space of the gallery black box, in contrast, eschewed any didactic or explanatory intent and sought to directly manipulate consciousness through light, space, and sound.

The third chapter, “Non-Media and Architectural Flickers: The Environments of Pulsa,” focuses on the work of intermedia group Pulsa. Pulsa’s work is examined in light of their contribution to Project Argus at the Yale Arts and Architecture building in 1968. As an interdisciplinary group of architects, artists and technologists, Pulsa sought an even more direct connection between architectonic space and mental phenomena. If Burtin’s project was in essence pedagogical, epistemological, and positivist, Pulsa wanted to confound architectural space with the human nervous system, using a complex computational and multimedia apparatus to render a new environment within existing architectures. The architectonic black box became an audiovisual but “non-referential” medium. Yet the effects of this black box on architecture were far from conventional. Particular to the Paul Rudolph

A&A building is the idea of corrugated concrete as a surface rendered in relief. Pulsa’s use of computer-controlled banks of hundreds of Oluorescent light bulbs combined with mylar surfaces could be construed as both an obliteration and a re-rendering of the surfaces of

Rudolph’s building. If Burtin’s Integration and Brain installations were supposed to inculcate a detached observation of phenomena, Pulsa aspired to demolish the barrier between the participant subject, strobing light, and architectural space.

Important to this consideration of Pulsa is the group’s structure as an organization built

13 on “parallel processing,” as well as their status as interstitial practitioners between academia and the art world. Pulsa’s work is considered within the milieu of the system art of Jack Burnham, but also in reference to the Olicker Oilms of Tony Conrad and minimalist art. Theorist François Laruelle’s ideas on media and mediation are used to situate Pulsa’s work as an example of “non-media,” where perception itself becomes the medium in an attempt to eliminate the distinction between mind and environment.

The fourth and Oinal chapter, “Dolphin Embassy: Architectures of Interlock, Cinema, and

Excommunication,” examines Dolphin Embassy as a topos for architecture as a communication medium in an expanded Oield of practice in the 1970s. Originating in Ant

Farm’s work, Dolphin Embassy was a series of largely unrealized projects by Doug Michels,

Curtis Schreir, Robert Perry, and Alexandra Morphett from 1976-1978. While Ant Farm’s contemporaries Pulsa were rethinking the architecture of the gallery as an electronic environment capable of producing psychotropic effects that blurred the perceptual boundaries between subject and environment, the Dolphin Embassy projects were designed to mediate between species that resided in radically different environments—water and air.

Dolphin Embassy inverted the concept of the black box; instead of the box being an enclosure sealed off from the environment, the Dolphin Embassy was conceived as a means of manipulating the inputs and outputs to and from the environment. InOluenced by the work of John C. Lilly, who both evangelized the dolphin as an intelligent entity and theorized the human brain as a biocomputer capable of being reprogrammed with psychedelics, the Dolphin Embassy became a project that combined architecture, research vessel, and media pod in order to facilitate a cross-species state of “interlock,” or a direct communicational transfer between brains.

14 This chapter initially focuses on the early history of Dolphin Embassy from 1974-76.

Funded by the NEA as an exploratory trip to Australia, the project was publicized in 1975 in a speculative proposal by Curtis Schreir published in Esquire magazine. Primarily driven by

Michels’s interest in dolphins as intelligent entities, the project grew in ambition to encompass increasingly radical proposals that blurred the boundaries between architecture, scientiOic expedition, and Oilm production.

This chapter concludes by looking at Dolphin Embassy’s transformation into another ambitious yet unsuccessful project: the science Oiction Oilm Brainwave in 1977-78. In need of funding, Michels and Morphett proposed Brainwave as a science Oiction “pre-enactment” of the Dolphin Embassy. Initially supported by the Australian Film Commission, and featuring a script by Peter Weir collaborator Tony Morphett, the Oilm was improbably conceived as a Hollywood blockbuster Oilm. Brainwave featured a Oictionalized version of the Dolphin Embassy expedition with a narrative built around a teenage girl who had unusual abilities to communicate with animals. The denouement of the Oilm involves a mass

“interlock” between the crew and scientists of the expedition with a group of dolphins, implying that dolphins and humans originated from a single species.

This strange, visionary, and ultimately unproduced project is positioned as a cousin to other types of speculative architectural enterprises of the 1970s, speciOically Rem

Koolhaas’s paranoid revisioning of Manhattan, Delirious New York, published in 1977.

Michels and his collaborators were engaged in the creation of “weird media,” Eugene

Thacker’s term for media that attempts to bridge “a gulf or abyss between two ontological

15 orders.”27 Dolphin Embassy is situated as symptomatic of the 1970s—a liminal decade that historian of religion Erik Davis has characterized as a post-countercultural period of

“uncanny connections,” where the psychedelic, the weird, the extraterrestrial, and the esoteric had begun to fundamentally undermine normative accounts of reality.

27 Eugene Thacker, “Dark Media,” in Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 133-134. 16 Chapter 1 – Will Burtin’s Integration: Architectures of Visual Reason

In 1948 in a small backroom gallery of the Composing Room, a New York City typesetting company, Will Burtin exhibited an installation he called Integration, The New Discipline in

Design. At Oirst glance this installation could easily be construed as a portfolio reproduced in three dimensions. Composed mainly of Burtin’s graphic design work of the previous two decades, Integration could be considered monographic and self-promotional in intent. Yet

Burtin’s aim with this installation was polemic; it reads less like self-promotion than as a manifesto attempting to stake out a vast territory for design that encompassed architecture, exhibitions, graphic design, the natural sciences, and what Burtin called, “new media and techniques of expression.”1

In a brief 1949 essay in the Swiss journal for graphic and applied arts Graphis, Burtin made the case for a new ontology of design that would encompass the “extra-sensatory reality of science,” and its effects on human psychology and society.2 In this essay Burtin couches his arguments in architectural terms, invoking the concept of the Vitruvian man where “Man is both – a measure and measurer” of qualities both formal and scientiOic.3

Integration owes a clear debt to avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, while at the same time demonstrating a positivist belief in the progress of modern science. This counterintuitive position revolves around an idea that Burtin called “visual reasoning,” articulated slightly earlier in the 1948 essay “Interrelations” written with L.P. Lessing.4 In

1 Will Burtin, “Integration, the New Discipline in Design,” Graphis 5, no. 27 (1949): 233. 2 Burtin, 232. 3 Burtin, 230. 4 Will Burtin and L.P. Lessing, “Interrelations,” Graphis 4, no. 22 (1948): 108–17. 17 this essay Burtin and Lessing advocate a visual language that functions as a direct extension of natural language while also privileging the graphic qualities that would give immediacy to visual information. This was a reaction to the increasing complexity of everyday life, where the operation of technology required clear, easily understood instructions for use.

Burtin and Lessing are clearly working out a concept of vision similar to that articulated by Gyorgy Kepes in his Language of Vision, Oirst published four years earlier in 1944.5 All three appear committed to vision as an epistemic process of revealing, a Whiggish process of clariOication that results in a better understanding of both the natural world and social reality. “Interrelations” and Language of Vision assert that progress in science and technology must be coordinated with aesthetic representation. Both pieces use the idea of a

“new dimension” or “new reality” that must be apprehended by human consciousness. As

Michael Golec notes, Kepes, inOluenced by Gestalt psychology, believed in a “natural” human capacity to “organize discrete elements into a whole.”6 The vehicle for this was what Kepes called “optical communication,” which he saw as a “means both to reunite man with his knowledge and to re-form man into an integrated being.”7 This plastic force works as a gestalt mechanism integrating perceived parts into wholes. It is this integrative process that

5 See Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1964). Kepes was also a contributor to A-D magazine, the trade publication published by the Composing Room; he published “The task of visual advertising” in the February-March 1940 issue. This piece appears to be the basis for the last section of Language of Vision, “Technological motivations, The invention of photomontage.” 6 Michael Golec, “A Natural History of a Disembodied Eye: The Structure of Gyorgy Kepes’s ‘Language of Vision’,” Design Issues 18, no. 2 (2002): 5. In this article Golec argues that Kepes’s Language of Vision is caught between two contradictory positions: the idea of realism, inspired by A.N. Whitehead, where objects in the world exist independently of human perception, and conversely the idea that objects were constructed primarily by perception and memory. This last idea was drawn from Gestalt psychology and the work of Hermann von Helmholtz. For Golec this disparity becomes untenable while Kepes ended up advocating for a hygienic view of vision that required the “eye to disengage from the body, to rise above the ground, and to dominate its surroundings” (p.16). This seems to parallel Burtin’s ideas regarding what he called “visual reasoning,” where sight is the primary register of perception. 7 Kepes, Language of Vision, 13. 18 is key for Kepes—the retina acting as the physical and cognitive organizing force for a homeostatic concept of visual unity, where Oigure and ground have reached an equilibrium.8

The register is not merely perceptual or psychological, but ontological. Burtin and Lessing echo this in “Interrelations,” with their emphasis on graphics as a means for “extending human vision by demonstrating a new reality to which the uninitiated as yet have no key.”9

They even go so far as to claim that “visual consciousness” will become the “next stages of the arts,” conOlating vision and cognition.10 Burtin’s installation at the Composing Room is a kind of proof of concept for a materialized visual consciousness, a polemic in architectonic forms. In his published statements about “Integration” Burtin parses the exhibition into four parts, or “four principle realities,” which are ontological in their conception: “reality of man,” “reality of light,” “reality of space,” and “reality of science.”11

Utilizing a combination of materials—Masonite, clear colored plastic, plexiglass, and honeycomb aluminum—Burtin’s construction acts as a model of consciousness. Integration acted as a demonstration of principles as well as a deliberate conOlation of interior and exterior. The contents of Integration originate from a variety of sources, including Burtin’s own design work, and are presented as both exemplars of his design ontologies and fodder for a more integrated, comprehensive approach to design. The four panels of Integration, prefabricated by Displayers Inc. in 10’ × 6 ½’ sections, represented the four realities.

While Burtin was clearly inOluenced by Kepes, his time working in the OfOice of Strategic

Services (OSS) also had an indelible effect. If the perceptual underpinnings of Burtin’s

8 Kepes, 15. Kepes describes visual perception as “a dynamic process of integration, a “plastic” experience.” 9 Burtin and Lessing, “Interrelations,” 111. 10 Ibid. 11 Burtin, “Integration, the New Discipline in Design,” 230. 19 Integration remain within the media gestalts of Kepes, the media tectonics of Integration are indebted to the techniques and architectures of presentation developed at the OSS. This chapter is an examination of the origins of Burtin’s understanding of these architectural strategies as a transaction between the informational and the human, where architecture became an apparatus of exhibition designed to model and manipulate the human nervous system.

Q-2: Architecture as Black Box and Museum

In July of 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the ofOice of Coordinator of

Information (COI), appointing William J. Donovan as Coordinator of Information. This was in direct response to the need to centralize the organization and analytical capabilities of a national intelligence apparatus that was spread amongst the OfOice of Naval Intelligence, the Military Intelligence Division, and the State Department.12 Crucial here was the realization by Donovan that this new national intelligence agency needed a research and analysis department that could create parsimonious visual presentations of complex data across a variety of media. The COI as an organization proved to be short-lived; it acted as an interim agency that was expanded and given greater scope and military authority less than a year later, in June of 1942, when it was renamed the OfOice of Strategic Services (OSS).13

Yet in its brief period of existence the COI established an important precedent for the

12 See Waldo Heinrichs, “The United States Prepares for War,” in The Secrets War: The Ofcice of Strategic Services in World War II, ed. George C. Chalou (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1992), 8–18, for the background on the formation of the COI and OfOice of Strategic Services. 13 See “From COI to CIG, Historical Intelligence Documents,” Studies in Intelligence 37, no. 5 (1994): 111–23, for reproductions of key documents that detail the formation and dissolution of the COI and OSS from 1941 to 1945. 20 development of a new architectural typology that functioned both as an exhibition and as a way of organizing information, combining the spatial organization of a museum with the black box of the movie theater.

In the fall of 1941, the deputy director of the COI Colonel Atherton Richards conceived of a new type of building, code-named “Q-2.”14 Richards had been tasked with the

“formulation of techniques of visual presentation, the erection of a suitable building and the creation of displays and performances therein for the direct use of the president.”15

Emboldened by the needs of the new agency to assimilate massive quantities of information from abroad and to present this information in accessible forms, Richards outlined the necessity for a windowless building to house exhibits that would “dramatize the elements involved in U.S. national defense.”16 This history was summarized in the internal OSS document from around 1943, “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic:

The Rise and Fall of Q-2,” a narrative that describes the programming and disposition of the proposed building. Barry Katz, a historian of design and technology, described Q-2 as a

“grandiose scheme . . . which was sustained throughout the war, between the infant intelligence profession and the only slightly older profession of industrial design.”17 Q-2 can be seen as a type of institutional paper architecture whose historical remains are almost

14 This designation refers to building Q, a temporary structure that housed personnel in the early years of the COI and OSS. The building was adjacent to the E Street campus for the OSS at 2430 E Street NW in Washington D.C. The site for Q-2 would have been adjacent to building Q, probably south of the E Street campus. See the narrative description in Sefton et al., “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for E Street Complex (OfOice of Strategic Services and Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters),” 14-27. 15 “History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft)” Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, 4. 16 “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic, The Rise and Fall of Q-2,” Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, 105. 17 Barry Katz, “The Arts of War: ‘Visual Presentation’ and National Intelligence,” Design Issues 12, no. 2 (1996): 6. Katz’s investigation into the inOluence of industrial design and architecture on the OSS and the development of the Visual Presentation Branch is foundational to this chapter. 21 entirely discursive. The 1944 document “History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary

Draft)” provides additional key details about the function and design of Q-2.18 The impetus behind the elevation of visual presentation to an architectural scale is found in a COI memo from Hubert C. Barton to Emile Despres and Edward Mason.19 Barton, who would eventually go on to head the Presentation Branch when the COI was reconstituted as the

OSS, argued for “novel and more effective methods of presentation,” which involved “many types of temporal, geographic, and qualitative variation.”20 In the memo Barton argues for the combined use of motion pictures, image, and sound, unconstrained by what he calls

“Oixed display.”21 Barton reasoned that presentations utilizing multiple forms of media enabled users “to absorb much more material within a given time.”22 It is here that quantity and efOiciency became an overriding concern for these multimedia theaters; attention was valuable, and compressing information into smaller segments of time became a desired outcome for visual presentation. Notably, this use of combined audiovisual media was called “new media,” anticipating by several decades the idea that recombinations of media within novel technologies have some essential quality of newness.23 The fact that Both

18 Both the 1943 and 1944 documents exist as draft copies in the U.S. National Archives and Record Adminstration. There is no cited author for either document, although the 1944 “History of Presentation in OSS” is annotated as being checked by Colonel Richards, Francis King, Martin McHugh, Donal McLaughlin, Oliver Lundquist, and Harry Metlay. 19 See H. C. Barton, Jr. to Messrs. Mason and Despres re Visual Presentation Project, Coordinator of Information, December 2, 1941, Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226. Katz also notes that Emile Despres was an economist and former chief of the Federal Reserve who had been hired into the COI as part of the Research and Analysis Branch (R&A). Despres was to act as a liaison between R&A and Visual Presentation. Barton, who was also an economist, worked under Despres at the Federal Reserve (Katz, “Art of War,” 10). 20 Barton, Jr. to Mason and Despres, RG 226, NACP. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 5. 23 This term is found in “History of Presentation in OSS,” 1. Describing the need for a building to house the Visual Presentation Branch the memo remarks: “It was tentatively decided that by employing new media adapted to a building specially designed for visual presentation, strategic information could be [most] rapidly, 22 Despres and Barton were trained as economists also links the Presentation Branch to a tradition of graphic visualization in business and economics. As early as 1921, rapidly expanding corporations such as Du Pont were devoting entire rooms to large scale charts and graphs as a way to efOiciently control and disseminate information through vast corporate structures.24

Judging from the OSS archival traces of this building, the range of collaborators assembled both internally and externally was extraordinary, encompassing the Oields of

Oilm, industrial design, and stage design. “History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary

Draft)” lists Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, and Walter Dorwin Teague as primary

“expert consultants.” Set designer Lee Simonson, sound designer Douglas Shearer, cartographer Richard Edes Harrison, and Walt Disney also were listed as contracted consultants, rounding out a group with a substantial skillset that contributed to the multimedia and performative aspects of Q-2.25 It is also notable that Lewis Mumford, former Assistant Secretary of State James Grafton Rogers, and the editors of The New York

Times and Fortune, John Chamberlin and Richardson Wood, were recruited for the project.

Presumably these consultants would have contributed to the editorial side of the project, as

Olexibly and dramatically furnished to the President and his advisory ofOicials.” The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the earliest popular use of “new media” to a New York Times article in 1972. See “new media, n.” OED Online (Oxford University Press, March 2017). http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/255819? redirectedFrom=new+media. 24 See JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication : the Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Yates understands the use of communications systems in the management of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American corporations as a kind of “control through communication.” In particular chapter eight, “Du Pont, 1902-1920,” details Du Pont’s use of 350 room size charts as a means of quickly communicating information to the executive committee about each division of the company. 25 “History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft),”1A. This document also notes that Charles Kettering, General Manager of the Research Laboratory Division, General Motors Corporation was assigned the task of developing technology to support the use of epidiascopes and “new presentation techniques.” 23 there was a clear need to translate the reports and data from the COI into a form that could be rendered into information visualizations. Architects are conspicuous by their absence in the historical record, implying that the building itself might have been largely generic; the design of interior spaces and systems presented the most telling problems for the integration of media and design.

Although Richards emphasized the theatricality and the performative aspects of the proposed building, the aim of the architecture would be to integrate audiovisual media into new forms of presentation—simultaneously utilizing Oilm, television, photography, epidiascope projections, graphs, and charts—in order to provide “a complete visual picture of world conditions as they relate to war.”26 Particularly important here is the emphasis placed on the idea that presentation would be nearly contemporaneous with events happening in the war. Timeliness, speed, and ephemerality were important qualities enabled by the architecture of Q-2. The inclusion of television as a medium for Q-2 underlines the ambition to convey events in as direct a manner as possible.27 A novel aspect of this conception of institutional architecture is the idea that the building would function not just as a presentation or exhibition space, but would also house the complete apparatus of information collating and processing. Analysis, design, and projection would occur in the same piece of architecture, organized along Oive functions: receiving, collation, evaluation, interpretation, and dissemination. These Oive programmatic requirements were outlined in a memo from Captain Merian C. Cooper to William J. Donovan, dated 12 October 1941.28

26 “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic, The Rise and Fall of Q-2,” 107, 110. 27 It is noted in “History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft),” 2, that the use of television could obtain “information only available in the Navy’s Situation Room,” implying the use of television as a kind of virtual extension of Q-2. 28 Quoted in “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic, The Rise and Fall of Q-2,” 114-115. 24 Cooper, who was perhaps best known as the Oilmmaker behind the 1933 movie King Kong, was hired by Donovan to aid in the creative and technical development of visual presentation techniques. In a sense these Oive “functional lines” for the building represent

Oive points of media architecture, recasting the building’s program in terms of information processing and management.

“Receiving” was the Oirst function in Cooper’s memo. It encompassed the gathering of intelligence from sources external to the COI. Cooper saw this function as a 24/7 operation, a continual process of collecting news and information from newswires such as the

Associated Press and United Press, as well as intelligence agencies of the military, the State

Department, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of the Interior.29 For

Cooper the key was that this news was to be “hot,” unanalyzed and uninterpreted by any source.30

“Collation” denoted the straightforward task of organizing information by geographic region and time. The function of “evaluation” was entirely focused on assessing the truth of a piece of news, and strangely was completely segregated from the function of

“interpretation.” Only “interpretation” required a more professional apparatus of expertise, which could gauge the relative value of the intelligence that had been Oiltered into its purview. Cooper states, “there should be Army, Navy, Economic, and Diplomatic portions of

29 Ibid., 114. 30 Ibid. The function of receiving appears to be wedded to the idea that the COI alone was responsible for high-level strategic interpretation and analysis. Although it is tempting to think of “hot news” as synonymous to “raw data,” the use of “news” implies a relationship closer to fact, even if Cooper seems to indicate that “hot news” is uninterpreted and not yet factual. See Daniel Rosenberg’s discussion of the epistemic shift in data from something “beyond argument” into an entity that was “pre-analytical, pre-factual” in the early twentieth century in the chapter “Data before the fact,” from the anthology “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013): 15-40. 25 this section,” implying that external experts would need to be incorporated into Q-2.31

The last function, “dissemination,” is perhaps the most surprising, detailing activities that essentially amount to publishing and broadcasting within the military and government. If, as Cooper writes, “Intelligence produced in this agency should be disseminated both up and down,” then the COI occupies a middle layer in the stack of governance, mediating between the executive ofOice and the individual military services and government departments.32 Essential to dissemination is the space of the war room, the

“inner-sanctorium” of Q-2.

The visual evidence for Q-2 is very limited, but it provides a view into the architectural thought that went into conceiving a building devoted to visualizing different types of analysis and intelligence. The internal OSS document “History of Presentation in OSS

(Preliminary Draft)” provides the most complete set of architectural descriptions, renderings, and sketches. Tipped into the opening pages of the document are two renderings by Henry Dreyfuss of the “inner-sanctorium” of Q-2.33 These two images (see

Oigures 1-1 and 1-2) show a proposed interior for Q-2 that demonstrates an unorthodox way of thinking about the presentation of media. The Dreyfuss renderings show two

31 “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic, The Rise and Fall of Q-2,” 115. The Research and Analysis (R&A) division of the OSS would end up working closely with the Presentation Branch providing the external expertise needed for evaluation. See Barry Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Ofcice of Strategic Services, 1942-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.) Katz’s history of the R&A division details the extraordinary array of Americans and European émigrés recruited for the division, including Herbert Marcuse and Carl Schorske. 32 Ibid. 33 See “History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft),” 1A. These renderings have been reproduced both in Katz’s “The Arts of War,” and more recently in Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (Montréal; Paris; New Haven: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011), 323. 26 different views of what is called both a “semi-circular room” and a “situation room.”34 An important detail is that this room was conceived not as a box but as an ellipse in plan. On page three of “History of Presentation in OSS” there is a pencil sketch (see Oigure 1-3) of the plan of the main Oloor of Q-2. This plan shows the “semi-circular” situation room as an ellipse truncated at the long ends. The seating for this room is aligned through the long axis of the room, and is presented as a triangular dais suspended in space adjacent to curving projection surfaces meant for a range of “…pictorial techniques, such as motion pictures, animated slides, television, by which would be obtained information available only in the

Navy’s Situation room…” The Dreyfuss renderings show this space from two different perspectives. Figure 1-1 shows a view down the longitudinal axis from the dais toward the truncated end of the elliptically shaped room. This end was to have a Oilm screen for conventional projection. On either side of the Oilm screen were screens for projecting information in a variety of formats. Viewed from the central dais, the right side of the room was designed for the exhibition of Olow charts. In the scene depicted in Oigure 1-2, a chart showing U.S. Naval production can be seen above the silhouettes of seated Oigures in the dais. The curving walls to the left of the central movie screen were to be occupied by graphic representations of statistical information. This combination of informatic and Oilmic space was a signature of Q-2, where the immediacy of real-time visualizations of events in every theater of war could be distilled into presentations on-demand, and the space of architecture became an ontology for processing information.

The precedents for this kind of design are unusually varied. The spherical form appears

34 Documents differ in the nomenclature for the presentation room shown in the Dreyfus renderings. “History of Presentation” uses the descriptive title “semi-circular” room, and “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic” calls the room a “situation room.” 27 to have had a large inOluence on the Dreyfuss concepts. The document “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic” makes the claim that the Commissioner of the Public Building

Administration W. E. Reynolds originated the idea that Q-2 should have a room shaped like a globe, where the interior becomes a map of the world and the geographical context of events and intelligence could be easily understood.35 Most likely this was inspired by the

Mapparium, a walk-in globe designed by Chester Lindsay Churchill for the Mary Baker Eddy

Library in 1935.36 Dreyfuss’s own work from the period also seems unusually relevant, particularly his collaboration with Wallace K. Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux on the Trylon and Perisphere (see Oigure 1-4), the architectural centerpiece of the 1939 New York World’s

Fair, which evokes both Boullée and Russian constructivism. Dreyfuss was hired to design

Democracity, the diorama and multimedia production housed inside the spherical

Perisphere.37 Democracity, like the more well-known Futurama exhibit designed by Norman

Bel Geddes for the General Motors Corporation, was a vision of the future. The exhibit focused on a city called “Centerton” in the year 2030, which had a circular city plan based on Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse.38 Although the theme of the fair, “Building the World of

Tomorrow,” was largely established by the Board Committee on Theme led by architect and

35 “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic, The Rise and Fall of Q-2,” 110-111. 36 The Mary Baker Eddy Library maintains an online history of the Mapparium. Churchill was apparently inspired to design the Mapparium after seeing a twelve-foot globe in the lobby of the New York Daily News. The walk-in globe was designed to “symbolize the international character and ‘world-consciousness’” of the Christian Science Publishing Society. See “The Mapparium,” The Mary Baker Eddy Library, https:// www.marybakereddylibrary.org/project/mapparium. 37 Victoria Newhouse, Wallace K. Harrison, Architect (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 80-93. Chapter nine, “1939: ‘The World of Tomorrow’,” details the design of the Perisphere and Dreyfuss’s contribution to Democracity. 38 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York : A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 276., Koolhaas notes that Democracity, along with Trylon and Perisphere, was representative of the “collapse of Manhattanism, the exact moment when Manhattan’s architects surrender their own version of the Skyscraper as sublime instrument of controlled irrationality.” The futuristic city of Centerton represented a capitulation to the “Towers in a Park” style of urbanism proposed by Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse masterplan. 28 urban planner Robert D. Kohn, Dreyfuss’s execution of the presentation strategies for

Democracity shows a clear relationship to his ideas for Q-2 and the Combined Chiefs of Staff presentation rooms. The circular parti and the design of dual viewing platforms on the interior evoke both nineteenth-century panoramas and a theater in the round (see Oigures

1-5 and 1-6). Designed as a scripted performance lasting Oive-and-a-half minutes, the main attraction was a scale model of Centerton, which ran through a light show that simulated a diurnal cycle while the two viewing platforms circled around on motorized tracks.39 The accompanying score and narration added to an experience intended as both informative and “immersive.” Notable was the use of what were called “movie murals” projected on the interior of the 180-foot-tall sphere. The April 30, 1939, World’s Fair Section of the New York

Herald Tribune describes the effect as “representing the various groups in modern society…

Starting as pinpoints, the Oigures attain a size of Oifteen feet, a living mural in the sky…”40

This kind of spectacle Oit within the need of Q-2 to “dramatize the elements involved in U.S. national defense.”41 Early in the development of Q-2, the situation room was often referred to as a “theatre room.”42 Dreyfuss’s ability to present information and ideas in a multimedia system integrating sound, music, architectural models, and Oilm projection made him an ideal designer to facilitate the creation of an architecture that could show “a complete visual picture of world conditions as they relate to the war for the private use of the

39 The New York Public Library’s online exhibition of archival material from the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair notes that Dreyfuss and Kohn designed a “continuous dramatic presentation,” that was primarily the model of Centerton and the so-called “narratage” that sequenced the attendant lighting effects and soundtrack composed by William Grant Still. See “A Harmonious Whole,” New York Public Library, http:// exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/worldsfair/beacon-idealism-building-democracity/story/story-theme. 40 Quoted in Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 284. 41 “Visual Presentation and Field Photographic, The Rise and Fall of Q-2,” 105. 42 Ibid., 109. Merian C. Cooper in this passage is described as having visited British situation rooms that inspired the idea of building a similar “theatre room” speciOically for President Roosevelt’s use. 29 President.”43

The idea of a panoramic set of screens that surrounds an audience is integral to Walter

Gropius’s 1926 proposal for a “Total Theater.” In The Theater of the Bauhaus, Gropius describes a theater with an elliptic plan designed to “create a great keyboard for light and space.”44 Inspired by Erwin Piscator’s Brechtian stage productions, which often used Oilm projections and other forms of media, Gropius envisioned an architecture that could encompass all possible theatrical stagings, including the classic proscenium theater, the deep stage, and more modern concepts such as the center stage with a panoramic surround of projected imagery. It is this last possibility that moved Gropius to note in the introduction to the 1961 English translation of The Theater of the Bauhaus:

By using a system of spotlights and Oilm projectors, transforming walls and ceiling

into moving picture scenes, the whole house would be animated by three-

dimensional means . . . Thus the playhouse itself, made to dissolve into the shifting,

illusionary space of the imagination, would become the scene of action itself.45

This deliberate conOlation of architectonic space and the space of the mind approaches the model of Q-2, which also emphasized the theatrical as a mode of immediate, real-time apprehension.

This mode of thinking about the interior as a space of dissolution is intimately linked to the work of László Moholy-Nagy, in particular his 1930 collaboration with Alexander

Dorner, “Room of our Time,” a proposed, but unrealized gallery space for the Hanover

43 Ibid., 110. 44 See Gropius’s introduction to the 1961 English translation of The Theater of the Bauhaus, 12. 45 Ibid.,14. Interestingly, Gropius also notes, “for if it is true that the mind can transform the body, it is equally true that [architectural] structure can transform the mind.” 30 Provincial Museum that would have combined Oilm, photography and projection technology.

Art historian Noam M. Elcott characterizes this as a “black-box museum,” a gesamtkunstwerk, and a means of presenting a new conception of space where “mobility, transparency, weightlessness, immateriality, and [the] multi-perspectivalism of cinematic space,” took precedence over a more traditional gallery organization.46 Elcott links this to

Rudolf Harms’s idea of a “spaceless darkness,” a darkness created by the projected light of the cinematic apparatus that creates an ontology of dematerialization.47 This concept has a double-edged nature; as Elcott notes, cinematic avant-gardes sought to critique and subvert the immersive darkness of the cinema even as the developments of black-box environments in museums undermined these experiments.48 Alexander Dorner in particular saw the potential for the adoption of cinematic space in the gallery to create an “atmosphere room,” by which he intended to represent the apotheosis of western art history. As Elcott notes,

Dorner was clearly inOluenced by Aloïs Riegl’s idea of Kunstwollen, the “artistic will” of a particular historical period.49 What is odd here is Dorner’s attempt to map literally Riegl’s metaphysics of aesthetic expression onto what would have been in 1930 a gallery of contemporary art. Dorner intended “Room of Our Time” to function as kind of modern

“atmosphere room” or Stimmungsräume, an architectural and curatorial instantiation of a

46 Noam M. Elcott, “Rooms of Our Time: László Moholy-Nagy and the Stillbirth of Multimedia Museums,” in Screen/space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Tamara Trodd (New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), 26-29. Elcott details a compelling analysis of “Room of Our Time” in relationship to the cinematic dispositif, the Bauhaus experiments in theater, and Alexander Dorner’s museum philosophy. 47 Elcott, 5. 48 Elcott, 26. Elcott invokes Frederic Jameson’s critique of the “return of the aesthetic” as a way of understanding the black box museum as “producing a new brand of passivity and disembodiment, distraction and spacelessness.” 49 Elcott, 27. Elcott quotes from an essay by Dorner, “Die Erkenntnis des Kunstwollen durch die Kunstgeschichte,” published in 1922, where Dorner articulates his own formulation of Kunstwollen: “understood historically [it] is the series of the artworks themselves grasped with the concepts of the present.” Dorner views Kunstwollen as being accessible through an “inuitively grasped inclination.” 31 historical period’s Kunstwollen. Yet instead of Kunstwollen being a quality that is manifest through historical analysis it becomes something grasped more directly through intuition.

Dorner and Moholy-Nagy deOine through curation a kind of contemporary Kunstwollen of the 1930s, where space becomes a dematerialized medium. “Room of Our Time” is built around the organizing principle of the black box, drawn from Moholy-Nagy’s salle deux from the Paris Werkbund Exhibition of 1930, which combined Oilm, projectors, photomurals, and theatrical props into an assemblage that sought to integrate architectural space with the space of media (see Oigure 1-7a). This kind of integration became for both

Moholy-Nagy and Dorner a means of destroying the material of architecture and replacing it with the immaterial substance of projection, screens, or what Moholy-Nagy called

Lichtraum or “light-space.” As Elcott notes, Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator is the most exemplary application of this concept.50 Despite the appearance of the Light-Space

Modulator as a kind of kinetic sculpture, its intent was epiphenomenal. Spectators were expected to view the attendant patterns of shadow and light, while the device itself was depreciated in importance. The apparatus both introduced a new form of technology into the exhibition space of the museum, and as Elcott notes, produced a condition where the qualities of disembodiment, immateriality, and illusion were “mobilized toward new ends.”51 Elcott situates this as a quasi-Foucauldian turn from a Rieglian formalist art history towards a conception of technology in the gallery or aesthetic dispositif that produces a network of power relations.52

50 Elcott, 39. 51 Elcott, 46. 52 Ibid. Elcott understands this as a kind of dialectic where there is a “simultaneous abolishment and conservation” of the cinematic apparatus. 32 In this context Q-2 can be seen as a kind of black box situated between two poles: the interwar avant-garde notions of space as a new immersive and dematerialized medium on one end, and the apparatus of the emergent national security state on the opposite end.

Although it is difOicult to connect Q-2 directly to the avant-garde lineage of Dorner and

Moholy-Nagy both because of the distributed, institutional nature of its authorship, as well as due to the fact that it was never built, the Dreyfuss renderings (see Oigures 1-1 and 1-2) clearly show a debt to Moholy-Nagy’s “Room of Our Time” and more fundamentally to his idea of “simultaneous or poly-cinema.” As detailed in his 1925 Painting Photography Film, this concept of cinema relied on a set of continuous screens formed from a spherical segment that were designed to show a process of movement.53 Moholy-Nagy uses the example of simultaneously projected narrative Oilms occupying this continuous space, although the movement was designed to be abstract, using “non-objective light-projections” with no representational or narrative content.54 The “Room of Our Time” also shows a clear interest in this continuity of images and movement, as in the “Endless Belt” built into one of the walls out of a continuous sheet of images of Bauhaus and Moholy-Nagy’s own works (see Oigure 1-7b).55

Both Q-2 and “Room of Our Time” used architecture as a kind of information channel to

53 László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 41-42. Moholy-Nagy understands a circular or spherical surface for Oilm projection as a way of combining multiple narrative Oilms that intersect at key points. This is a kind of simultaneity of overload at the register of narrative rather than information. 54 Moholy-Nagy, 42. 55 Contemporary retrospectives of Moholy-Nagy’s work have featured a realization of “Room of Our Time.” See “Moholy-Nagy: Future Present,” organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago, on view at LACMA from February 12, 2017 to June 18, 2017. This realization was originated at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 2009. See Elcott, “Rooms of Our Time,” 49n25. 33 create a disembodied subject as both receiver and participant. In Q-2 the subject was no longer a spectator of prerecorded media, but an observer of events unfolding in real time.

Cognition and immediacy were linked through architecture. In this way Q-2 looks both backward to the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and forward to the canonical multimedia architectures of the postwar period. It is an architecture that is the product of merging the black box of “spaceless darkness” and the black box of computation and the human mind, enervating vision, and privileging thought and the concurrent mediation of events. In this sense Q-2 can be placed into a lineage of architecture that models human cognition and consciousness, pointing towards a different genealogy of assemblies of media and architecture that were built after World War II. The fact that Q-2 was never realized, that it exists only as an example of bureaucratic paper architecture, only reinforces its power as a paradoxical form, bridging functionalism, governance, exhibition techniques, and media in an architecture that was as much a prolepsis of the future as it was a culmination of avant-garde aspirations to create utopian forms of media technology within the boundaries of a museum. Yet in a very literal sense Q-2 did have a descendent that was realized; instead of a building, a set of rooms designed by Henry Dreyfuss was built for the

Combined Chiefs of Staff. Although these presentation rooms did not have the totalizing ambitions of Q-2, they reveal a continuing Oixation on visuality as the ultimate arbiter of intelligence, a Oixation that would turn from the intelligence of war and espionage into a rethinking of reasoning itself.

34 Henry Dreyfuss: Q-2 and the Presentation Room in the Combined Chiefs of Staff

Building

The only realized project that shows a clear debt to the conceptual work of Q-2 is the

Presentation Room built for the Combined Chiefs of Staff in 1943, in what was then the

United States Public Health Services Building at Constitution and 19th Street in

Washington, D.C. This presentation room acted both as a functioning media room and a showcase for the technologies of presentation instrumentalized by the war machine, and was signiOicant enough to warrant an OSS publication and an editorial spread in the

Feburary 22, 1943, issue of Life Magazine.56 The room was designed by Henry Dreyfuss, whose renderings for the proposed Q-2 situation room had demonstrated a process of grappling with the disposition of media projection and data visualization within interior architecture. The Presentation Room was in most ways a diminution of the scope and function of Q-2. While Q-2 was an entire building literally programmed to be a kind of information processing, data analysis, and data visualization system, the Presentation

Room was reduced in scale and in ambition to a two-room presentation theater. Yet it is worth looking at in order to understand how the architectural logic of Q-2 was realized in a more utilitarian context.

Dreyfuss himself describes the Presentation Room as a kind of set design. In his book

Designing for People, in the chapter “Working for the Government,” he describes the process

56 See Some Facts about the Presentation Room in the Combined Chiefs of Staff Building (Washington: U.S. Government Printing OfOice, 1943). This Oifteen-page pamphlet describes the interior layout and media equipment of the space using black-and-white photographs and captions. The February 22, 1943, issue of LIFE contains a photo essay featuring the Presentation Room. See “U.S. High Command Plans Strategy in Map- Filled Sanctum,” Life, February 22, 1943: 72–74. Interestingly, these photos were the only editorial content in color in the entire magazine. 35 of design as a kind of jigsaw puzzle combined with the task of accommodating the security and communications infrastructure.57 The Presentation Room was also designed to be entirely portable. Dreyfuss talks about how the room was created to have “the Olexibility of an Erector set,” since the room was assembled in an abandoned brewery in New York and had to be shipped to Washington, D.C., for installation within an auditorium in the United

States Public Health Services Building.58 An early sketch of the room preserved in the records of the OSS resembles a building within a building (see Oigure 1-8), with two main rooms for media presentation along with a small suite of ofOices and facilities for the preparation of visual presentations.59 The photographic documentation of the built rooms that appeared in LIFE and the OSS publication, Some Facts about the Presentation Room in the Combined Chiefs of Staff Building, appears to support the plan laid out in this sketch.

Figures 1-9 and 1-10 from LIFE show color photographs of what was called the “main” conference room, with a curving wall map and chairs speciOically for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The “smaller” conference room has a more traditional arrangement, with a U-shaped arrangement of tables oriented around a movie screen. Some Facts about the Presentation

Room describes these rooms respectively as “The Conference Room,” where “the entire wall surface of this room can be used for maps,” and somewhat confusingly, “The Presentation

Room,” which is similar rather to a movie theater that can be conOigured with tables (as in

57 Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People [1955]. (New York, NY; Boston, MA: Allworth Press; Design Management Institute, 2012), 162-165. Designing for People is Dreyfuss’s professional autobiography, detailing his career as a theatrical set designer and industrial designer. Dreyfuss brieOly alludes to Q-2 on p. 163, noting, “The original proposal was to erect a building, but this idea was abandoned because of lack of materials and the time limit.” 58 Dreyfuss, 163. 59 This unsigned sketch can be found in a folder in the Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 85 Box 7, Wash Visual Pres Proj, label 144, 145 Description: 00359. 36 the LIFE photoshoot) or folding chairs for forty people.60 Crucially, the programming speciOied different types of media for each space.

Two key ideas from Q-2 migrated from concept to realization in the Combined Chiefs of

Staff presentation rooms. Firstly, the idea that visual presentation should be a live, real-time event drove the design of the interior surfaces of the rooms. Figure 1-9 shows the disposition of the interior of the conference room with the curved steel map wrapping around the front of the room. Magnetic symbols could be placed manually on the map representing troop movements, convoys and enemy forces. The guiding principle of this map was its ability to be easily and continually updated. In addition to the magnets, information could be projected directly on the map via telescore projectors.61 These overlays could be meteorological symbols or any other type of information that did not need continual updates.

Secondly, the presentation room had a Olexibility in layout similar to Q-2, accommodating either rows of folding chairs in a lecture format or a more formal arrangement of conference tables oriented towards the main projection screen in the room.

The nature of the screen in this room is twofold. Hidden behind a curtain and proscenium

(see Oigure 1-8) is both an opaque screen for conventional Oilm or transparency projection, and a transparent screen for rear projection from a preparation room behind the screen.62

60 Some Facts about the Presentation Room, 5-9. 61 Dreyfuss, Designing for People, 164-5. Dreyfuss notes that these telescore projectors were appropriated from bowling alleys. A means of projecting bowling scores on a screen, telescore projectors used sheets of acetate that users could annotate directly, which were then projected onto larger screens mounted on the ceiling above alleys. 62 Some Facts about the Presentation Room, 8. Also see Oigure 1-8, which shows a “Chart Assembly, Storage, and Machinery Room” with a bench for stereomotograph (automatic slide projector), slide projector and epidiascope projecting onto the backside of the transparent screen in the Presentation Room. 37 The transparent screen was used for a reOlecting projector, or epidiascope. Episcopic projection (projection via reOlected light as opposed to transmitted light) allowed the viewing of opaque objects such as books, drawings, maps, and photographs. The speciOications for the epidiascopes in Some Facts about the Presentation Room indicate a sixteen-by-sixteen-inch projector for use on an eight-foot-square screen.63

The use of epidiascopes suggests an intersection with another type of architecture devoted to the live visualization of phenomena. Henning Schmidgen, in “1900–The

Spectatorium: On Biology’s Audiovisual Archive,” notes the extensive use of the epidiascope in physiological lecture halls of the early twentieth century. In Schmidgen’s formulation these lecture halls presented an archive not of static images and charts, but of biological specimens, an audiovisual record of live images of animal dissections.64 Schmidgen focuses in particular on the work of physiologist and pharmacologist Carl Jacobj, who directed the pharmacological institute in Tübingen from 1907-1927. Jacobj advocated a visual approach to education in the life sciences as a response to the need to efOiciently educate large numbers of students in increasingly complex domains of scientiOic knowledge. Jacobj explicitly erased a traditional architectural division in lecture halls for demonstrating experimental physiology, by bridging the preparation room and lecture hall with a transparent screen and what Schmidgen calls the “cinematography without Oilm” of the epidiascope.65 Figure 1-11 shows a plan of Jacobj’s intervention between lecture hall and preparation rooms. The Dreyfuss design (see Oigure 1-8) for the Combined Chief of Staff

63 Some Facts about the Presentation Room, 10. 64 Henning Schmidgen, “1900—The Spectatorium: On Biology’s Audiovisual Archive,” Grey Room, no. 43 (2011): 42–65. 65 Schmidgen, 49. 38 Presentation Rooms clearly echoes this arrangement. Although the “Chart Assembly,

Storage, and Machinery Room” involves no biological specimens, there is a parallel privileging of the visual as the primary register of conveying information and subject knowledge. In a 1927 article, “Visual Instruction and the Projection Method,” Jacobj argues for the primacy of the visual in education: “Vision is the most important channel by which objective knowledge reaches the mind, since it approximates material reality more closely than do any of the other senses.”66 Much of Jacobj’s rhetoric is echoed by the documentation for the Presentation Branch and Q-2, where the visual is ascendant, embodying both efOiciency and accessibility in conveying complexity. Images—particularly “live” ones”—are prized for directness. This focus on vision and image constitutes an essential link between the presentation rooms and architecture of the OSS, and Burtin’s Integration.

The OSS Presentation Branch and Will Burtin

The inOluence of OSS visual presentation strategies and the proposed Q-2 building on Will

Burtin is hard to precisely assess. At the same time there is extensive documentation of

Burtin’s service in the OSS and Army Air Force that illuminates key points of contact and clariOies his participation in both organizations. The single existing monograph on his work, the 2007 Design and Science, The Life and Work of Will Burtin, by R. Roger Remington and

Robert S.P. Fripp, notes that Burtin was inducted into the U.S. Army on July 14, 1943.

However, the authors conOlate his service in the Army Air Force and OSS;67 this is

66 Carl Jacobj, “Visual Instruction and the Projection Method,” Methods and Problems of Medical Education Sixth Series (1927), 1. 67 See R. Roger Remington and Robert S. P. Fripp, Design and Science : The Life and Work of Will Burtin (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2007). Chapter two in Design and Science focuses on Burtin’s graphic design career after he emigrated from Germany in July 1938. Before his induction into the

39 misleading since the OSS was an entirely separate, mainly civilian organization.68 A declassiOied memorandum from March 23, 1945, written by Hubert C. Barton, Chief of the

OSS Presentation Branch, presents a detailed timeline of OSS attempts to transfer Burtin from the Army into the OSS literally from the day he was inducted into the Army.69 This strange bureaucratic saga went on for almost two years, until May 8, 1945, when Burtin was ofOicially transferred to the Presentation Division of the OSS70 in response to a request six months earlier in November of 1944. The documents related to this bureaucratic imbroglio reveal that Burtin was working in the Psychological Research Section at Laredo

Army Air Field within the Flexible Gunnery Division.

Burtin’s major output from his time in the Army Air Force is the design of the Gunner’s

Information File manuals. Images and page spreads from these manuals are reproduced in the monograph by Remington and Fripp, as well as in the “Interrelations” essay.71 They are worth a brief examination as examples of Burtin’s interest in visualizing multiple instances of time in a single image, a technique he will later use in his Integration exhibition, which will be discussed in more detail at the end of this chapter. The Gunner’s Information File was intended as an instructional reference to train gunners in the techniques of aerial gunnery.

Army in 1943 his clients included The Architectural Forum, the Upjohn publication Scope, and the Federal Works Agency. Interestingly he designed the cover of a June 1939 issue of The Architectural Forum, featuring the Trylon and Perisphere as part of an issue covering the World’s Fairs in New York and San Francisco. See Remington and Fripp, 26. 68 Remington and Fripp, 33. 69 See H.C. Barton Jr. to Lt. Cmdr. B.W. Antell re Sgt. Will Burtin, Personnel Procurement Branch, March 23, 1945, Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 224. 70 See E. F. Connely to The Commanding General, Army Air Forces, subject Transfer of Army Personnel to the OfOice of Strategic Services, OfOice of Strategic Services, October 30, 1944, Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 224. 71 See Remington and Fripp, Design and Science, 35-36; and Burtin and Lessing, “Interrelations,” 109-110. Remington and Fripp note that Burtin worked on “at least” four other training manuals. The manuals were designed to be effective visually even with men who were illiterate. 40 Figures 1-12 and 1-13 are exemplary of the information design and visualizations used to portray the technique of aerial gunnery and concepts such as deOlection, which is needed to compensate when shooting at a moving Oighter from another plane in motion. Both of these images show multiple “sections” of time in a single frame, enabling a trainee to understand the underlying spatial principles of deOlection and how it can be used to target enemy aircraft.

Burtin’s ofOicial tenure in the OSS was from May 8, 1945, to October 5, 1945. The exact disposition of his work is unknown, although there is evidence that Eero Saarinen approached him as early as 1943 about joining the Presentation Branch. Saarinen was employed by the OSS as a consultant from October 15, 1942 and was appointed on March 5,

1943, to the position of Chief, Special Exhibitions section.72 In this position Saarinen worked on a variety of projects that were primarily described as “exact scale models of an architectural and terrain nature.” He also was involved in the design and creation of another situation room (for the Eisenhower Building) in 1945 that also went unrealized.73 Burtin’s role, if any, in these projects is unclear. He appears to have been assigned to projects of a more graphic nature, which supposedly included “Air Transport Command” and “Army

Personnel Control” presentations.74 Yet even if the exact inOluence of the Q-2 building

72 See memo from Director of Personnel, OfOice of Strategic Services, February 23, 1943, Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 224. 73 See the memo “Situation Room in the Department,” January 16, 1946, Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 85. This memo outlines the spatial requirements for the situation room in the State, War and Navy Building (currently known as the Eisenhower Executive OfOice Building). A State Department outline agenda also includes Saarinen by name in the discussion about the creation of a presentation room. See “Outline Agenda of State Department Meeting on the Presentation Room Proposals,” January 30, 1945, Records of the OfOice of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 85. The OSS was abolished by executive order on September 20, 1945, before the situation room could be completed. 74 See E. F. Connely to The Commanding General, Army Air Forces, subject Transfer of Army Personnel to the OfOice of Strategic Services, OfOice of Strategic Services, October 30, 1944. 41 proposal or any of the subsequent situation rooms upon Burtin’s work is speculative at best, there are decisive parallels that suggest a commonality of origin and an evolution of purpose that puts Burtin’s work in a lineage with Q-2.

Integration and the Ontology of the Black Box

It is important to note that Integration was staged at a gallery that was part of a transition from a hand-crafted, artisanal mode of typesetting and print production to a model based on industrial processes. The Composing Room and A-D Gallery were founded by Dr. Robert

Lincoln Leslie and Sol Cantor in 1927.75 The gallery held exhibitions from a range of graphic designers, including Paul Rand, Hebert Matter, Alvin Lustig, and Ladislav Sutnar, throughout the 1940s. The company was one of the Oirst New York-based typesetters to offer the speed and efOiciency of electromechanical “hot metal” typesetting for what was called “Oine advertising work.”76 The Linotype and Monotype systems used at the Composing Room are signiOicant in that they collapsed the production of type and its composition into one machine.77 In particular, the Monotype system converted the content to be typeset into perforated paper tape that was read by the typecaster. Both the Linotype and Monotype

75 See Steven Heller, “Dr. Leslie’s Type Clinic,” Eye 4, no. Winter (1994): 68–77, which details the history of the Composing Room and its role as both a commercial typesetter and a gallery that operated as a means of promoting modernist typography and design through the work of European émigré designers in the 1930s and 1940s. 76 Heller, 71. The Linotype machine itself was a mechanical contraption with a keyboard attached to a mechanized assembly that rapidly built lines of type via slugs of metal on demand, controlling a casting pot that held an alloy of tin, lead and antimony that would be cast into individual letters. It produced lines of customized type on demand, rather than “cold type” where each letter was prefabricated and needed to be manually composed. This kind of electromechanical automation allowed a vast increase in the quantity of daily printed journalism. See also, “What the Linotype Is,” in The Big Scheme of Simple Operation: A Primer on Linotype Mechanism and Operation. (Brooklyn, NY: Mergenthaler Linotype Company, 1940): 5-6. 77 “The Composing Room Story,” Print 4, no. 4 (1946): 21–28. This brief piece with no byline notes that The Composing Room used three of the major hot metal typesetting systems of the era: Mergenthaler Linotype, Lanston Monotype and the Ludlow Typograph. 42 systems can be seen as a historical pivot point where the “content” of design was being abstracted into a format of universal information.78

It is in this milieu that Ezra Stoller, in a series of photos of Integration documenting its installation within the A-D gallery in 1948, lit the space of the gallery as if it were in pitch blackness with spotlights illuminating key components of Integration. Figures 1-14 and

1-15 show the installation as if it was Oloating in a kind of spaceless chiaroscuro where Oloor and ceiling are obliterated. This lighting, which seems calculated to produce a dramatic effect, raises an interesting question: where is Integration supposed to exist? As a product of a very speciOic form of architecture designed to integrate space and screen seamlessly,

Burtin’s installation seems in one sense to be a regression: all of the media is static, there is no Oilm projection or use of sound. In many ways the image of the model of Integration is the most revealing (see Oigure 1-16). This image, which accompanies Burtin’s essay on

Integration in Graphis No. 27, implies that the installation itself is a model, a kind of three- dimensional rendering at the scale of a room.79 It is a model of the brain articulated through the language of design.

The key to this is a diagram that appears in the brochure for a showing of Integration at the Bundscho Library in Chicago in 1949. Accompanying an introductory text by Serge

Chermayeff, who at the time was president of the Institute of Design, the diagram shows a simpliOied model of the designer and their relationship to what Burtin calls the “four

78 It is notable that the perforated paper tape system used in the Monotype system was adapted for input/ output use in magnetic drum data storage units for early commercial computers in the 1950s. These paper- tape-based systems were called Flexowriters, and were essentially programmable typewriters that could be used as a kind of universal input/output device for a wide variety of applications. See Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1998), 38-44. 79 Burtin, “Integration, the New Discipline in Design,” 230. 43 realities” of design. Based on a compass wheel, the diagram shows each “reality” as a cardinal point on the compass accompanied by increments indicating various qualities of each reality (see Oigure 1-17). Although visually concise this diagram is full of antinomies.

The designer is at the center of the diagram—oddly putting the designer outside the reality of “man,” which is positioned as one of the communication vectors that the designer must deal with. In this dial of ontologies, Burtin positions architecture close to the reality of

“space/motion/time,” invoking Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture. At the same time the reality of “man” merges with the reality of “light/color/texture,” suggesting odd associations such as “state of health” becoming a kind of formal quality. Burtin appears to encourage different associations and relations between the four realities, with the disembodied designer at the center of this dial having equal access to each reality and its subdivisions. This diagram is not mapping a discipline, but rather a set of processes and potentials.

In the A-D gallery Integration articulates these relationships in a very different manner.

The disembodiment of the diagram is retained but spatialized. The exhibition plan for

Integration (see Oigure 1-18) shows the four wall panels representing each reality along with a central table. Clearly visualized in these production drawings by Displayers Inc. are the relationships between each wall panel. The diagonal lines crisscrossing through the central table are not just diagrammatic conventions, but are “drawn” into the exhibition as wires attached to hook eyes. The path of the wires suggests reOlected light, a catoptric quality that emphasizes the self-enclosed character of the exhibition. These connections emphasize a simple topology, or in Burtin’s own words the “interrelations” between the four realities. Burtin’s understanding of design, as articulated in the “Interrelations” essay,

44 entails a synthesis of science and art through the techniques of graphic representation, and is based essentially on reason: “this synthesis, involving a delicate interplay of intellectual and emotional values, the experienced and experimental, the speculative and provocative, proceeds from a base of reason and has its Oinal test in the understanding.”80 In this way

Integration is a topological model of the designer’s mind. This is the black box of media architecture reconstituted as a space of consciousness and reason.

The four panels representing each reality are arranged discretely in one panel per wall, with no obvious hierarchy. Burtin’s own diagram of the exhibit in the Bundscho Library pamphlet (see Oigure 1-19) shows the exhibition as a disembodied aggregation of elements coded in primary colors.81 The counter-clockwise circulation suggested in Oigure 1-19 indicates a progression beginning with man, passing through light and space/motion, and ending with science. This pathway of increasing abstraction, from elementary forms like color to the more inchoate properties of space/time, thus privileges the reality of science as the ultimate arbiter of what is situated as a “logical order” in visual communications.82

Important in this diagram are the conventions used to demonstration the relationships between each panel. A dotted circulation line indicates the path of a viewer that is immersed in the exhibition while being separate from the exhibition itself, participating only as a spectator. The promenade between the central table and the four panels is a meander, a suggestion rather than a clear map through the exhibit. In relation to the black boxes in Dreyfuss’s proposal for Q-2 and Moholy-Nagy’s “Room of Our Time,” Integration

80 Burtin and Lessing, “Interrelations,” 108. 81 See Will Burtin et al., Integration, An Exhibition (Chicago: The Art Directors Club of Chicago, 1949), inside cover. 82 See Burtin et al., Integration, An Exhibition, 8. 45 represents a hybrid of strategies. At one end of the spectrum, the presentation rooms and inner-sanctums of Q-2 were meant to enable a kind of visual reading, conveying information through an architecture of audiovisual apparatuses. At the other were the media rooms of Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Dorner, which were intended to produce a disembodied spectator through the medium of Oilm projection and its negation, a cinema without Oilm (Light-Space Modulator). Burtin combined the strategies of reading and disembodiment, while at the same time eschewing Oilm and sound or any sort of sequential media, instead using static media that suggested motion, analogy, and projection. In this sense Integration is constructed very much like a model of “visual reasoning,” the term coined by Burtin and Lessing to highlight the epistemic properties of graphic techniques of visualization.83 Burtin understands the “problem of space” that “underlies all design problems” as involving the extension of what he calls “visual consciousness.”84 This idea of consciousness as visual permeates Integration.

The panel (see Oigure 1-20) representing the “Reality of man” is the most sparse. On the

10’ × 6 ½’ Masonite board is an image of the Vitruvian Man adjacent to a grid of images functioning as a chart, and a human hand. As a visual translation of the idea that “Man is both – a measure and measurer,” this panel sets up the mechanics of visual Olow for the exhibition in a way that mirrors what Burtin and Lessing outlined in their “Interrelations” essay. In an illustration in “Interrelations,” they lay two sets of lines over a page from the design of one of Burtin’s U.S. Army Air Force training manuals to indicate the paths of

83 Burtin and Lessing, “Interrelations,” 108. 84 Burtin and Lessing, 111. In the last paragraph of this essay Burtin and Lessing advocate the use of three- dimensional models and exhibitions as a means of “grappling with the task of bringing into human consciousness the new realities of relativistic physics, atomic structure, and their interrelations.” 46 reading Olow.85 A dotted line indicates the “comprehensive glance” over the page, while a dashed line marks the path of “close reading.” Positioned as two forms of “optical comprehension,” this kind of twofold visual apprehension also guides the design of each panel in Integration. Burtin and Lessing note that this style of visual presentation is intended as a kind of “cinematic Olow” adapted to a static medium.86 The “Reality of man” panel utilizes this technique, with the “glance” of visual symbolism (hand and Vitruvian man) encapsulating an argument that Burtin literally places on the wall for a “close read” (visible in the lower left hand corner of Oigure 1-20).

This focus on visual logic is played out over the remaining three panels. The “Reality of light, color, texture” is visualized in a similar way, as a palette of colors in a four-by-six grid of circular shapes that are mapped onto different associations such as seasons, emotions, and visual qualities (see Oigure 1-21). Texture is also demonstrated, with panels of various materials, both natural and synthetic, attached to the Masonite panel and lines scored into a coat of paint on top of the Masonite. Notably, there is no key of associations for the array of textures, their haptic qualities being treated as self-evident.87

The following panel, on “Space, motion, time,” is devoted entirely to techniques of displaying moments of time on a single two-dimensional surface. In the most radical spatial articulation in the entirety of Integration, Burtin uses a combination of photography and metal wire models to show multiple instances of time on the same surface. Figure 1-22 shows four different examples of a kind of “frozen time.” The metal wire assemblage to the

85 Burtin and Lessing, “Interrelations,” 108-109. 86 Burtin and Lessing, 108. 87 There is no indication in any of the Burtin archival material or written documentation of whether this panel was designed to be actually touched. 47 right of the panel was meant to display the relative movements between earth, sun, and moon, over a period of Oive years. The image on the left appears to be a stroboscopic photograph of a man swinging at a baseball.88 Most revealing is the reproduction of the U.S.

Army Air Force training manual page from the “Interrelations” essay that overlaid two sets of lines to indicate the path of reading.89 This explicit indicator of how the exhibit is structured perceptually gives Integration a subtle self-reOlexivity; the viewer is made aware, at least potentially, of how their own perceptions are being shaped and manipulated.

“Space, motion, time” is also the product of Burtin’s desire to collapse space and time into a more relativistic relationship, or as Burtin deOines it: “When the effects of multiple motion in space were recognised, the concept of relativity emerged, which lends time a double meaning—measure of space and evolution—and changes space itself from a linear to spherical volume.”90 The effects of this concept of relativity can be seen in media of all types: at the scale of the page, where reading time and typographic organization were paramount; in the temporal condensation of motion pictures; and in the spatial organization of exhibitions. A key transposition happens in Integration: Burtin deliberately transmutes Einstein’s conception of relativity into principles of design. Even in 1948 Burtin was following an avant-garde lineage initiated by the Futurists that had seized on the ideas in special relativity and the concept of “space-time” to reimagine the plastic arts.91 The

88 Most likely this is an image from the work of Harold Edgerton, who, starting in the early 1930s, created innovative high-speed, multiOlash photographs which froze rapid movement in single frames. See “The Edgerton Digital Collections (EDC) project” (MIT), http://edgerton-digital-collections.org. 89 These appear to be the images that appear on pgs. 18 and 109 in the “Interrelations” essay. 90 Burtin, “Integration, the New Discipline in Design,” 231. 91 See Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), for a convincing genealogy of the inOluence of special relativity and the physical sciences on the early avant-garde. In particular, chapter three, “Physical Theory and Modernity: Einstein, Boccioni, Sant’Elia,” deals with the “new plasticity” of space in Futurist sculpture and architecture. 48 stroboscopic image, where “motion collapses into stages: Time and space melt into one single unit,” is of particular importance to Burtin. More broadly, each of the four panels is meant to be read in relation to the others, while acting simultaneously as a unitary whole, a means of “integration.” There is also a distinct echo of Gyorgy Kepes’s Language of Vision, where Kepes observes that “spacetime is order, and the image is an ‘orderer.’”92 Both Kepes and Burtin privilege the image as the unique arbiter of space, Burtin going so far as to unequivocally conOlate the two: “the visual image (space) can develop from realism to illusions of astonishing depth and dexterity.”93

This belief in the ordering and illusionistic properties of images comes to an apotheosis in the Oinal panel of Integration. Designed as the concluding panel to the exhibition, “Reality of science” takes the epistemic and representational qualities of the image to its extreme, even to the point of obscuring the ostensible content of the panel. In the war between the epistemology of the image and the epistemology of science, the image wins. Organized as an overlapping collage of disparate images visualizing different natural and scientiOic phenomena, this panel as a whole seems more invested in the aesthetics of scientiOic visualization than in science itself. Figures 1-23 and 1-24 show a panel that is almost entirely devoted to the reproduction of an equation. Demarcated with a three-by-Oive grid, the panel has the look of a lab notebook or a hemocytometer grid used to count blood cells.

The overlapping cluster of images towards the right side of the panel appears to be a demonstration of the range of imagery that can be produced from natural and technological phenomena. The arbitrary, unsystematic nature of the imagery encourages the logic of

92 Kepes, Language of Vision, 68. 93 Burtin, “Integration, the New Discipline in Design,” 231. 49 association and “interrelation” that Burtin is concerned with. This collection of images includes an image of spectral analysis, an infrared image of the Milky Way, photos of industrial machinery, particle paths from a cloud chamber, graphs of behavior patterns after the administration of a drug, a leaf representing photosynthesis, and images of the structure of synthetic rubber.94 The massive equation that acts as a backdrop provides a counterpoint, being used almost like wallpaper, while being entirely inscrutable unless the viewer understands the language of mathematics. There is no indication anywhere in the exhibition identifying the equation or explaining its signiOicance other than as a kind of stand-in for the processes of scientiOic abstraction. The equation itself appears to utilize a

Rayleigh number (Ra). SigniOicantly, the Rayleigh number is an expression in Oluid mechanics measuring the level of convection or Oluid motion caused by differences in density, a crucial component in understanding nonlinear systems in disciplines such as meteorology.95 Although it is difOicult to ascertain whether Burtin was intentionally using this equation as a way to indicate an afOinity with a set of scientiOic concepts, it seems signiOicant that Oluid mechanics is an important part of the genealogy of the interface.

Branden Hookway, in his study of of the interface, notes that much of the understanding of the interface is derived from nineteenth-century studies of Oluid dynamics. Engineer James

94 Captions for each image are present on the panel, although the text is difOicult to read in photo documentation of the exhibit. Two of the images appear to be from Burtin’s own work for Fortune magazine during his tenure as art director from 1945-1949. The piece with images of penicillin molds appears to be a spread on antibiotics, and the infrared image of the Milky Way appears to be taken from another Fortune spread. 95 For the signiOicance of the Rayleigh number in postwar meteorology, see Amy Dahan Dalmedico, “History and Epistemology of Models: Meteorology (1946-1963) as a Case Study,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 55, no. 5 (2001): 395–422. David Aubin also notes the importance of the Rayleigh number in characterizing convection systems that were key in the development of chaos and catastrophe theory in the 1970s. See Aubin, “A Cultural History of Catastrophies and Chaos: Around the ‘Institut des hautes etudes scientiOiques,’ France,” Phd. diss., Princeton University, 1998. 50 Thomson coined the term “interface” in 1869 in a paper that described the “dynamic boundary condition” between one Oluid body and another.96 Hookway positions the concept of the interface as fundamentally a “form of relation,” or a way of relating to technology, not a form of technology itself.97

Burtin’s Integration is the strangest of black boxes. It is intermediate in form, a system of screens designed to convey complex visual information, while at the same time being an ideological model for the designer, situated in a cinema without Oilm or projectors. The diagram (see Oigure 1-19) drawn as a kind of map for Integration is a topology of enclosure, the nodes and edges referring only to the internal logic of the four panels. The spectator becomes a peripatetic link with the outside, passing through a succession of Oixed images that are mobilized only by the spectator’s movement through the space. Anne Friedberg in her study The Virtual Window notes the paradoxical relationship between Oilm and architecture. The cinema, with its effects of panning, montage, and tracking shots, offers a

“virtual mobility,” in Friedberg’s words, “the illusion of transport to other places and times for its spectators.”98 This is counterbalanced by the way that the architecture of the cinema developed as an extension of the theater, with a seated audience and projected images on a screen behind a proscenium. Friedberg positions the cinema of the 1920s and 1930s as part of a continuum of movement that includes a “prologue and postlogue” of walking in urban environments.99 At the same time cinemas were shorn of ornament and decoration,

96 Quoted in Branden Hookway, Interface (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), 59-60. Hookway understands Oluid dynamics as a kind of physical instantiation of paradoxical concepts. Thomson’s idea that an interface is a “dividing surface” implies that two Oluid bodies share a single surface. 97 Hookway, 1-7. 98 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 160-161. 99 Friedberg, 167. 51 turning them into stripped-down functionalist boxes for viewing a single screen. Burtin combines these two modes of experience into a kind of promenade of screens. Lacking mechanical projection, the only motion occurred through the movement of the spectator, every image being static even if capturing multiple moments of time in the same image.

This quasi-Oilmic movement achieved through walking provides a key link to Friedberg’s observation on the emergence in the late 1930s of the idea “that modern visuality is implicitly cinematic.”100 She links this directly to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 essay, “Montage and Architecture,” where Eisenstein analyzes the Acropolis as a kind of montage created by a viewer’s path through the buildings. Eisenstein sees the site plan of the Acropolis as a very carefully considered arrangement of views, a kind of editing in space, that creates a

“montage” of alternating panoramic, oblique, and en face views of building facades that becomes essentially cinematic.101 Interestingly, Eisenstein also applies this type of reading to the iconography of Bernini’s Baldacchino di San Pietro, seeing in the eight Barberini coats of arms on the plinths of the Baldacchino a sequence that satirizes Urban VIII.102 Of interest here is what can be seen as a hermeneutics of architectural circulation.

In this light, Burtin’s design of Integration appears as an atavistic operation, a return to the movement of the spectator as a pre-modern technique of creating a proto-cinematic

“montage” through architectural circulation, while at the same time using this movement to inculcate a “language of vision.” This language was based primarily on a concatenation of images in a suggested sequence of four panels, but was also understood in a topological,

100 Friedberg, 172. 101 Sergei M. Eisenstein and Yves-Alain Bois, “Montage and Architecture,” Assemblage, no. 10 (1989): 117-120. Eisenstein creates this reading by direct quotation from Auguste Choisy’s 1899 Histoire d’architecture, situating his own interpretation as already embedded in existing scholarship. 102 Ibid., 121-125. 52 nonlinear sense, as a network of associations. Burtin, with his logic of “interrelations” and use of a promenade architecturale within a topology of screens and images, succeeds in creating a model of consciousness and reasoning. The black box of information and the black box of media are merged to create the ultimate black box, a kind of prototype of cognition. In this sense Integration looks forward in two different ways. Firstly, it anticipates Burtin’s own, more instrumental uses of visuality, architectonic space, and networks of images as the analogical structure of thought and consciousness. This is realized primarily in the Brain installation, the subject of the next chapter, a didactic, multimedia mechanism meant to promote an understanding of the function of the human brain, which was commissioned by the Upjohn pharmaceutical company in 1960. Secondly,

Integration offers an intriguing parallel to the development of the black box in postwar cybernetics and information theory. A concept that is the product of thinking about epistemic unknowns, the black box found its earliest articulation in the work of Norbert

Weiner and W. Ross Ashby.103 Ashby in particular saw the black box not only as a thought experiment related to electrical engineering and deductive reason, but also as a way of approaching the incompletely observed phenomena of everyday life.104 This conceptual plasticity of the black box allows the elucidation of a genealogy where architectural black boxes containing media and information can entangle themselves with the nascent “science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine.”105 Frictions of this type can

103 W. Ross Ashby, Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1956), 86-117. In chapter six, “The Black Box,” Ashby positions the black box as a part of the foundational logic of cybernetics. 104 Ashby, 109-113. Here Ashby extends the idea of the black box to the epistemic problems of everyday life using the example of a bicycle, which seems explicable by basic Newtonian mechanics yet is still composed of “interatomic forces that hold the particles of metal together” (p. 110). 105 See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: MIT Press, 1961). 53 result in the production of new kinds of “monsters” that resist reduction to the machine while at the same time unavoidably situating brains and computers as just different types of machines.106 This is less a co-constitutive relationship than one where architecture, exhibition design, and media cut orthogonally across the discourse of servomechanisms, machine organisms, and the new “universal science” of cybernetics, to Oind different ways of modeling and manipulating consciousness through novel integrations of architecture and media.

106 In a 1960 letter to J. C. Gauntlett an executive at Upjohn, Burtin in his preparations for showing the Brain installation at the American Medical Association convention describes it as a “monster” that “is going to be quite beautiful.” See Will Burtin to J. C. Gauntlett, May 9, 1960, 14.5, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 54 Chapter 2 – Upjohn’s Brain: Exhibiting the Black Box

In June of 1960 at the American Medical Association convention in Miami, the Upjohn

Company displayed a device on a platform twenty-four feet in diameter. Twelve feet in height, the dome-like assembly had three large disks that operated as screens for an audience arrayed around the platform and acted like a proscenium. This strange device had a single didactic purpose: to reveal and explain the function of the human brain. Although the device, designed by Will Burtin, was made as a commission for the Upjohn Company, the project is a continuation of many of Burtin’s ideas that were on display in Integration.

The somewhat startling visual form of The Brain is accounted for by the fact that the model was never meant to be visually mimetic of an actual human brain;1 Burtin’s design was intended rather as a conceptual explanation of the brain’s function. It is a model rendered in aluminum and 40,000 lights, the lights functioning as pixels in coarse resolution screens that demonstrated the path of stimulus in the brain.

The development of The Brain is consistent with many of the principles developed in the Q-2 proposal at the OSS, and continued in Burtin’s Integration, where three- dimensional space is considered as a communications medium. Burtin, writing in the

August 1960 issue of Industrial Design, invokes the function of communications, noting that

The Brain demonstrates “receiving, articulating and commanding responses to experience.”2 These qualities could only be demonstrated through “real space, and motion,

1 In ofOicial Upjohn Company publications and archival material there appears to be no canonical name for the brain model. The model is referred to as “Brain,” “The Brain,” and “Brain exhibition.” For consistency and utilizing Chicago Manual of Style conventions for exhibition names, the model will be referred to as The Brain. 2 Will Burtin, “The Human Brain,” Industrial Design 7, no. 8 (1960): 66–69. 55 and color,” situating the conceptual model of the brain in direct relation to three- dimensional space. In a broad sense this method was designed to reveal the inner workings of the black box of the human brain, even if this attempt was ultimately an explanation of an abstract process through another set of abstracted processes. The architectural logic of The

Brain was predicated on interlocking “segments of spheres,” each segment representing a different functional brain center.3 This was a way to indicate the lateralization of functions in the cerebral cortex (popularized as the so-called “right” and “left” sides of the brain), as well to simulate consciousness through the central disk, which was named the

“consciousness screen.” The three hemispheres of The Brain functioned as screens, utilizing a wide array of representational techniques that included both abstracted, pixelated elements and photographic imagery. The screens and aluminum structures of the model were supplemented by a more conventional exhibit that detailed the historical development of the scientiOic understanding of the brain, as well as by a textbook-style presentation of the current understanding of brain structure and function. Burtin, in a letter written in early 1960 to Dr. A. G. Macleod, ScientiOic Director of Upjohn, notes that he intended the model of the brain to “stress the conceptual order,” while the ancillary exhibitions focused more on “the complexity of that order.”4

As an architectural model, The Brain inverts the typical scale relationships, operating at a level of magniOication of roughly thirty-six to one, and enlarging the brain to the size of an enclosure twenty-four feet in diameter and twelve feet high.5 The physical substrate of the

3 See Dr. A. Garrard Macleod, “Demonstrating a process,” in Will Burtin, Visual Aspects of Science (Kalamazoo, Michigan: The Upjohn Company, 1964), n.p. 4 Will Burtin to Dr. A.G. Macleod, letter, January 30, 1960, Box 12, Folders 3-4, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 5 Remington and Fripp, Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin, 89. 56 human brain, which occupies around 1,500 cubic centimeters, is blown up and transformed into a kind of audiovisual display system. Designed for an audience of around Oifty people, this model was widely disseminated as a traveling exhibition, making stops in Los Angeles,

Cleveland, and New York, and appearing on NBC’s Today Show.6

The Brain as an exhibition and model had the primary goal of acting as a promotional tool for the Upjohn Company, speciOically its mass-market promotion of a relatively new class of psychopharmacological drugs that instrumentalized brain physiology to alter and enhance mood and affect. The promotional literature commissioned by Upjohn for The

Brain often included an insert advertising Monase (see Oigure 2-1) or etryptamine acetate, a compound manufactured speciOically to treat depressive and psychotic symptoms in

“patients with no demonstrable pathology.”7 The Brain was designed as a mechanism to demystify the function of the brain in order to make both medical and lay audiences more comfortable with the idea of prescribing and using psychopharmacological agents. This installation was not intended to alter perception or consciousness, but rather to make the spectator aware of “the problem of how we think about thinking,” in a kind of reOlexive process.8 What is fascinating here is that an installation designed to promote an entactogen

—a drug that altered affect and experiences of empathy—was premised on a clearly

6 Remington and Fripp, 94. 7 See The Upjohn Company, A Moment at a Concert (Kalamazoo, Michigan: The Upjohn Company, 1961). The promotional insert for Monase was intended for an audience of medical doctors at conventions. Copy in the center spread of the brochure appropriates the well-known line often attributed to Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, “hyacinths to feed the soul,” as a way of positioning industrial pharmaceutical products as a kind of medical art. The advertising copy also anticipates the idea that psychopharmacological drugs could be marketed to consumers with no discernible pathology other than the “blues.” 8 Burtin, “The Human Brain,” 68. 57 mechanistic model of brain function.9

Burtin’s later writings about The Brain indicate an intriguing shift in the way he understood the model. In a 1965 essay “Design and Communications,” written for the

Gyorgy Kepes-edited volume Education of Vision, Burtin talks about The Brain as an “audio- visual experience.”10 In this scheme the emphasis is less on the intricacies of neurophysiology than on the immediate experience of sound and image. The model becomes an apparatus for understanding the brain as a kind of spatial media. This framing of the brain as a form of media can be understood within a genealogy of the black box.

Burtin’s model of the brain is a key point of inOlection where the techniques of media and simulation became explicitly redeOined as a model of cognition.

This machine-like representation of the brain has two aspects: the physiological understanding in the 1960s of brain function as essentially mechanical, and the formal expression of this mechanism through the tropes of architecture. The seemingly incongruous yoking together of these disparate domains created the conditions for representing consciousness as a kind of media. This idea is informed by a discourse of information theory, applied to the neurophysiology of the brain. By the early 1960s the idea of the brain as a kind of “machine that thinks” had become a relatively familiar notion.11

9 The classiOication of Monase as an entactogen occurred only retroactively. “Entactogen” was coined in 1986 by David E. Nichols to describe a psychoactive compound that is “not hallucinogenic, but rather facilitates communication and introspective states.” See David E. Nichols, et al. “Derivatives of 1-(1,3-Benzodioxol-5- Yl)-2-Butanamine: Representatives of a Novel Therapeutic Class,” Journal of Medicinal Chemistry 29, no. 10 (1986): 2009–15. Upjohn promotional literature describes Monase somewhat ambiguously as creating a “simple psychomotor effect.” See Monase insert in A Moment at a Concert. 10 Will Burtin, “Design and Communication,” in Education of Vision, edited by Gyorgy Kepes (New York: G. Braziller, 1965), 88. 11 For example, see Edmund C. Berkeley, Giant Brains or Machines That Think (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949). Berkeley was computer scientist who used symbolic logic to address operations in insurance companies. Giant Brains was intended for a mass audience with no scientiOic or technical background. 58 The notion that the brain could be understood like a mechanism had its roots in neurophysiological research of the 1920s and 1930s. One of Burtin’s scientiOic collaborators, Dr. Wilder PenOield, produced a map of the body in 1937 from the perspective of the cortical areas of the brain, exaggerating the size of body parts in proportion to the relative size of the cortical areas devoted to that body part.12 Called the “sensory and motor homunculus,” this distorted mapping created a representation of brain function through the more familiar language of the human body, where the hands, tongue, and lips were massively exaggerated in size relative to the chest and abdomen.13 Although this technique of representation had little direct inOluence on The Brain, it is clear that the conceptual move of articulating brain function through a more accessible means of presentation appealed to Burtin. PenOield’s homunculus demonstrated a clearly mechanistic vision of the brain where there was a clear one-to-one relationship of body part to cortical center.

At the same time The Brain has clear antecedents in the architecture of media presentation. The use of the sphere can be seen as part of a lineage that extends back to

Harrison and Filoux’s Trylon and Sphere and its inOluence on Henry Dreyfuss’s proposal for

Q-2’s elliptical presentation room. The use of “sections of spheres” also invokes a genealogy of the Enlightenment. Etienne-Louis Boullée’s Projet de Cénotaph de Newton stands as a symbolic precedent, in that it united the entirety of scientiOic and metaphysical knowledge into one architectonic form.14 The sphere was used as a device to assemble a summa of all

12 Wilder PenOield and Erwin Boldrey, “Somatic Motor and Sensory Representation in the Cerebral Cortex of Man as Studied by Electrical Stimulation,” Brain 60, no. 4 (1937): 432. 13 Ibid. 14 Paula Young Lee, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Boullée’s ‘Atlas’ Facade for the Bibliothèque Du Roi,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 4 (1998): 404–31. Lee sees Boullée's use of the globe and sphere as a means to unify the ancient and modern, myth and epistemology. 59 existing knowledge repeatedly during the nineteenth century, notably in the form of geographer James Wyld’s Great Globe. A competitor to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the

Great Globe was a map of the earth scaled to the concave interior of a globe. Designed to be viewed via a four-story staircase that situated the spectator within a 10,000-square-foot map of the world highlighting key features of the British empire, the Great Globe performed like a panorama as well as an immersive cartography that promoted the epistemologies of colonialism and state.15 Bernard Lightman notes the hybrid nature of the Great Globe, which was didactic in intent while also functioning as a kind of entertainment adjacent to the panorama and other spectacles in Leicester Square.16 The Brain echoes this sort of hybridity, functioning as a mechanism to convey an understanding of the operation of the human brain, while providing a spectacle or novel experience that could be engaged by a broad audience.

Interestingly, The Brain is nearly absent in the secondary literature outside of monographic treatments speciOic to Burtin’s work as a graphic designer. R. Roger

Remington’s brief article “Will Burtin’s Brain exhibit for Upjohn,” which appeared in a 2005 issue of Information Design Journal, is the sole article that addresses The Brain in any depth, and Remington’s treatment is more descriptive than historical or critical.17 Other than a perfunctory reference to Herbert Bayer’s exhibition designs in the 1930s, there is little attempt to contextualize Burtin’s work within any broader history of architecture or design.

Remington notes that Burtin, “anticipated by 35 years the communications Oield called

15 Bernard Lightman, “Spectacle in Leicester Square: James Wylds Great Globe, 1851-1861,” in Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840-1910 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 19-39. 16 Ibid. 17 See R. Roger Remington, “Will Burtin’s Brain Exhibit for Upjohn,” Information Design Journal 13 (2005): 249–54. 60 ‘multimedia’,” yet this is merely restating Burtin’s own view of his work, as in the aforementioned 1965 essay where Burtin describes The Brain as an “audio-visual experience.”18 Bayer’s work does provide a useful precedent, even though Bayer’s implicit premise is that of the mobile spectator immersed in a Oield of static displays in a gallery, while The Brain shifts this dynamic to one of static spectators viewing mobile images and abstract visual patterns, something more akin to viewing a Oilm in a theater.19

The conception and design of The Brain are located both within these histories and in the corporate sponsorship of Upjohn, culminating in the exhibition of The Brain at Italia ’61 in Turin, Italy. As a kind of black box, this model of the brain was designed to externalize and reveal function, driven by a didactic design that understood space as a topology of duration. Instead of epistemic opacity, The Brain offered “explanations,” but only through metaphors that materialized the ineffable processes of cognition and consciousness, through the media of installations and architecture. This entrance into an art and architectural discourse both aligned Burtin’s model with the idea that organic and electronic brains needed to be “designed,” and undermined Burtin’s desire that his model brain avoid all analogies of the human brain with electronic computational devices.

Designing the Brain

Designed as an audiovisual experience that simulated perception in the human brain, the assertion that The Brain should not be directly compared to any sort of computational mechanism creates a very odd tension in the project. This arises from the fact that the brain

18 Remington, 253. 19 Anne Friedberg notes that this is the fundamental paradox of the cinematic spectator, the “twin paradoxes —of mobility and immobility.” See Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 150. 61 model is in part an analysis of time through space. In portraying the process of perception, events that would take fractions of seconds are protracted to Oive to eight minutes. Time is slowed down in order to allow a precise visualization of the development of thought through image and sound. This representation of thought as motion mirrors an understanding of physical movement as motion frozen in a singular frame, what Sigfried

Giedion refers to as the “springs of mechanization,” which is best exempliOied in the work of

Étienne Jules Marey, Harold Edgerton, and Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth.20 Burtin united the mechanization of neurophysiology with a mechanization of thought itself in the Upjohn brain model: brain as mind as machine.21

The brain model was conceived as a speciOic sequence of events, a temporal structure as much as a spatial structure. The three main documents that detail this structure are:

“Suggested sequence of events in the Upjohn brain model based on Dr. Macloed’s [sic] script and Mr. Salt’s (Displayers) electrical analysis,” dated April 3, 1960; “Upjohn ‘Brain’ Exhibit -

Order No. 9504 Action Sequence,” dated October 13, 1960; and “Upjohn Narrative,” from

1960.22 The “Action Sequence” details forty-four actions that comprise a complete demonstration of the model. The duration of the performance was originally designed to be

300 seconds, or Oive minutes; further development throughout 1960 lengthened the

20 Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 17-30. 21 The idea that computation is a mechanization of thought processes was often explicitly articulated. In 1958 an early computer science conference addressing machine intelligence, sponsored by the National Physical Laboratory of the United Kingdom, was titled, “Mechanisation of Thought Processes.” See “Mechanisation of Thought Processes; Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the National Physical Laboratory on 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th November 1958” (London: H.M. Stationery OfOice, 1959). 22 “Suggested sequence,” “Upjohn ‘Brain’ Exhibit - Order No. 9504 Action Sequence,” and “Upjohn Narrative” can be found in Box 12, Folders 3-4 at the Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 62 sequence to 490 seconds, or a little over eight minutes after adding a voiceover narrative component.23 The “Action Sequence” and “Upjohn Narrative” documents invoke parallels with graphical forms like the micromotion studies of Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth. The

Gilbreths’ micromotion studies, undertaken to quantify worker efOiciency in routine tasks, are a kind of predecessor to The Brain and these scripting documents, which parse representation of brain processes down to the second. As Elliott Sturtevant notes, the micromotion studies brought human and machine elements into “a single conceptual grammar.”24

The “Action Sequence” in particular engages in an explanatory method of breaking down movement into discrete actions. A sample of the Action Sequence that describes actions 36 and 37 (see Oigure 2-2) shows a conOlation of model and brain anatomy, where light tubes Olow in and out of the central mid-brain disk and illuminated patterns turn on and off in an elaborate choreography of processing sight and sound. The Gilbreths’ use of graphic representations such as their “Simultaneous Motion Cycle Chart,” which graphs the movement of a worker performing a task by breaking it down into sixteen elements, Oinds a successor in the Upjohn brain model. The Brain acts as a visualization, prescribing a kind of conceptual model for the viewer so that they might understand their own cognitive processes as a kind of efOicient machinery. This machine is unusual however, in that it does not manufacture material things, but images and patterns.

It is worth recalling Burtin’s work in the U.S. Army Air Force, which focused mainly on

23 The “Upjohn Narrative,” which appears to be a later iteration, shows the eight-minute presentation divided into twenty sequences, each with a speciOied duration between 2 and 112 seconds. 24 Elliot Sturtevant, “ ‘Degrees of Freedom’: On Frank and Lillian Gilbreath’s Allocation of Movement,” Thresholds, no. 42 (2014): 166 63 the design of training manuals for aerial gunnery.25 As noted in chapter one, these were visually sophisticated documents that were meant to be understood by soldiers with high school educations. Because of a lack of Oixed positioning, gunners had to use “non- computing” sights that did not automatically correct for deOlection. Hence these manuals were designed to teach heuristics for “computing” angles of deOlection on the Oly. Much of the content of these manuals involves illustration strategies of simultaneous motion portrayed in the same frame. For example, Oigures 2-3 and 2-4, respectively, show a pursuit curve for a Oighter attacking a bomber from two different points of view, and six different frontal attacks from the point of view of a nose gunner. As a substitute for an analog computer, the human gunner had to be trained via a method called “position Oire,” which gave rules of thumb for interpreting the apparent motion of an attacking Oighter. This concept of the user is different than that used by Norbert Wiener in the construction of his antiaircraft predictor, a servomechanism designed to anticipate the Olight path of enemy

Oighters and Oire at the anticipated position. As Peter Galison notes, the design of the predictor assumed that human beings could be understood as a type of “mechanical analogue,” and as part of a system of feedback and control that was essentially mechanical.26 Burtin’s Olexible gunnery manuals do not replace soldiers with servomechanisms, but instead aim to inculcate a machine-like vision and perception in human subjects. Adapting cinematic techniques to the page, Burtin employs a sort of

25 See United States Army Air Forces, Training Aids Division and Army Air Forces Instructors School, Gunner’s Information File: Flexible Gunnery (Training Aids Division, OfOice of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Training Headquarters, Army Air Forces, 1944). 26 Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 240. The phrase “mechanical analogue” is quoted from Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician, the Later Life of a Prodigy; an Autobiographical Account of the Mature Years and Career of Norbert Wiener and a Continuation of the Account of His Childhood in Ex-Prodigy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 251-52. 64 montage to compress as much information as possible into a single frame. Burtin emphasizes the efOiciency of his gunnery manuals, claiming that, “training time for aerial gunners was cut exactly in half, from twelve weeks to six.”27 In effect, humans were being used as ready-made “computing” mechanisms. The gunners were a key component in a human-machine interface, where the human plays the role of the “computer,” the machine is a non-computing piece of weaponry, and the “software” is a printed and bound manual of illustrations and text. Burtin’s excursion into creating human computers dovetails with

Galison’s observation that war was the historical crucible that produced cybernetics, an ideology of feedback and self-regulation that understood nature and human behavior as counterpoised servomechanisms.28 Burtin’s task with the design of the Olexible gunnery manuals was to aid in the retraining of human perception as a kind of servomechanism, a human-machine akin to Wiener’s “Manichean devils” that use tricks and cunning to battle a capricious enemy.29

It is in this context that Burtin’s work in designing Upjohn’s brain model should be seen.

The task now changed from designing better training manuals as “inputs” feeding into the black box of the human brain, to dismantling the black box of the human brain in a way that explained the process of perception as a kind of mechanism. The retraining of perception evolved from an instrumental action of killing the enemy to a self-reOlexive understanding of the process of perception itself. The brain model presents perception as a kind of motion, which enacts a mechanical, efOicient process. This process parallels the concepts of

27 Burtin and Lessing, “Interrelations,” 109. 28 Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 263-66. 29 See Galison. 65 cybernetics, but also unavoidably intersects with an understanding of the brain as a digital mechanism.

Despite the antipathy of Burtin and Upjohn towards any direct comparison of the brain model to a computer, the design process of The Brain often appropriated the design language of the computer industry. This is particularly obvious in a series of photos taken by Ezra Stoller of early models of the brain. Figures 2-5 and 2-6 show a model that is even more abstracted than the Oinal version. It seems that this iteration conceived of the audience as more casual in its interaction; there appears to be no seating, and spectators would apparently be encouraged to approach the exhibit in order to view the half-spheres representing different functional parts of the brain. The most curious thing here is the display behind the brain model, which appears to contain a light box that would display backlit images. This arc-shaped structure would have displayed supplementary material in a more traditional exhibition format. The use of a curving arc as a partial enclosure brings to mind John Harwood’s observation that IBM used a design strategy of the

“counterenvironment,” or a means of enclosing the space of computation that scaled from the level of computers to architecture. The 1961 Thomas B. Watson IBM Research and

Development Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, designed by Eero Saarinen and

Associates, with its concentric arcs oriented around a vast, open courtyard seems to echo the structure of The Brain. Harwood considers this building a “counterenvironment” turned inside out.30

The fact this early iteration of the Upjohn brain evokes these tropes of environment/

30 John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 122. 66 counterenvironment, modularity, and interiority, gives it a conceptual adjacency to the developing corporate design language of computation. There is also evidence that Burtin and Upjohn explicitly sought collaborations with IBM as a way to show the parallels between scientiOic models of the brain and the mechanisms of computation.

Burtin, in correspondence related to exhibition plans for The Brain in August of 1960, notes the possibility of collaboration with IBM: “[IBM] was very interested in a joint exhibition of the Upjohn Brain with IBM's mechanized memory (computer) demonstration.

Their purpose would be to state that they are not in the ‘brain business’ but merely in a more adequate utilization of one function which human memory performs.”31 This comparison by way of exhibition was to have occurred in IBM’s showroom at 590 Madison

Avenue, designed by Eliot Noyes.32 What is interesting here is the attempt to differentiate

The Brain, not by avoiding direct comparison to a computer, but rather by way of a direct juxtaposition of the two that would presumably indicate their obvious differences. At the same time, IBM’s focus on instrumentalizing narrow functional domains such as “memory” only mirrors Upjohn’s understanding of the human brain via a “strict physiological approach” that conceived of the brain as a mechanism.33

The Brain was an exhibition haunted by the mechanism of computation. This resulted from the fact that Upjohn and Burtin conceived their model of brain function within a Oield of knowledge predicated on the mathematical modeling of biology. A disdain for psychoanalysis as both overly subjective and insufOiciently empirical underlies almost all of

31 See Will Burtin to W. Fred Allen, letter, August 8, 1960, Box 12, Folders 3-4, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 32 Harwood, The Interface, 45-46. 33 See The Upjohn Company, The Brain [Brochure] (Kalamazoo, Michigan: The Upjohn Company, 1961). 67 the literature that accompanies the brain exhibition. Instead, a focus on the brain as a “sum of Oinely coordinated composite functions localized in many more or less distinct anatomical structures” demonstrates a mechanistic approach that would allow the brain to be quantiOied and assessed in ways that could be targeted by a pharmaceutical manufacturer like Upjohn.34 Crucially, The Brain was created in an era where human brain function had been conceptualized as immanently mathematical. The work of Nicolas

Rashevsky, who founded the Oield of mathematical biophysics, was foundational to the understanding of the human brain as a network of neurons that operated as an “engine of logic,” using discrete on/off states as a way of propagating signals throughout the brain.35

This resulted in the concept of the nervous system and brain as a “net of neurons” governed by a propositional logic, an idea introduced by Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts in their seminal article, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in the Nervous Activity,” published in 1943.36 This article has proved extraordinarily inOluential in computer science, leading to John Von Neumann’s equally seminal concept of the stored program digital computer, the basis for every modern computational device.37 The work of McCulloch and

Pitts also provided the underlying paradigm for most modern systems of machine learning, supplying the building blocks of a “connectionist” approach to artiOicial intelligence.38 As

Michael A. Arbib notes, McCulloch and Pitts demonstrated “that thought could be expressed

34 Ibid., n.p. 35 Tara Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 18. 36 Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5, no. 4 (1943): 115–33. 37 Michael A. Arbib, “Warren McCulloch’s Search for the Logic of the Nervous System,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43, no. 2 (2000): 212. 38 Ibid. 68 just through the interaction of neurons alone—without mind or soul to somehow inOluence the brain.”39

The archival records documenting The Brain indicate that Upjohn and Burtin conceived of the model with many of McCulloch’s and Pitt’s ideas built into the didactic structure of the exhibition. In particular, the disdain for psychoanalysis and holistic approaches to brain function mark the epistemology of The Brain as operating within a post-dualist concept of the brain—a framework where mind and soul have been collapsed into the material of neurons, circuits, and calcium channels. It is important to note that the concept of mind as logical engine, although skirting reductionism, did not quite equate mind with the physiology of the brain. As Lily E. Kay notes, the idea of mind as logic engine, “was a mechanical but non-reductionist approach to cognition, for the very notion of ‘mechanical’ has been reconOigured in the postindustrial era.”40 It is within this postindustrial “second” machine age that The Brain was designed and constructed. Burtin’s own statements about the design process of the brain model clearly note that anatomical representations were abandoned in favor of a focus on what Burtin called, “functioning principles,” going as far as to say that these principles were a kind of “logic” that united all brain function.41

Although McCulloch is not directly mentioned by name in any of the literature prepared for The Brain exhibit or in the adjacent correspondence between Burtin, Upjohn, and

Burtin’s scientiOic collaborators, McCulloch’s conceptual framework is overwhelmingly present in the design of the Upjohn brain. One of Burtin’s primary scientiOic collaborators,

39 Ibid., 213. 40 Lily E. Kay, “From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind: Warren S. McCulloch’s Project in Neuroscience,” Science in Context 14, no. 04 (2001): 610. 41 Burtin, “The Human Brain,” 67. 69 Horace W. Magoun, worked directly with McCulloch on studying the organization of the cerebral cortex at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute in the 1940s.42 Burtin himself, in a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1955 explicitly understood design as a “communication of ideas.”43 In this lecture Burtin invokes the language of information theory, talking about messages and receivers, and underlining many of the themes present in his Integration exhibition that necessitated harnessing the explanatory power of the “four technics” of printing, radio, Oilm, and television.44 When seen in the context of Burtin’s work at the Presentation Branch in the OfOice of Strategic

Services, and the aspirations of that ofOice to create a building-sized theater of information processing, it is not difOicult to understand how Burtin could grasp the signiOicance of modeling brain function and cognition as kinds of electronic circuits or, in McCulloch’s and

Pitts’s formulation, “nervous nets.”

It is perhaps The Brain’s unique accomplishment to unite an architectural scheme with a digital computational logic in the form of a model of the brain. This model was a simulation of a Oinite-state machine—in simplest terms, an abstract machine that can parse input into discrete states. Crucially, this input can be transformed using Boolean logic (i.e., if/then, or and/or statements) and looping statements in order to build machines with fairly complex functions. Common examples used to illustrate this concept are locks, gates, turnstiles, or almost any simple mechanism that has clear on/off or locked/unlocked states.

Marvin Minsky in his 1967 book Computation: Finite and Incinite Machines deOines Oinite-

42 Abraham, Rebel Genius, 107. 43 See Will Burtin, “Communication of Ideas,” lecture for American Association for the Advancement of Science – PaciOic division, June 23, 1955. 44 Burtin, 3. 70 state machines as “machines which proceed in clearly separate ‘discrete’ steps from one to another of a Oinite number of conOigurations or state[s].”45 The exemplar that Minsky uses to demonstrate a Oinite-state machine is the McCulloch and Pitts model of the neurons in the human brain, which by the mid-1960s had achieved much of its notoriety as an abstracted logical machine useful primarily to computer scientists. This model also had the advantage of being extraordinarily simple, with only two states for each neuron: on and off.

It is the kind of binary simplicity found in the McCulloch and Pitts model that lends itself to rendering the complexity of the mechanisms of brain function as an electronic machine. In recreating the process of seeing and hearing as a series of discrete states, the

Upjohn model of the brain worked to naturalize this simulation as an accurate portrayal of brain function, even as it was run entirely by an analog electromechanical system. These discrete states were augmented by parts of the model that showed looping or feedback functions, evidenced in the scripts and correspondence documenting the design process of the simulation. Although there is no explicit link to the work of McCulloch and Pitts, the fact that Magoun had a collaborative working relationship with McCulloch provides a clear route for some kind of inOluence. Furthermore, Burtin’s understanding of design as an information-processing activity would likely have made him sympathetic to understanding the brain in an analogous fashion.

The Brain’s performance of the process of perception as a meticulously scripted sequence of actions speaks both to the logistics of coordinating a complex series of audiovisual events as well as to a discrete logic that was built into the performance. It is

45 Marvin Minsky, Computation: Finite and Incinite Machines (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 11. Minsky wrote this book as a primer on the theory of computation that could be understood with a background in high school mathematics. 71 worth going through the action sequence of the The Brain in order to understand the model as a temporal structure that teaches and normalizes a view of cognitive function as computational in nature.

The best overview of the apparatus of the brain model can be found in an image that appears to show it in a kind of demo mode, where all major visual features are illuminated.

Figure 2-7 shows the front of the model as an audience would see it.46 The large disks on the right and left of the model are illuminated with all the abstract icons visible. A similar image, which clearly annotates how each part of the model corresponds to a speciOic anatomical feature, can be found in a brochure “The Brain,” presumably created as a handout for the inaugural showing of the model at the American Medical Association

(AMA) convention in June 1960. A color version (see Oigure 2-8) of a similar view can be found in another brochure, A Moment at a Concert, which shows how color is used to trace the propagation of signals in the model.

Burtin designed the model for a small audience, primarily seated and listening through a headphone. The parti of the model was based on the propagation of visual and auditory stimuli through the brain, from perception to the creation of a memory. The intricacy and technical complexity of the model was constantly emphasized in collateral material; “40 miles of wiring and 45,000 lights in the exhibition sculpture,” was a common refrain, underlining sheer technical mastery as a kind of spectacle.47 The performance began at a

46 Figure 2-7 was taken from the Smithsonian Science Service Historical Images Collection website. Originally conceived as an archive of “images pertaining to a wide range of electrical technologies,” this website now appears to be defunct. See http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/science-service-historical-images- collection. 47 See the brochure, From Superstition to Science (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Health Museum, 1961). This brochure was issued for the exhibition of the Upjohn brain at the Cleveland Health Museum. 72 post labeled “the brain,” which had an image of an opera singer embedded in the other side to represent visual stimulus of the retinas (see Figure 2-9). The headphones that each audience member wore broadcast an accompanying soundtrack and voiceover that represented auditory stimulation. The eyes were shown as rings of pixel-like light bulbs connected via a series of “light paths” to the centrencephalic or reticular system, represented by the convex disk lying horizontally at the bottom-center of the model (see

Figure 2-10).48 Half-spheres on the sides of this convex disk represented the ears.

Neurosurgeon Wilder PenOield, one of Burtin’s scientiOic collaborators, understood the centrencephalic system as the center of consciousness, which acted like a switchboard that triggered attention in the brain. PenOield went so far as to theorize this system as a kind of

“computer” that also controlled the autonomic nervous system, or as PenOield puts it, the

“human automaton” that controls breathing, heart rate, and the Olight-or-Oight reOlex, while the conscious mind is occupied.49

These light bulbs led to the visual and auditory cortices, inscribing paths that are functionally similar, but that indicate the different parts of the brain that process sight and sound. A key feature of this model is the feedback between the centrencephalic system and the disks representing the visual and auditory cortices. The signals go from the centrencephalic system to the cortices to be processed into recognizable images and sounds, then back to the central switchboard to be integrated as a recognizable event—in this case, an opera singer at a concert.

Perhaps the most provocative and effective part of the brain model is what Burtin

48 This disk was amusingly described as a “giant aluminum mushroom” in the Cleveland Museum brochure. 49 Wilder PenOield, Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.), 41. 73 termed the “consciousness screen.”50 This is the central disk of the model, featuring nineteen projection circles that contained images on backlit transparencies. It appears to have been conceived as a shortcut to illustrate the idea of consciousness or awareness.

Functionally, the screen had an anachronic or atemporal aspect to the way it displayed images; although it represented images that were recognized in real time (the opera singer), it also showed images that were recalled from memory in a way that suggests both free association and the comparison of closely related memories. In contrast to the consciousness screen, the two large screens on the left and right represented the memory cortices (see Oigure 2-11, showing the illuminated abstract patterns in the memory disks).

Instead of photographic representation, these disks used abstract patterns to represent the

“vast depots of patterned recordings of past experiences, thoughts, judgements and reactions.”51 This abstraction appears to be a way of indicating unique, speciOic memories, while at the same time giving them an inchoate quality. The fact that these patterns are rendered out of thousands of small light bulbs resembling pixels gives them a quality that is recognizably digital, if only in representation. The interaction between the consciousness screen and the two pixelated memory cortex screens is of particular interest, as it shows a back-and-forth movement between photographic and abstract representation, or to rephrase it in the scheme of the model, between “consciousness” and “memory.”

The complete process is clearly delineated in The Brain in a movement from the sensory organs (eyes and ears) to the consciousness screen; a speciOic part of the process is then rerun to emphasize a particularly important segment. This demonstrates that the narrative

50 Burtin, “The Human Brain,” 67. 51 The Upjohn Company, A Moment at a Concert, 10. 74 was constructed as a set of discrete steps or states that could be turned on or off. Any segment could be replayed at will, in a kind of nonlinear system of transport. The idea that the brain could be divided up into discrete states of function, which could then be looped and modiOied by feedback, reinforced rather than diminished the isomorphism between computation and brain neurophysiology.52 The reception and marketing (a process that is usually co-constitutive by design) of The Brain always emphasized the electronic nature of the model. Press photos released in 1960 for publicity purposes contain a caption sheet that describes the model as an “electronic replica.”53 A summary of the presentation of The

Brain at the AMA meeting in 1960 compares it to an electronic scoreboard, the type that might be found at a baseball game.54 Judging from photographs that circulated in the media, particularly images from LIFE magazine (see Oigure 2-12) that documented the model at the

52 Despite the antipathy to psychoanalysis exhibited both by McCulloch and in Upjohn’s contextualization of the brain model, McCulloch’s understanding of feedback loops as a key component of the nervous nets of the brain was directly inOluenced by the work of psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie. Kubie theorized that neurosis and other neurological disorders could be characterized as “circular waves” moving in brain circuits. See Lawrence S. Kubie, “A Theoretical Application to Some Neurological Problems of the Properties of Excitation Wave Which Move in Closed Circuits,” Brain 53, no. 2 (July 1, 1930): 166–77. McCulloch mentions Kubie’s work in a 1949 address, “Brain as Computing Machine.” In particular McCulloch notes that “Kubie was the Oirst to call attention to the reiterative core of every neurosis, and he was right. All evidence now indicates that neuroses begin in some normally negative feedback going regenerative...It tends to sweep more and more cells into its orbit and so removes them from their normal function as free-Oloating computers.” See Warren S. McCulloch, “Brain as Computing Machine,” Address to American Institute of Electrical Engineers winter general meeting, New York, NY, January 31-February 4, 1949 (Warren S. McCulloch Papers, American Philosophical Society). John Johnston, in the chapter “The In-Mixing of Machines: Cybernetics and Psychoanalysis,” of his historical study of artiOicial intelligence, The Allure of Machinic, details the inOluence of Kubie’s idea of “reverberating circuits” on both McCulloch and Jacques Lacan. See John Johnston, “The In- Mixing of Machines: Cybernetics and Psychoanalysis,” in The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Articicial Life, and the New AI (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 65–103. 53 See the note attached to the back of a promotional photo contained in Box 30, folder 5. Titled “Giant Brain” and dated June 25, the note is a caption for the image describing Dr. A.G. Macleod standing in front of the “electronic replica.” 54 This account comes from an article titled “‘The Brain’ at the A.M.A.,” referenced on the website upjohn.net, which appears to be a collection of period documentation from Upjohn’s history collated by former Upjohn employees. This article is reproduced as a scan. No bibliographic information is given. See “The Brain and The Cell,” http://www.upjohn.net/other/brain_cell/brain_cell.htm. 75 AMA convention, the comparison to electronic scoreboards seems apt.55

The LIFE photo of Burtin standing amidst the model is an image of the designer as an impresario of screens. The “thought-pictures” of the consciousness screen are presented as the synthesis of sensory impressions and the inchoate abstraction of memory. The visual logic of the brain model anticipates the idea that the human brain is an analogical cinema, a black box for projection and image circulation. The idea of the screen as a means of representing the processes of the brain has a genealogy that extends from Henri Bergson to

Gilles Deleuze. In Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze elucidates the role of the image in cinema via a theorization of Bergson’s work.56 Of particular interest here is the idea of an exchange between an actual and virtual image, a conceptual division of perception that Deleuze borrows from Bergson.57 The most basic description of Bergson’s concept of actual and virtual is as the X and Y axes of a graph. In

Oigure 2-14, taken from Bergson’s Matter and Memory, the horizontal line AB is understood as the actual, a line that “contains all simultaneous objects in space,” while the vertical line

CI represents “successive recollections set out in time.”58 The intersection at point I represents consciousness. Bergson also notes a temporal division here: line AB represents

55 “Lighting Up the Brain Waves,” LIFE 49, no. 8 (1960): 68, 70a. 56 In a 1986 interview Deleuze also explicitly described the brain as a kind of display device. In the interview, unambiguously titled “The Brain is the Screen,” he notes that, “The circuits and linkages of the brain don’t preexist the stimuli, corpuscles, and particles [grains] that trace them. Cinema isn’t theater; rather, it makes bodies out of grains. The linkages are often paradoxical and on all sides overOlow simple associations of images. Cinema precisely because it puts the the image in motion, or rather endows the image with self- motion [auto-mouvement], never stops tracing the circuits of the brain.” See Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain Is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze,” in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 366. 57 It is useful to note that Bergson deOines matter as an “aggregate of ‘images’.” Images themselves have a kind of ambiguous ontological status, “placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’.” See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 9. 58 Bergson, Matter and Memory,142-3. 76 the future “what we are going to perceive” while CI is the past, representing “that which has already been perceived.”59 This diagram is in many ways analogous to the design of the

Upjohn brain model. Burtin’s method of demonstrating the perceptual moment at an opera portrays a similar process of the “virtual” or memory informing the creation of a perception. The consciousness screen utilized in The Brain represents the Oinal product of perception as mimetic and photographic, while the abstract symbolic patterns displayed on the disk screens of the memory cortices represent memories. The use of abstraction here, a literal pixelation of recollections and associations, speaks in very powerful ways about memory as a “virtual” that is linked decisively to the digital.

A corollary to Bergson’s ideas of the actual and virtual images is Deleuze’s idea of a crystal-image, a means of synthesizing the actual and virtual into a kind of cinematic time.

Crucially Deleuze thinks of this as a circuit, a relation that appears in the formal vocabulary of cinema as a Olashback. The Olashback serves as a “closed circuit which goes from present to the past, then leads us back to the present.”60 The logic is one of the forking path where memory is constituted in a manner that is fragmented and multiple, where linear causality is broken and the past appears as a panoply of virtual images. The consciousness screen in the Upjohn brain portrays a similar process, where the array of eighteen possible images of singers shows a Oield of potential recollection that is only determined by an iterative, circuitous process between the consciousness screen and memory cortices. Deleuze’s understanding of Bergson’s logic of image, perception, and memory as cinematic, where

“knowledge is of a cinematographical kind,” offers the possibility of reading The Brain as a

59 Bergson, 144. 60 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 48. 77 Bergsonian image-machine.61 However, Burtin’s model of perception in the human brain complicates the Bergsonian idea of perception by deliberately colliding two ideas of the virtual: one analog (the brain as Bergsonian image-Olows) and the other digital (the brain as a Oinite-state machine).

The deliberate separation of consciousness-as-screen from memory-as-abstraction in

The Brain normalizes the idea of cognition as made up of fundamentally discrete elements.

This is due in part to the didactic nature of the model; the Upjohn brain was designed as a teaching apparatus that could appeal to professional medical audiences and lay people alike, and the visualization of brain processes in discrete steps would make the model more accessible. However, the naturalization of this idea makes the homology of brain to computer almost inevitable, if not exactly explicit in the model. John Harwood notes in his study of the IBM corporate design and architecture program that there was a consistent desire among both designers and computer scientists in the 1950s and 1960s to equate thought with computation and information, a homology that in his view was Olawed since it elided the role of mediation and interfaces in human-machine interactions.62 The Brain can certainly be seen as sitting within this history of “homology machines,” as it was designed to accustom viewers to the idea that brain functions are analogous to computational processes, and thus amenable to alteration by speciOically targeted pharmaceuticals. Yet the intent, articulated very clearly in correspondence between Burtin, Upjohn, and IBM, was

61 Deleuze quoting from Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), 306; in Brain is the Screen, 295-296. 62 In particular Harwood criticizes the Eameses and their 1953 Oilm A Communications Primer, which understands information theory as isomorphic with the creation of culture, obliterating interpretation and semantics in the circuits of communication. Alan Turing’s famous “Imitation Game,” a heuristic for assessing machine intelligence, is also criticized by Harwood as sidestepping the act of mediation that is essential for the comparison between human and machine. See Harwood, The Interface, 44-45, 62-65. 78 that The Brain would disrupt this reiOication of brain as computer. In correspondence dated

September 1960 from Upjohn advertising manager John Deal to R.L. Monahan, an IBM

Corporate Design Coordination Manager, Deal writes,

To contrast this exhibit with a demonstration that features the mechanization of

memory procedures—such as information-processing represents—would refute

emphatically the “electronic brain” association, which, I understand, has caused

some discomforts in the past.63

This aspiration is however undercut by the somewhat contradictory idea, also expressed in the correspondence, that an exhibition of the Upjohn brain and an IBM computer would point out similarities between mechanized “memory procedures” and the process of memory in a human brain. Even more peculiar is the language Deal uses to describe

Upjohn’s model of human brain function, where sensorial inputs “are received, processed, and correlated for the initiation of action and for storage as memory.”64 In a discursive sense, the differences between brain and machine are thus minimal, even if the intent is to distance The Brain from computational machines. Deal describes the Upjohn brain model in a way that is confounded with computation from the outset, the language of information- processing embedded in a model of a fundamentally biological organ.

The idea of a collaborative exhibition between IBM and Upjohn bore no direct fruit. Yet

The Brain failed to advance beyond this analogical discursive crutch. Its dissemination into the broader environments of art and architecture became wedded to IBM, and more speciOically to the IBM RAMAC computer.

63 See John Deal to R. L. Monahan, letter, September 26, 1960, Box 12, Folders 3-4, Will Burtin Papers. 64 Ibid., 1. 79 Exhibiting Brains, Exhibiting Computers

In 1959, curator Arthur Drexler in an exhibition for MOMA entitled “Twentieth Century

Design from the Museum Collection,” displayed relay and control panels from the RAMAC

IBM computer (see Oigure 2-13). Described as an exhibition of “useful objects,” the inclusion of the RAMAC components marked a turn within the understanding of the computer, from a mere tool to something more complex. Felicity C. Scott notes that this was Drexler’s response to the “dematerialization effected by electronics.”65 Drexler himself states that a

“characteristic of the new machine aesthetic is its dematerialization of Oinite shapes into diagrammatic relationships.”66 In this context, IBM’s RAMAC (Random Access Memory

Accounting Machine), initially introduced in 1956 as a novel storage system for randomly accessing data on aluminum disks and pitched to corporations as the solution to manipulating and retrieving massive amounts of data, has a dual function. It is simultaneously a material object and a metaphor. Drexler’s presentation of the control panel of the RAMAC as a design object spotlighted the computer’s resemblance to action painting. For Drexler this accidental formal echo in the construction of the RAMAC indicates an “underlying parallel in thought and ideas,” between artists and scientists.67 In an odd way the RAMAC acted as a palimpsest, evoking abstraction (action painting) while standing

65 Felicity D. Scott, “When Systems Fail: Arthur Drexler and the Postmodern Turn,” Perspecta 35 (2004): 146. 66 Arthur Drexler and Greta Daniel, Introduction to Twentieth Century Design from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art New York (Garden City, NY: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1959), 94. 67 See the press release from The Museum of Modern Art, “Twentieth Century Design from the Museum Collection,” December 17, 1958. Drexler is quoted as saying that the inclusion of printed circuits, RAMAC components, X-ray, and TV tubes indicates an emerging “new design vocabulary.” In the catalog for the exhibition these objects are classiOied as “new machine art.” See Drexler and Daniel, Introduction to Twentieth Century Design. 80 as an index for the immaterial processes of electronics, and was represented in MOMA’s collection not in relation to some centralized control unit but as isolated components (relay and control panels) that could be understood as architectural.

The Brain stands as a perfect foil for the RAMAC. It was also designed as a mechanical brain, utilized a visual language of formal, diagrammatic abstraction, operated as a means to translate immaterial processes into a didactic visual form, and was speciOically designed as an exhibition that used architecture and design as a means to convey the function of cognitive processes. These objects are two different representations of efOiciency as a kind of process. As noted previously in this chapter, Upjohn’s desire to exhibit The Brain with the

RAMAC was evident from very early on in the project. However, the idea that differentiation could be achieved through a direct comparison of a model of perception and memory in the human brain (The Brain) with an electronic derivative of those biological processes (the

RAMAC) seems contradictory at best. Notably, Upjohn promoted such a collaborative exhibition based on the idea that the presentation would, “combine and thereby contrast the basic differences between biology and technology in one exhibit. . . to open a useful avenue toward a better public understanding of our basic objectives.”68 The assumption by representatives of Upjohn that there was an inherent, natural difference between the biological and technological, although unsurprising, seems naive. In a strategic sense the broad dissemination of The Brain to every possible venue made sense; the brain model was designed as a kind of pedagogical advertisement for Upjohn pharmaceutical products, and using the brain model as a kind of traveling show that could be adapted to museums, trade shows, or international exhibitions Oit well within the logics of corporate design and

68 See John Deal to R. L. Monahan, letter, September 26, 1960, 2. 81 advertising in the early 1960s. Yet the proposal to display an IBM computer together with

The Brain in IBM’s Madison Avenue showroom edged perilously close to reifying biology as a strictly computational mechanism. Accounts and photography of the Eliot Noyes renovation of the Madison Avenue showroom in 1955 clearly indicate that IBM intended the space expressly as a means of promoting the data-processing capabilities of its technologies. An August 1955 article in Industrial Design featuring the new showroom was even titled, “IBM Brain Center.”69 It is thus difOicult to understand how a display of the The

Brain within IBM’s showroom would reinforce a differentiation between model and computer. IBM itself renamed the space “Electronic Data Processing Center,” as if to underline the fact that anything appearing in the space would be subsumed within a Oield of data processing.70 John Harwood notes that the showroom redesign was, “an exhibition staged in a shop window. Noyes and IBM were concerned at the outset with projecting an image of IBM as a provider of an essentially modern service: the handling of information.”71

This ambience of information processing and display would be provide a difOicult environment in which to assert the essential difference between biology and technology, between a model of human perception and a machine for reading and writing data.

Contemporaneous understandings of the relationship of machine to biological organisms focused less on creating a clear divide between biology and mechanism, than on understanding these categories as a continuum. Georges Canguilhem in a 1946 lecture at

College Philosophique titled “Machine and Organism,” asserts that a reversal has occurred,

69 Hugh B. Johnson, “IBM Brain Center, a New Machine, a New Showroom Dramatize IBM Design Policy,” Industrial Design 2, no. 4 (1955): 36–42. 70 Johnson, 37. 71 Harwood, The Interface, 46. 82 where the Cartesian understanding of body-as-machine has been upended and machines could now be understood as instantiations of biological principles, or in Canguilhem’s words, “machines can be understood as organs of the human species. A tool or machine is an organ, and organs are tools or machines.”72 In this sense a comparison between a model of the brain and a data storage medium is not one of differentiation, but of extension. The

RAMAC as a data storage device externalized memory, while The Brain acted as an externalization of perception. Both pieces of technology function as “organs” for humans to reorder their understanding of information processing. The RAMAC control panels, severed from their functional apparatus as external memory organ, stood as a kind of technological fragment entombed in the white cube of MOMA, the Elgin marbles of aluminum and plastic to the Parthenon of the IBM 305. Upjohn’s brain had a different relationship to display and exhibition, functioning rather as a kind of architectural model.

The diagrammatic, model-like nature of The Brain demands comparison to contemporaneous strategies of exhibition in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The most compelling parallels can be found in the work of the Independent Group, particularly that of Richard Hamilton. Hamilton’s exhibitions of the late 1950s used a similar set of strategies to understand nature as a kind of visual resource for design, particularly in the Growth and

Form exhibition staged at a room in the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1951. Strongly inOluenced by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form, the exhibition sought to collapse science and design into a single discipline. In her study of Hamilton’s exhibition- making, Victoria Walsh notes the inOluence of Kepes’s Language of Vision, Moholy-Nagy’s

72 Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism [1946],” in Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1992), 55. 83 Vision in Motion, and Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, as well as Surrealism and the work of Marcel Duchamp.73 This array of inOluences resulted in an exhibition that privileges visual perception as the key to melding science and art. Although Growth and

Form focused on morphology and growth within biological systems while The Brain focused on the process of cognition, they shared ideas that were essentially positivist.

Isabel Moffat notes the direct inOluence of logical positivism on Hamilton and the

Independent Group through the work of philosopher A.J. Ayer, who lectured on the concept of veriOication in 1952-53.74 This resulted in a concept of vision that Moffat describes as entailing “a kind of clarity of cognition that discounts ambiguity and connotative meaning as esoteric.”75 Vision, as a proxy for empiricism, claimed a unique objectivity. The exhibition was also inOluenced by the Festival of Britain, staged in the summer of 1951, with its emphasis on, “national stock-taking, good natured technological optimism, and vernacular scientism.”76 Growth and Form was itself commissioned in part by the ICA as a complement to the Festival of Britain.

It is also worth noting that Hamilton appeared to understand advertising techniques as a didactic means to educate the spectator. Moffat indicates that Hamilton had an admiration

“for the professionalism and the new type of knowledge of the ‘Adman’.”77 This is mirrored by Kepes and Burtin, who both practiced as graphic designers and advocated for

73 Victoria Walsh, “Seahorses, Grids and Calypso: Richard Hamilton's Exhibition-making in the 1950s,” in Richard Hamilton, edited by Mark Godfrey, Paul Schimmel, and Vicente Todolí (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 61–75. 74 Isabelle Moffat, “‘A Horror of Abstract Thought’: Postwar Britain and Hamilton’s 1951 ‘Growth and Form’ Exhibition,” October 94 (2000): 94. 75 Moffat, 94. 76 Moffat, 98. 77 Moffat, 99. 84 advertising as the primary driver of visual communication.78 Hamilton’s own background in design, drafting, and commercial art, indicates a sensibility that would co-opt advertising.

Hamilton worked in the advertising department of an electrical engineering company, as well as in the exhibition department of the Reimann School. He also learned engineering drafting through the Government Training Centre during World War II. After studying at the

Royal Academy Schools and Slade School of Art, he taught design courses at Central School of Arts and Crafts.79 Although Growth and Form was an installation conceived and executed by an artist, Hamilton’s knowledge of design and advertising underscored a desire for the exhibition to persuade a broader public. Growth and Form thus shared a didactic intent with Upjohn’s brain model. However, unlike The Brain, which was conceived as piece of advertising that materialized and narrated ineffable processes for entirely instrumental purposes, Hamilton’s exhibit staged scientiOic imagery and models in a manner devoid of any kind of language or instruction.

A striking aspect of Hamilton’s exhibit is his use of a black box format with projected imagery. Contemporary accounts note, “shapes and forms move[d] on screen on the ceiling or on the Oloor. Projected on the ceiling was the drama of crystal formation; on another screen, sea urchin’s eggs divided themselves.”80 It is not entirely obvious from the photographic documentation of The Brain, but it appears that ideally the model would also

78 Advertising was a central component for both Kepes and Burtin in understanding the uses of plastic expressions of space. Kepes saw advertising as a new medium devoid of the “handicap” of traditional forms. Ads could yoke together “heterogeneous elements” that created new forms of what Kepes called “dynamic plastic organization.” See Kepes, Language of Vision, 221. Burtin also understood advertising as a foundational component of his concept of “integration,” which much like Kepes organized multiple kinds of design disciplines into a new meta-discipline. See Will Burtin et al., Integration, An Exhibition (Chicago: The Art Directors Club of Chicago, 1949). 79 Alice Rawsthorn, “Richard Hamilton and Design,” in Godfrey et al., Richard Hamilton, 126-129. 80 Quoted in Moffat, “‘A Horror of Abstract Thought’,” 102. 85 be installed in a darkened, if not pitch black, room. In particular the images used for promotion of the brain model show an illuminated structure in total darkness. For example, the images used for the LIFE magazine article (see Oigure 2-12) and the cover of the A

Moment at a Concert brochure (see Oigure 2-8) show The Brain as an object in a theatrical, spaceless darkness. This suggests that the model was designed to recreate a kind of cognitive interiority that depended on what Noam M. Elcott terms the “artiOicial darkness” of the modernist black-box environment.81 The continuities and resonances between

Burtin’s brain model and the work of Hamilton show, if not a clear line of inOluence, a similarity in understanding how media, design, and spatial constructs can reorganize perception to facilitate an understanding of scientiOic concepts.

There is also a startling consonance between the brain model and the basic percepts of what Reyner Banham understood as the “New Brutalism.”82 Although Banham was writing architectural criticism in his 1955 essay, the underlying concepts that he articulates provide a provocative means of assessing the Upjohn brain model. As a revision of what Banham calls the “normal vocabulary” of modernism, the qualities of the New Brutalism are summarized in three main points: “1, Memorability as an Image; 2, Clear exhibition of structure; and 3, Valuation of Materials ‘as found’.”83 Banham’s formulation appears to be inOluenced by the ShefOield University competition entry by Alison and Peter Smithson, drawings from which are reproduced in the article, with a caption comparing their plan of

81 See Noam M. Elcott, Articicial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Elcott positions artiOicial darkness as a kind of Foucauldian dispositif or apparatus that works between media. Étienne-Jules Marey’s Physiological Station, Richard Wagner’s Festival Theater in Bayreuth, and the theater of Oskar Schlemmer are important sites in Elcott’s argument, creating what he calls a “historicity of darkness.” 82 Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architecture Review 118, no. 708 (1955): 355–61. 83 Banham, 361. 86 the building to what Banham calls “a-formal” paintings by Jackson Pollock and Alberto

Burri.84 This a-formal quality was the result of a loose compositional style where “topology becomes the dominant and geometry becomes the subordinate discipline.”85 In emphasizing topology over volume, proportion, or geometry, there is a resultant need for an explicit delineation of structure. In this way structure seems to be clearly related to image. In Banham’s formulation, image is less about aesthetics than a kind of visual logic that makes a building legible as a whole.

Topology and legibility are both qualities that could be used to describe The Brain. It is not difOicult to understand how the exposed apparatus of the model could be seen as a kind of structural revealing. The Brain—in addition to its dual role as a model of the brain and an advertisement—can be viewed as a sculpture, a mobile architecture that translated the ineffable into aluminum and light. The key quality here is the dominant idea of connectivity, and its relationship to a “clear exhibition of structure.” Arguably, The Brain manages to achieve a distinctive image through this expression of structure and connectivity. The memory screen Olanked on either side by the aluminum disks of the memory cortices and linked via a complex network of aluminum tubing embedded with electrical lights presented an image of the brain as a kind of pure connectivity. Particularly when the model is shown in a darkened space, the visual emphasis is on these connections and the aggregate function of the structures in the perception of sight and sound. The visuality of what Banham terms the “image” is combined with a kind of tangibility and thingness. As

Alex Kitnick notes, Banham’s deOinition of the New Brutalist image already “had a certain

84 Banham, 360. 85 Banham, 360. 87 corporeality and palpability about [it].”86 The Brain acted as a means for translating the intangible processes of perception into a three-dimensional model. Although it was not designed to be touched, its presence, which approached a kind of machine aesthetics rendered slightly monstrous, deOied conventions of scientiOic visualization and advertising.87 In the context of the principles articulated by Banham in “The New

Brutalism,” both Hamilton’s Growth and Form and Burtin’s The Brain mark out extremes of connectivity, or reticular ways of linking explications of biological processes to aesthetic form.

Both Hamilton and Burtin chose formats that deemphasized descriptive text and focused on visual form as exposition and explanation. In Growth and Form Hamilton deliberately conOigured the exhibit to integrate photography and three-dimensional forms without much textual explication. The iconic three-dimensional grid structures (see Oigure

2-15) designed by Hamilton for Growth and Form function as what has been described as a

“sight screen” by David Mellor.”88 Imposing the idea of a screen on multiple static objects in different media gives the structure an ordering and integrative function. Parallel to Burtin’s later consciousness screen in the brain model, there is a clear concept of the screen as an instrument for mediating different modes of information. In Oigure 2-16 (which acts as a reverse shot to Oigure 2-15), the plaster-covered partition is framed as an illustration of the

86 Alex Kitnick, “Eduardo Paolozzi and Others, 1947-1958,” (Ph.D diss., Princeton University, 2010), 42. 87 In a May 9, 1960, letter to Upjohn executive vice-president J. C. Gauntlett, Burtin cheekily refers to The Brain as a “monster” that “is going to be quite beautiful.” See Will Burtin to J.C. Gauntlett, letter, May 9, 1960, Will Burtin Papers. Kitnick in his discussion of Banham’s “The New Brutalism,” notes that the New Brutalist image is characterized by a kind of anti-aesthetic, “against glossy veneers and slick advertisements.” See Kitnick, “Eduardo Paolozzi and Others,” 42. 88 David Mellor, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Modernity: Vision, Space and the Social Body in Richard Hamilton,” in Richard Hamilton (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), 30. See also Moffat, “‘A Horror of Abstract Thought’,” 109. 88 various “laws” of the development of biological form derived from Thompson’s book On

Growth and Form.89 Behind this screen (in Oigure 2-16) is a three-dimensional grid, holding both structural models and studio photos of radiolarians and sponges. On the back wall is an enlargement of an x-ray of a human hand. This dense layering of similar structural objects rendered in a concatenation of representational modes—grid, photograph, x-ray, and model—emphasizes the idea of perception as an act of pattern recognition and information parsing. The spectator was supposed to understand Thompson’s “principle of discontinuity,” which ostensibly guided all classiOication systems of the natural sciences, as a kind of epistemological gestalt.90 Employing a similar strategy to different ends, Burtin in

The Brain used the interplay between the central consciousness screen and the two disks to either side representing the memory cortices (see Oigure 2-8) to aid in reifying memory and perception as a mediated, computational process. Here the discontinuity is between the arbitrary abstractions of the memory disks and the “real” images of the opera singer and its cluster of associated imagery.

Hamilton’s adoption of Thompson’s principles of discontinuity of order through heterogeneity, and Burtin’s use of unadorned connectivity as the parti for The Brain, indicate a similar interest in what Banham identiOied as the “exhibition of structure.” For

Burtin this is less about the structure itself than the topology of what is connected. The edges (lines) are the most important feature, as opposed to the nodes. The Brain works as a model via its simulation of electrical connections in the brain that explicitly showed the process of vision and hearing. The structural and unadorned nature of Burtin’s use of

89 Moffat, “‘A Horror of Abstract Thought’,” 98-101. Moffat shows that the inOluence of Thompson on Hamilton was registered speciOically in a strategy of dissecting form to demonstrate Thompson’s principles. 90 Mellor, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Modernity,” 29. 89 aluminum gave the model the look of a piece of industrial machinery stripped bare to reveal the topological mechanisms of perception.

Italia ’61 and the Architecture of Communication

Described as a “concrete Parthenon,” the Palazzo del Lavoro (Palace of Labor) designed by

Pier Luigi Nervi and Antonio Nervi with interiors by Gio Ponti, was built to house the

International Labor Exhibition for Italia ’61 in Turin, Italy.91 This international exposition ran from May to October 1961 and marked the hundredth anniversary of Italian uniOication.

Within the Palazzo del Lavoro, Upjohn staged Burtin’s brain model as a part of the United

States exhibition entitled Man and Communications, a series of demonstrations focused on technological progress in communications systems of the previous 100 years. There appears to be very little in the theme of the exhibition that directly addresses either Italy or the concept of labor.

The extensive set of demonstrations in Man and Communications also included General

Electric’s showing of educational and industrial television, a display on air trafOic control systems, the IBM RAMAC, and a section billed as “communication with the stars.”92 As a whole, the exhibit focused on communications as “the voice, the printed word, the picture, and the signal.”93 The exhibition is notable for the fact that it appears to be the sole joint public presentation of the IBM RAMAC and The Brain. Instead of IBM and their Madison

91 Peter Blake, “Concrete Parthenon,” Architectural Forum 112, no. 5 (1960): 122-25. 92 C. C. Pusey, Turin Trade Fair Coordinator for the U.S. Department of Commerce, notes in correspondence the major American companies exhibiting at Italia ’61. See C. C. Pusey to J. J. Barnhill, letter, November 4, 1960. The pamphlet accompanying the exhibit included a brief description of the show, maps, an introduction and presidential statement by John F. Kennedy. See United States of America, OfOice of International Trade Fairs, Man and Communications (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 196), n.p. 93 Man and Communications, n.p. 90 Avenue showroom, Italia ’61 and the Palazzo del Lavoro became the mediator of the human brain and electronic computer as comparable communication devices.

The Palazzo del Lavoro was designed by Nervi for a tender competition in 1959.

Competing with the likes of Carlo Mollino and Riccardo Morandi, Nervi’s design won the competition based on its clarity of structure and relative ease of construction given a short timeframe. The structure of the palazzo was modular, based on sixteen freestanding roof panels called “mushrooms” that each sat on a cruciform column that tapered to a radial cantilever supporting the roof panel. The entire form of the building is generated from these sixteen modular components.94 Figure 2-17, from the July 1961 issue of Domus, shows the interior of the Palazzo del Lavoro as it neared completion; the facade and cruciform columns can be seen in Oigure 2-18, taken from Peter Blake’s review in

Architectural Forum.95

Nervi designed the Palazzo as a kind of “factory” for culture, which demonstrated the efOiciencies of Fordist production while validating Italia ’61’s commemoration of the

Risorgimento as a symbolic reintegration of Italy into the economy of postwar Europe.96 The logic here is contradictory: a backwards-looking spectacle that uses the emerging technologies of computation and communication as a means to buttress Italian identity and economic power. In a sense, the inclusion of Man and Communications was merely

94 “Palazzo Del Lavoro, Turin,” The Architect & Building News 219, no. 23 (1961): 755–64. This article notes that Gio Ponti designed the interior with contrasting horizontal and vertical lines; the vertical outlines were meant to heighten the centrality of the Italian exhibition at the center of the hall. 95 “E.I.L.: Momenti Di Uno Spettacolo, Prima Dell’apertura,” Domus 380, no. 7 (1961): 1–18. See also Peter Blake, “Concrete Parthenon,” 125. 96 Norma Bouchard, “Italia ’61: The Commemorations for the Centenary of UniOication in the First Capital of the Italian State,” Romance Studies 23, no. 2 (2005): 117–29. Bouchard positions Italia ’61 as the end of an era of Italian national integration, which by the 1970s would turn towards political fragmentation, terrorism, and economic disunity. 91 symptomatic of changes in the broader design and architectural culture. Jane Pavitt observes that the hothouse design culture in postwar Europe was largely underwritten by the Marshall Plan.97 As a comprehensive economic assistance program spearheaded by U.S.

Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the Marshall Plan encompassed a broad range of assistance to achieve “a concerted US campaign of modernization.”98 This modernization was functionally a program of economic liberalization that incentivized mass production based on an American model of efOiciency that contributed to a robust program of free trade. The Marshall Plan was as much an ideological and propaganda program as an economic one. Hence mechanisms of “soft power” were deployed, such as an array of grants and aid that subsidized housing, design, and craft industries. In Italy this was manifested by the revival of the Italian car industry and the creation of public housing via the INA-Casa housing program administered by the Italian National Insurance Institute in the late

1940s.99 In this continuum, Italia ’61 was the ideological capstone of the Marshall Plan, a way to demonstrate the uniOication of Italy as a successful reconstitution of the economy in the American model, via Fordist productivity reforms and the centrality of design as commodity. Man and Communications served as an example of American design and economic virtuosity situated within Italian design and history, a reminder of what Pavitt terms an “‘internationalist’ modernism Olowering under Western democratic alliance.”100

Judging from its position as the Oirst object in the plan of the exhibition sequence, The

97 Jane Pavitt, “Design and the Democratic Ideal,” in Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970 (London: V&A, 2008), 76-78. 98 Pavitt, 76. 99 Pavitt, 79-81. For a more robust treatment concerning the development of the INA-Casa housing program and Marshall Plan funding, see Stephanie Pilat, Reconstructing Italy: The Ina-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), in particular chapter one. 100 Pavitt, 85. 92 Brain had a prominent role in the Man and Communications exhibition. This prominence acted as a way of conditioning the audience to think of the human brain as the model for all communications, the biological becoming a template for the consideration of media technology. Published maps of the exhibition (see Oigure 2-19) show a clear pathway through the exhibit that began with the distribution of the LecTour radio guide system that provided wireless commentary for each exhibit.101 Spectators then circulated through an introductory alcove and past a media room cordoned off from the rest of the U.S. exhibition

(also referred to as the “U.S. sector” in ofOicial correspondence and documentation). The media room contained the Upjohn brain model in a reconOigured installation format.

Instead of wrapping around behind the cluster of aluminum disks and pathways as a supplement to the audiovisual presentation, the explanatory material became an introduction. The plan in Oigure 2-19 shows The Brain wedged into a corner of the sector

(number 3 in the key). The L-shaped corridor leading into the exhibition space was used to display a timeline and wall-mounted models that explained the basic anatomy of the brain.

Figure 2-20 shows the title of the exhibition, clearly labeled in Italian, German, French, and

English: “The Brain: Man’s Communication Center.” An introduction to the exhibit was distributed in the form of a sixteen-page brochure produced by Upjohn simply titled “The

Brain.” In this brochure the reader was encouraged to contemplate the deep origins of the human brain in spineless organisms a half-billion years old. A history of medical visualizations of the human brain detailed a timeline that ran from Leonardo da Vinci to

101 See C. C. Pusey to J. J. Barnhill, letter, November 4, 1960, which mentions the use of the LecTour for the U.S. exhibition at Italia ’61. The LecTour system was introduced at the National Gallery of Art in 1958. The historical timeline on the website for the National Gallery of Art makes prominent mention of the introduction of this technology. See the 1958 entry at https://www.nga.gov/research/gallery-archives/nga-history- timeline.html. 93 René Descartes, Ramón y Cajal, Ivan Pavlov, and Walter Hess.102

The gambit of communication that explicitly pervades the U.S. sector of the Palazzo del

Lavoro takes a decisive turn with The Brain. Burtin and Upjohn decided to replace almost all the explanatory wall text with audio commentary available via the LecTour radio guide.

Photographic documentation of the exhibition shows almost every spectator listening to a

LecTour (see Oigure 2-21) as they circulate through The Brain installation, free to move around rather than constrained by a more theatrical seating system with Oixed headphones.

The peripatetic nature of the U.S. sector in particular, and of the International Labor

Exhibition in the Palazzo del Lavoro in general, is symptomatic of what Tony Bennett has described as “organized walking as evolutionary practice,” where the path and structure of museum exhibitions from the nineteenth century onward instilled a progression that confounded natural history with cultural history.103 This insight is particularly useful in understanding why Burtin and Upjohn decided to introduce Man and Communications with a panel that showed cross-sections of six skulls illustrating the progression of cranial capacity from Procynosuchus, an ancestral mammalian genus, to “Cro-Magnon,” an early modern human. Figure 2-20 shows the clockwise orientation of the illustrations, mimicking the projection circles of the consciousness screen of The Brain. This introductory panel does not appear to exist in any previous version of The Brain that traveled in the United

States. The explicit linking of an evolutionary progression to this display of communication technology through the intermediary of the Upjohn brain model shifts the context of the

102 See John Pfeiffer, The Brain [Italia ’61] (Kalamazoo, Michigan: The Upjohn Company, 1961). 103 Tony Bennett makes this argument in chapter seven of The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. In particular Bennett focuses on the development of the natural history museum in the nineteenth century as an origin point for the organization of collections as an “irreversible succession of evolutionary series.” See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 177-208. 94 exhibition radically. Positioned at the apex of millions of years of natural evolution, the presence of the RAMAC and The Brain stake a claim for a strange kind of progression, as if the advent of computation, radio telescopes, and home automation were the outgrowth of some sort of biological principle.

A review published in the August 1961 issue of Industrial Design by Robert Zeidman provides an unusually detailed description of Man and Communications.104 Zeidman is largely critical of the exhibition, noting both its evasion of the political and social implications of an exposition devoted to labor as well as the dysfunctional nature of the

LecTour radio device as a kind of automated guide. His most serious objection is the most basic: the exhibit fails to communicate with the average spectator, characterized by

Zeidman as “the Italian working man.” He ends his review by admonishing what he assesses as the central theme, “a message which says that this nation is dominated and run by machines. I hope I am wrong.”105 He notes that the presentation of the RAMAC consists essentially of a seated attendant pushing a console button to activate a typewriter that prints out the computer’s canned responses to audience queries. Overall, Zeidman argues that there is an attitude of “push-buttoning,” where technology becomes the ready-made response to all the problems of everyday life.

Perhaps Zeidman’s most severe criticism is saved for The Brain, which he dismisses in a half-sentence: “it seems entirely out of character here (and frankly its blinking lights left this viewer more confused and less knowledgeable than ever).”106 The illegibility of The

104 Robert Zeidman, “Turin’s Italia 61,” Industrial Design 8, no. 8 (1961): 68–73. 105 Zeidman, 73. 106 Zeidman, 72. 95 Brain for Zeidman, the model creating more confusion than sense, indicates a lack of coherence outside of a setting that is predominantly didactic. The inscrutability of the consciousness screen, and the aluminum disks embedded with lights projecting abstract

Oigures, demands a level of attention that exceeds the casual pace of an exhibition more intent on creating a spectacle. Although perhaps appealing as an ambient installation, The

Brain elucidates nothing without focused attention. The use of The Brain here is not didactic, however, but demonstrative, intending to show a disposition in relationship to technology.

The Upjohn brain model could be considered the Oigurehead of a postindustrial order of technology and economics, as industrial economies transformed into ones based on information and control. This transformation is one more of representation than reality.

James Beniger’s history of the roots of the postindustrial information economy The Control

Revolution makes the case that by the time computers became publicly visible in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. economy in particular had long since transitioned to one in which knowledge and information work were the dominant type of labor. In Beniger’s argument, the transformation of agricultural and industrial work into knowledge work had already occurred in the late nineteenth century, via vast administrative bureaucracies that centralized and controlled the unwieldy forces of industrialization.107

As an architecture that was designed to house an exhibition on labor and that evoked the image of a factory, Nervi’s Palazzo worked orthogonally to the idea that communications was displacing and altering labor as a concept. The Palazzo del Lavoro

107 See James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 96 worked in a vein of modernism that combined material expression and neoclassical structure, or as Peter Blake put it memorably, a “concrete Parthenon.” Man and

Communications used the human brain as a pivot to link fossils over 250 million years old to the technologies of automation, computation, and radio astronomy. This created a problematic position of architecture as the proxy for culture, a shell to house a demonstration of technology that claimed an extraordinarily deep ancestry of hundreds of millions of years. In the presidential statement that introduces Man and Communications,

John F. Kennedy deOined communication as, “the science which has made it possible to transmit the products of thought over vast distances in instants of time.”108 Kennedy implies that this speed of thought transmission has fundamentally changed labor on a global scale in ways that would only be legible in the future.

Man and Communications functions as a kind of genealogy rather than a history or a coherent demonstration of technology and its effects on everyday life. The form of this genealogy is unique in that its coherence seems to be derived from an idea of topology rather than linear history. The conceit of communications was a way to knit together the disparate materials of the exhibition, creating connections among an array of objects that had no obvious relationships. The Brain acts as a model of this type of thinking, even if it is not entirely legible to an average viewer. The photo of the brain model taken by Paolo Monti inside the Palazzo del Lavoro (see Oigure 2-22) emphasizes the topological structure of The

Brain as an electromechanical contraption, which only becomes legible when temporality comes into play.

It is useful here to refer to The Brain’s counterpart in the exhibition, the IBM RAMAC.

108 See John F. Kennedy, “Presidential Statement for Turin,” in Man and Communications. 97 Arthur Drexler’s elevation of the RAMAC into an exemplar of the conOluence of technology and design in the 1959 exhibition “Twentieth Century Design from the Museum Collection,” provoked a response from a surprising source. Richard Hamilton remarked in a review of the catalog that Drexler's interest in the abstract and dematerializing effects of technology results in a diminishing of material objects, and an increased interest in what Drexler states as the “design of the process—the machines themselves.”109 Hamilton interprets this reductio ad absurdum, and archly questions: “what is the pay-off for the Museum of Modern

Art? The most beautiful collection of the blueprints from the second half of the century?”110

Hamilton’s point is that design will be depreciated into mere representations of things as opposed to the things themselves, and that design would be more like paper architecture.

Even more interesting is the fact that Drexler classiOied the RAMAC as an example of “new machine art,” invoking Philip Johnson’s and Alfred H. Barr’s Machine Art exhibition at

MOMA in 1934.111 In a very direct sense the RAMAC operates in opposition to the curatorial sensibility of Johnson and Barr, which tended towards what Jennifer Jane Marshall refers to as “neoplatonic formalism.”112 In the case of Johnson and Barr, a peculiar conjunction of aesthetics and technology allowed them to unite tangible, mechanical objects with absolute ideals in an attempt to reposition what was largely a collection of everyday functional objects in terms of aesthetic contemplation. The RAMAC undoes this kind of formalism, in that it is neither a simpliOied solid nor a representative of any kind of abstract ideal. It is

109 Arthur Drexler, “Introduction,” in Introduction to Twentieth Century Design, from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 9. 110 Richard Hamilton, Collected Words, 1953-1982 (London; New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 165. 111 Drexler and Daniel, Introduction to Twentieth Century Design, 94. 112 Jennifer Jane Marshall, “In Form We Trust: Neoplatonism, the Gold Standard, and the ‘Machine Art’ Show, 1934,” The Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 598-599. 98 explicitly incomplete, a component of a larger system that is not decomposable or legible in its individual parts. The aluminum, plastic, and wire of the RAMAC offered no access to an abstract realm of pure form, even if there was a coincidental resemblance to abstract impressionist paintings.113 The Brain might be seen as categorically different from the

RAMAC, being a model rather than a component. Yet The Brain was also an object of aluminum and wire whose value lay to some degree in its representation of patterned and

“diagrammatic relationships.” Photojournalist Jerry Cooke documented the construction of

The Brain extensively in a series of unpublished images that show the model as an apparatus spilling forth with wires while being built. In Oigures 2-23 and 2-24 the images are of a device in the same vein as the RAMAC, a skein of wires diagramming topological relationships that are utterly obscure when in a disassembled, non-functional state.

The Upjohn brain model provides a way into understanding the shift from a dichotomy that Reyner Banham schematized as “tradition” and “technology,” to a state where these two categories have been collapsed. Nervi’s Palazzo del Lavoro uneasily symbolized tradition with its modular construction, echoing a Wittkowerian concern with neoclassical allusions and symmetries, while Man and Communications advocated for a genealogy of the technology of communications as a type of evolution. Richard Llewelyn-Davies, writing in a

1960 Banham-edited series in The Architectural Review, noted obliquely that experiments in spatial perception, mathematical probability, and complexity theory have introduced new possibilities for architecture that have no obvious precedent.114 Although Llewelyn-

Davies characterized these disparate Oields as the “human sciences,” these possibilities

113 Drexler and Daniel, Introduction to Twentieth Century Design, 94. 114 Richard Llewelyn-Davies, “Human Sciences,” Architectural Review 127, no. 757 (1960): 188-190. 99 stood at the margins of the architectural Oield, and were presumed to function at an

“unconscious level.”115 The way forward would eventually be characterized in a provisional form as “supermannerism,” “LSDesign,”or what Ada Louise Huxtable referred to as the

“black art” of architecture.116 The Brain could be seen as the beginning of a passage from machine-as-metaphor to machine-as-environment. The next chapter will consider how ensuing experiments in modeling perception mutated from didactic presentation into a real-time apparatuses that used screens and noise to interface directly with the human sensorium, where the audiovisual qualities of space were understood as technological

“organs” of the human species. The black box was not just a concept to be explained or demystiOied, but would become a technique of manipulation, organization, and critique.

115 Llewelyn-Davies, 190. 116 See Ada Louise Huxtable, “Kicked a Building Lately?” New York Times, January 12, 1969. 100 Chapter 3 – Non-Media and Architectural Flickers: The Environments of Pulsa

In the fall of 1967 a group of artists that produced work collectively under the name “Pulsa” elaborately modiOied a loft space in downtown New Haven, Connecticut with banks of

Oluorescent light bulbs and an electric signal generator. Photos of the loft (see Oigure 3-1) show a space that resembles a gallery, with a Oluorescent light dangling down from a skylight. The lighting in the room seems to emanate from the skylight, but the only source of light appears to be the curtain of Oluorescent light Oixtures hanging from the ceiling aperture. Pulsa published a sixty-page booklet in the late 1960s that outlined their installations in New Haven and Boston from 1967 to 1969.1 This document appears to have been self-published and had limited circulation. In this booklet Pulsa details four projects that engage with what they call “an aesthetic interaction of the computer and society.”2

More speciOically, this interaction is described as an “open-ended research of environmental art based on the control of perceptible wave energies . . . abstract time-extended phenomena articulated by plastically changing presences of light and sound.”3

Pulsa’s beginnings in the fall of 1967 coincide in productive ways with a symposium organized by Will Burtin. This coincidence presents a kind of historical superimposition, allowing a productive thread to be drawn through both events. Burtin’s symposium was called Vision 67; sponsored by the International Center for the Communication Arts and

Sciences (ICCAS), it was the second of two conferences organized by Burtin in the

1 See William Crosby, Pulsa Installations 1967–1969 (New Haven and Oxford, CT: Pulsa/Yale Research Associates in the Arts, 1969). 2 Crosby, n.p. 3 Crosby, n.p. 101 mid-1960s. The Oirst conference, Vision 65, took place in October of 1965 at Southern

Illinois University and featured a range of speakers including R. Buckminster Fuller,

Marshall McLuhan, Herbert A. Simon, and Stan Van Der Beek.4 Subtitled “World Congress on New Challenges to Human Communication,” this conference posited that communication in all its forms, from mass media to computation and newer forms of audiovisual media, was the central problematic for contemporary culture.

Vision 67 reiterated this problem in even more urgent terms. Running from October

19-21 at New York University, the theme of the conference was “Survival and Growth

Through Human Communications,” inspired in part by Buckminster Fuller’s remarks about the necessity for a more equitable distribution of what he termed “the world’s energy” in an environment where material scarcity was the product of an obsolete geopolitics.5 Vision 67 was structured around a series of panels designed to emphasize discussion and dialogue rather than rote lectures. The speakers were predominately European and American, and included Gordon Park, Vittorio Gregotti, and Umberto Eco. Artists Jean Tinguely and Victor

Vasarely also presented, as well as information theorist and writer Max Bense. The conference ended with what was advertised as a “space-time spectacular,” involving a live, televised discussion with Marshall McLuhan and S.I. Hayakawa, who were attending a

4 See the Spring 1966 issue of The American Scholar, which published an extensive selection of papers from Vision 65. The editorial introduction to the issue by Hiram Haydn notes that architect John Johansen and his wife Mary Ellen were instrumental in the creation of the issue, in that they pestered him to borrow his copy of McLuhan’s Understanding Media. See Hiram Haydn, “Editorial,” The American Scholar 35, no. 2 (1966): 189-190. 5 A reprint of a New York Times article “Communications is Parley Subject,” from September 24, 1967, is reproduced on the backside of the Vision 67 program. See Vision 67 program, Box 107, Folder 3, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 102 concurrent (but unrelated) conference in Montreal.6 In an opening address, Burtin situated the conference as a means to “seek ways to bridge a still widening world-wide gap between human needs and the effects of technology.”7 Critically, despite McLuhan’s participation, many of the speakers at Vision 67 directly questioned the assumptions behind McLuhan’s famously prescriptive aphorisms regarding a post-literate electronic media culture. Both

Selby Mvusi, a South African industrial designer, and Eco distinctly criticized McLuhan’s famous formulation “The medium is the message” by articulating its elision of semiotics and culture.8 SigniOicant also was the clear articulation that the computer as a programming and control tool had become an important device for use by artists and designers. Max

Bense presented a paper on the concept of generative aesthetics, based on experiments with computer-driven plotters that were programmed to create parametric drawings according to what he calls “a combination of plan and chance.”9 Gordon Pask made the case for understanding society as a set of interactions between humans, tool-like machines, and procedural machines such as institutions and governments.10

The work of Pulsa, a transdisciplinary group of artists afOiliated with Yale University

6 See “News: VISION 67,” Box 107, Folder 5, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. This nine-page press release details the theme and conference speakers for Vision 67. 7 Will Burtin, “A Brief Address,” in Vision 67: Survival and Growth, Loeb Student Center, New York University, NY, NY, October 19-21, 1967, Box 106, Folders 2-4, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 8 See Selby Mvusi, “Problem Growth or Growth Problem,” and Umberto Eco, “The Liberation of man and the esthetics of technological progress.” Copies of both presentations can be found in Box 106, Folders 2-4, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 9 Max Bense, “Aesthetics and Programming,” in Vision 67: Survival and Growth, Loeb Student Center, New York University, NY, NY, October 19-21, 1967, Box 106, Folders 2-4, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology, 9. 10 See Gordon Pask, “Comments on Men, Machines and Communication Between Them,” in Vision 67: Survival and Growth, Loeb Student Center, New York University, NY, NY, October 19-21, 1967, Box 106, Folders 2-4, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 103 through a program called the Yale Research Associates in the Arts, can be seen to dovetail a similar set of discursive engagements with those instigated by discussions at Vision 67. If

Pulsa found consonance with McLuhan’s post-semiotic and post-formalist understanding of media, they also saw value in collective engagement, a set of guerrilla tactics to create new forms of media that bridged perception, computation, and architecture.

David Rumsey founded Pulsa in the fall of 1966. Rumsey, a Oilmmaker with a BFA and

MFA from Yale University, recruited Michael Cain and Patrick Clancy, who were graduate students in Yale’s painting department. Bill Duesing, who worked as a photographer and was a graduate of Yale School of Architecture, joined during the same period.11 William

Crosby, an artist based in New York, as well as Paul Fuge and engineer Peter Kindlmann, joined a year later.12

At the core of Pulsa’s interest in light and sound was a project to affect perception directly. Pulsa, in both its means and methods, is a large step away from the corporate psychopharmacology and neurophysiological models of perception of Upjohn; Pulsa’s engagement with the physiology of perception was based on far more direct interventions.

Instead of computation supplying an underlying structure for the propagation of visual and auditory perception, the computer became a way to control the audiovisual environment. In a way this was an externalization of control, moving from the darkened interiors of human perception into the darkened interior of the gallery.

As a practice, Pulsa both evades straightforward disciplinary categorization while also

11 The best source for a description and analysis of Pulsa’s early organization and work appears in Joel Katz, “Pulsa: Light as Truth,” Yale Alumni Magazine 31, no. 8 (1968): 39. Katz’s proOile of Pulsa focuses on their work for Project Argus at Yale in May of 1968. 12 Katz, 43. 104 functioning as a critical node where architecture, intermedia, computation, and minimalism come into a kind of trading zone. Pulsa’s work stands at a conjunction of different practices and discourses on the environment and perception. This chapter will use Pulsa’s extensive commentary on their own work as a framework to place them within a continuum where these adjacencies begin to cohere. Particularly important is Pulsa’s involvement in architecture, which inOiltrates every aspect of their practice. Their understanding of

Bernard Rudofsky’s work, and his concept of “architecture without architects,” focuses less on vernacular, “nonpedigreed” building than on the idea of collective process. Pulsa thought of architecture as an anterior condition for their work that provided a temporal environment measured not in hours or days, but in decades. This idea of collectivity connects in a completely apposite way to Pulsa’s interest in the technology of computation.

This was manifested speciOically in their appropriation of the concept of parallel processing and neural networks from computer science. Much of this thinking is derived from sociologist Robert Boguslaw’s The New Utopians: A Study of System Design and Social

Change. Boguslaw’s 1965 book attempted to historicize the new disciplines of systems design, game theory, operations research, and computer programming as extensions of utopian thought that stems from Plato, Thomas More, Charles Fourier, Herbert Spencer, and

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.13 Boguslaw was distinctly inOluenced by Herbert A. Simon, whose

13 Pulsa brieOly allude to Boguslaw’s book in their “Notes on Group Process,” where they describe their work as a “Oluid organization modeled after a ‘closed loop’ feedback system.” See “Notes on Group Process,” 3, 1968, https://archive.org/details/Pulsa-NotesOnGroupProcessCa1968. They were speciOically interested in Boguslaw’s characterization of open loop and closed loop systems. This relatively simple distinction is between a system that requires manual operation (gas heater in a room) or automatic operation according to environmental conditions (thermostat). See Robert Boguslaw, The New Utopians, a Study of System Design and Social Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 31-32. The closed loop of the thermostat is analogous to what N. Katherine Hayles refers to as Oirst wave cybernetics, based on a homeostatic equilibrium with the external environment, but without any notion of how an observer affects the system observed. See N. 105 contribution to systems science and computation was predicated on thinking of both humans and machines as “species of the genus information processor.”14 These variegated and incongruous inOluences appear to be wielded in a conscious fashion as Pulsa sought to create what they called a new art form out of “programmed light and sound environments.”15

Using the series of environments they constructed in their New Haven loft and the Yale

School of Art and Architecture, as well as later works at MOMA and Automation House in

New York City, this chapter will situate Pulsa as a key, if under-acknowledged, inOluence in the development of “literalism,” or what Mark Linder calls “representation without idealization.”16 Linder considers literalism as an interface between architecture and post- minimalist art that appeared in the late 1960s, as critics like Colin Rowe, Michael Fried,

Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg began to grapple with an erosion of medium speciOicity, and with “productive improprieties” across the arts that generated work that was increasingly architectural even as it was entirely un-architected.17 For Pulsa, literalism

Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 50-57. 14 Quoted in Hunter Heyck, “DeOining the Computer: Herbert Simon and the Bureaucratic Mind–Part 1,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30, no. 2 (2008): 44. The original quote comes from Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, Human Problem Solving (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). 15 Pulsa’s most coherent expression of this project appears in their application for a National Science Foundation grant from 1968. See Peter Kindlmann and Howard Weaver, “Development of Increased Programming Capability in Electronic Environmental Art,” Preliminary version of application for National Science Foundation Grant, 1968. The application was unsuccessful. This document contains the most canonical information on the group’s existence, including brief biographies, lists of publications, and extensive technical details about the custom-built technology they used in their installations. 16 Mark Linder, Nothing Less than Literal : Architecture after Minimalism. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 11. Literalism is a term that originates in the art criticism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Linder in particular emphasizes Fried’s Artforum essays from 1965 to 1970 as building on a Greenbergian formalism while simultaneously undermining it. Fried’s 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” is of central importance here. See Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148-172. 17 Linder, Nothing Less than Literal, 7. 106 and post-minimalism were also engaged in a technocratic endeavor centered on the computer. Following Boguslaw’s understanding of the extension of utopian ideas into the mechanisms of system design—a term that encompasses a broad range of disciplines that included cybernetics, operations research, and neoclassical economic regimes—Pulsa did not overtly acknowledge any conOlict in this technocratic approach with their practice of installation art. This lack of conOlict is due not to a naive faith in technocratic means of creation and production, but appears to be part of a deliberate strategy of transdisciplinary engagement that would facilitate a genealogy of post-minimalist art and architecture.

Although there are no clear statements on the origin of Pulsa’s name, there are obvious associations with Oilm and intermedia of the period—in particular Tony Conrad’s 1966 Oilm

The Flicker. This Oilm, with its stroboscopic effects of six and sixteen hertz, induced perceptual effects that verged on the hallucinatory. Branden W. Joseph notes that The

Flicker was intended only as an instantiation of a set of techniques, and that Conrad understood the Oilm as a kind of “lighting effect” that could be reproduced in other media.18

Infamous for the disclaimer at the beginning of the Oilm warning about the potential for inducing seizures in epileptics, The Flicker offers a method of situating Pulsa’s work within an uneasy genealogy of media works that can be said to use the human perceptual system itself as a type of medium. Pulsa expands the techniques of The Flicker into a perceptual environment that, while ephemeral and immaterial, is entirely dependent on the material interfaces of architecture and electronic media.

This chapter argues that Pulsa’s use of media, their deliberate avoidance of recorded

18 Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage: A “Minor” History (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 301-302. 107 media such as Oilm, and their focus on real-time systems of control and imaging, can readily be conceptualized as a tension between “Olicker and montage,” or framed another way, between ontology and representation. The most appropriate contrast to Pulsa and their use of the media of environmental Olicker is Archigram, and their participation in the Light/

Sound Workshop at the Hornsey College of Art. Craig Buckley positions Archigram and their use of montage as a methodology of media assembly co-extensive with their body of work, but of heightened importance in their media installations and urban speculations.19

However, Archigram’s panoply of architectural stuff, assembled and recompiled across environments both virtual and physical, and Pulsa’s appropriated interior catoptric architectures and landscapes bathed in liminal Oields of electronically generated signals, only intersect in their use of “media,” a term that begs clear deOinition. In Pulsa’s case it is more a use of “non-media,” a use of the digital, the Boolean, to sublate binary difference into a singularity.

In a 1969 discussion panel on the nature of time in art moderated by Lucy Lippard and reproduced in Art International, Michael Cain, a member of Pulsa, notes that their research into what they called “programmed environments” aspired to Oind “a way of putting stillness into the environment’s activity.”20 This key quality of conjunction between the machine-mediated “programmed environment” and environmental stillness requires a different kind of historicity, which paradoxically produces the experience of the non-digital

—stillness and indeterminate duration—out of technocratic machines and practices.

19 Craig Buckley, “Envisioning Assembly: Archigram and the Light/Sound Workshop,” Grey Room 73 (2018): 26–53. 20 Lucy Lippard et al., “Time: A Panel Discussion,” Art International 13, no. 9 (1969): 20–23, 39. 108 Minimalism, Formalism and Non-Media

The most signiOicant analysis of Pulsa’s work to date situates their work as a means to historicize contemporary art practices that focus on technology and ecology. In Yates

McKee’s assessment, Pulsa engages both in a type of post-minimalist practice and in a technique of cybernetic, psycho-physical retraining of the senses that originates with

Hermann von Helmholtz.21 This somewhat ungainly formulation neglects any commentary on the architecture of Pulsa’s installations, or on the unconventional role of the computer as both tool and arbiter of process. But perhaps the biggest aporia in McKee’s understanding of Pulsa is a lack of any substantial argument that positions their work within a genealogy of minimalist art.

For Pulsa there is a clear intersection and afOiliation with minimalism, evident both in written statements and in practice. Most prominently, in November of 1968 Pulsa staged a tape concert featuring the work of Lamonte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip

Glass. A teaching seminar followed in December with Reich, Riley, Young, and James Tenney in attendance. This event featured a discussion with the composers and a “collaboration using Pulsa control system and output devices in studio space.”22 Although there is no record of the output of the seminar, Pulsa appeared to have been intent on afOiliating themselves with minimal music and art. Edward Strickland in his synoptic account of minimalism across both music and the visual arts, notes that the November 1968 tape

21 Yates McKee, “The Public Sensoriums of Pulsa: Cybernetic Abstraction and the Biopolitics of Urban Survival,” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (2008): 49-52. McKee emphasizes Pulsa’s problematic relationship with relations of power embedded in discourses on ecology and the environment, where “abstract aesthetic awareness” is substituted for critical political engagement. See McKee, 66. 22 See “Schedule of Meetings for Pulsa Seminar,” 1968, https://archive.org/details/PulsaYaleSeminar1968. This single-page document lists events from November 7th to December 19th, presumably as part of a seminar taught under the rubric Yale Research Associates in the Arts. 109 concert was signiOicant in that it was sole event of the period that presented work by Young,

Riley, Reich, and Glass.23 Pulsa themselves are absent any consideration in Strickland’s account, being cast as the conduit for the work of other composers.

The most famous example of Pulsa’s incursion into the discourse on minimal art occurred at the panel discussion on the topic of time in art organized by The Student

Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam on March 17, 1969.24 Panelists included

Pulsa member Michael Cain, artists Carl Andre, Douglas Huebler, and Ian Wilson, and curator and writer Seth Siegelaub. Pulsa’s contact with minimalist and conceptual artists here produces frictions both acknowledged and unacknowledged. Lippard, who moderated the panel, appears to have selected Pulsa as the “emerging” practitioner, hence the prefatory remarks by Cain describing Pulsa’s work. The framework that both Cain and

Lippard use emphasizes Pulsa’s adoption of electronic technology and media. Interestingly, in an answer to an un-transcribed comment from the audience, Cain stresses Pulsa’s interest in a “new kind of architecture,” created out of “controlling perceptible energy in particular time-spaces, environments.”25 This response is followed by Carl Andre’s remark that Pulsa’s work seems less oriented towards the plastic arts than the performing arts, implying that the live, real-time nature of their installations is the most salient feature.

Cain’s response to Andre is both detailed and revealing, conOlating African music, Indian music, architecture, environment, and computation. SpeciOically, Cain cites the “plastic effect on the senses” that is found in Indian and African music. He connects this to an interaction

23 Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 210. 24 See Lucy Lippard et al., “Time: A Panel Discussion.” 25 Lippard, 22. 110 between humans and machine that some how evades the need for control:

What we’re doing is very much involved with the computer revolution, the

revolution of man-machine relationships. Inasmuch as we’re developing

environments that are under electronic control or direction and people are

experiencing those environments, they’re not in any way controlled by them; they’re

interacting with them. By being monitored, responded to by the control systems,

they will be able to develop a much richer and more knowledgeable relationship to

all their experiences.26

This weird symbiosis between human and machine is notable, not for the adaptation of a language of cybernetics that in the late 1960s was becoming more commonplace, but for the insistence on the duration of this kind of interaction, and speciOically on the idea of architecture as supplying a necessary embodiment of context. Cain continues:

Within this context, architecture is an appropriate situation, since it constitutes the

principal [sic] environment in which we all live, and since it is one of the few places

where something can be done now that can last for 20 or 30 years—the time we

anticipate as being really meaningful for a programmed environment to develop and

interact with people.27

Here the idea of duration is on the scale of a building’s lifecycle; Pulsa envisioned their installations essentially coexisting with a piece of architecture for its entire lifetime. Yet

Cain goes on to refer to George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time as a rebuke to the idea that art should aspire to timelessness, suggesting that instead art should manipulate the

26 Lippard, 22. 27 Lippard. 111 “experience of time, in some way to suggest the experience of timelessness, or phenomena outside of everyday experiences.”28 The implication here is that, instead of the actuality of a duration measured in decades, the experience could be simulated. This contrasts with Carl

Andre, who insists on a temporal sense centered on the present, and the importance of construction without structure. For Andre, works like his Scatter Pieces invoke a physical, aleatoric, atemporal procedure that has no clear connection to linear time.29 This distinction between a physical, material (if structure-less) construction, and the creation of environments where “energy exists as a phenomenon directly perceivable,” indicates a fundamental congruence, but also a divergence of Pulsa from minimalism.

Pulsa’s work can be understood as a mediation of architecture through minimalism. The techniques of this mediation did not lie purely in Michael Fried’s twin bugaboos of theatricality and literalism, but in an electronic reconstitution of these qualities. This reconstitution evoked a kind of endlessness whose precise medium is not spatial, but cognitive and perceptual. Throughout Pulsa’s writings, they emphasize the idea of a collective intelligence that functions in a singular way. The speciOic example they use is instructive: “Within the perspective of structuralist interpretations of cultural history, perhaps this work has much in common with such monolithic, one-spirited cultural expressions as the pyramids of Egypt.”30 Here Pulsa appears to echo Hegel and his concept of Egyptian architecture as straddling a boundary between architecture and its anterior independence, as an external materialization of spirit, yet in the case of pyramids ultimately

28 Lippard. 29 Lippard, 23. 30 See “Notes on Group Process,” 4. 112 acceding to function and abandoning purposeless independence.31 This attachment to a

Hegelian historical anterior and to a monolithic architecture of monumental scale and duration connects directly to one of minimalism’s most controversial effects—what Michael

Fried characterizes as the problem of “endlessness.” Fried’s antipathy to this quality derives from Tony Smith’s experience of the New Jersey turnpike that resulted in a foundational shift in his thinking about the “end of art,” and the perception of seemingly unending landscapes like abandoned airstrips and drill grounds. Smith’s observations became the centerpiece of Fried’s critique of minimal art, “Art and Objecthood.”32 Fried’s carefully plotted rhetorical assault focuses both on the theatrical, limitless nature of minimalist objects, and on what he identiOies as a latent anthropomorphism, objects functioning as

“other persons” with an “inner, even secret life.”33 This results in a fundamental hollowing out of art, as theatricality and literalism become the salient qualities of the art object.34

Pulsa’s work is founded on many of the qualities that Fried attributes to minimal art. In particular, the quality of endlessness and the use of repetition as a formal building block are immanent qualities of the programmed environments. Lucy Lippard remarks that in the

31 Hegel understands Egyptian architecture as inhabiting a space in history anterior to what he terms “classical architecture,” and belonging to a class of functionless “independent or symbolic architecture.” See G.W.F. Hegel, “Independent or Symbolic Architecture,” in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art Vols 1-2, trans. T. M Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 635-659. 32 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 157-160. Interestingly, Pulsa in their essay “City as an Artwork” echo Smith’s observation about the “endlessness” of urban landscapes and infrastructure. For Pulsa there was no extant artistic practice that dealt with scale at this magnitude: “No existing systems express on a large scale the living gestalt, the changing nature of urban energy Olow, except highways, whose optimum use is intercity travel and other transports systems that are generally hidden or based outside urban complexes.” See Pulsa, “The City as an Artwork,” in Arts of the Environment, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: G. Braziller, 1972), 210. 33 Ibid., 156. 34 Fried uses the term “hollow” repeatedly throughout “Art and Objecthood,” speciOically to describe the work of Donald Judd and Robert Morris. This culminates in his criticism of Tony Smith’s interest in pneumatic structures as the zenith of a “literalist sensibility,” since structures full of air are “hollow with a vengeance.” See “Art and Objecthood,” 156-157. 113 perceptually diffuse “non-relational, non-referential” environments that Pulsa creates,

“Ideally the experience would go on forever, and the artiOicial audience-art object relationship would be destroyed for good.”35 Yet the formal illegibility of Pulsa’s installations, and their manifest interest in direct manipulation of the human nervous system, create a problem of category. Lippard draws the point of comparison with minimal music (Cage, Young, Tenney and Riley), Merce Cunningham’s performances, and

Buckminster Fuller’s concept of synergetics. There is little to anchor the light-sound environments in a material substrate related to the plastic arts other than electronic equipment, but at the same time Pulsa’s work is not purely conceptual.36

Fried’s critique of literalism thus appears inapplicable to Pulsa’s environments, since despite having a distinct “nonrelational, unitary character,” they lack entirely in thingness.37

At the same time Pulsa’s deliberate appropriation of architecture as the substrate for their environments highlights one of Fried’s blindspots; as Mark Linder succinctly puts it, Fried engages in a wholesale “denial of architecture” in his attack on minimalism.38 In another sense Pulsa’s objectless environments manufacture a very intentional kind of context and presence through the electronic control of environmental phenomena via “perceptible wave

35 Lippard, “Pulsa,” artscanada 25 (1968): 59. 36 Lippard, 60. 37 See Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 153. Fried deOines the literalist sensibility as “theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work . . . the experience of literalist work is of an object in a situation.” He continually remarks on the “nonrelational, unitary character” of Robert Morris’s and Tony Smith’s “literalist” objects, as a means of creating distance between viewer and artwork via sheer scale. Interestingly Fried sees literalism’s assertion of context and presence as a kind of paradox of medium, where painting as an artwork effectively becomes “not an object.” See Fried, 152-156. 38 See Linder, “Incredibly Convincing: Michael Fried’s Denial of Architecture,” in Nothing Less that Literal, 101-130. 114 energies.”39 The process here is less about developing a distinct physical presence than about producing a sensation of endlessness and inOinite extension—the effects of the pyramids without the pyramids themselves. This evokes a quasi-Hegelian independent or symbolic architecture (without the architecture itself), where limitlessness becomes an essential effect of “spirit” and its attempts to produce an architecture that reconciles form and inner life.40 For Pulsa these effects are immanent within the human mind. The support of electronic media and physically existing architecture is necessary, yet secondary to the phenomena generated within the human perceptual apparatus. The literalism here eschews physical medium and semiotics as it proceeds to entangle itself directly with the perception of temporal and spatial endlessness.

In a three-page 1968 document, “Environmental Art,” Pulsa views their programmed environments as based on conceptual art and happenings, which they deOine as practices

“which point out existing environments with the objective of establishing heightened awareness.”41 Upon this heightened awareness they see a stack of interventions that includes “human scale sensory readouts,” “interactive situations,” environmental modiOications, and “man-made phenomena which plastically orders a primary experience.”42 The desired result of these programmed environments is consistent with a

39 “Notes on Group Process,” 1. 40 Hegel understands this as a transition from a purely symbolic architecture for purposes of national or religious unity, to a state closer to purposiveness where the there is a clear function (such as pyramids and tombs). See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 644-648. Michael Osman has noted that Hegel positions architecture as an autonomous and absurd self-negation where, “free of reference through simple externalization of symbolism, it was cut off from the capacity of self-reOinement through strict limits on its ability to produce subjective experience.” See Michael Osman, “Architecture Ad Absurdum,” Log 22, (2011): 43-46. 41 Pulsa, “Notes on Environmental Art,” 1968, 1, https://archive.org/details/ PulsaNotesOnEnvironmentalArtCa1968. 42 Ibid. 115 kind of perceptual literalism: the manipulations of perceptual phenomena must be perceived as continuous with the existing environment.43

In an entirely incidental way, this echoes Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s 1963 argument about the phenomenal transparency found in Le Corbusier’s architecture vis-à- vis the cubism of Léger and Braque.44 As Mark Linder notes, this involved understanding the facade of the Villa Garches as a ground “conceived of vertical surfaces.”45 As a kind of

“impropriety” where space is perceived as the surface of a painting, this functioned also an orthogonal shift from space to media—from ground/plan to the structure of a wall, where windows function as portals, screens, and gateways. Linder connects Rowe and Slutzky’s orthogonal appropriations to an observation made by Leo Steinberg, that the picture plane had gone from vertical to horizontal, something Steinberg characterizes as the “Olatbed picture plane.” Paralleling but reversing Rowe and Slutzky’s operation of turning plan into facade, Steinberg argues for an image of the work-surface that emphasizes “operational processes” rather than visual experience.46 In particular Steinberg invokes Robert

Rauschenberg’s use of blueprint paper and the concept of architectural plans in the early

1950s as a way to generate images that are aligned with process rather than an upright, naturalistic, visual Oield.47 This shift is driven by a use of media where painting is supplanted by the process of technological reproduction. Notably, Steinberg characterizes

43 Ibid., 3. Pulsa note that “The phenomenon must be unobtrusive, must be unimposing, must seem to form a continuum with the existing environment so that environmental experience integrates. Otherwise the phenomena would be comparable to music and ineffective.” 44 Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta 8 (1963): 49. 45 Linder, Nothing Less than Literal, 41. 46 Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972): 83-84. 47 Steinberg, 85. 116 Rauschenberg’s 1963 Overdraw as an amalgam of “surface that tabulates information” and

“a work surface [that] stood for the mind itself—dump, reservoir, switching center, abundant with concrete references freely associated as in an internal monologue—the outward symbol of the mind as a running transformer of the external world.”48 The impropriety of viewing an architectural plan as the surface of a painting was dissolved into a pictorial space reconOigured as a Oield of information.

This translation would likely have appealed to Pulsa, as two members of the group,

Patrick Clancy and Michael Cain were graduates of the MFA program in painting at Yale.

Both were steeped in the hard-edge painting of Al Held and were interested in ways to substitute light for paint.49 Clancy and Cain soon met David Rumsey, who at the time was an undergraduate Oilmmaker attending Yale’s art school. Clancy notes in a 1992 interview that

Pulsa emerged from an informal meeting of students that were interested in tape music and musique concrète,50 centered around Bulent Arel, an electronic music composer who taught at the Yale School of Music. Clancy met Michael Cain and David Rumsey through the group.

Arel is notable for his invention of an angled guillotine tape splicer at the Columbia-

Princeton Electronic Music Center, a tool that facilitated looping and editing of tape.51

Despite this exposure to musique concrète and tape music, the direction that Clancy, Cain,

48 Steinberg, 88. 49 See Michel Oren, “‘Light as Truth’: An Electronic/Art Historical ‘pocket’ of the 1960s,” Paper presented at School of Art, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, January 5, 1990, 13. 50 See Patrick Clancy, “Clancy Tape Transcription 3-25-92 (PDF),” 2-3, interview by Steina and Woody Vasulka, http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Interviews/53Clancy.pdf. The Vasulkas co-founded The Kitchen in 1971 as a “live-audience test laboratory.” They are primarily known as video and media artists. As part of their practice they accumulated a large archive documenting early video and intermedia. The archive was acquired by the Daniel Langlois Foundation in 2000. The Clancy interview was done as part of this archival project. See Gene Youngblood, “A Meditation on the Vasulka Archive,” Daniel Langlois Foundation website, October 2009, http:// www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=179. 51 See Daria Semegen’s account in Robert J. Gluck, “The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: Educating International Composers,” Computer Music Journal 31, no. 2 (2007): 29-30. 117 and Rumsey pursued was less about the manipulation of physical recorded media than the manipulation of light and sound in a physical space. The emphasis was on immediate experience in real time, not the creation of recorded media.

At the same time, this desire “for controlling perceptible wave energies” resulted in the creation of a series of technically complex apparatuses that functioned as a means to alter speciOic architectural spaces through installations that produced sound and non- representational visual effects. Pulsa’s installations are the product of a post-formalist understanding of painting, real-time media production, and the appropriation of architectural space, designed to interact directly with the afferent inputs of human sensory organs.

The key question here is, what kind of media is this? Pulsa themselves consciously connected their work to Allan Kaprow, the Open Theater, and Carol Schneeman.52 Although assessing Pulsa within the realm of performance studies is outside the scope of this dissertation, it is notable that Pulsa sought to afOiliate themselves with live events and happenings—art that could be documented in some way, but was not instantiated in any tangible medium. A resistance to mediated reproduction is underlined in their disdain for

Oigurative representation. Their National Science Foundation (NSF) application from 1968 argues for “an approach which rejects image, melody and other referential constructs, and substitutes physiological abstraction.”53 This combination of performance with a non-

52 See Kindlmann and Weaver, “Development of Increased Programming Capability in Electronic Environmental Art,” 5. This application for a National Science Foundation grant speciOically mentions Kaprow, Schneeman, and the Open Theater as providing examples of environmental art that functioned as antecedents to Pulsa’s work. Interestingly Pulsa also lists a transdisciplinary lineup of artists, Oilmmakers, and composers that includes Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Lamonte Young, Steve Reich, John Cage, Peter Kubelka, and Bruce Conner. Strangely, Robert Smithson is included as a “writer,” along with Alain Robbe-Grillet and William S. Burroughs. 53 Ibid. 118 objective approach to constructing an audiovisual environment resulted in a technology that was fundamentally about signal synthesis. The environment of “perceptible wave energies” had to be generated, not reproduced. As a corollary to this interest in synthesis,

Pulsa also distinguished themselves from a wide range of works that utilized light and sound. In the NSF application they speciOically identify the work of Dan Flavin and James

Turrell as “promising, but . . . actually unrelated to an art committed to abstractly programming the psysiological [sic] energies of perception.”54 The key distinction here involves synthesis and programming. Both Flavin and Turrell used static lighting schemes from either natural or artiOicial sources, but did not speciOically alter, modulate, or control light via electronic means. Adjacent to Flavin and Turrell was the group USCO, founded by

Gerd Stern, Steve Durkee, and Michael Callahan. Pulsa describes the work of USCO as

“generalized, meta-symbolic multi-media,” yet as still falling short of engaging the kind of programming of perceptual thresholds that Pulsa envisions as essential to their project.55

It is notable that both in their cataloging of inOluences and in their systematic attempt to distinguish themselves from other artists working with light and sound, Pulsa neglect to mention the work of Jack Burnham, the curator and provocateur of systems art. Burnham, an artist, critic, and curator, emphasized the use of systems and technology in art. Burnham is most notable for his curation of the Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum in the fall of 1970, which showcased new artworks that conceived of “information technologies as a pervasive environment.”56 Software resisted the idea of a “technological art,” and insisted on

54 Ibid., 6. 55 Ibid. 56 Jack Burnham, “Notes on art and information processing,” in Software; Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (New York: American Motors Corporation, Smithsonian Institution, and the Jewish Museum, 1970), 14. 119 a blurring of “artistic and technical subcultures.”57 A Burnham lecture is mentioned in a schedule of events for a seminar that Pulsa taught in the fall of 1968 at Yale.58 Burnham was to give a lecture titled “ArtiOicial Intelligence; The Technological Environment,” followed by a discussion with Pulsa and Jan Stolwijk, an environmental scientist who worked at the

Yale-afOiliated John B. Pierce Laboratory and specialized in the computer simulation of biological systems.59 Burnham’s work is important for Pulsa, despite a reportedly competitive relationship that resulted in Burnham excluding Pulsa from the Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum.60 Burnham used Pulsa as an exemplar of a practice that utilized what he characterizes as real-time and intelligent systems. In the essay “Real Time

Systems,” which appeared in the September 1969 issue of Artforum, Burnham explicitly situated Pulsa as a group that effectively used collective parallel processing to create what he characterized as “computer-based programs of light and sound.”61 Burnham seemed enamored by one of Pulsa’s environmental installations in New Haven, praising it for its absorption into the landscape as a strange “light phenomena,” as he Olew over it in a plane.62

57 Ibid. 58 See “Schedule of Meetings for Pulsa Seminar,” 1968, https://archive.org/details/PulsaYaleSeminar1968. 59 Stolwijk’s work focused on modeling thermal comfort zones for humans. He worked extensively with NASA in deOining the parameters of body temperature regulation for the Apollo program. Stolwijk also collaborated with James D. Hardy in research foundational to establishing acceptable standards for temperature regulation in the built environment. See “About Jan Stolwijk,” Yale School of Public Health, https://publichealth.yale.edu/ ehs/curriculum/mph/stolwijk/stolwijk_bio.aspx, and Arthur B. Dubois, “James Daniel Hardy: August 11, 1904-September 6, 1985,” in Biographical Memoirs (National Academy of Sciences, 2006), 88: 17-18, http:// www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/hardy-james-d.pdf 60 See Oren, “‘Light as Truth’,” 26. Oren notes anecdotally that Pulsa contributed signiOicantly to Burnham’s Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1970, mainly through putting Burnham in contact with resources that aided him in staging the show. Burnham did not include Pulsa’s work in the show, reportedly out of a sense of competition, despite prominently referencing Pulsa’s work in his essays, “The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems,” and “Real Time Systems.” Oren does not cite a source for this information other than “one Pulsa member.” 61 Jack Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” Artforum 8, no. 1 (1969): 49–55. 62 Burnham, 55. 120 The weird inversion here of humans acting like machines to produce art that is indistinguishable from natural phenomenon is a chiasmus worth unpacking. What

Burnham is highlighting here, mainly through its apparent absence, is the aspect of mediation. Pulsa’s installations are not recordings; every instance is an event that is not meant to be reproducible. They can be documented with photography, but were never recorded with video or Oilm. Photography was used as a means to preserve process and tools, but failed as a kind of index of the actual experience of the installations. Crucially,

Pulsa did not rely on any kind of strategy of remediation. Their installations produced a phenomenological transparency—the perceived disposition of a space laid over an existing space—that only could be experienced through the mediation of mylar, Oluorescent light bulbs, and sound-generating synthesizers.63 Burnham’s approach mirrors this attempt to

Oind a different way of understanding art after the decline of formalism. In a 1970 interview published shortly after the debut of his Software exhibition, Burnham understood that what he called “process art” and “ecological art” stood outside the dichotomy of formalism and literalism/minimalism.64 Pulsa’s work could easily be construed to Oit both these categories, including elements of ecology and process, yet neither term completely encompasses their practice. More revealing is Burnham’s insistence in “Real Time Systems” that art itself is a

63 Pulsa’s installations resonate in some ways with the work of Leonardo Savioli and his students at the University of Florence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in their appropriation of Italian discos or Pipers for a new type of architectural interior that used projected audiovisual media to create McLuhanesque surrounds of “allatonceness.” See Sylvia Lavin, “Andy Architect™ — Or, a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Disco,” Log, no. 15 (2009): 99–110. It should be noted that Pulsa tended to eschew any kind of representational imagery or overt “content” in their installations. Their media environments tended towards the meditative and austere. 64 See Burnham, “Willoughby Sharp Interviews Jack Burnham,” in Jack Burnham, Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews, 1964-2004, MIT Press Writing Art Series, ed. Melissa Ragain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 254. 121 kind of “archaic information processing system.”65 In this scheme, artists are “programs” and the discursive and institutional structures that permeate the art world are

“metaprograms.”66

Burnham is using this odd terminology speciOically in reference to the work of John C.

Lilly, a neurophysiologist who was best known in the 1960s for his development of the isolation chamber and his work on human-dolphin communication.67 In 1967 Lilly published a book titled Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer based on his research for the National Institute of Mental Health that took place from 1953 to 1967,68 which infamously involved his use of isolation tanks while dosing himself with

LSD-25. Burnham’s use of Lilly’s idea of metaprograms is an articulation of computation not just at the level of tool or instrument, but as a mechanism of culture and discourse. This totalizing system of computation at every level of art and society appears as a kind of technocratic demiurge in a society conceived as a command, control, and communications system. Pulsa were clearly inOluenced by similar lines of thought. Their own conceptualization of their collective organization as a kind of “parallel processing,”

65 Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 49. 66 Ibid. 67 Although Lilly has been seen as an intellectual pariah and a kind of crackpot within marine mammal science, his reputation has been somewhat revived since his death in 2001. Chapter four will explore Lilly’s inOluence on Dolphin Embassy, a project originated by Ant Farm and spun off by Doug Michels and other collaborators into an independent project that focused on interspecies communication and video. D. Graham Burnett, in his study of cetaceans as a kind of epistemological Oigure in twentieth-century science and environmental history, devoted a chapter to Lilly’s work on dolphin communication in the 1960s. See D. Graham Burnett, “Shots Across the Bow: Cetology and the Mind in the Waters 1960-1975,” in The Sounding of the Whale: Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 518-645. Burnett emphasizes Lilly’s role as one of the Oirst scientists to argue that dolphins had sufOicient intelligence, language skills, and social sophistication to be considered as a moral agent equivalent to human beings. 68 See John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments [1968] (New York: Julian Press, 1987). 122 inOluenced by Boguslaw and Herbert A. Simon’s idea of the human as an “information processor,” surely is evidence of this. Yet the weirdly open-ended spectacle of their work, and the deliberately boundless nature of their installations that are confounded with the environment, indicate that they think of media not as the discrete product of a technological apparatus, but as part of the environment itself.

In distinction to a kind of “post-medium” condition that proliferates media, performance, and technology in deOiance of the articulations of any set medium, Pulsa chose an alternative option, that of non-media.69 Pulsa’s non-media is deOined both by an adaptation of the unbounded environmental conditions of minimalism, and an emphasis on the mediated and perceptual nature of their installations. In this sense, to quote François

Laruelle, “the real is communicational, the communicational is real.”70 Media is not a

69 Rosalind E. Krauss’s 1999 lecture “A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition,” is the best articulation of the depreciation of the concept of medium in art since the 1960s. Essentially a meditation on the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Krauss notes that medium in the late twentieth century had become bound to the idea of “automatism,” a term she borrowed from Stanley Cavell that implied a kind of technical and improvisational relationship to medium. In many ways this lecture could be construed as a recuperation of medium in the age of digital reproduction. Evoking both Marshall McLuhan and contemporary theorizing of media as containers of other media, Krauss ends the lecture by proposing the idea of “differential speciOicity,” where the speciOicity of media is always “self-differing.” In this case “medium” can never be merely material or technical, and is intimately involved in its own remediation. See Rosalind E. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York, N.Y.: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 70 See François Laruelle, “The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication.” Parrhesia, no. 9 (2010): 22. Alexander R. Galloway understands one of the key principles of Laruelle’s thought as a media principle where truth is communicated without interpretation or subject—a profoundly anti- phenomenological stance. Hence “the real is communicational, the communicational is real” stands as a statement of intent for Laruelle. See Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xx-xxii. This is part of Laruelle’s larger project of what he calls “non- philosophy,” predicated on a kind of exodus of thought from philosophy, and presuming a radical immanence of “the one.” As Ian James puts it, Laruelle demands that philosophy’s “fundamental operations be suspended.” Laruelle uses a kind of structuralist thought that seeks invariant structures without any recourse to transcendence. See Ian James, “François Laruelle: Beginning with the One,” in The New French Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 159-164. Because of this largely anti-phenomenological theorizing of media, Laruelle seems particularly pertinent to Pulsa, who in their work seem unpersuaded by phenomenological or semiotic claims. Many of their statements seem to anticipate Laruelle’s position, particularly their understanding of the city and architecture as spatialized information and communication structures that “can embody the totality of human knowledge and activity.” See Pulsa, “The City as an Artwork,” 217. 123 speciOic output, but a condition of a generic or virtual space, shorn of any indices of representation, hermeneutics, or phenomenology—space as space. As Alexander Galloway notes, in Laruelle’s understanding of the real as a communication medium, space becomes an active virtuality, an echo chamber for mediatic traces of the real.71 In Pulsa’s work, information is transformed from the binary of the digital into a signal that is different, but indistinguishable, from the environment—ambience without difference. The stillness that

Pulsa sought to create in the environment suggests a desire to eschew media completely;

Pulsa repeatedly asserts the desire to modify the environment “directly.” Their 1968 document “Environmental Art” advocates the “actual modiOication of the environment,” and considers architecture as the archetype of this kind of environmental modiOication.72 For

Pulsa, architecture becomes the boundary condition, both actual and ancestral, anterior to their own production of virtual, generic space.

New Haven Loft Laboratory and The Flicker

Pulsa’s Oirst public exhibition as a coherent group, in 1967, appears to be in what they called their “laboratory period” in a loft in New Haven, Connecticut, on Orange Street.73

Lucy Lippard describes the exhibition as possessing a “non-relational, non-referential

71 Galloway cites an example used by Deleuze in Cinema I, that of Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People, speciOically a scene where a woman in a pool is terrorized by a leopard that is only seen in shadow and sound. Galloway notes that “The leopard is not there in the space, because it has metastasized across the entire room, visible only in the glint of light reOlected on a wall, and audible only in the recursion of the echo of the screaming prey.” See Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital, 200. This rendering of an immaterial sort of presence within perceptual totality also applies to Pulsa’s work. 72 See Pulsa, “Notes on Environmental Art,” 2. 73 Pulsa’s brochure for their October 1968 Boston Public Garden installation lists the address for the loft experiments as 257 Orange Street, New Haven CT. See “Pulsa [Boston Public Garden installation announcement],” September 30, 1968, https://archive.org/details/Image- PulsaBostonExhibitionAnnouncementSept1968. 124 quality,” where the sensations produced by the installation “were so abstract that they seemed to exist at some new perceptual threshold.”74 Lippard’s description of the experience in the loft is worth reproducing in full:

Rippling Oields of Oluorescent light folding and unfolding at various intervals in a

dark room were periodically broken by abrupt Olashes of strobe-light. Though all the

lights were white, prolonged exposure produced the retinal illusion of a spectrum of

pastel colors. The diverse sound programs related to but did not directly reOlect the

rhythms of the lights. The show lasted as long as one wanted to stay; after the Oirst

half hour it became increasingly difOicult to separate oneself from the environment.75

This description reveals qualities that situate Pulsa’s environments in a realm that is difOicult to place. The sublation of subject and environment via strobing effects connects it to the logic of Olicker Oilms created by Peter Kubelka and Tony Conrad, yet its Oilm-less and open-ended environmental nature comes closer to a kind of happening or intermedia event.

There is an obvious “dematerialized” aspect to the experience, even as the technological apparatus of the walls of Oluorescent light bulbs and electric signal generators occupied a signiOicant part of every space. Figures 3-1 and 3-2 show the loft installation in 1967, looking towards the single skylight in the room. A curtain of Oluorescents dangles from the skylight in front of a wall of tubes. Figure 3-1 appears to show the space in a dormant state, with what seems like natural light coming in through the skylight. A sheet of mylar backs the tubes. The resemblance in this image is to a cinema, although the photograph does not show the opposite end of the room, which has an almost identical setup but with no

74 Lippard, “Pulsa,” 59. Lippard’s review of Pulsa’s work covers their 1967 laboratory loft experiments as well as their 1968 installations, Project Argus, and the environment they staged in the Boston Public Garden. 75 Ibid. 125 skylight. The plan reproduced in Oigure 3-3 shows the spatial arrangement of the installation, with the skylight end of the room on the right. The far wall shows a more sculptural use of the lights, as they protrude from the wall at forty-Oive degree angles. This wall can be seen illuminated in the background of Oigure 3-4. In Pulsa Installations 1967–

1969, the text that accompanies this plan is lifted directly from Lippard’s 1968 artscanada review quoted above.76 The implication is that the actual experience of the installation was difOicult to reproduce in a visual medium; hence the words of a critic who had experienced the installation Oirsthand was a useful shorthand to convey the perceptual intensity of the environment. Photographs that Pulsa produced of the installation (see Oigures 3-5 and 3-6) appear to use double exposures to mimic the impression of sublation in the environment, the human Oigures looking ghostly within the space of the loft.

The generic, banal nature of the space is important, since Pulsa always sought to situate their work in environments that were not far removed from everyday experience. Other than the Project Argus show in the gallery in the Yale Art and Architecture Building, and their installation in the MOMA sculpture garden, Pulsa avoided showing their work in galleries or museums. The spaces they presented their work in were largely ad-hoc environments that were appropriated for their purposes and modiOied accordingly.

Combined with the fact that Pulsa considered “all parameters of the urban and technological environment as potential media,” this brings to the forefront the fact that

Pulsa’s work ultimately lacks a coherent medium, yet is suspiciously entangled within urban and architectural spaces.77 If Pulsa pursued a project based on a kind of non-media

76 See Crosby, Pulsa Installations 1967–1969, n.p. The Lippard quote is not attributed. 77 See “Pulsa Boston Demonstration Report, October 8 to 27, 1968,” Medion: a magazine published and distributed by the Museum of the Media 1, no. 2 (1969): 5. 126 practice, then architecture became not a container but a way to shape the environment through a kind of negative space made material.

Despite Pulsa’s disavowal of works that used “unprogrammed light,” it is useful to understand their approach as sharing at least a foundational commonality with some such works where there is no distinct object or medium other than perception itself. François

Laruelle calls this a kind of “photic materiality.” Alexander R. Galloway in his treatise on

Laruelle’s philosophy of media, Laruelle: Against the Digital, glosses this as a means to

“think perception, not think about perception.”78 This so-called “non-standard” view of art and perception cuts out the layer of mediation, in line with Laruelle’s view of reality as operating on a kind of “media principle” where the real collapses into the communicational.79 Pulsa’s installations are a way to “think perception,” or as Pulsa say repeatedly, a way to generate audiovisual energies that are directly perceivable.

Clear precedents for this kind of direct manipulation of perception lie in Tony Conrad’s work, in particular The Flicker, a 1966 structuralist Oilm that was focused on the

“communication of atmosphere” through a thirty-minute sequence of stroboscopic effects.80 Distilled to an essential perceptual mechanism, The Flicker acts as a direct stimulus to the central nervous system and brain through its coordinated strobing effect.

Conrad himself thought of The Flicker as a new kind of medium that divorced Oilm from

78 Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital, 154. 79 Galloway, xx. 80 Branden W. Joseph notes in his study of Conrad and his milieu in the 1960s that Conrad understood The Flicker as a new kind of medium based on the strobing effect, an instantiation of “pure information.” Conrad thought that the Oilm did not need conventional projection and could be effectively viewed indirectly or through closed eyes. Interestingly, Joseph notes that Conrad never speciOied how this “new” medium would work on the human body and nervous system. Joseph sees this as an adaptation of McLuhan’s “externalization of the central nervous system,” where the model of cognitive function is the computer as a media device. See Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 301-303. 127 cameras or even from the necessity of direct viewing on a projection screen. This deployment of Oilm to produce effects that are neurophysiological in effect, and arguably non-cinematic in intention, functions as a clear point of departure for Pulsa’s work. Conrad seemed to indicate a desire, well established within the idiom of an “expanded cinema,” for

Oilm to create a total environment via the atmospheric effects of the projection of Oilm in a theater.81 The register of this effect is not just cinematic, but architectural. Conrad seemed to understand the space of the theater as part of the “medium” of Oilm, a strange expansion that points towards an elision of boundaries between space and media.82 Although Pulsa mentions the Oilms of Peter Kubelka as an antecedent to their work in their fairly extensive writings on their own practice, they are silent on Conrad’s work.83 This seems like a deliberate omission, seeing that Pulsa clearly cultivated contact with key Oigures in minimal music. Their December 1968 symposium “Music as [sic] Psysiological Environment” with

Steve Reich, Terry Riley, James Tenney, and Lamonte Young would indicate that they sought an afOiliation with minimal music as a sympathetic and adjacent set of practices. Lamonte

Young in particular had an extensive history as a collaborator with Conrad.84 The title of the

81 See Joseph, 300. Joseph quotes Conrad’s comments on the environmental nature of The Flicker from a December 1972 interview in the French journal Cinéma. Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema remains the canonical reference on the interdisciplinary use of media and Oilm in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the preface to Expanded Cinema, Youngblood emphasized a McLuhanesque conOlation of media, networks, and consciousness. See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970), 41. 82 See the Cinéma interview quoted in Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 300. 83 For Pulsa’s mention of Kubelka, see Kindlmann and Weaver, “Development of Increased Programming Capability in Electronic Environmental Art,” 5. Branden Joseph notes that although Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer is often seen as a precedent to The Flicker, Conrad claims to have not seen the Oilm until deep into the production of The Flicker. See Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 435n27. P. Adams Sitney characterized Arnulf Rainer as a reductive graphic Oilm that extends a cinematic tradition that began with Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet Mécanique and Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma. See P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant- Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 269-292. 84 Joseph details this productive, yet extremely fraught relationship between Conrad and Young, speciOically their collaboration in the initial version of The Theatre of Eternal Music, from 1965-66. See “What Is a Minor History?” and “The Social Turn,” in Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 11-58 and 59-108. 128 seminar turns on the idea that music can be considered a “physiological environment,” that the register is no longer aesthetic or harmonic, but a phenomenon of space.

Pulsa’s Oirst installation in the New Haven loft borrows—in concept if not in execution

—some of the principles of The Flicker. The clearest difference was the fact that the loft installation was constructed as a space rather than a Oilm. The “laboratory period in the loft,” as they call these installations, was a kind of psychoacoustic treatment of the architectural space of the improvised loft gallery. The loft had a sloping ceiling that tapered down on the short sides of the room to angled walls made of Oluorescent light tubes and backed by sheets of mylar. The setup was initially conceived using an analog tape system and incandescent lights, which were replaced by Oluorescents and a signal generator after a period of experimentation.85

The key detail here is both obvious and non-intuitive: the Oluorescent lights were used both as a way of emitting light and as a means of generating audio. Patrick Clancy in a 1992 interview with the Vasulkas details the process that Pulsa used to build their Oluorescent wall installations.86 He notes that they used seven walls of Oluorescents in the New Haven loft space. Most of the material and equipment was found in army surplus stores, in particular used Oluorescent tubes that were six to eight feet long. Pulsa extensively modiOied the light tubes so that they could be controlled via audio signals by an ampliOier connected to a two-channel tape deck. Each wall of Oluorescent tubes was wired to function as a Oield so that the tubes would Oire in unison. Clancy refers to this particular installation as

85 See Crosby, Pulsa Installations 1967–1969. The descriptions of the Oirst three projects appear to be cribbed directly from Lucy Lippard’s artscanada proOile of Pulsa in the December 1968 issue. See Lippard, “Pulsa,” 59– 60. 86 See Clancy, “Clancy Tape Transcription 3-25-92 (PDF),” 2-4. 129 “Program 3.” One channel of the tape deck was used to send an audio signal to Oire the

Oluorescent tubes. Frequency determined intensity—higher frequencies produced bright light, lower frequencies produced murky lower intensity light—simulating a kind of synesthesia where sound stimulates visual effects. The second channel of the tape deck was used to record the sound of the gas in the Oluorescent tubes ionizing as it Oired. Audio and light were thus linked, if not exactly synced. Two pairs of speakers at opposite ends of the room reproduced both the initiating audio signal and a live feed of the ionizing gas.

Clancy explained that since the motors running the tape decks were non-synchronous, the seven walls would fall out of phase slowly until they gradually came back into phase after a 45-minute interval. This somewhat arbitrary duration determined the length of the installation piece. Documentation of the loft installations shows the Oluorescent light walls in different conOigurations. Figures 3-2 and 3-4 show close-ups of the tubes. Figure 3-4 is of particular interest, showing the only “wall” mounted on the ceiling, or more precisely hanging from a skylight that led to a dormer window.

The mylar sheets were used mainly as passive reOlective surfaces. Pulsa’s plan drawing of the installation, found on the Oifth page of their self-published booklet Pulsa Installations

1967–1969 (see Oigure 3-3), shows the spatial conOiguration of the walls in the installation.

The short ends of the loft had the widest walls (Clancy estimates this width at around twenty feet). This particular plan appears to show a slightly different conOiguration than what Clancy detailed in “Program 3,” with only Oive walls.

Lacking any Oilm documentation of the active installation, the best account of the installation’s effects can be found in an article written by painter Jack Tworkov, who at the time was the chair of the Yale Department of Art. Published in Eye: Magazine of the Yale Arts

130 Association, the article provides a brief description of the experience of viewing the installation, emphasizing the fact that viewers were plunged into total darkness as the light walls were initiated. Tworkov emphasizes the Olickering, pulsating nature of the light and sound:

The Oluorescent tubes light up and go out in a succession of discrete rhythmic pulses.

The sound crackles, or beeps in ordered rhythms. You look at a bank of lights and a

Olash of light crackles behind you. . . . After Oive, ten minutes it get[s] monotonous,

even boring, but at the end of Oifteen minutes you are somewhat in a trance. When

the sound stops and the utility lights go on again you realize that for Oifteen and/or

twenty minutes you were subjected to an experience as concrete as a shower.87

The affective experience, vacillating between boredom and trance, induced by the rhythmic Olicker of light and sound seems analogous to Conrad’s The Flicker. Both Conrad and Pulsa appear to be less interested in their respective Oilm and installation as works of mediation, than in the direct neurophysiological effects on an audience. Conrad’s meticulously-created strobing patterns—generated by alternately Oilming a piece of white paper and total darkness with a cap completely occluding the lens—were synced to a metronomic, electronically composed soundtrack to create a Oilm devoid of conventional content.88 Conrad’s own statements repeatedly hinge on the idea that the Oilm creates a new environment, or “gives unexpected birth to a sense of aural vastness.”89 There is also an ambition for a synesthetic blending of the senses, with Conrad reportedly remarking in a

87 Jack Tworkov et al., “The Yale Art School Light Show,” Eye: Magazine of the Yale Arts Association, no. 2 (1968): 32. 88 See “The Flicker,” in Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 279-352. 89 Joseph, 285. 131 notebook that he wanted to create a concert of “OP Music” with Walter Di Maria.90 This blending of sound and space, the use of sound generating a kind of perceptual vastness, seems to be a clear precedent for Pulsa’s loft installations. It is unclear whether Conrad viewed any of Pulsa’s installation work. Clancy in the interview with the Vasulkas insinuates that the installations generated substantial interest from artists and musicians in

New York, but there is no clear evidence that Pulsa and Conrad were in any kind of direct contact.91

Conrad does appear to acknowledge Pulsa’s installations with his 1972 work, Oirst performed at The Kitchen, Ten Years Alive on the Incinite Plain. An ensemble of Conrad, Rhys

Chatham, and Laurie Spiegel played the droning soundtrack to ninety minutes of Oilm loops of vertical lines of light that Olickered and moved across four screens. The Oilm loops are strongly reminiscent of the Oluorescent light walls and the perceptual effects that Pulsa achieved in their loft installations. The black-and-white striations projected on the screens evoke a similar kind of pulsating rhythm, and were the result of live video processing of a

Oilm source by Steina and Woody Vasulka.92 This combination of sound and visual elements was another attempt to create a “total, immersive, and transformative experience,” using minimal audiovisual techniques and long durations.93 The intent was to create an experience that was less musical than immanently spatial.

90 Joseph, 286. Joseph quotes from Conrad’s blue Flicker notebook. 91 See Clancy, “Clancy Tape Transcription 3-25-92,” 4. 92 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 370 n24. Also relevant is Liz Glass, “The Moment of Enlightenment is a Sound: Tony Conrad and the Long String Drone,” in Art Expanded, 1958-1978, Living Collections Catalogue, ed. Eric Crosby with Liz Glass, vol. 2.(Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015). http://walkerart.org/collections/ publications/art-expanded/moment-enlightenment-sound-tony-conrad-long-string-drone. Glass details Conrad’s continued use of invented musical instruments, in particular one called the Long String Drone, that was used in Ten Years Alive on the Incinite Plain. 93 See Glass, “The Moment of Enlightenment is a Sound.” 132 Pulsa’s and Conrad’s work were driven by sets of ideas that intersect in their desire to elide the concept of media. The critical reception of The Flicker centered mostly on P. Adams

Sitney’s formulation of structural Oilm as a genre of Oilms that function as “audio-visual objects”; Conrad’s focus on the mechanisms of perception was interpreted as generating a

“static,” un-evolving work.94 At the same time Conrad emphasized his antipathy to the idea of Oilm as a medium, speciOically articulating in period interviews an intent to “produce the actual imagery directly within the observer rather than in a normal way of having the eye interpret the light patterns on the screen.”95 Pulsa echoes this idea in their insistence that their installations are uniquely tuned to the “scale and rhythm of human perception. It is unlike ‘multi-media’ in that it is uniOied and abstract; it is unlike ‘psychedelia’ in that it is neither imitative of experience nor phantasmagoric.”96 The abstract qualities of the perceptual experience and the integrated nature of the installations are used to create an environment where “the phenomena of light and sound are uniquely capable of being perceived as literal physical entities.”97 This “literalism” or “minimalism” on Pulsa’s part drove them to continue their experiments and installations at far larger scales, encompassing architecture and the totality of the environment.

94 See P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” in Film Culture Reader (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 326-348. 95 This quotation is from a 1966 interview with Jonas Mekas published originally in Film Culture. See Jonas Mekas, “March 24, 1966, An Interview with Tony Conrad: On the Flickering Cinema of Pure Light,” in Movie Journal: the Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971, ed.Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 236-240. 96 See Tworkov et. al., “The Yale Art School Light Show,” 34-35. As part of his impressions of the installation, Tworkov included Pulsa’s two-page commentary about the loft installation. 97 Ibid. 133 Project Argus and the A&A Building

Pulsa’s participation in Project Argus in May of 1968 at the Yale Arts and Architecture building, while their most famous work, is obscured by the transdisciplinary nature of the project. Pulsa’s main contribution to the project—a collaboration with Charles Moore, then chair of the Yale School of Architecture, Kent Bloomer, and Felix Drury—was an elaboration of their New Haven loft installations, executed here at a larger scale and higher level of technical complexity. The full name of the collaboration, Project Argus: A Multiple Montage from the Griggs Collection of Classic Film and an Experiment in Light and Sound Environment in and around the Department of Architecture’s New Structure in the Exhibition Hall of the

Art and Architecture Building, was ungainly, but also pedantically descriptive of the three main parts of the installation.98 Moore, Bloomer, and Drury student’s created a two-story wooden structure that extended diagonally across the second-Oloor exhibition space and rose up to the third Oloor.99

Pulsa’s contribution to Project Argus was the Experiment in Light and Sound

Environment, which competed with the silent Oilms from the newly acquired Griggs collection that were projected on the mylar-covered walls of the wood structure.100 The invitation for Experiment in Light and Sound Environment (see Oigure 3-7) indicates that it showed in the evening on consecutive weekends, May 10-11 and May 17-18. This

98 See Robert A. M. Stern and Jimmy Stamp, Pedagogy and Place: 100 Years of Architecture Education at Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 337. 99 Interestingly this contingent of students included Steven Izenour, who at the time was a student in Yale’s Master of Environmental Design program. Izenour went on to assist at Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas studio in the fall of 1968, and coauthored the eponymous book. See Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 293, 337. 100 The Griggs collection was an archive of silent Oilms donated to Yale by actor John Griggs. The collection of two hundred Oilms reportedly contained Oilms by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. See Stern and Stamp, 339, 614n374. 134 cacophony, equal parts architectural folly, Oilm projection, and audiovisual installation, has often been interpreted as an example of the intersection of intermedia and architecture, and as an aestheticized protest against institutional power in general and the Yale School of

Architecture speciOically.101

The few reviews from the period indicate that the installation was well received as a kind of spectacle. The New Haven Journal-Courier described it as a “living labyrinth,” with the spectators “bombarded and bathed by the frenetic strobe light of hundreds of light tubes—in rows overhead, on the walls, bouncing back up from the shiny Oloor.”102 The sound of the installation is speciOically cited as evoking a “herd of technological dinosaurs, their growls and groans, whistles and moans echoing through your very heart.”103 The overall effect is described in a synthaesthetic manner—“lights you could hear, plastic

[mylar] that groaned”—that indicates an explicit crossing of sensory circuits.

An account in the Yale Daily News notes in an interview with Pulsa member Paul Fuge that the intent of the audiovisual environment was to shape space through sound.104 Fuge remarks that the rhythmic pulses of the installation were created spatially. He gives the example of a ping sound rotated through ten different speakers that inscribes a space or

101 The relatively sparse scholarship that situates Pulsa’s work within architectural historiography connects them speciOically to the pedagogical nature of Project Argus in the context of the Yale School of Architecture. See Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, and Eve Blau, “This Work Is Going Somewhere: Pedagogy and Politics at Yale in The Late 1960s,” Log, no. 38 (2016): 131–49. Felicity D. Scott more acutely links Pulsa’s participation in Project Argus to a kind of neo-avant garde of the late 1960s that sought a Foucauldian interruption of dominant modes of architectural production. See Felicity D. Scott, “‘Vanguards’,” e-clux, no. 64 (2015), https://www.e-Olux.com/journal/64/60873/vanguards. This is an extension of Scott’s historiographic argument about the relationship of architecture, technology, and media in the late 1960s. See Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 102 See William Betsch, “Panoptics Fill Yale Gallery,” New Haven Journal-Courier, April 11, 1968. 103 Ibid. 104 See Thomas Hine and John Coots, “Light, Sound, People Make ‘Argus’ Happen,” Yale Daily News (New Haven, CT), April 26, 1968. 135 shape, rather than a sound. This ability to specify and manipulate sound in space had the potential to annoy participants; Fuge describes altering the pitch and volume of the sound to an apparently room-clearing effect.105 Perhaps most famously, C. Ray Smith included

Project Argus in his survey of what he called “supermannerism,” or more verbosely, “the

Bold New Poly-Expanded Mega Decoration,” in the October 1968 issue of Progressive

Architecture.106 Smith extended his argument ten years later with the book

Supermannerism, subtitled “New Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture.” Although more journalistic than academic in tone, Supermannerism attempts a kind of in-situ periodization.107 Strangely, Pulsa is classiOied as a “lighting design group,” and as a sort of adjunct to the structure of the diagonal, which provided a “dazzling bombardment.”108

The architecture of Project Argus appears akin to a stage set. The single published plan and elevation of the structure appeared in the October 1968 issue of Progressive

Architecture as part of C. Ray Smith’s articles detailing “The Revolution in Interior

Design.”109 The elevation shows a set of walls, cut to Oit within the double-height space of the exhibition gallery (see Oigure 3-8). It resembles an internal partition, a cutout that could be used as a surface substrate for the specular effects of mylar. Commentary on the

105 Felicity D. Scott notes that this ability to manipulate participants through shifts in the sonic environment of the Experiment in Light and Sound Environment revealed that the “mechanisms of transformation and modes of ‘participation’ operated on a razor’s edge.” In this account, experimentation in the technological control of environments veered between liberation and perverse forms of control. See Scott, “‘Vanguards’,” 5. 106 See C. Ray Smith and Jean W. Progner, “The Revolution in Interior Design: The Bold New Poly-Expanded Mega Decoration,” Progressive Architecture 49, no. 10 (1968): 148–208. This section of the issue was sub- divided into nine sections: “The New Interiors: Fad or Fact?”, “Chaos as a System,” “Hard Edge Interiors,” Fun- House Architecture,” “System/Kits,” “The Synthetic Environment,” “Soft-Edge Exteriors,” “The Kinetic Electric Environment,” and “The Verdict.” All were authored by Smith, except “The Kinetic Electric Environment,” which appears to have been written by Progressive Architecture assistant editor Jean W. Progner. Pulsa’s work for Project Argus is addressed primarily in “The New Interiors: Fact or Fad?” 107 See C. Ray Smith, Supermannerism: New Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture. (New York: Dutton, 1977). 108 Smith, 109. 109 Smith, “The Revolution in Interior Design,” 152. 136 structure of Project Argus focuses on its potential for a kind of “destruction” of the Rudolph building. In Supermannerism, Project Argus is given prominence as the quintessential

“diagonal,” a formal permissiveness that asserted a rebellion against history and the regimes of the modernist grid. Smith declares that “No diagonal drawn in the 1960s was such a clear statement of rebellion against the past as Project Argus,” although it is unclear what aspect of the past this rebellion is aimed at.110

Pulsa in their role as “lighting design group” played a decisive role in Project Argus’ function as a kind of intermedia spectacle. It is unclear what kind of coordination there was between Pulsa and the studio run by Moore, Drury, and Bloomer. Judging from Pulsa’s own documentation and published writings, the Experiment in Light and Sound Environment was driven by their speciOic project of using a type of applied engineering aimed directly at the human perceptual apparatus.111 Their hand-drawn plan for the light and sound environment (see Oigure 3-9) shows a deliberate strategy of deconstructing and recompiling the interior space of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture building. Images that were initially published in the Yale Alumni Magazine in May 1968 show an expanded array of equipment that include hundreds Oluorescent lights organized into “lightwalls” and what

Pulsa called a “hybrid” control system.

Figure 3-10 shows the space as it appeared in Pulsa’s plan drawing, and includes

110 Smith, Supermannerism, 108. 111 Although the name “Project Argus” alludes to the many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, Felicity D. Scott also notes that Project Argus appears to take its name in part from Operation Argus, a series of US atomic tests that occurred over the south Atlantic in 1958. See Scott, “‘Vanguards’,” 4. Although Scott does not gloss this further, Operation Argus was unique in that it used high altitude nuclear detonations to test the ChristoOilos theory that radiation belts could be synthesized in the upper atmosphere that could destroy the arming and detonation mechanisms of ICBMs, forming a “radiation” shield against nuclear attack—a kind of dematerialized attack on a physical weapons system. See C. B. Jones, et al., Operation Argus, 1958 (Washington, D.C.: United States Defense Nuclear Agency, 1982). 137 speakers, Oluorescent light tubes, strobes, mylar, and control systems. Notable here are the mylar panels embedded with speakers that run roughly parallel to the Project Argus structure. These operated as reOlective screens that could be controlled via an electrostatic drive element, which could vibrate the panels at frequencies that, at speciOied distances, produced unusual distortion of reOlected images; these images could then be synchronized with the Oluorescent lightwalls.112

Photos of the installation during the spring 1968 showings reveal a surround of reOlective surfaces. Figure 3-11 shows the installation from the exhibition space Oloor, while

Oigure 3-12 shows a view from the third Oloor, looking out at the exhibition space below.

Although these intensely catoptric images give little more than a fuzzy impression of the space, the surfaces are revealed as screen-like, reOlecting the immediate environment directly. The one elevation (Oigure 3-8), published in C. Ray Smith’s “The Revolution in

Interior Design” article for Progressive Architecture, shows a structure that is deliberately

Oilled with voids, an aspect that disappears in the catoptric photos. The one concession to practicality is the alcove for Pulsa’s control systems, which were incorporated on a raised platform. Figure 3-10 also shows Bill Crosby and David Rumsey in the space for the control systems, situated approximately at the mid-point in the Project Argus structure facing the

York Street side of the A&A.

This modular rack-mounted control system was important not only as the key technical component driving the installation, but also as an instantiation of Pulsa’s collective mentality regarding signal generators, ampliOiers, and logic circuits. The system was

112 Kindlmann and Weaver, “Development of Increased Programming Capability in Electronic Environmental Art,” 19. 138 published in a December 1968 issue of IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics.

The article, “Sound Synthesis: A Flexible Modular Approach with Integrated Circuits,” was coauthored by Paul H. Fuge and Peter J. Kindlmann. It is the most comprehensive published description, at least in a technical sense, of Pulsa’s work. Kindlmann was the sole member of Pulsa that came from a technical engineering background. At the time he also was a faculty member in Yale’s Department of Engineering & Applied Science.113 Focusing on a device that was designed as a modular sound synthesizer in the mold of a Moog or Buchla synthesizer of the era, Kindlmann and Fuge detailed the “voltage control of audio variables by separate functional modules,” using off-the-shelf integrated circuit technology—a necessary invention, given the high cost of computer-controlled systems. Pulsa speciOically call the system an “analog-digital programming device.” Kindlmann and Fuge claim that they had designed forty-two different modules, although the focus of the paper is on a single voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) module. The VCO was a circuit board that produced a basic waveform controlled by a voltage source and modulation of frequency.

This waveform could be modiOied by other modules to create shifts in attack, delay, sustain, and release, via a kind of parametric yet analog control of sound.

While the IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics article detailed the technical speciOications of sound synthesis, Pulsa also documented the output devices in their failed

National Science Foundation grant. What Pulsa deOined as output devices could more accurately be described as a kind of envelope for the modiOied interior architecture of the exhibition gallery. In the NSF grant they specify ten hi-Oi speakers, Oive lightwalls made out

113 A brief biography of Kindlmann is available on Yale’s Ezra Stiles College website. See “Peter Kindlmann,” Ezra Stiles College, https://ezrastiles.yalecollege.yale.edu/peter-kindlmann. 139 of one thousand Oluorescent light tubes, four vibrating mylar panels, six Oluorescent strobes, and eighteen audio channels connected to these devices.114 Their analog-digital programming device generated audio signals that were reproduced as sound, but also were converted into light via the lightwalls and mylar panels. Eschewing any symbolic or representational media, or what they termed as “image or melody,” Pulsa designed the entire stack of their installation as a way to manipulate space through information.115 Their non-objective methods, based on a kind of plasticity of signal that could produce sound or light, understood matter as fundamentally programmable. They speak of programming both in the technical engineering sense and in the more provocative sense of “programming physical energies,” eliding any difference between technique and speculation.116

At a certain level this was a profoundly mechanistic view of how perception functions.

Pulsa even use the term “physiological abstraction,” to distinguish their practices from others that could be seen as inhabiting a similar medium of light and sound. Despite aligning themselves with environmental art and event-based performances by Allan

Kaprow and Carolee Schneeman, Pulsa maintained a technocratic belief in art as a type of information processing.117 Echoing Jack Burnham, who approved of their use of real-time systems as well as their conception of a collectivity based on parallel processing, Pulsa understood their installations as a mechanism to create a physiological abstraction, or non- representational form of information transfer from machine to human.

This is what separates them most deOinitively from groups like USCO, which sought to

114 See Kindlmann and Weaver, “Development of Increased Programming Capability in Electronic Environmental Art,” 6, 17-19. 115 Kindlmann and Weaver, 4 116 Kindlmann and Weaver. 117 Kindlmann and Weaver, 5. 140 create a psychedelic immersion or “acid vision” that verged on the mystical. Founded by

Gerd Stern, Steve Durkee, and Michael Callahan, USCO (an acronym for “US Company” or

“Company of US”) is most famous for their site-speciOic intermedia installations that utilized

Oilm projection, video, strobe lights, and sound. Their 1966 installations in a church in

Garnerville, New York, and The World, a discotheque housed in an airplane hangar in

Garden City, New York, are obvious precedents for Pulsa’s work. But Pulsa were keen to distance themselves from any use of symbolism or appropriated imagery in their installations, both of which were present in USCO’s work.118 Pulsa preferred the

“neutrality” of the laboratory or gallery. Or more speciOically, they preferred to situate their work within different kinds of architecture, shunning venues that had associations with entertainment or the ecclesiastic.

Their collaboration with the Yale School of Architecture, an odd amalgam of design/ build project and archival presentation of silent Oilms, has always overshadowed the elephant lurking in the gallery, namely that the brutalist, late modern architecture of Paul

Rudolph’s Art and Architecture building is perhaps the most incongruous of sites for Pulsa’s work. If Pulsa invoke Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 exhibition Architecture without Architects as a model for the output of their collective production, then Rudolph’s A&A is the antithesis of their ideal of anonymous authorship.119 Nikolaus Pevsner at the inauguration of the

118 Both Felicity D. Scott and Michel Oren situate USCO’s work as invested in creating a kind of environmental LSD, intent on obliterating the distinction between self and environment. Oren notes the importance of creating a sensory overload via op art, projected media, and the use of the strobe light in many of USCO’s installations and events. See Michel Oren, “USCO: ‘Getting Out of Your Mind to Use Your Head’,” Art Journal 69, no. 4 (2010): 76–95. Scott notes that the strobing effects used in USCO’s installations produced a “loss of demarcations between the self and environment, the amorphous visual and psychological character of the psychedelic trip, and the melting of the self into a communal, religious, and mystical domain.” See Felicity D. Scott, “Acid Visions,” Grey Room, no. 23 (2006): 29. 119 See Pulsa, “Notes on Group Process,” 4. 141 building thought the architecture so sui generis that he classed Rudolph with Eero Saarinen,

Philip Johnson, and Minoru Yamasaki as architects whose self-expressive qualities made them impossible to imitate.120 Yet the A&A is a perfect foil for the dematerialized, electronic nature of Pulsa’s work. The hand-Oinished nature of the A&A’s corrugated concrete surfaces were designed as a kind of optical illusion, deliberately fracturing the perception of light to dematerialize the building and reduce its scale in the surrounding landscape.121 This is further complicated by Rudolph’s use of Yale’s collection of Beaux-Arts plaster casts that had been discarded and stored in the basement of Street Hall. This nineteenth-century collection had been largely abandoned by the previous chair of the design program at Yale,

Josef Albers, and was composed of casts from a huge array of periods and cultures that represented the complete “chain” of history from Egypt to the Italian Renaissance.122

Rudolph valued the casts as a kind of found ornament that articulated space at a more human level, but also as a reminder of the ability of the Beaux-Arts tradition to create formal connections and relationships between different buildings.123

These details about A&A Building might appear irrelevant or antipodal to Pulsa’s

120 Nikolaus Pevsner, “Address Given by Nikolaus Pevsner at the Inauguration of the New Art and Architecture Building of Yale University. 9 November 1963,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26, no. 1 (1967): 6. 121 See Timothy M. Rohan, “Rendering the Surface: Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale,” Grey Room, no. 1 (2000): 85-86. Rohan quotes a Rudolph essay, “Enigmas of Architecture,” from a 1977 issue of A+U, where Rudolph addresses the dematerializing effects of the A&A’s corrugated concrete surfaces. 122 For an extensive account of the use of plaster casts in the A&A Building, see Mari Lending, “The Yale Battle of the Casts: Albers vs. Rudolph,” in Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017): 183-221. Lending sees Rudolph’s use of the casts as creating an anachronic effect that emphasized the historicity of the casts, while modulating the space in ways that created intimacy in the vast warrens of the building. 123 See the Rudolph quote regarding the Beaux-Arts tradition, in Lending, “The Yale Battle of the Casts,” 193. In this quote Rudolph notes, “One of the most serious charges against Modern architecture is its failure to produce understandable theories about the relationship of one building to another. The École des Beaux Arts was actually very rich in this aspect.” See Paul Rudolph, “Six Determinants of Architectural Form,” Architectural Record 120 (October 1956): 183. 142 interests, yet their practice was reliant on a sensibility that understood the historicity and temporal duration of architecture as primarily monumental. As mentioned previously in this chapter, Pulsa’s consideration of architecture through a Hegelian lens emphasizes the spatial endlessness and anteriority of architecture. In this sense the A&A Building is an excellent piece of architecture for Pulsa, despite it being contemporary to their own work.

Rudolph’s use of early twentieth-century casts from Hatshepsut’s funerary temple in the

Theban Necropolis in the stairway leading to the penthouse, and the iconic copy of Minerva overlooking studio space on the fourth Oloor, among other plasters, gave an ambience of antiquity.124 This ambience appears to have been a deliberate concoction, a way of creating what Rudolph called “chance encounters” within the A&A Building.125 Mari Lending describes the plasters as a “reproductive medium, with their inbuilt ruinous vulnerability,” presenting an unstable, contingent form of history.126 Within this historical bricolage, Pulsa found an architecture that invoked the aura of duration and history and could form a substrate for a technologically-induced perceptual “oneness” with the environment.

Timothy M. Rohan Oinds that the monumentality of the A&A Oits well within the paradigm of age-value espoused by Alois Riegl.127 Age-value in Riegl’s deOinition involves the visible erosion of monuments, a process that can be appreciated by almost anyone since it engages

124 See Lending, “The Yale Battle of the Casts,” 194-208, for a comprehensive history of Yale’s plaster casts. Lending makes the case that the casts in general and the Minerva copy in particular were not exact replicas of historical objects, but the result of a “tradition of unruly developments through complexes of lost, sometimes multiplied, originals and Oluctuating copies.” (205) 125 Lending, 210. 126 Lending, 207. 127 Rohan, “Rendering the Surface,” 93. Rohan notes that Rudolph’s apparent engagement in a Rieglian project is somewhat coincidental and is legible only retrospectively. Rudolph did not read German, and Riegl’s 1903 “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” would not be translated into English until 1982. 143 sensory perception and is not dependent on intellection.128 The A&A, if not literally in ruins, did project an aura of being both an epigone and a showcase of historical imitations of architectural fragments. It is against this backdrop of historical media of variegated semiotic richness, and within an embodiment of nineteenth-century architectural media history, that Pulsa chose to stage their Experiment in Light and Sound Environment. Within the “diagonal” of Project Argus, and inside the pinwheel plan of the A&A, Pulsa poised their installation as a kind of architectural Olicker, or a way of using the qualities of human perception to circumvent media while at the same time creating a novel type of space that resides in a domain incorporating waveform, architecture, and perception.

One aspect of Pulsa’s collective approach that has been underappreciated was their collaboration with composer Maryanne Amacher. Amacher was a student of Karlheinz

Stockhausen and Constant Vauclain, and a frequent collaborator on the soundtracks for

John Cage’s Oilms.129 She is known primarily for her installations that utilize the acoustic properties of architectural structures and compositions that use psychoacoustic qualities of the human ear to generate tones. Patrick Clancy noted that Amacher was an “unofOicial” member of Pulsa and that she was a key collaborator in a 1971 video installation in

Automation House in New York City.130 Clancy also mentions Amacher’s presence at their

128 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25, Fall (1982): 24. 129 See Bill Dietz, et al., “Program Notes,” in Maryanne Amacher: Perceptual Geographies (Philadelphia: Bowerbird; New York: Blank Forms, 2019. https://issuu.com/bowerbirdphilly/docs/amacherprogramonline. 130 See Clancy, “Clancy Tape Transcription 3-25-92 (PDF),” 14-15. The undated press release advertising the installation describes it as a “group TV sensorium. . . a simulated environment with color video projections, sound and light.” The installation was on view April 12-18, 1971. See Pulsa, “Pulsa: Presents a Group TV Sensorium,” Automation House press release, undated. https://archive.org/details/ AutomationHouseNewYorkPressReleaseForPulsaGroupT.v.SensoriumApril. The Automation House installation also appears in Pulsa’s article “The City as an Artwork,” 220-221. It is described as a three-Oloor installation, “linked so that one could speak with life-size projected image of a person two Oloors above.” Video effects processors were used to create “ ghost trail” images in the delayed video feeds. Automation House was a collaboration between Theodore Kheel’s American Foundation on Automation and Employment, 144 Harmony Ranch, Pulsa’s communal house located in Oxford, Connecticut. There is photo of

Amacher, Alvin Curran, and members of Pulsa (see Oigure 3-13) taken sometime in 1970 at

Harmony Ranch.131 While the exact nature of their collaboration remains vague, the most important point of interest here is Amacher’s contemporaneous work done in 1965 and

1967, which was speciOically architectural in nature. In 1965 Amacher composed

Adjacencies, a piece for percussion ampliOied in quadrophonic sound. This piece was from a series called “AUDJOINS a Suite for Audjoined Rooms,” and was notable in that it was the only piece from the series with any kind of written notation.132 The sound of the piece was intended to be mixed live in a joint performance between percussionists and sound engineers, with the aim of creating a kind of virtual room in real time through the four speakers, or as Amy Cimini notes, “rooms and walls of sound with variable shapes and densities.”133 Amacher extended this idea of remaking and recompiling the sounds of architectural space in a real-time manner in her 28-hour piece City-Links #1 (Buffalo),

Experiments in Art and Technology, and the Intermedia Institute. Fred Turner notes that it aspired to be a “center for re-thinking human-machine labor” through hosting multimedia art exhibitions, collective bargaining sessions and television production facilities in the same building. See Fred Turner, “Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 1 (April 1, 2008): 5–26. Architectural Forum had a small feature on Automation house in 1970, noting that the converted three-story nineteenth-century townhouse was formerly part of the Soviet Embassy. See “Humanizing Automation,” Architectural Forum 133, no. 1 (1970): 74-75. 131 See Michel Oren, “‘Light as Truth’,” 18, for a brief account of the Harmony Ranch house. Oren notes that the house existed from roughly 1969-1972. The address for Harmony Ranch was listed as 282 Riggs Street, Oxford, CT. See also Crosby, Pulsa Installations 1967–1969. Members of Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), an improvisational music group founded by Alvin Curran, Fredric Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum, were also visitors to Harmony Ranch. Amacher was part of the MEV ensemble that toured the US in 1970. See Alvin Curran, “MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA November 15, 1989,” http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/mev.html. Interestingly, Curran used a 1970 recording of Amacher talking to a parrot at Harmony Ranch for a 1995 work of musique concrete, “A Beginner’s Guide to Attracting Birds,” broadcast on New American Radio. See Curran, “A Beginner’s Guide to Attracting Birds, program notes,” http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/ beginner%27s%20guide.html. An mp3 of the broadcast is available online; see Curran, “A Beginner’s Guide to Attracting Birds,” recorded 1995, New American Radio, http://audioOiles.newamericanradio.org/birds.mp3. 132 See Amy Cimini, “Maryanne Amacher’s Adjacencies,” in Maryanne Amacher: Perceptual Geographies, (Philadelphia: Bowerbird; New York: Blank Forms, 2019): n.p. 133 Ibid. 145 broadcast live from WBFO in Buffalo in 1967. Using microphones placed in eight different locations in Buffalo, the piece mixed ambient sound transmitted over phone lines with prerecorded tracks to create what Amacher called a “long distance music,” merging spatially (and temporally) disparate sound sources into one Oield.134

The aspect of sound transmission through and between architecture fascinated

Amacher, and informs much of Pulsa’s use of sound in their Project Argus installation in the

A&A. Accounts of Pulsa’s installations, from their New Haven loft “program” series experiments to Project Argus, note the aspects of the environments that seem “destructive” of the built architecture and that create new but dematerialized spaces. The New Haven

Journal-Courier article refers to the Project Argus environment as a “living labyrinth,” while the Yale Daily News account emphasizes a more somatic reaction, where the sound generated by the environment seems to hit speciOic regions of the body.135 Jack Tworkov likens the New Haven loft environments to “an experience as concrete as a shower.”136

The relentless volume of the sound generated by Project Argus is remarked upon in

Robert A.M. Stern and Jimmy Stamp’s account: “The effect was blinding and deafening, with the sound penetrating the entire building and rendering ofOice life on the third Oloor virtually intolerable.”137 It is probably the level of noise that prompted the idea that Project

Argus was destructive on some fundamental level. Ada Louise Huxtable in her cheekily

134 Maryanne Amacher, Maryanne Amacher: City-Links (New York: Ludlow 38 Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Goethe Institut, 2010), 2. City-Links #1 was part of a series of City-Links pieces that ran through the late 1980s. Other cities included New York, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Pass Christian (Mississippi), and Groningen (Netherlands). Amacher also staged three City-Links pieces for the Walker Art Center exhibition “Projected Image” that ran from September 26–November 3, 1974. 135 See Bestch, “Panoptics Fill Yale Gallery,” and Hine and Coots, “Light, Sound, People Make ‘Argus’ Happen.” 136 Tworkov et. al., “The Yale Light Show,” 32. 137 Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 339. 146 titled 1969 New York Times article “Kicked a Building Lately?” considered Project Argus a deliberate but “temporary destruction” of the A&A exhibition space. As a freewheeling review appraising C. Ray Smith’s newly coined “style” supermannerism and the various experiments in this realm at Yale, Huxtable takes a more or less sympathetic view of the work.138 Despite this, there is an implied assumption that Project Argus and Pulsa’s work are a profound undoing, a kind of creative destruction that is necessary, but marginal, to architectural practice. The persistent association with LSDesign and psychedelia marks them as external to the discipline. As a way of demarcating work that fails to be assimilated in a foundational way, Huxtable notes that supermannerism could represent a kind of return to ornamentation, an overturning of one of modernism's key shibboleths. At the same time it would be hard to pigeonhole much of the other work labeled as supermannerist as purely decorative; the projects sampled in C. Ray Smith’s “The

Revolution in Interior Design: The Bold New Poly-Expanded Mega Decoration” include the atrium for the Illinois State Bar Association headquarters by Walter Netsch and SOM, as well as quirky product designs like the Doug Michels Tank Chair.139

Situating Pulsa’s Experiment in Light and Sound Environment in the broader terrain of architectural practices related to media, projection, and environments reveals a startling but obvious fact: the lack of imagery, visual symbolism or any form of mimetic representation puts Pulsa at odds with the production of media, in architecture or in the

“expanded cinema” of intermedia. As opposed to the project of “graphic assembly” that

Craig Buckley sees as the key technique informing the twentieth-century production of

138 See Ada Louise Huxtable, “Kicked a Building Lately?” New York Times, January 12, 1969. 139 See Smith and Progner, “The Revolution in Interior Design: The Bold New Poly-Expanded Mega Decoration,” 179, 182-83. 147 images in architecture, Pulsa prefers forms of communication and media that deny imagery.140 The media installations done by Archigram in the 1960s provide a point of comparison (or perhaps opposition). Engaging a similar strategy of creating perceptual environments with the tools of sound and projection, Archigram’s Light/Sound Workshop at the Hornsey College of Art from 1965-68 show a path that diverges substantively from

Pulsa’s practices—speciOically in their 1967 exhibition K4: Kinetic Audio Visual

Environments, which included kinetic art by François Morellet and GRAV, as well as works by Peter Cook and Dennis Crompton. Buckley notes that the exhibitions in K4 were predominantly “discontinuous image montages . . . creating a layered optical and acoustic

Oield that violated the frame of the image and aimed to break down the boundaries between media and disciplines.”141 The register here is the still that of the image, which enabled a kind of bombardment on both an audiovisual level and a semiotic level.

Like Pulsa, Archigram had clear designs on rethinking the urban fabric. Pulsa’s essay

“City as Artwork” is introduced with a statement that could have been a quotation from

Archigram: “The city is composed of soft information systems as well as hard architectural systems; the information systems are becoming more architectural, while the architecture is becoming less object-like and more systemic.”142 The radical divergence lies in the fact that Pulsa thought of these “soft information systems” not in terms of language or semiotics, but in terms of what they called “manipulations of actual phenomena concurrent within the environment” via electronic media.143 They would consider their installations

140 See Craig Buckley, Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 141 Buckley, 97. 142 Pulsa, “City as Artwork,” 208. 143 Pulsa, “Notes on Environmental Art,” 2. 148 operative at a fundamental perceptual level, directly manipulating qualia rather than functioning as another type of immersive, semiotic overload.

The distinction here could be thought of as the difference between pictura and imago, the former an image that is clearly observable and measurable, the latter a kind of virtual image that is without material basis, appearing only to the perceiver.144 Pulsa seem particularly interested in the imago as a method of generating virtual, “phenomenal” spaces with audiovisual technologies, inverting the role of architecture as envelope or container of content; or, in Marshall McLuhan’s words, “architecture becomes the content of the new information environment.”145 This inversion takes architecture out of a role as a medium or mediator of other things and turns it into the thing being conveyed. The problem here is that Pulsa deliberately positioned their installations as a kind of non-media, a seamless apparatus indistinguishable from the surrounding environment. There was no screen to look at, no proscenium, no performers; only visual and acoustic energies, which presented as Olickering, slowly distorting images reOlected in mylar with a deafening soundtrack that seemed to control the distorting images—the audio tuned to a frequency so disruptive that it could clear rooms. Here the medium was not quite the message, even as it could easily be construed as a desire to raze a building to the ground.

In conclusion it is useful to brieOly consider a project that Pulsa completed immediately after Project Argus. In October of 1968, Pulsa wired Boston Public Garden’s swan boat pond for light and sound, translating much of the Experiment in Light and Sound environment for

144 See Anne Friedberg’s discussion of the virtual in relationship to Johannes Kepler’s concepts of pictura and imago, in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7-12. 145 See the June 22, 1965 letter from McLuhan to Edward T. Hall, quoted in Larry Busbea, “McLuhan’s Environment: The End (and Beginnings) of Architecture,” Aggregate, December 11, 2015, http://we- aggregate.org/piece/mcluhans-environment. 149 Project Argus into an artiOicial landscape that they called a “demonstration” of a programmed environment. As a collaboration with Ashley, Myer, and Associates, this was their only installation done with a professional architecture ofOice.146 As a way to attract people to the gardens at night, the effects of this project were more subtle and liminal.

Xenon strobes were placed underwater in the pond while poly-planar speakers were arrayed around the path surrounding the pond. The plan of the environment can be seen incorporated onto the back of the invitation to the event (see Oigure 3-14.)

Sequences for activating sound and strobe were programmed for each night. The effect was less a spectacle than a kind of liminal environment that was meant to be discovered.

Photos taken of the activated environment, such as Oigure 3-15, are only suggestive of the intended environmental effects, which incorporated both strobe lights and multi-channel electronic audio in unexpected ways. Of crucial importance here is the presence of water, an element that treads an ambiguous line between media and environment. As John Durham

Peters notes, water in general and the ocean speciOically is either the “greatest medium” or the “limit point of any possible media.”147 This turn towards water as a possible medium, one that also has a strange kind of architectural speciOicity, seems to be a perfect if temporary turn for Pulsa. The possibilities of manipulating an element that deliberately confounded boundaries between medium and environment is in exact concord with Pulsa’s practice of eschewing media while at the same time highlighting surface, duration, and

146 The invitation for the Boston Public Garden installation notes that it was done under the aegis of Signs/ Lights/Boston, a joint project between Ashley, Myer and Associates and the Boston Redevelopment Agency. See Pulsa, “Pulsa [Boston Public Garden installation announcement],” September 30, 1968. https:// archive.org/details/Image-PulsaBostonExhibitionAnnouncementSept1968. 147 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 55. 150 illusory dimensions.

This perceptual engineering, replacing mylar with water, seems to be an extension of their obsession with vast infrastructural spaces, a kind of corollary to Tony Smith’s New

Jersey turnpike. Pulsa’s press release for the Boston Public Garden demonstration emphasizes the co-opting of “areas of new perception,” such as the audiovisual environs of cities and the endless streams of auto headlights on highways at night.148 Yet unlike Smith, who saw endlessness as a boundary condition for art, Pulsa had strangely more instrumental reasons for attempting a to simulate an unbounded perceptual environment.

Their demonstration was a kind of rehearsal or pre-enactment of an environment that could manifest a responsive intelligence and a complete automation of environmental controls.149 This echoes Reyner Banham’s proposition “that if dirty old nature could be kept under the proper degree of control . . . the United States would be happy to dispense with architecture and buildings altogether.”150 It is not entirely farfetched to understand the

Boston Public Garden demonstration as an interface for something like François Dallegret’s

Environment Bubble,151 except that the interface would not be a screen, switch, dial or keyboard, but “the systematic intelligent behavior of such environments abstractly manifest to people interacting with them.”152 This abstraction was a kind of architectural and environmental Olicker, the last traces of a media system that Pulsa’s installations and architectonic contraptions had tried to disappear into the environment.

148 See Pulsa, “Press Release,” September 19, 1968, https://archive.org/details/ PulsaPressReleaseForBostonExhibitionSept1968. 149 See Pulsa, “Pulsa Boston Demonstration Report, October 8 to 27, 1968,” October 1968, https:// archive.org/details/PulsaBostonDemonstrationReportOctober1968, 4-5. 150 Reyner Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America, no. 2 (1965): 70–79. 151 See Dallegret’s illustration in Banham, “A Home is not a House,” 77. 152 Pulsa, “Pulsa Boston Demonstration Report, October 8 to 27, 1968,” 5. 151 Chapter 4 – Dolphin Embassy: Architectures of Interlock, Cinema, and

Excommunication

In a 1998 email Doug Michels expounded on what he called his “avant-research” of the mid-1970s. He traces his interest in dolphins, the subject of this “avant-research,” to a nighttime beach party on Padre Island off the coast of Texas near Corpus Christi in 1969.

Michels notes that his encounter with dolphins in the wild was otherworldly and hypnotic.

He recalls that his skin tingled, “as the dolphins scanned their sonar over our bodies, a not altogether unpleasant sensation.”1 This encounter seems to have had a delayed but consistent effect on Michels, both as a member of the Ant Farm group and in his own practice after the demise of the collective. The strangeness of feeling a dolphin imaging your body via pings of echolocation is a Oitting foundational event for Michels—a tantalizingly alien experience that introduced him to a form of mediation of the oceanic environment foreign to most human beings.

This combination of media and water found its culmination in a series of projects that

Michels did from 1976 through 1980, initially in collaboration with Ant Farm, but after

1976 in collaboration with British artist Alexandra Morphett and Australian architect

Robert Perry. The broad swath of work that Michels conceptualized under the rubric

“Dolphin Embassy” is literally what it says it is: proposals for building a seaborne craft— part ship, part laboratory—for the purpose of communicating with dolphins. As Michels notes in correspondence, dolphins were conceived here not as individual marine mammals,

1 See Doug Michels, email to Teresa S, Peri, September 20 1998, Box 6, Folder 9, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. 152 but as a broader “delphic civilization” that deserves a kind of diplomatic outreach—hence the idea of an embassy embedded in the project’s name.2

Over the course of the late 1970s the Dolphin Embassy went through a key transformation, pivoting from a non-proOit expedition funded by grants from the

Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, to a screenplay and proposed Oilm called Brainwave. Throughout the evolution of the project there was a consistent use of architecture and technology as a means to interrogate the interface between the human and the natural, an interface that probes the perceptual and communicational boundary between species. If Will Burtin and Upjohn’s Brain was a didactic schema designed to render the function of neural nets and brain physiology legible to a lay audience, and Pulsa’s experiments with architectonic programmed light and sound were a means to activate the brain as a medium in and of itself, Dolphin Embassy extended this potential neurological activation across species and into the non-human realm.

The array of strategies and modes of operation used by Michels, Schereier, Morphett, and their collaborators is a summa of post-1960s practices. Michels’s particular trajectory shows a protean sensibility that evolved from the collectively authored hijinks, installations, and provocations of Ant Farm, to an entrepreneurial hustle that moved from the non-proOit realm to an expanded Oield of architectural production, and involved the formation of two different corporations. It is notable that Michels’s entrepreneurial sense

2 Michels uses the term “delphic civilization” in a September 21, 1998, email to Teresa S. Peri. He describes the Dolphin Embassy as a 501 (c3) non-proOit foundation devoted to communication experiments with wild dolphins that “scan across all aspects of human activities.” See Doug Michels, email to Teresa S. Peri, September 21, 1998. Box 6, Folder 9, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. John Durham Peters also notes that seacraft have been used as metaphors for statecraft, an analogy that originates with Plato. See John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 107. 153 was never predicated purely on Oinancial reward, but was more a stratagem to continue funding projects whose impetus was fundamentally visionary, often pressing to the extremes of that term. As Felicity D. Scott has noted, Ant Farm’s practice through the mid-1970s was oriented towards an “investigation into the potential geopolitics of quickly expanding communications networks,” via their use of video and media installations, and was a way of critiquing and engaging dominant systems of power.3 Michels both extends and subverts this practice. The Dolphin Embassy became less a literal attempt at an unwieldy fusion of scientiOic, artistic, and technological research than a method of blurring the boundaries of fact and Oiction in order to probe at the boundaries of the human. The

Dolphin Embassy acts as an emissary of excommunication, an annulment of communication rather than its coherence. Fundamentally, it involves types “of mediation that refuse bi- directionality, that obviate determinacy, and that dissolve devices entirely.”4 At the bottom of this is the basic incommensurability of any kind of linguistic interspecies communication

—it was, and is still, impossible. Eugene Thacker talks of excommunication as a kind of

“dark media,” which in a Sisyphean sense attempts “the mediation of that which is unavailable or inaccessible to the senses, and thus that of which we are normally ‘in the dark’ about.”5 This is not the classic dictionary deOinition of being excluded or cut off in an ecclesiastic sense, but rather a condition where communication is altogether impossible.6

3 Scott, Architecture or Techno-utopia, 220. 4 Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 10. 5 Eugene Thacker, “Dark Media” in Galloway, Thacker, and Wark, Excommunication, 85. 6 The Oxford English Dictionary deOines excommunication in two senses: “The action of excommunicating or cutting off from fellowship,” and “The action of excluding an offending Christian from the communion of the Church; the state or fact of being so excluded.” See “excommunication, n.,” OED Online, December 2019, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/65861?. Thacker notes in his deOinition of excommunication that “Excommunication employs a logic of negation, a logic that dreams of an absolute

154 Yet Michels and his collaborators also risked the “classic” kind of excommunication in pursuing a project so patchwork, difOicult, and fringe, that its funding dried up soon after its benefactors realized there were no tangible results from two years of funding.7

This chapter is not focused on the epistemic stakes inherent in the possibilities of interspecies communication, but rather on the interest that lies in the Dolphin Embassy as an “architectural pre-enactment.” Michels and his collaborators speciOically used this term to describe the movie Brainwave, an unproduced screenplay modeled on 1970s era science

Oiction blockbusters, which was to function as an entrepreneurial method of funding

Dolphin Embassy by producing a Oictionalized version of the project. This can be seen as an extension of Michels’s work with Ant Farm, particularly their staged events such as Media

Burn and The Eternal Flame that were recorded and disseminated through video. If, as

Kirsten Fleur Olds notes, Ant Farm reused television news coverage of the Media Burn event, “appropriating and recasting the footage through their parodic lens,” in a now- familiar media practice of détournement or self-reOlexive appropriation of mass media, then

Dolphin Embassy was a strategy to move the stakes to a more radical register.8 The terms were not just about media and representation, but about ontology. Despite the suspect negation, though the truth is that this negation is always shadowed by an engimatic residue—the message that says ‘there will be no more messages’.” See Thacker, “Dark Media,” 80. 7 Perhaps the most glaring evidence of this is correspondence between Michels and the Rockefeller Foundation in the aftermath of the 1977 grant that the foundation gave Michels for video documentation of Dolphin Embassy. The individual grant issued under the direction of Howard Klein appears to have been focused on media arts, in the brief period where Klein and The Rockefeller Foundation funded individual artists. Michels is listed as a video artist in records of The Rockefeller Foundation. See Marita Sturken, “Private Money and Personal InOluence: Howard Klein and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Funding of the Media Arts,” Afterimage 14 (January 1987): 8–15. The grant appears to have have run aground upon the shifting sands of Michels’s objectives for the project, which migrated from documentation of the Dolphin Embassy project to funding the project itself. See Dolphin Embassy – Rockefeller Foundation Correspondence, Box 27, Folder 13, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. 8 Kirsten Fleur Olds, “Networked Collectivities: North American Artists’ Groups, 1968–1978,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009), 163. 155 science underlying attempts at interspecies communication, Michels intended Dolphin

Embassy to be a realized or at least realizable project. The project appears to insist on a weird blending of reality and Oiction, of speculation and pre-enactment. The roots of

Dolphin Embassy lie clearly in Ant Farm and its collective efforts at creating a mediated funhouse through media manipulation and a process of “diffusion” that Olds notes was “a negotiation of networks and nodes,” spanning mass media, television, and informal networks.9 Dolphin Embassy took this approach to a maximalist level by including a non- human species, which operated less as an actual entity to converse with than as a boundary

Oigure that represented the limits of communicational possibilities.

Ant Farm’s countercultural politics and notions of critique had always been undercut by ambivalence, and an impulse to mine the internal contradictions in their engagement with staged “pseudo-events” and the recursive feedback circuits of the mass media.10 Dolphin

Embassy attempted deOinitively to break architecture out of its foreclosure within a capitalist system of commodities, even as it leveraged corporate structures and subscriber shares to fund its own excommunication. If, as Olds notes, a “both-and” approach was Ant

Farm’s calling card—a technique adapted in part from Robert Venturi’s Complexity and

Contradiction in Architecture—then Michels seems to embody this principle to the core.11

Yet it is this willful melding of contradictory impulses that seemed to doom Dolphin

9 Olds, 117. 10 Olds, 159-160. Olds understands Ant Farm’s staging of Media Burn as a “publicity stunt,” or using Daniel J. Boorstein’s term, a “pseudo-event,” designed to create media coverage. This is less about a disruption of power than a kind of symbolic politics where media coverage itself creates a mediated experience. 11 Olds, 108. Olds traces Ant Farm’s propensity for embedded contradictions to their Cadillac Ranch project, where upended, half-buried Cadillacs operate as critique, satire, and merchandise opportunity. Michels, in a letter to patron Stanley Marsh, states that the installation should have souvenir stands with postcards and t- shirts available for sale. See Olds, 108-116. 156 Embassy to remain unrealized.

The Dolphin Embassy was Oirst introduced in the March 1975 issue of Esquire and featured Curtis Schreier’s drawings.12 Authored by Ant Farm, the article presents the work as highly speculative. Conceived as an enormous ferro-cement sailboat (see Oigure 4-1), the work was explicitly inspired by the work of John C. Lilly as a way to encourage humans and cetaceans “to study each other up close.”13 Mentioned previously in chapter three, Lilly had been a neuroscientist and dolphin researcher in the 1950s and 1960s, writing two popular books on dolphins: Man and Dolphin in 1961, and The Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman

Intelligence in 1967. Lilly’s Communication Research Institute (CRI) in St. Thomas, U.S.

Virgin Islands, provided a research and typological model for the design. The CRI was active from 1959-1968, and was funded primarily by the National Institute of Mental Health and

National Institute of Health. A plan of the institute was published in Lilly’s 1988 autobiography, The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography. Figure 4-4 shows the CRI plan in detail. The programmatic logic of the CRI seems to have been retained in the initial concept of Dolphin Embassy, with a clear segregation of lab facilities, electronics/ communication equipment, and a grotto for dolphin-human interaction. In Oigures 4-2 and

4-3, these sections can be seen to occupy the sides and corners of the triangular design.

Schreier’s rendering of the embassy evokes a strange combination of inOlatable, elements of Bruce Goff (particularly the biomorphic, spiraling parti that seems to govern interior and exterior spaces), and an artiOicial island resort. In the Esquire article Schreier notes that he intended the Dolphin Embassy to be constructed out of ferro-cement, but also

12 Ant Farm, “Embassy to the Dolphins,” Esquire 83, no. 3 (March 1975): 83–85. 13 Ant Farm, 83. 157 speculates that, “the technology of the Nineties will probably have developed a lighter, silicon-based material as silicon chemistry replaces the carbon-petroleum-based chemistry we have now.”14 The propulsion system appears to be only partially thought-out, comprising a combination of massive sails and “Oluidic modules” underneath the craft that act as a type of propulsion system with an unspeciOied power source. These Oluidic modules were also positioned as a potential computational device; Schreier noted the similarities between water and electricity in that they both “Olow,” and alluded to the fact that Owen-

Corning had experimented with Oluidic gates that could act like a switch for an analog computer.

Even in this extremely speculative form, Dolphin Embassy brings together the computational, communicational, and experiential through the medium of water, qualities that Michels sustains through the iterations of the project. The connection to water and oceans engages the project with, as media theorist John Durham Peters notes, “the greatest medium or the limit point of any possible medium.”15 For Peters, the cetacean acts as an agent in “thought experiments about intelligence in different media.”16 Electricity, computation, and intelligence function as the literal and metaphorical rolled into one medium.

This chapter examines the Dolphin Embassy through its two major instantiations: as a proposal for a research craft named Oceania, and as a screenplay for the movie Brainwave.

Despite the sprawling scale and the lack of practical realization of Dolphin Embassy, Michels

14 Ant Farm, 84. 15 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 55. 16 Peters, 56. 158 could be said to share similar goals with Pulsa, a group whose history serendipitously dovetails with his at the Yale School of Architecture in the late 1960s.17 Like Pulsa, Michels sought forms of direct communication that eschewed and exceeded conventional semiotics and meaning. But the methods by which they attempted to achieve this couldn’t be more different. Unlike Pulsa, with their engagement with reductive, post-minimalist techniques of creating audiovisual installations, Michels in Dolphin Embassy engaged with a plethora of different forms of mediation, narrative, symbolism, and image-making. The model here was not abstention, but promiscuity.

This chapter will unpack Dolphin Embassy as an ontological emissary between fact and

Oiction, and as a failure that successfully sits at the center of a network of practice combining the architectural neo-avant-garde and the “high weirdness” of the 1970s.18

Origins: Yale, Charles Moore, and “architectural phenomenology”

The roots of Dolphin Embassy lay in part in Michels education at Yale. As a student of both

James Stirling and Robert Venturi, and as Charles Moore’s assistant and supergraphics amanuensis, Michels carved out an unusually prominent place for himself at Yale.19 This is

17 It is notable that Pulsa and Michels shared the same collaborator at Yale: Charles Moore, chair of the School of Architecture. Pulsa’s crucial participation in Moore’s Project Argus was detailed in chapter three. Michels assisted Barbara Stauffacher with the supergraphics at Sea Ranch and decorated Moore’s ofOice and residence in New Haven. Yet there is no evidence that Michels had contact with any member of Pulsa while he was a student at Yale or working in New Haven. See Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 336-340. 18 “High Weirdness” is the term historian of religion Erik Davis uses to describe the psychedelic zeitgeist of the 1970s that reshaped understanding of consciousness and mainstreamed a focus on the outré, occult, and uncanny. These ideas will be explored in more detail at the end of this chapter. See Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (London and Cambridge, MA: Strange Attractor Press and The MIT Press, 2019.) 19 Michels in a 1990 letter to Herman D. Spiegel, a structural engineer and former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, noted the inOluence of Venturi and Stirling, both of whom were Michels’s thesis critics in 1967. Looking back, Michels claims that Stirling’s ideas were “very potent,” while Venturi “was still interested in open creativity.” SufOice it to say that Michels used this praise to segue into a ranting critique about post-

159 apparent in C. Ray Smith’s sprawling Supermannerism book, in which a disregard of disciplinary boundaries and an unusual focus on Yale provided an avenue for an emerging practitioner like Michels to come to the fore. Michels’s early work designing and executing supergraphics became his calling card. In Supermannerism, Smith reproduces four different supergraphic treatments that Michels did between 1965 and 1968. An article Smith wrote on supergraphics for Progressive Architecture in November 1967 centers on Michels, quoting him four different times in the article, despite also featuring the work of more prominent architects and designers such as Moore, Hugh Hardy, Barbara Stauffacher, and

Bill Grover. Showing an uncanny knack for publicity and media manipulation, Michels clearly understood the value of a sound bite. It is salient to note that Michels made a very clear demarcation between what he considered Olat, two-dimensional graphics that happened to be at building-size scale, and what he called “space trips,” or graphics that used optical illusions to extend three-dimensional space.20 Notable in Michels deployment of supergraphics is what Smith in Supermannerism calls “superimposition,” where

“phenomena can be perceived both separately and simultaneously”—a kind of Oirst draft of the “both-and” principle that drove Michels’s work in both Ant Farm and Dolphin Embassy.

It is important at this point to deal with the intellectual genealogy of supergraphics in the work of Charles Moore and Jean Labatut, both of whom are central Oigures in the rise of what Jorge Otero-Pailos calls “architectural phenomenology.” Although Otero-Pailos understands this category as a “retroactive intellectual formation,” it is useful in the case of modernism and student work at Yale under Alan Plattus. He ends the letter with the salutation “VOTE DOLPHIN...Far Out, Global, NEW AMERICA.” See Doug Michels to 2 LIVE HERMAN [Herman S. Spiegel], letter, December 10, 2090 [1990], Box 5, Folder 47, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. 20 C. Ray Smith, “Supergraphics,” Progressive Architecture 48, no. 11 (1967): 132-137. 160 Michels and the Dolphin Embassy as a way of understanding the intellectual origins of the project and the swerves it contains.21 Otero-Pailos succinctly notes that architectural phenomenology, “replaced the belief that architecture would become more sophisticated as technology moved toward the future teleologically, with the notion that architecture would become more advanced as human experience returned to its origins ontologically.”22 This idea of an experiential return to ontological origins appealed to Moore in particular. Otero-

Pailos notes that supergraphics were a kind of superimposition where the act of drawing, or disegno, was superseded by directly painting on buildings at full scale.23 In this sense, design and experience were uniOied. The building very literally became a medium in itself.

As noted in the previous chapter, Ada Louise Huxtable considered Project Argus and the adjacent supergraphics work at Yale an assault on, or “temporary destruction” of, the A&A exhibition space.24 Despite the cheekiness of Huxtable’s assessment, the intersection of

Pulsa’s work with supergraphics points towards a shared practice of applying dematerializing techniques to extant architecture in order to emphasize perceptual effects.

These practices can be traced even farther back to Jean Labatut, Charles Moore’s doctoral advisor and mentor at Princeton. In Otero-Pailos’s account, Labatut’s classes on design for camouOlage in the 1940s were an origin point both of the idea of using painterly design techniques to perceptually disrupt observation of objects at a distance and, in the case of

21 Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xi. Besides Moore and Labatut, Otero-Pailos includes Christian Norberg-Schulz and Kenneth Frampton in his genealogy of architectural phenomenology. Otero- Pailos emphasizes the fact that the anti-institutional bias and a focus on individual experience of all the key Oigures guaranteed that they never would formally deOine themselves as a group or movement. 22 Otero-Pailos, xi. 23 Otero-Pailos, 127. 24 See Huxtable, “Kicked a Building Lately?” 161 camouOlage, of the direct application of patterns onto objects and buildings, bypassing any sort of drawing.25

In the ensuing years Labatut understood this experiential process of design as non- rational and poetic. As an alternative to Cartesian rationality, this became a process of severing history from itself. In what Otero-Pailos calls a “sensual modernism,” Labatut’s phenomenological take on modernism broke from history but reanimated history as pure experience.26 This was fodder for an embodied, subjective understanding of historical architecture, without anything resembling intellection.

In this context, supergraphics appear as an architectural practice that was meant to efface itself. Throwing out the disegno with the bathwater highlights a collapse of process onto the object being designed (or decorated). But this collapse also points towards an ontological disruption. In a world with no dividing line between representation and material, drawing and building, the line between fact and Oiction also becomes porous.

Otero-Pailos calls Labatut’s design a “eucharistic architecture,” invoking the mystical

Christian union between essence and substance.27 While being drawn from Catholic dogma, this also shows a path forward towards a radical, more secular rethinking of ontology in architecture.

25 Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, 62-63. Otero-Pailos notes that Labatut learned the techniques of camouOlage in the French Army Corps of Engineers during World War I when working on obscuring the Gran Canal of Versailles from the German air force. See Otero-Pailos, 26-28. 26 Otero-Pailos, 94-95. 27 Otero-Pailos emphasizes the inOluence of neo-Thomist philsopher Jacques Maritain on Labatut’s thinking. Maritain advocated a philosophical “critical realism” where mind and reality were absolutely isomorphic. He was a key inOluence in developing Labatut’s ideas about intuition and direct experience. See Otero-Pailos, 58-63. It useful to note the importance of Christian theology in Giorgio Agamben’s theorizing of Foucault’s dispositif, or apparatus, where the dispositif is derived from the schizophrenic severing of oikonomia from being. In this sense Labatut’s “eucharistic architecture” becomes an attempt at metaphysical reuniOication of a traumatic split. See Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 8-12. 162 If there is a link between Michels’s supergraphics and Dolphin Embassy, it must be traced, somewhat uneasily, through this genealogy. Michels was no phenomenologist, yet he seems to have assimilated a number of the underlying ideas that Oind their origin in Otero-

Pailos’s concept of architectural phenomenology.

Video as technology of consciousness

SufOice it to say that Dolphin Embassy, in all of its iterations, is an apparatus for generating experiences. It was primarily a platform for video, but less as a tool for documentation than as a “technology of consciousness.” This is a term coined by Fred

Turner to describe the function of intermedia artworks of the early 1970s, particularly the work of sound artist Paul DeMarinis. In 1973 DeMarinis created a device from off-the-shelf consumer electronic components that responded to ambient electrical currents by continuously altering a Oive-note melody, produced by a synthesizer that gave a gamelan- like timbre to the notes. Called the Pygmy Gamelan, Turner considers this an exemplar of a technology of consciousness, or a technique for “the enhancement of individual consciousness, and more particularly, of the individual’s awareness of cosmic forces,” and a means “to know the world from within.”28 In Turner’s argument, such technologies would enable the restructuring of American society into collectives and communes, in a countercultural alternative to administrative bureaucracies.

28 Fred Turner, “The Pygmy Gamelan as Technology of Consciousness,” in Paul DeMarinis: Buried in Noise, ed. Ingrid Beirer, Sabine Himmelsbach, and Carsten Seiffarth (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2010), 25. Turner notes that the problem of consciousness rather than governance was the key concept driving the development of countercultural technologies. Buckminster Fuller’s idea of the comprehensive designer was seen as an inspiration moving the designer/engineer from exploiter of natural resources to a kind of post-technocratic creator of tools that could redistribute material wealth. 163 The late sixties and early seventies provided a particularly fertile ground for technologies of consciousness to emerge. Peter Sachs Collopy uses this conceptualization of technology to understand the rise of consumer video as a potent form of consciousness- altering media. Collopy sees video from this period emerging as a tool for the “art gallery, the psychiatric hospital, and the streets.”29 Video functioned as both medium and mediator of a new consciousness, which was uniquely embedded in the practices and techniques of this new technology. In Collopy’s view, video at this nascent stage became wedded to another technology of altered consciousness: LSD. As an electronic analogue of LSD, video provided a “safer” technology of documentation and representation that could be used in a wide variety of contexts.

It is appropriate that one of the Oirst presentations of the Dolphin Embassy, after the

Esquire article in 1975, involved video. In a video by Michels and Ant Farm titled “Video

Communication Unit,” the embassy project was presented as a press conference, the Oirst piece in an anthology of videos documenting Ant Farm’s May 1976 trip to Australia.30

Organized by Bob Perry, an architecture student at the New South Wales Institute of

Technology, the tour was structured as a series of lectures and workshops that ran from

May 2 through May 14. Most of the footage of events for “Video Communications Unit” was shot around this period. The tone of the footage is satirical and deeply unserious. The 32- minute video includes clips of heavily edited TV interviews in Australia, and random advertisements cribbed from Australian television broadcasts including a TIME ad for an

29 Peter Sachs Collopy, “The Revolution will be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015), 1. 30 See Ant Farm, “Video Communication Unit,” Media Burn Archive, July 20, 1976, video, 31:22, https:// mediaburn.org/video/video-communication-unit/. The Dolphin Embassy press conference appears from 4:52 to 13:05 in the video. 164 issue on then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. Also included is “Ned Telly and the

Golden Spanner,” a piece that famously features Ant Farm’s playful deconstruction of the

Harbour Bridge in Sydney with the use of a gigantic gold-colored wrench.31

As part of this bricolage of satire, performance art, and general deadpan humor, Dolphin

Embassy could easily be mistaken for a parody or absurdist performance. Doug Hurr, a member of Ant Farm, joined Michels on the press conference set in front of four television sets and two easels. The event appears to have been taped in Hawaii. Michels speciOically thanks Oceanic Cablevision, a Honolulu-based cable television provider.32 Judging from the setup of the press conference, it appears that this was taped on location in some type of public-access studio. No journalists identify themselves, and the press conference consists essentially of Michels responding to basic questions for around seven minutes. Despite the weird tenor of the performance, a mix of the speculative with Ant Farm’s practice of parodic

TV appearances, Michels conveys serious points about Dolphin Embassy. Importantly, he emphasizes the fact that Ant Farm conceived of Dolphin Embassy in “artistic” terms. Michels admits that there is a “mythology of interspecies communication,” and shifts the goalposts from scientiOic inquiry to a practice based on “different kinds of visual means to establish a language. And the visual means in our case is videotape and imagery.”33

In a fundamental sense, this admission places Dolphin Embassy in a clear continuum

31 See Chip Lord, “Chip Lord: Some Notes on Ant Farm,” ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, last modiOied April 30, 2005, https://zkm.de/de/event/2005/04/chip-lord-some-notes-on-ant-farm. Lord refers to, “Ned Telly and the Golden Spanner, a modern performance-version of the famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly created by Hurr, Michels, and Schreier. Golden spanner is used to symbolically unbolt Sydney's Harbour Bridge.” 32 Oceanic Cablevision had started serving the Honolulu market in 1969. See Federal Communications Commission Reports: Decisions, Reports, and Orders of the Federal Communications Commission of the United States, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing OfOice, 1971), 944-45. 33 These excerpts occur in “Video Communication Unit” at around 10:00. 165 with Ant Farm’s media events, even as the sense that this is a put-on or sham diminishes the apparent seriousness of the project. Earlier media events such as Media Burn functioned as a critique or meta-commentary on media itself. In an ontological sense, Media

Burn substitutes representation for reality. The singular image of a customized 1959

Cadillac smashing through a wall of Olaming television sets is the event; it is less a representation than an image meant to circulate within existing media circuits as a self- contained entity.34

With Dolphin Embassy Michels and Ant Farm had signiOicantly revised their strategy; instead of disruption and parody, there was a desire to create an interface or a

“communication form” between the human and the non-human. Michels, in response to a press conference question about the feasibility of interspecies communication, notes:

The communication form would take the communication form of any beings

whether human or non-human, post-human, sub-human that enjoy being with each

other and need dialogue or language in order to communicate parts of those

feelings, the experience of being together.35

This extremely promiscuous and broad-ranging impulse appears to understand the embassy project as a Oirst step in engaging a spectrum of non-human species. Michels then proceeds to elaborate that the development of these video-based, visual communication

34 Kirsten Fleur Olds positions Media Burn as an event designed to circulate as both a proposal that enacted Ant Farm’s status as art world “outsiders,” and a machine for generating media attention and commercial tie- ins such as t-shirts, posters and stickers. Ant Farm’s focus on producing a singular image of a car smashing through a Olaming television lent itself to a commodity logic of producing a “great postcard.” This created uneasy tensions in their work between the potential for disrupting institutional frameworks and mass media circulation, and the work’s “commercial potential.” Olds also notes that Media Burn was referred to as “Easy Money” in correspondence with SFMOMA in 1974. See Olds, “Networked Collectivities,” 149-158. 35 This quote from Michels occurs at around 11:28 in “Video Communications Unit.” 166 systems would “transcend land-based concepts such as politics and economics.”36 The implication here is that communication between species would somehow avoid the agon of politics and power, leaving the symbolic order behind to commune at some non-linguistic level. Fundamentally this was an escapist impulse that located the outside in the domain of water. The “non-human, post-human, sub-human” that Michels speaks of is a parataxis of categories that admits to no hierarchy. The dolphin is “not” human, but its exact relationship to humans is ambiguous.

Video, in the context of Michels and Ant Farm’s conception of Dolphin Embassy, acts as a mechanism of participation. Collopy notes that by the early 1970s, video and psychedelic drugs had become “analogous” technologies, in the sense that video mirrored, in a visual sense, the altered states of consciousness of psychedelics. Interestingly this mirroring of psychedelic effects was not limited to the visual, but also existed at the ontological level of participation, where the user was at once creator, audience, and critic.37 The idea that video could unite humans and dolphins is a speculative leveraging of the perceptual effects of the medium. The precise term here is “media ecology,” a now well-known term that has a distinct historical origin in reference speciOically to video as a communication medium.

Media ecology as a term appears to originate in the pages of Radical Software, a journal published intermittently between 1970 and 1974 that focused on the use of video and technology as a tool for art and social transformation.38 In the spring 1971 issue, Raymond

36 This quote from Michels occurs at around 11:55 in “Video Communications Unit.” 37 Collopy, “The Revolution will be Videotaped,” 144-149. Collopy notes that Nam June Paik understood that video could facilitate an experience similar to that of psychedelics. He thought his video synthesizers could create an experience where the user played the role of creator, audience, and critic. 38 Both David Joselit and William Kaizen have written about Radical Software and its centrality in understanding video as a networked ecology that provided a means of both art-making and political activism. See David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 93-98; and

167 Arlo provided a provisional deOinition of the term in an article titled “Media Ecology.”39 This article reads like a collage of concepts meant to be completed and connected by the reader.

Ecology as language seems to be a central conceit, but Arlo also notes, “In the future, we will ‘explore’ the outer/inner dimensions of multiple realities, ‘discovering’ attitudes to assume, ‘projecting’ probes into the unknown, ‘free-falling’ through time/space/life with our own coordinate systems providing equilibrium.”40 The tension between the linguistic and the phenomenological in Arlo’s concept of media ecology is reOlected in Dolphin

Embassy and its understanding of video as both an interspecies “experience” facilitated by the embassy craft, and a method for interspecies communication. It should be noted that

Ant Farm appears to have had a close relationship to Radical Software. Ant Farm is listed in the “Feedback” section of the Oirst issue of Radical Software as a group producing video documentation of their work.41 Michael Shamberg, who is listed as publisher for the journal, collaborated with Ant Farm in his TVTV video collective, and commissioned the group to design his book Guerrilla Television.42 Michels in particular seems to have embraced this hybrid of the communicative and the experiential as a pathway to positioning architecture as a linguistic or conceptual practice and as an immediate experience. This echoes Bernard Tschumi’s formulation of a paradoxical tension that ran through much of the architectural experimentation of the 1970s: the schism between the

William Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (2008): 86-107. 39 See Raymond Arlo, “Media Ecology,” Radical Software 1, no. 3 (1971): 19. 40 Arlo, 19. 41 See “Feedback,” Radical Software 1, no. 1 (1971): np. 42 See Olds, “Networked Collectivities,” 123. Also see Deidre Boyle’s account of Shamberg and the founding of TVTV in Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36-47. 168 pyramid and the labyrinth.43 The pyramid represented Hegel’s understanding of architecture as pure supplement, bound in Tschumi’s interpretation to representation and language, while the labyrinth was the immediate, phenomenological experience of space.44

If this duality seemed totally incommensurable, Michels and Ant Farm found a way through it by understanding that there was a kind of outside that did not involve transcendence.

Current scholarship on Dolphin Embassy situates the project as a zoological speculation hybridized with technology. Janine Marchessault sees the Dolphin Embassy as a Latourian demonstration of a non-hierarchical distributed network of relations between human and non-human.45 Tyler Survant positions Dolphin Embassy as a kind of “zoopolitics,” where the embassy becomes a Foucauldian project for the management of the entire animal kingdom.46 Both of these interpretations miss the mark in eliding the architectural background of the Dolphin Embassy. It is the speciOic combination of video and architecture that creates an environment for a communication platform with a biological other, or a type of excommunication strategy. For Ant Farm in general and Michels speciOically, the dolphin became both a symbolic Oigure and a Oigure of mediation, an impetus to create an architecture that could act as an interface between human and non-human minds. In this sense, the Dolphin Embassy became an architecture of consciousness, a way of accessing

43 Bernard Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth,” in Questions of Space (London: Architectural Association, 1990), 12–29. 44 Tschumi apparently derived much of his argument about the pyramid and labyrinth from the work of Denis Hollier, speciOically Hollier’s book on Georges Bataille La Prise de la Concorde. See Louis Martin, “Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumi’s Architectural Theory,” Assemblage, no. 11 (March 1, 1990): 23–35. 45 See Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 217-229. 46 See Tyler Survant, “Biological Borderlands: Ant Farm’s Zoopolitics,” last modiOied February 18, 2014, https://archinect.com/features/article/93011262/screen-print-7-horizonte 169 minds via video and direct interaction.

Video would enable this kind of direct interaction through its ability to bridge language and experience. As an emerging technology that had begun to be used by artists, video operated as a medium of expanded consciousness and a representational machine that facilitated an ecological approach to media. At the core of this concept of ecology is less an interest in “environmental relationships” or “expanding our apprehension of reality,” as

Gene Youngblood understood the use of media and video as a type of expanded cinema, but rather a speciOic strategy of interspecies communication that was embedded in a countercultural fascination with dolphins.

Dolphin Embassy c. 1977: Cowboy Nomads and Interspecies Communication

In a 1976 grant proposal for Dolphin Embassy, Ant Farm and Michels included a bibliography that outlines their research for the project. Notably the list included three books by John C. Lilly: The Center of the Cyclone, Simulations of God, and Lilly on Dolphins, a compilation of Lilly’s major works on dolphins.47 By the mid-1970s Lilly had become a strange combination of disgraced scientist, countercultural guru, and above all a Oigurehead for popularizing dolphins and other cetaceans as intelligent species equal to humans. As D.

Graham Burnett notes, by the mid-1970s dolphins and whales had become, “familiar

47 Lilly on Dolphins included revised versions of Man and Dolphin, Dolphin in History, and The Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence, all published in the 1960s. The subtitle of Lilly on Dolphins, which did not appear in the grant proposal bibliography, was “humans of the sea.” This emphasized the idea that humans and dolphins were assumed to be equals. The grant proposal, which is authored by Ant Farm, appears to be one of two developed in support for a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation. See Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. The Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to Michels on January 10, 1977 for the sum of $15,000. See Lawrence D. Stifel to Doug Michels, letter, January 10, 1977, Box 27, Folder 13, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. 170 spirits, capable of mobilizing sentiment and action, capable of representing complex and culturally signiOicant assemblages of aspiration and belief.”48 Through his books Lilly popularized the notion that dolphins, particularly the bottle-nosed dolphin Tursiops truncatus, had unique qualities that separated them from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Paramount for Lilly was the fact that the size of the Tursiops brain relative to its body was about the same as in a human. It was also crucial that dolphins communicated through vocalizations that humans could hear.49 The idea of collapsing the hierarchy between human and dolphin, or as Michels puts it, placing the “non-human, post-human, sub- human” on a par with humans, created an opportunity to re-imagine a habitation for humans and dolphins.

By early 1977 Michels, Doug Hurr, and Alexandra Morphett were actively promoting the

Dolphin Embassy as a project. At a press conference at the San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art on January 13, 1977, the trio announced the “Dolphin Embassy expedition,” which would focus on attempting human/dolphin communication with Tursiops around the

Great Barrier Reef off of Queensland, Australia.50 The San Francisco Chronicle noted in a somewhat skeptical report that none of the trio had any kind of scientiOic background. Hurr remarked, “the oceans are the last frontier, right? We want to help eliminate what happened with the American Indians and the Australian Aboriginies.”51 This strange linkage of the dolphin to indigenous people, and the conceptualization of dolphins as citizens of some

48 D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 642. 49 See John C. Lilly, Man and Dolphin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 21-23. 50 See Dolphin Embassy Press Release, n.d. Box 27, Folder 37, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. 51 See Carl Nolte, “The Art of Conversation With Bottlenosed Dolphins,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 1977. 171 kind of imaginary nation, is a thread that ran through the entire Dolphin Embassy project.52

The acknowledgement that the project could be seen as colonial by proxy seems to reveal both a radical egalitarianism—dolphins being equal to humans—and an insistence that oceans were akin to the Wild West. This particular insinuation had clear precedents in Ant

Farm’s work. Fred Turner notes that this “cowboy nomad” attitude had been a distinct part of Ant Farm’s ethos at least since 1969. This attitude was widespread throughout the strain of the counterculture particular to The Whole Earth Catalog that rejected middle-class values while still hewing to norms of consumption and gender. As Turner puts it, the cowboy nomad is “mobile, Olexible, masculine, he is to consume knowledge and information and carry it with him on his migrations.”53

It is these ideas of mobility and a fascination with dolphins as a kindred, yet alien, species that drove the initial versions of Dolphin Embassy. The version published in the

March 1975 issue of Esquire was described by Ant Farm in 1976 as a “fantasy craft,” that originated in an even earlier version from 1973.54 By early 1977, the Dolphin Embassy had taken a more practical form. In both grant proposals dating from 1976, a shallow-draft, dual-hulled craft is speciOied. Figures 4-5 and 4-6 show renderings of the craft from three- quarters view and astern. These images were reproduced in a Dolphin Embassy proposal

52 Lisa Uddin in particular has written on the linkage of race to the rehabilitation of zoos in American cities in the early 1970s. As a “zoo renewal” paralleling urban renewal schemes of the period, Uddin notes that “Zoos function as microcosms or fragments of empire; they solicit versions of the ethnographic gaze, model captive wildlife in the image of human colonized subjects, and situate all zoo participants within panoptic visual structures.” The Dolphin Embassy project, despite being in a sense anti-zoo and about a kind of Oield work in the dolphin’s natural habitat, does not escape these colonial logics. See Lisa Uddin, Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 8. 53 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 88. 54 See Ant Farm, “The Dolphin Embassy,” San Francisco Magazine 19, no. 9 (September 1976). 172 from 1976, which appears to be the Oirst extant outline of the entire project.55 For a budget of around $104,000, Ant Farm and Michels planned on building the seafaring craft and launching it in May of 1977. Presumably out of a concern for cost, they thought the embassy could be made out of ferro-cement, a relatively cheap fabrication material they had used in the House of the Future.56 Overall the goal was to use this ferro-cement “Oloating communications station” to “maximize close human/dolphin interaction on a long-term basis in the open sea environment.”57 This interaction was entirely predicated on a technical apparatus that the proposal only brieOly sketches out. Central to this apparatus was an observation dome that would be lowered into the water, which contained a video camera and operator to document the dolphins in situ (see Fig 4-7). Other media tools included a system designed to visualize dolphin vocalizations using hydrophones, audio recorders, and synthesizers.58 The proposal also notes that video portapaks would be used to record human/dolphin interactions. Ant Farm and Michels speciOically use the word

“mirroring” here, where video is used for “mirroring the human/dolphin behavior.”59 This suggests that a kind of psychotherapeutic relationship could be created between the two species.

As outlandish as this sounds, the precedents for this kind of relationship can be found directly within the practices of video. Artist Paul Ryan, one of Ant Farm’s cohort at Radical

55 See Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Images are from page 4 and 7. 56 See “House of the Century; 1973: Lubetkin House,” Progressive Architecture 54 (June 1973): 126–31. The House of the Century was designed as a weekend residence for Houston art patrons Marilyn and Alvin Lubetkin. This unauthored article also mentions that Chip Lord and Michels chose ferro-cement boatbuilding construction technology as a means to weatherize the house in anticipation of hurricane season. 57 Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, 4. 58 Ibid., 5. 59 Ibid. 173 Software and Raindance Corporation, used video as a kind of mirroring device. In a 1970 article in Radical Software, “Self-Processing,” Ryan makes the case for the Moebius strip as the best kind of topology for “dealing with the power videotape gives us to take in our own outside.”60 Explicitly derived from Gregory Bateson’s work on cybernetics and psychology,

Ryan positions video as a technology of self-reOlexivity, fundamentally a mirroring operation. He suggests that the act of recording, editing, and acting in a self-made video is a kind of “processing” of the self through an electronic medium. William Kaizen notes that for

Ryan, this self-reOlexive act “becomes the theme of the work,” and produces an awareness of the self as a construction.61

The centrality of video as a conduit to communicate with dolphins is manifest in the design of this communications station as a Oloating video production studio. In the view from astern (Oigure 4-6) the craft can be seen in a mode of deployment. The viewing bubbles on the stern of each hull operate as a means of viewing the human and dolphin interaction from a removed perspective. Each of the Oigures in diving gear appears to have some sort of video camera in hand, although the tone of the image is not one of interaction with another species, but of one-way documentation. Figure 4-7, which shows the proposed

Dolphin Embassy craft from underneath, reveals more glass bubble portals, presumably for viewing and videography. This version of the craft was clearly designed as an observation platform. It signiOicantly lacked the means to create the “interspecies living room” that was envisioned as a kind of living platform where humans and dolphins could interact freely.

This freedom of interspecies interaction required not just video cameras, but an entire

60 Paul Ryan, “Self-Processing,” Radical Software 1, no. 2 (1970): 15. 61 Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication,” 95-96. 174 apparatus that could translate communications between the two species. Initially presented in an Ant Farm’s 1976 grant proposal, a drawing of the “Frequency Image

Synthesizer” shows an idealized interaction between dolphin and human (see Oigure 4-8) ensconced in what is described as a “sheltered but open underwater environment.”62 This environment was designed as a visual and auditory communication system, whereby the dolphin would emit vocalizations picked up via hydrophones and hear responses via underwater speakers. The human would participate via a touch panel for input and a video display for a visual translation of the dolphin’s vocalizations. At the core of this system was the “Frequency Image Synthesizer,” a black box that would translate audio signals from the dolphin into a kind of iconographic language. How this translation would occur is entirely speculative and not detailed in any form.

The “Frequency Image Synthesizer” appears to build off existing research on human- dolphin communication, speciOically John C. Lilly’s research at his Communication Research

Institute in the 1960s. Lilly designed a system vastly more functional and but far simpler in its goals, which rewarded dolphins for vocalizing at precise frequencies. A system of hydrophones picked up dolphin vocalizations underwater and fed them into a sonic analyzer connected to a Digital Equipment Corporation Linc III real-time computer, which parsed the frequencies generated by the dolphin. If the requested frequency was generated, the dolphin was rewarded with a Oish from an automatic Oish feeder. Figure 4-9, published

62 See Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, 6. The drawing appears to have been done by Curtis Schreier, who numbered his drawings and used a dotted lunate sigma, a Greek letter, as a monogram. The dotted lunate sigma was an editorial mark, dating from the Hellenistic period, that signiOied the incorrect positioning of a line of poetry. Schreier’s reason for appropriating this letter is unknown. 175 in a 1967 issue of Electronic Design, shows a schematic of Lilly’s system.63 Despite the relative complexity of this diagram, the system was designed simply to match a speciOic predetermined frequency to what the dolphin was vocalizing. Most of what appears above and below the hydrophone ampliOier, sonic analyzer, real-time computer, and automatic Oish feeder is devoted to representing and recording the session—a set of operations that would be critical for the Dolphin Embassy’s more speculative apparatus.

Lilly expanded this behaviorist mechanism, which clearly conditioned a dolphin’s response via a reward of Oish, into an apparatus intended to facilitate a conversation between humans and dolphins. Called an “electronic frequency converter,” a name echoed by the proposed Dolphin Embassy device, this system was designed to “translate” human speech into a higher frequency that closely matched the range of the dolphin’s hearing, while the inverse operation was done for the dolphin’s vocalizations (see Oigure 4-10). Lilly used vocoder (or “voice coder”) technology to do this translation. Figure 4-10 shows this as two different pieces of technology in the schematic (a “man-dolphin coder” and a “dolphin- man coder”). The vocoder was developed by Homer Dudley at Bell Labs in the 1930s as a synthetic human speech system. The technology could compress and reconstruct the human voice by dividing it into frequency bands in order to facilitate transmission via telephone cables.64 As a kind of codec or “coder-decoder” system for transmitting

63 Richard N. Einhorn, “Dolphins challenge the designer,” Electronic Design 15, no. 25 (1967): 52. This article detailed various investigations into dolphin echo-location and communication abilities. Lilly’s research at the Communications Research Institute was emphasized throughout. 64 The vocoder has an interesting history with regard to attempting translations between human and animal vocalizations. In a 1941 patent, Dudley remarked that the vocoder could be used to simulate the “speech of a wolf, lion, or giant or other large beings where the resonances are broad and low.” See Homer W. Dudley, System for the artiOicial production of vocal or other sounds, U.S. Patent 2,243,089A Oiled May 13, 1939, and issued May 27, 1941. Dave Tompkins also wrote a freewheeling social history of the vocoder, emphasizing its wide-ranging use in military cryptography, hip-hop and electronic music. See Dave Tompkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks (New York: Melville House, 2011). 176 information, the logic of the vocoder seemed to insinuate itself into the Frequency Image

Synthesizer of the Dolphin Embassy. In Oigure 4-8 this component appears to act like a vocoder, but with the crucial difference that it was meant to process sounds into images.

Also notable is the touch panel above and to the right of the human Oigure that was meant as an input device, implying a kind of language-based input that could be translated into sounds that the dolphin could understand.

The strangest part of this system is the video monitor at the bottom right of the diagram. The image on the screen does not appear to reOlect any sort of translation of either human or dolphin language, but rather is a direct imitation of Aboriginal rock art found on the island of Groote Eylandt, off the coast of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territories in

Australia. These paintings were reproduced in in the second volume of a report by the 1948

American-Australian scientiOic expedition to Arnhem Land.65 This expedition, led by Charles

Mountford, was multi-disciplinary in nature and spent eight months examining the

Aboriginal communities, Olora, and fauna of the region. Over 50,000 artifacts and specimens were collected.66 Two pages of the Arnhem Land report were reproduced in the Dolphin

Embassy proposal, and provide a clear source for the image on the video screen.67 What

65 Charles P. Mountford, ed., Records of the American-Australian Scienticic Expedition to Arnhem Land; 2; Anthropology and Nutrition (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960), 304. 66 Sally K. May notes that the expedition was one of the largest scientiOic expeditions ever mounted in Australia. Sponsors included the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Commonwealth of Australia. The leader of the expedition, Charles Mountford, was previously a senior mechanic for the Adelaide post ofOice with no formal training in archaeology, anthropology, or the natural sciences. His avocational interest in Aboriginal and indigenous art and culture led him to make two documentary Oilms which enabled him to get a job with Australia’s Ministry of Information. May understands the Arnhem Land expedition as an intersection of colonial, geopolitical, and ethnographic interests that produced an enormous archive of useful but often problematic collections of artifacts. See Sally K. May, Collecting Cultures: Myth, Politics, and Collaboration in the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition (Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press, 2010). 67 See Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, np. 177 interested Ant Farm and Michels here is the reproduction of a cave drawing from

Junduruna, a cave complex on Groote Eylandt. Although there is no speciOic reference or comment on the cave paintings, of obvious interest was the dolphin-like form on the right side of the image interacting with numerous human Oigures (see Oigure 4-11). The accompanying text in the Arnhem Land report is mainly descriptive, although the report notes that Junduruna was located near a traditional ceremonial ground, and that

“Junduruna” was the name of an ancestral being.68 What fascinated the Dolphin Embassy collaborators was the connection of the dolphin cave paintings to Aboriginal concepts of non-linear ancestral time, popularly known as “dream time” or, more accurately, dreaming.69 SpeciOically, Aboriginal tribes on Groote Eylandt had a foundational story linking dolphins to the creation of the Oirst human beings. In the Dolphin Embassy proposals there is a clear reference to what is called “Dolphin Dreamtime,” which is contextualized as belonging to Aboriginal tribes of the coastal areas in Australia, although there is no further gloss on what exactly Dolphin Dreamtime constitutes other than having a “special religious signiOicance.”70 Jim Nollman, an occasional collaborator with Ant Farm and a correspondent with Michels, provided a more complete description of the myth as a conOlict between indjebena (dolphins) and yakuna (sea snails) centering around Dinginjabana, the leader of

68 See Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, np. The penultimate page of the proposal reproduces page 300 from Records of the American-Australian Scienticic Expedition to Arnhem Land; 2; Anthropology and Nutrition. 69 The popularization of the Aboriginal concept of dream time or dreaming stems from anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner’s 1953 essay “The Dreaming.” As an untranslatable concept deriving speciOically from the word alcheringa of the Arunta/Aranda tribe, Stanner deOines it as “a sacred, heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are; but neither ‘time’ nor ‘history’ as we understand them is involved in this meaning.” By Stanner’s account, Aboriginals usually translate the concept into English as “The Dreaming” or “Dreaming.” See W. E. H. Stanner, “The Dreaming (1953),” in White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays, 1938-1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979): 23-40. 70 Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976,16. 178 the dolphins, and his mate Ganadja. Dinginjabana’s death after being torn apart by tiger sharks resulted in the transformation of his soul into one of the Oirst humans.71 This myth provided an animating genealogy that conOirmed the close afOinity of dolphins to humans.

In the proposal, this myth of Dolphin Dreamtime provided a clear justiOication for why

Australia had been selected as the site for Dolphin Embassy—it provided a distinct historical precedent and an appropriated ancestral time in which to position the project as more serious than quixotic. As the proposal states, “We are merely re-establishing an ancient tradition of dolphin-human communication using today’s tools and tomorrow’s vision.”72 This cleverly provides a historical pretext, while also glossing over the fact of their colonizing privilege as a collective of white “cowboy nomads,” fabricating a future out of

Aboriginal practices and culture. Nevertheless, despite the problematic nature of this appropriation, the idea that dolphins, vocoders, hydrophones, and non-western ideas of anterior temporal states unconnected to linear time could exist in one apparatus is an impressive feat of imagination.

John C. Lilly, Metaprogramming, and Interlock

It is worth mentioning another piece of speculative technology that was meant to complement the Frequency Image Synthesizer. Although this device was not outlined in any of the proposals for the Embassy, it appears in Michels’s archive at the University of

71 Jim Nollman, Dolphin Dreamtime: Talking to the Animals (London: Anthony Blond, 1985), 22-26. Nollman is a composer and environmental activist who accompanied members of Ant Farm on a dolphin expedition to Baja Mexico in either 1976 or 1978. Video artist Paul Ryan was also part of this expedition. See Constance Lewallen, Steve Seid, Chip Lord, and Ant Farm, Ant Farm, 1968-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 169-170; and Paul Ryan, Video Mind, Earth Mind: Art, Communications, and Ecology. Semiotics and the Human Sciences, Vol. 5. (New York: P. Lang, 1993), 414. 72 Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, 16. 179 Houston; Oigure 4-12 shows the device in a drawing by Schreier titled “Frequency Sensitive

TV Image Drawing System.”73 Although it is not dated, the numbering scheme Schreier used indicates that it was roughly from the same time period as the drawings he did for the 1976 proposals. This proposed drawing system used video as the centerpiece of a drawing mechanism, exploiting the possibility that dolphins could generate stereophonic vocalizations. This assumption appears to be based on Lilly’s work on what he called dolphin “stereophonation,” or the ability of dolphins to use different sides of their blowhole to generate sound. Lilly claimed that, when hooked up to hydrophones and an oscilloscope, dolphins could generate sounds that could be plotted on X and Y axes.74 This is reOlected in

Schreier’s drawing (see Oigure 4-12), which shows a system for translating an audio recording of stereophonic dolphin vocalizations into a pulse that indicates a position on a grid of pixels measuring 200 × 200, or in total 40,000 pixels. The drawing speciOies the technology of the video frame buffer, which in the mid-1970s was a new technology for drawing with bitmaps on a TV screen.

Although the system Schreier envisions is Olawed by its lack of a coherent means for the dolphin to see the results of their vocalizations on-screen (how were dolphins supposed to intuit that their vocalizations produced an image on a TV screen? Would they even understand the process of drawing?), the idea that dolphins could be made creative agents in the fundamental act of architectural design, that of disegno or drawing, is a remarkable

73 This drawing is found in the folder titled Dolphin Embassy - Log: 1976-1978 (Assembled 2003, unbound), Box 27, Folder 37, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. 74 See John C. Lilly, “New Findings: Double Phonation and Stereophonation,” in Lilly on Dolphins: Humans of the Sea (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975), 302-323. This is chapter 12 from Lilly’s The Mind of a Dolphin, originally published in 1967. 180 feat of imagination. It implies that the technology of drawing, computation, and video were conceived as a way of bridging the communication gaps between different but fundamentally equal species. The function of the image as an essential building block of communication between species intersects with the function of the video frame buffer, a technique central to every kind of digital representation on a screen. As Jacob Gaboury notes, the frame buffer is a type of computer memory utilized so that “the computer can separate calculation from display, storing visual data in memory as needed until it is changed or transformed through interaction.”75 Gaboury also notes that this allows a computer to store information for display and visual output separately from the calculations of a central processing unit, a method of translating digital computation to the analog output on a screen.

This connection of communication to digital representation and computation is not incidental. Lilly, in addition to his laboratory research on interspecies communication with dolphins, developed a serious research program examining the neurophysiological effects of isolation tanks on human subjects that resulted in the 1967 book Programming and

Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, which was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health Career Award for Oive years from 1962 to 1967.76 The book, which Lilly calls a summary report and which achieved wide dissemination in the 1960s counterculture via the Whole Earth Catalog, details his theory that the human mind is fundamentally a general-purpose biological computer that can be programmed and

75 Jacob Gaboury, “The Random-Access Image: Memory and the History of the Computer Screen,” Grey Room 70 (March 1, 2018): 34. 76 See John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments [1968] (New York: Julian Press, 1987), ix. 181 “metaprogrammed” like any other general purpose computing device, with very few inherent “hardware” limitations.77 The key difference from programming an artiOicial computer is that here the user programmed their own, internal biocomputer. Lilly deOined programming in this context as almost any kind of human behavior, learned or autonomic.

Metaprogramming was a higher-level executive and control function that focused on the

“erasability, modiOiability, and creatability of programs.”78 The most immediate analogy here is the relationship of a computer program to the function of an operating system.

It is evident that Lilly most likely appropriated the language of metaprogramming from the LINC (Laboratory Instrument Computer) minicomputer. Lilly was part of an evaluation program for the LINC from 1963 to 1965, and used it in his research into human-dolphin communication at the Communication Research Institute.79 Lilly appears to have derived his concept of the “metaprogram” from the operating system of the LINC. Designed and programmed by Mary Allen Wilkes, this operating system used “meta commands” to edit and control programs.80 Lilly even uses the term “metacommand language” in Programming

77 In the author’s note to Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, Lilly mentions that after Stewart Brand reviewed the book in the Whole Earth Catalog, subsequent demand resulted in the book being reprinted in an edition of several thousand copies. See Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, x; and “Human Biocomputer,” Whole Earth Catalog, Spring (1969): 60. The book was also reviewed in Radical Software; see Robert Willig, “Acid programming,” —Radical Software [California section], —Vol. 1, no. 4 (1971): 4. Willig characterized the book as using the analogy of computation for brain function as “a neat simile for that hard to deOine phrase — self-actualized personality.” This particular issue of the magazine had separate sections containing contributions from Canada and California and featured a cover by Ant Farm. 78 Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, 5. It is worth mentioning that Lilly appears to trace his understanding of the human brain as essentially computational to the work of Warren S. McCulloch, whom he explicitly thanks in the acknowledgements as “inspiration for the pursuit of the logic and languages of artiOicial computers as related to the brain.” See Lilly, 129. As mentioned in chapter 2, McCulloch wrote on the computer-brain analogy as early as 1949 in a presentation to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. See McCulloch, “Brain as Computing Machine.” 79 See Wesley Clark, “The LINC was Early and Small,” in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on The History of Personal Workstations, HPW ’86 (New York, NY, USA: ACM, 1986), 133-55. 80 See Mary Allen Wilkes, LAP6 Handbook. Tech. Rep. No. 2, (St. Louis, MO: Computer Research Lab. Washington University, 1967): 7-19. Wilkes deOined meta commands speciOically as a means to manipulate 182 and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer in reference to what he sees as the human biocomputer’s self-programming capabilities.81

It is important to note that the digital computation-based model of the human brain was not intended as a way to elevate humans above other species, but acted rather as a leveler.

In Lilly’s schema all mammalian brains were biocomputers, and hence could interact at a fundamental level. Lilly deOined the mechanism for interspecies communication as a process called “interlock,” an all-encompassing “dyadic coalition” between two biocomputers that could be human or non-human.82 In a broad sense, the process of interlock was fundamental to the function of any social network, at all scales. The term appears to be derived from the notion of computer interlock, which is a “method of coordinating and/or synchronizing multiple processes in a computer.”83

Despite what sounds like a reductionist way of thinking about the human mind, metaprogramming also functions as an elaborate therapeutic methodology. In general,

Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer could be said to be a manual for self-actualization. The processes of self-programming and self- metaprogramming are positioned as a means for increased self-awareness, and potentially as a kind of experimental therapy. Lilly explicitly states that the impetus for this research

existing text in Oiles within the LINC operating system. These commands comprised what are now basic functions such as saving a Oile, appending text to a Oile, or simply scrolling to a speciOic location in a document. Meta commands also had the unique feature of user customization. 81 Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, 7. 82 Lilly, 85. 83 See John Daintith and Edmund Wright, "interlock," in A Dictionary of Computing, Oxford University Press, 2008, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199234004.001.0001/ acref-9780199234004-e-2648. 183 was born in his experiments in isolation tanks.84 As he notes, total sensory isolation creates an environment where “the self-directed and other-directed programs can be clearly detected, analyzed, recomputed, and reprogrammed, and new metaprograms [can be] initiated by the solitudinous computer itself.”85 As an anechoic chamber for the mind, external noise and input is reduced to a minimum, creating a context that is essential for a self-reOlexive probing of the mind.86 The goals here are not related to engineering a better mind, but as Lilly notes, are equivalent to those in classical psychoanalysis. The subject can, with the assistance of both isolation and LSD-25, become their own analyst. Lilly himself had extensive training in psychoanalysis, and in the 1940s spent eight years at the

Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis studying under one of Freud’s students, Robert

84 Lilly’s research with isolation tanks dates to the mid-1950s. D. Graham Burnett notes that Lilly’s interest in the psychological effects of isolation tanks dates to his research on direct brain stimulation of “positive- pleasurable-start and “negative-painful-stop” centers in macaque and dolphin brains. Lilly concluded that, since direct brain stimulation with electrodes was not an option with human subjects, a withdrawal of all stimulation could isolate the human mind sufOiciently so that it could be explored in a self-reOlexive manner. See Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, 572-576. Burnett refers directly to John C. Lilly, “Some Considerations Regarding Basic Mechanisms of Positive and Negative Types of Motivations,” American Journal of Psychiatry 115, no. 6 (December 1, 1958): 498–504. In 1956 Lilly had published his research on the perceptual and psychological effects of isolation tanks on human subjects; see “Effects of Physical Restraint and of Reduction of Ordinary Levels of Physical Stimuli on Intact Healthy Persons,” in Illustrative Strategies for Research on Psychopathology in Mental Health, Symposium No. 2. Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (1956), 13-20, 44. 85 Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, 159. 86 It is worth mentioning adjacent practices in sensory isolation during the late 1960s, particularly those of James Turell and Robert Irwin with Edward Wortz for the Art and Technology Program at LACMA. Both Irwin and Turrell were interested in exploiting the sensory deprivation effects of anechoic chambers. They went as far as to experiment with a small number of test subjects in an anechoic chamber at UCLA. See Maurice Tuchman, A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967-1971, (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971), 127-143. Dawna Schuld notes that both Irwin and Turrell “approached a work of art as an event of engagement, rather than as any particular object.” Their experimentation with anechoic chambers acted as an extension of their phenomenological interest in the process of perception, rather than in what is being perceived. See Dawna Schuld, “Lost in Space: Consciousness and Experiment in the Work of Irwin and Turrell,” in Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science, edited by Matthew C Hunter and Roman Frigg, (Dordrecht; London; New York: Springer, 2010), 221-244. 184 Waelder.87 There is a distinct ambivalence here, in that Lilly appears to have mostly rejected psychoanalysis after the early 1950s, yet kept the language of analysis as a framework for his understanding of the brain as a biocomputer. Charlie Williams notes that Lilly’s turn away from psychoanalysis coincided with his further absorption into research that had clear uses for the U.S. military and intelligence community, speciOically in the areas of brainwashing and the cognitive manipulation of human subjects.88

The disturbing nature of the origins of Lilly’s research on the “solitudinous computer” adds another layer of complexity to what on the surface appears to be a countercultural turn towards computation and a phenomenological understanding of the self. The Cold

War logics embedded in Lilly’s project manifested themselves as what D. Graham Burnett calls the “imbrication of techniques of mind control and animal communication.”89 The interest in Lilly’s work on the part of publications like the Whole Earth Catalog and Radical

Software is not unexpected, since by the late 1960s and early 1970s he had become somewhat of a countercultural guru, a member of a loosely afOiliated group (also including

Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ralph Metzner) that advocated

87 See Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, 572n85. Mical Raz also notes the psychoanalytic use of sensory deprivation in the work of Karl Menninger to create a state of regression. Menninger and other psychoanalysts also thought of the spatial qualities of the environment where analysis took place as deliberately inducing a kind of sensory deprivation that would aid in the process of analysis. See Mical Raz, “Alone Again: John Zubek and the Troubled History of Sensory Deprivation Research,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 49, no. 4 (September 1, 2013): 379–95. 88 See Charlie Williams, “On ‘ModiOied Human Agents’: John Lilly and the Paranoid Style in American Neuroscience,” History of the Human Sciences 32, no. 5 (December 2019): 84–107. Williams notes that two unpublished papers from the 1950s, present in Lilly’s papers in Stanford University Library Special Collections, focus speciOically on the military applications of direct manipulation of emotions and behavior via electrostimulation of the human brain. Williams describes one paper as speculating on the possibilities of inserting “neuroelectric datasets or ‘programs’ into a recipient human brain.” D. Graham Burnett also conOirms, via a Freedom of Information Act request, that Lilly had contact with the national security establishment throughout the late 1950s advising the OfOice of Naval Research, the Air Force, and the Army. See Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, 577-578. 89 Burnett, 579. 185 consciousness expansion through psychopharmacological means.90 It is in this strange crucible that Lilly forged a theory of the human mind that was partly mechanistic, partly therapeutic, and profoundly spatial in its orientation.

Lilly explicitly uses spatial analogies in his mapping of the brain as a kind of psychoanalytic computer. In the third chapter of Programming and Metaprogramming in the

Human Biocomputer, titled “Personal Metaprogrammatic Language: An Example of Its

Properties,” Lilly articulates an experience of what he calls the “language which controls the computer itself, how it operates, and how it computes as an integral whole.”91 Despite the clinical language, the experience of this language is nonverbal and architectural. This personal metaprogrammatic language is described as a “hypothesized building,” which evolves from a rigid set of rooms to a structure that is Oilled with balloon-like rooms that can be topologically extruded through keyholes.92 This conOlation of psychology and space seems to echo the obsession with inOlatables in architecture of the period. Ant Farm themselves were key proponents of what Reyner Banham slyly describes as “monumental wind-bags.”93 The critical component here was the dissolution of structure into a kind of topological bubble gum. Felicity D. Scott notes that inOlatables of the period had a

“psychedelic aesthetic logic” of spatial disorientation and sensory discombobulation.94 The

90 See Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, (New York: Grove Press, 1985). 91 Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, 53. 92 Lilly, 55. 93 Reyner Banham, “Monumental Windbags,” in The Inclatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68, ed. Marc Dessauce ( New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 31-33. 94 See Felicity D. Scott, Living Archive 7: Ant Farm; Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout of July 21,1969; plus the Complete Ant Farm Timeline (Barcelona; New York: Actar, 2008), 84. Scott positions Ant Farm’s use of inOlatables as a deterritorialized countercultural practice that leveraged a DIY “counter-architecture” in the service of exploring new forms of communal living and a reimagined relationship to the environment. 186 dissolution of a cognitive or interior environment into a topologically Oluid structure produced a state where the individual or user could re-program their minds at will, through the manipulation of these inOlatable-like structures. Lilly sums up his own experience in the realization that “the key is no key”—an awareness that the divisions and locks between rooms and spaces are arbitrarily determined by the mind.95

Lilly’s understanding of this inward, autonomous, and perhaps self-absorbed examination of the human mind is counterbalanced by his idea of interlock, the “dyadic coalition” that offers the possibility of networking between biocomputers. Since in Lilly’s view, all mammals are essentially biocomputers, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer concludes that human-dolphin interlocks would be the ideal species pairing for this kind of process. Interlock was the technique required to create coalitions, a concept Lilly borrowed from Heinz Von Foerster.96 His link to Von Foerster suggests a strong afOinity for second-order or second wave cybernetics, where as N.

Katherine Hayles notes, systems are structurally coupled to each other in a reOlexive sense, forming a system of systems.97

95 Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, 54. 96 See Heinz Von Foerster, “Bio-Logic,” In Biological Prototypes and Synthetic Systems Volume 1: Proceedings of the Second Annual Bionics Symposium Sponsored by Cornell University and the General Electric Company, Advanced Electronics Center, Held at Cornell University, August 30-September 1, 1961, ed. Eugene E. Bernard and Morley R. Kare (New York: Plenum Press, 1962), 1–12. Lilly references Von Foerster in the chapter “Coalitions, Interlock and Responsibility,” noting that “Von Foerster…calls attention to the increasing survival times of increasingly large aggregates of connected matter which he deOines as coalitions. Living systems are coalitions par excellence.” Von Foerster argues that this coalition strategy is a fundamental quality of living organisms. 97 See N. Katherine Hayles, "The Second Wave of Cybernetics: From ReOlexivity to Self-Organization," in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 131-159. Hayles understands the second wave of cybernetics as originating in the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, whose work on the perceptual systems of frogs led them to understand perception not as a representation of reality, but a construction of the individual organism’s perceptual apparatus. Hence organisms are constantly involved in the process of self-making or autopoiesis. At larger, more complex scales this is manifest in a coupling between environment and organism. 187 It is this kind of structural coupling—an interlock between two species—that drove the

Dolphin Embassy project. Although it was never quite realized, its ambitions both co-opt and transform Lilly’s project. Ant Farm and Michels intended to create an architecture of interlock, a means of realizing a set of goals that were literally unobtainable. Instead of a practice that could be classiOied as paper architecture or preparatory work for some realized future project, the Dolphin Embassy went in an opposite direction, towards Oiction.

This was less a piece of science Oiction, than a Oiction of pre-enactment.

Oceania and the Brainwave Film

In early 1977, Olush with a $15,000 grant from The Rockefeller Foundation and having been presented at a press conference and exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in January, the Dolphin Embassy project began to take an unexpected turn. By 1977 the main contributors to the project were Michels, Alexandra Morphett, Robert Perry, and Doug

Hurr—98a semi-Australian splinter group from a collective that deliberately had no clear hierarchy. Morphett and Perry were Australians and played crucial parts in the next phase of Dolphin Embassy. Both Morphett and Perry appear to have been students when they met

Michels and Hurr, most likely in 1976 during Ant Farm’s initial foray to Australia. Morphett was a London-born student studying Italian Futurism at the Alexander Mackie School of

Art, while Perry was an architecture student at New South Wales Institute of Technology.99

98 Michels mentions this in an unpublished 1982 manuscript. See the folder “Michels’ Notes on D.E. History, 1982,” Box 27, Folder 1, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Chip Lord also seems to corroborate this, since he understood Dolphin Embassy as a project that was primarily initiated by Michels and Schreier in 1976. See Chip Lord, “Chip Lord: Some Notes on Ant Farm.” 99 Details of Morphett’s and Perry’s biographies can be found in the leadership section of a proposal for an expedition to Monkey-Mia, a beach in Shark Bay 500 miles north of Perth, Australia. See “Dolphin Embassy

188 By July, Michels had contracted with a marine architect—Allen Blackburne of

Blackburne and Associates, based in New South Wales, Australia—to assist in the design and construction of the Dolphin Embassy. In correspondence with Blackburne, it is noted that the craft was designed as both a Oloating research platform and a Oilm set.100 This appears to be a strategy to construct a dual use Embassy, both for the planned expedition and for a Oictionalized version of the same event. Using Oiction as a hedge for execution, the project became a blend of fact and Oiction. Michels in particular seemed to relish the elision of this boundary. In an October 1978 letter to Jim Nollman, reOlecting on the inability to fully fund an aspect of the Dolphin Embassy project, Michels extolls the “subtleties of the symbiotic relationship between fact and Oiction.”101 This would become an even more prominent quality of Dolphin Embassy as the project progressed, not towards realization, but towards Oictionalization, in what Michels refers to as a “pre-enactment” of the experience of interspecies communication.

This idea of pre-enactment gave shape to what became Brainwave, a Oilm conceived as

“science-Oiction that becomes future-fact,” Michels’s shorthand for a narrative that was an idealization of the Dolphin Embassy expedition using the cinematic idioms of popular

Monkey-Mia Expedition proposal,” 1978, Box 27, Folder 16, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Perry appears to have been a partner in a number of architecture ofOices after his involvement with Ant Farm and Dolphin Embassy, including Clarke, Perry, Blackmore, Architecture and Communications which was renamed Architecture Oceania in 1987, and Scott Carver where he was a director from 1992 to 2018. A brief bio can be found on an archived version of the Scott Carver website. See "Bob Perry Director," Scott Carver Pty Ltd. Last modiOied March 21, 2012. http:// scottcarver.com.au/cms-people/bob-perry.phps. Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/ 20120321150939/http://scottcarver.com.au/cms-people/bob-perry.phps. 100 See Allen Blackburne to Brainwave Productions Pty Ltd., July 12, 1977, Folder 7-8, Box 52, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Blackburne also notes that the craft could become a valuable asset after it fulOilled its useful life, possibly becoming a houseboat or “Marine Land styled auditorium.” 101 See Doug Michels to Jim Nollman, October 1978. Box 6, Folder 8, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. 189 science Oiction. In late May of 1977, Michels and Morphett had gone as far as establishing a proprietary limited company, designed as a Oinancial vehicle to support the production, distribution, and exhibition of a feature Oilm. Brainwave Productions used the name of the

Oilm treatment that Michels and Morphett had developed based on the Dolphin Embassy material. In the same period they had applied for and received development funds for a Oirst draft of the screenplay from the Australian Film Commission (AFC.)102 The screenplay was drafted by Morphett’s uncle, Tony Morphett, a screenwriter who had worked with Peter

Weir on The Last Wave.

The Dolphin Embassy craft had now been dubbed Oceania, taking its name from the geographic region of Australia. Between Ant Farm’s 1976 Australian roadshow, which featured an extensive interview with Michels about Dolphin Embassy, and the summer of

1977, the craft had undergone a fairly extensive re-design. What was once a double-hulled seafaring RV had transformed into something sleeker: a three-hulled vessel that could pull double duty as a movie set and research platform. A plan drawing from May 1977 shows a version of the Embassy that is more expansive, based on a triangular deck with a distinctly open plan (see Oigures 4-13 and 4-14). In elevation the vessel had an uncanny resemblance to a dolphin’s head. The pretext for this open plan seems to be the addition of various technical apparatuses, including aquariums and hydroponics. But it is also apparent that much of this re-design was done in order to reimagine the vessel as a set for Oilm production. A boom containing a video camera, which had been underwater in the 1976 version of the craft, is now a camera crane attached to the super structure of the vessel (see

102 See "Brainwave, A Feature Film By: Alexandra Morphett and Doug Michels," 1977, Box 52, Folder 1, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Tony Morphett is credited with the screenplay, although the actual document is a seventeen-page outline of the Oilm. 190 Oigure 4-14). Thus, Oceania did not hide what it had become.

Even in its earliest iteration, Dolphin Embassy had a documentary component. The last phase of the project involved a feature-length documentary that would have used video footage documenting all the activities aboard the Embassy during its voyage along the eastern and northern coasts of Australia.103 The documentary would have been part of the so-called “image Olow” of the project, one of the main components of the timeline that Ant

Farm created for their 1976 proposal. Figure 4-15 shows this unusual timeline, based on a set of confocal parabolas, with each month Olowing through several categories: create, analyze, observe, support, media tools, research, and image Olow. Image Olow encompasses the performative and promotional aspects of the project.104 The multi-dimensional nature of this timeline implies a conception of time where the past and future converge on the

Dolphin Embassy project as it goes through successive phases of design, build, and equip, culminating in the launch of the vessel, and continuing through testing and the actual expedition, called the “cruise” phase. The Oinal phase, “edit,” appears to be entirely about documentation and dissemination of the project, ultimately linking to image Olow and the creative conception of the project.

Despite its broad ambitions, it appears that the Embassy project was primarily successful on the level of documentation and dissemination. In light of Michels’s distinct interest in the blurring of fact and Oiction, it is worth looking at the precedents he used. In an undated 1977 letter to Chip Lord, the Olying saucer from the 1951 Oilm The Day the Earth

Stood Still is cited as an inspiration for the Oceania design. Michels also mentions in an April

103 See Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, 10. 104 Ibid., 8. 191 1977 letter to Schreier and Lord the fact that the re-designed Embassy “looks like a Olying

SAUCER.”105 The emphasis on the similarity between a Olying saucer from a 1950s science

Oiction Oilm and the Oceania vessel seems to be an admission of the Embassy project’s turn towards Oictionalization. In the summer of 1977, a newsletter for the Dolphin Embassy named Contact, published for three issues between 1977 and 1978, reproduced two renderings of the re-designed vessel (see Oigures 4-16 and 4-17). In addition to the Olying saucer inOluence, Chip Lord noted a slight resemblance to Ant Farm’s House of the Century, with the white bulbous surfaces and bug-like apertures.106 Needless to say, the inclusion in

Oigure 4-16 of what appears to be the a Loch Ness monster or seadragon-like creature next to the vessel adds to the veneer of the fantastic. This vacillation between fact and Oiction always seems intentional, even as it lends an air of absurdity to the project.

If Dolphin Embassy began as a quasi-architectural “technology of consciousness,” then by the spring of 1977 it had turned into a Oictional pre-enactment of such a transformative technology. Despite the quixotic nature of the project, the seriousness of Michels and his collaborators Perry and Morphett seemed to drive the project forward towards a kind of compromise with the reality of execution. With the cost of Oceania’s construction estimated at over $150,000, the idea that the project could be easily funded quickly evaporated.107 A scale model was eventually commissioned in January of 1978, but this was useful only as a

105 See $wamiii (Doug Michels) to Chip Lord, 1977, and Doug Michels to Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, April 2, 1977. Both letters can be found in the Dolphin Embassy correspondence folder, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and PaciOic Film Archive; Purchase made possible through a bequest of Thérèse Bonney by exchange, a partial gift of Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier and gifts from an anonymous donor and Harrison Fraker. 106 See Chip Lord to Doug Michels, 1977, Dolphin Embassy correspondence folder, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and PaciOic Film Archive. 107 See Allen Blackburne to Brainwave Productions Pty Ltd., July 12, 1977. 192 promotional tool, appearing in an issue of the Contact newsletter in 1978 (see Oigure 4-18) and as sidekick to Alexandra Morphett in a polaroid (see Oigure 4-19).108

Brainwave as a movie pulls from a plethora of sources and situates itself between aspirations to a blockbuster Hollywood movie and an obvious link to Australian New Wave

Oilms of the 1970s.109 This is best summed up in the introduction to the Brainwave outline, which positions the Oilm as appealing “to young adults who supported ‘mystery’ Oilms as diverse in type as ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.”110 Tony Morphett, a screenwriter with extensive experience in the Australian Oilm and television industry, proved to be a crucial interlocutor in translating Michels’s and Alexandra Morphett’s ideas into a gripping and professionally crafted screenplay. Most signiOicant here is Tony

Morphett’s collaboration with Peter Weir on the script for The Last Wave, released in 1977.

The Last Wave appears to be a touchstone for Brainwave in a thematic sense, as Tony

Morphett adapts and elaborates on many of the concepts in Weir’s Oilm. Both Oilms use genre tropes to get at a more complex understanding of the world. The Last Wave takes the form of a thriller, with Richard Chamberlain playing a Sydney lawyer tasked with defending a group of Aboriginal men accused of murder. This plot is essentially a pretext for the lawyer to Oind the source of recurring premonitory dreams he has of Sydney being

108 The model cost around $5,000 AUD. See Doug Michels to Joss Maasakkers, letter, January 4, 1978, Box 27, Folder 3, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. 109 The Australian New Wave or New Australian Cinema was initiated by state funding of a Oilm school and the underwriting of Oilms in the early 1970s. Key Oilms from the era includes Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career, Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Bruce Beresford's The Getting of Wisdom and Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. See Diane Jacobs, “The Last Wave,” The Criterion Collection, November 26, 2001, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/168-the-last-wave. 110 See "Brainwave, A Feature Film By: Alexandra Morphett and Doug Michels," 1977. Picnic at Hanging Rock is Peter Weir’s 1975 Oilm adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel of the same name. The movie and novel detail the mysterious disappearance of a number of schoolgirls and a teacher at Hanging Rock, Victoria, an extinct volcano. 193 inundated with water. The leader of the accused men, played by Aboriginal actor David

Gulpilil, becomes an increasingly important character as he provides the narrative’s key to unlocking the lawyer’s increasingly bizarre visions. Aboriginal dream time plays a crucial role in the Oilm, both as a source for the lawyer’s visions of watery oblivion and as a way for the lawyer to insinuate himself into Aboriginal culture as a kind of seer or visionary of an impending apocalypse. The Oilm ends with the lawyer’s vision of a gigantic tidal wave about to come crashing down on the beaches of Sydney, although it is unclear whether this “last wave” is real or hallucinated. Director Peter Weir used Gulpilil both as an actor and advisor on Aboriginal culture, often adapting and revising the script according to Gulpilil’s comments. Weir also employed Nandjiwarra Amagula in a similar manner. Nandjiwarra, a non-actor, was a tribal elder from Groote Eylandt who played a pivotal role in The Last Wave as a shaman.111 What likely attracted Michels and Morphett to the Oilm, beyond the fascination with Aboriginal culture and a vision of nature inundating civilization, was the cinematic portrayal of a kind of interlock between human and nature. Although there is no speciOic entity that the lawyer is receiving visions from, this capability of premonitions and communication at a distance becomes a key part of Brainwave.

Tony Morphett’s screenplay for Brainwave presents a scenario that echoes the narrative of speculative and horror Oilms of the late 1970 and early 1980s, speciOically the trope of the child or teenager in touch with the supernatural or a world beyond the everyday. Most famously, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind featured a child

111 See Weir’s reOlections on working with Gulpilil and Nandjiwarra in a 1985 interview with Susan Mathews, “Years of Living Dangerously: The Last Wave, The Plumber, Gallipoli,” in Peter Weir: Interviews, ed. John C. Tibbetts (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 85-92. Weir notes that Nandjiwarra prohibited the use of existing tribal symbols and artwork, hence the production designer was tasked with fabricating a Oictional Aboriginal visual language for the Oilm. 194 entranced and eventually abducted by extraterrestrials that repeatedly terrorized his family. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist from 1982 plays on a similar trope of a child who communicates with malevolent spirits through the static of a television set. In Brainwave the story centers around Oive main characters who inhabit the Dolphin Embassy on a research expedition: Jane, a teenager who has unusual abilities to communicate with animals; her mother Helen, the expedition’s videographer; Harold, a “new-breed anthropologist”; Barbara, a level-headed marine biologist; and Peter, the captain of the

Embassy.112 Much of the narrative centers around Jane, whose apparent ability to communicate with a dolphin she named Prince (after a beloved dead horse) only registers on visual and musical levels. The screenplay does not attempt to invent a human/dolphin language, but instead dramatizes the effects of a communication that is purely mental. Jane is occasionally portrayed as communicating with the dolphin through dream sequences that involve her playing and swimming with the dolphin in the open ocean, but the nature and content of these communications is generally implied, not illustrated.

An intriguing visual form of communication involves Jane creating elaborate patterns with shells and stones in collaboration with her dolphin interlocutor. In the screenplay,

Tony Morphett explains these patterns as derived from “a pattern of bodies which must be

112 See Tony Morphett, “Brainwave Film Script,” 1977, Box 52, Folder 4, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Both Stacey Keach and John Denver were considered for the lead role of Harold. Keach was named as a potential lead early on in planning for the Oilm. He is mentioned speciOically as the lead actor in a packet of production information that also includes a reproduction of a letter conOirming Keach’s interest. See “Brainwave Production Information,” December 7, 1977, Box 52, Folder 2, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Keach also visited Ant Farm at their Pier 40 headquarters in San Francisco in 1976. He can be seen with Michels and Lord in a 1976 photo. See “Actor Stacy Keach, Doug M., Chip Lord, and David Greenberg @ Pier 40,” photograph, 1976, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and PaciOic Film Archive. David Gupilil was considered for the role of Peter, the skipper of the Dolphin Embassy. See Tony Morphett to John Denver, letter, December, 20, 1977, Box 27, Folder 18, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. 195 formed whether for worship, or dance, or philosophy or some other reason accessible only to a mind which solves its problems without technology, in a truly three-dimensional space.”113 In a letter attempting to recruit John Denver to the lead role in Brainwave,

Morphett notes that these patterns were intended to communicate an epic poem, a

“Cetacean Book of Genesis,” that details the divergence of humans from dolphins.114 The telepathic communication between Jane and the dolphin named Prince is also described as

“a pattern of pictures and concepts.”115 These patterns, sent to the mind of the teenager and rendered in shells and stones, were evidence of a type of communication that was entirely unintelligible to humans. Despite Morphett’s intention that these patterns would represent a cetacean epic narrative, in the Brainwave screenplay they become the centerpiece in an apophatic moment, when the patterns become important not for their meaning or symbolism, but for what they cannot express. What were once innocuous patterns now occupy a zone of defamiliarization, a trace of communication between human and dolphin that always must be incomplete.116

Brainwave Olips the stakes for Dolphin Embassy in that it bypassed the use of video and technology for a more direct interaction that borders on the mystical. Although in one way this was a concession to creating an easily accessible narrative logic, this move was directly

113 Morphett, “Brainwave Film Script,” 15. 114 See Tony Morphett to John Denver. This information is included as a postscript in the letter. 115 Ibid. This non-cognitive style of communication echoes a similar kind of psychic transmission to that portrayed in Close Encounters. Roy Neary, the character played by Richard Dreyfus, receives images of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, the location where the alien mothership lands. Much of the second act of the movie involves Neary attempting to construct a model of this idée cixe with mashed potatoes and random gardening supplies until a chance viewing of a television broadcast connects the image in his head with the location in Wyoming. 116 Eugene Thacker notes that this type of communicational failure stems from conditions that are closer to a pre-modern mystical experience where there is an “accessible manifestation and inaccessible source.” See Thacker, “Dark Media,” 125. 196 anticipated in Ant Farm’s earlier proposals. In one of these proposals, Curtis Schreier had drawn a series of images portraying a triptych of idealized human-dolphin interactions.117

Figure 4-20 shows the progression across the triptych from “yesterday” to “today,” and ending in “tomorrow.” The temporal path Schreier illustrated shows a diminishing need for technology; the tomorrow of “communication thru psychic methods,” is exactly the scenario of Brainwave.118 The halos of waves broadcasting from the heads of both dolphin and human suggest an inchoate religious signiOicance as much as radio transmissions. Are human and dolphin supposed to be read as sacred?

This possibility indeed seemed immanent in the project. Correspondence from 1978 indicates that Dolphin Embassy was being received as a project that intersected with the hermeneutics of religious symbolism. In a letter from Theo Walker, Jr., a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame, Walker notes that the work of religious historian

Mircea Eliade resonates with many of the aims of Dolphin Embassy. Walker writes, “Though

Eliade is concerned primarily with religious symbols; much of what he and other scientist

[sic] have to say about the nature of symbolism and language could be directly applicable to the interspecies communications project!”119 The implication here is that a structuralist understanding of hermeneutics, primarily related to the use of language and symbolism, would lead to some sort of breakthrough in communicating with dolphins.

117 Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, 5. 118 Ibid. 119 See Theo Walker Jr. to Alex Morphett and Doug Michels, letter, April 22, 1978, Box 27, Folder 18, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Walker had apparently heard about Dolphin Embassy while working at Zodiac News Service, a left-wing news weekly based in Chapel Hill, N.C. Walker is currently Associate Professor of Ethics and Society at the Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. His biography on the SMU website lists Neoclassical natural scientiOic theology, scientiOic metaphysics, and African-American liberation theology as his main research interests. See https://www.smu.edu/Perkins/FacultyAcademics/FacultyListingA-Z/Walker. 197 Michels and Morphett appear to endorse this view, although the exact implications in practice are unclear. In a later proposal for an exhibition on Dolphin Embassy at the

Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston they include a lengthy quote from the foreword to

Eliade’s Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. The most salient part of the quote observes:

The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality—the deepest aspects—which defy any

other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible

creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulOill a function, that of bringing

to light the most hidden modalities of being.120

Although this quote is never glossed by Michels and Morphett, there is a double implication here: the dolphin, as both a symbol and a potential user of symbols, can effect this revealing of the “hidden modalities of being.”

As a narrative vehicle, Brainwave seemed well suited to enact or “pre-enact” this scenario. The plasticity of the medium of narrative Oilm lends itself to the force of metaphor and allusion better than the actuality of trying to stage a scientiOic expedition. The use of

Eliade’s thinking implies that the vision behind Dolphin Embassy was never really scientiOic, but instead was a return to an invented mythological past, which utilized a syncretic bricolage of sources: Aboriginal thought; Lilly’s research on dolphins and the human mind; video technology; and speculative Oiction. The ending of Brainwave points to the incommensurability of such disparate sources and concepts. The Oinal scenes of the screenplay describe an interspecies communion where the entire crew of the vessel is

120 See “Like a Dolphin [proposed exhibition - CAM Houston],” 1978, Box 13, Folder 1, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. 198 caught in a mind-meld with a dolphin, a psychic invasion of human minds by dolphins eager to demonstrate the one-ness of the two species. This passage from the treatment and outline for the Oilm is most evocative:

…humans are held in the dolphin mind-web, clothed in bodies not their own, clothed

in bodies of terrible power, half waking, half dreaming, they move through the very

grain of dark water, sensing other forms around them, the two species knowing each

other from the inside, and not yet understanding.121

It is difOicult to understand how such a cinematic sequence could be Oilmed. Yet this scene does read as a depiction of Lilly’s concept of interlock, a “dyadic coalition” across species, expanded here to include an entire crew of human beings.

Brainwave came to close enough to realization that the Oilm was advertised in an April

1978 issue of Cinema Papers, a bi-monthly Australian Oilm journal modeled on Cahiers du

Cinema.122 Figure 4-21 shows the full-page advertisement, which cheekily inverts the standard orientation of Australia on a map. The slogan “Put Australia on Top” does little to explain what Brainwave might be about, even as its blockbuster aspirations are indicated by a pop culture genealogy including 2001 and Star Wars. In the same issue of Cinema Papers,

Brainwave is listed as a Oilm in pre-production, with Alexandra Morphett as director,

Michels as producer, and a budget of $1 million.123 The information provided for other

Australian Oilms in production in mid-1978 indicate that the Oilm would have been peer to

Weir’s Gallipoli, Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career, and George Miller’s Mad Max.

121 "Brainwave, A Feature Film By: Alexandra Morphett and Doug Michels,” 14. 122 Brainwave, advertisement, Cinema Papers #16 [Cannes Special], April 1978, 2. 123 Cinema Papers #16 [Cannes Special], April 1978, 89. 199 In the end, Brainwave was sunk by the Australian Film Commission pulling its support for the project. Ironically it seems that by the time the advertisement in Cinema Papers was published in the spring of 1978, the project was effectively cancelled. April 1978 correspondence between Michels and R. J. Ellicott, The Minister for Home Affairs, indicates that Michels was desperate for a reconsideration of funding.124 The AFC had rejected full funding of the production of Brainwave in December 1977. A last-ditch attempt to get funding for a second draft of the screenplay also failed in March 1978. By the middle of

1978, Dolphin Embassy, as either an expedition or a Oilm, had been scuttled.

Situating Dolphin Embassy: Hierophany, Whole Design and the Weirding of the 1970s

As a project, Dolphin Embassy straddles paper architecture, Oilm, scientiOic research, and event. It is notable that, despite the project’s origins as an Ant Farm project, it appears to have created a rift in the group, a bridge-too-far moment when Michels left for the antipodes and decided to stay there. Ant Farm member Chip Lord seemed to have particular antipathy towards the project, especially as it became more of a Oilm project. In a

1977 letter to Michels, Lord notes the fact that Brainwave was “180 degrees off” of the original intention of Dolphin Embassy. Although he doesn’t seem to Oind the Oilm objectionable as a project, the idea of an expedition seemed far more appealing.125 Even

124 See Doug Michels to R.J. Ellicott, letter, April 5, 1978, Box 52, Folder 10, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. Ellicott as Minister of Home Affairs had administrative control over arts and letters funding for the Australian government. This included the Australian Film Commission. The Department of Home Affairs was a new administrative division created by Malcolm Fraser’s government in 1977. See the press release “The New Ministry,” December 17, 1977, PM Transcripts: Transcripts from the Prime Ministers of Australia, https:// pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-4602. 125 See Chip Lord to Doug Michels, letter, 1977, Dolphin Embassy correspondence folder, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and PaciOic Film Archive, https://webapps.cspace.berkeley.edu/bampfa/ search/search/?idnumber=2005.14.295.17.a-b&displayType=full&maxresults=1&start=1 200 more revealingly, in a 2007 interview with Pierre Huyghe, when asked to talk about Dolphin

Embassy as a project that incorporates its own media image into the work itself, Lord shifted the discussion to Media Burn as a more coherent exemplar.126

In a historiographical sense this is mirrored by scholarship on Ant Farm, in that Dolphin

Embassy has been mostly ignored, or at best considered peripheral to the core of the group’s work—never mind the fact that Dolphin Embassy could easily be caricatured as a string of increasingly quixotic failures. Felicity D. Scott notes that Ant Farm’s events, videos, and interventions paved the way for “a contestatory practice that appropriates tools at the limits of social and technological developments but deploys them to strategic ends.”127 On the surface this seems applicable to Dolphin Embassy, a project that presses at many limits; but the project seems devoid of any of the contestatory politics that animated Ant Farm’s other work. If there is any political valence in Dolphin Embassy, it is oriented towards the non-human, and a type of non-human that has an array symbolic meanings that are hard to ignore.

Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke note that dolphins are often positioned as a cetacean noble savage, a prototypical innocent untainted by civilization. At the same time dolphins are seen in science Oiction as becoming tractable subjects for civilization by transforming into cyborgs, or intelligent beings that can communicate with humans only through the use of an elaborate techno-scientiOic apparatus.128 Bryld and Lykke theorize the dolphin as embodying often contradictory qualities: creatures of profound, alien otherness, that also

126 See “Chip Lord and Pierre Huyghe, Conversation,” in Marie-Ange Brayer and Emmanuel Cyriaque, eds., Ant Farm [Exposition, Orléans, FRAC Centre, 12 Octobre-23 Décembre 2007] (Orléans, France: HYX, 2007), 45-46. 127 Scott, Architecture or Techno-utopia, 245. 128 Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals, and the Sacred (London: Zed Books, 2000), 66-67. 201 happen to be friendly and devoted.129 Dolphin Embassy reproduced all of these tropes, and doubled down on them in the Brainwave screenplay.

The need to attempt this nearly impossible project seems to have originated in a source that Michels only confessed to in late 1977. In a letter to Donna Grosvenor, Michels claims that in December of 1972, he “received the message to build a Oloating platform to live with free dolphins.”130 The medium or sender of this communication is not speciOied, but it is fairly clear from the context of the letter that this communication was close to a kind of hierophany, a manifestation of something not quite sacred, but certainly extraterrestrial.

Michels theorizes that this message originated with dolphins, who in his theory are an alien intelligence attempting to establish communication with humans through an ability to directly “plant” messages into peoples minds (an idea that appears to inform the telepathic link between Jane and the dolphin Prince in Brainwave). These messages had motivated humans to build dolphinariums and produce television shows such as Flipper, and most importantly had planted the seed in Lilly’s mind to more closely examine dolphin brains and behavior. The Oinal phase of this weirdly Hegelian progression of “reality and media” is of course Michels’s vision for Dolphin Embassy.131

It is impossible to retroactively assess Michels’s mental state in this period, nor is it wise to speculate on his enthusiasm as a consumer of psychedelic substances. There is also the confounding factor of his (and Ant Farm’s) success at combining fabulation and reality in entertaining and subversive events. But it is worth noting that such visionary

129 Ibid. 130 See Doug Michels to Donna Grosvenor, letter, November 28, 1977, Box 27, Folder 17, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. 131 Ibid. 202 experiences were endemic to the 1970s. Lilly himself documented dozens of these events in meticulous detail in his autobiographies The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of

Inner Space and The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography. Historian of religion Erik Davis notes that the 1970s saw the birth of of a “weirding of religious experience,” his term for the intensifying “patchwork metaphysics, religious reinvention, and visionary exuberance” that have been hallmarks of American spiritual experience since the nineteenth century.132

In Davis’s schema “the weird” is a low-brow, pulpy, more accessible version of the uncanny, that has less to do with a psychological unheimlich than a disruptive otherworldliness which creates an ontological unmooring of experience.133

Simon Sadler notes that the Whole Earth Catalog and its countercultural network, which deOinitely included Michels and Ant Farm, were engaged in a kind of “whole design,” a co- evolution between designer and the world, positioned as an ecology of the whole.134 Sadler connects this to Mark Wigley’s understanding of architecture as constantly engaged in a practice of “total design.”135 This becomes a “theology” of design that spans Vasari’s formulation of “Divine Architect” but also includes the system-building and geodesic dome constructions of Stewart Brand and Lloyd Kahn. Brand himself used the invocation, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” in the Oirst issue of the Whole Earth Catalog.136

What sets Dolphin Embassy apart from the more canonical Ant Farm projects as well as from the world-building aspirations of the Whole Earth Catalog is an engagement with “the

132 Davis, High Weirdness, 17. 133 Davis, 14-17. 134 See Simon Sadler, “An Architecture of the Whole,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008): 108– 29. 135 See Mark Wigley, "Whatever Happened to Total Design?" Harvard Design Magazine, no. 5: 1-8. 136 Sadler references this quote from Brand in making the argument about a theology of design. See Sadler, “An Architecture of the Whole,” 126. 203 weird.” Michels and his collaborators, despite a fascination with the possibilites of narrative

Oilm and world-building, were always focused speciOically on actualizing the architecture of

Dolphin Embassy as a portal for communication with dolphins. Brainwave was rationalized in part as a funding mechanism for an actual expedition that would have used the Oceania craft built for the Oilm.137 In a very real way, Dolphin Embassy was intended as an architecture of interlock, where communication across species could occur in the most complete way possible. Another way to put this, in the context of Sadler’s invocation of

“theology” in describing the Whole Earth Catalog, is that Dolphin Embassy was the product of a process that was closer to a gnostic illumination, an insight into the “uncanny connections” of reality, which was then deployed as a project that aspired to use video, architecture, and Oilm to realize new relationships between species.138 However, this is not the Renaissance model of architect as divinity or demiurge constructing the world as a gesamkunstwerk, but rather the architect as seer, mystic, or as Erik Davis puts it in a term very speciOic to the 1970s, a psychonaut. It is obvious that putting Michels and Dolphin

Embassy in a category that includes the mystical risks a total excommunication from the discipline of architecture, or at the very least a consignment to the circular Oile of marginal esoterica. Yet it is clear that Dolphin Embassy sits at a nexus of methodologies and pathways

137 This idea is explicitly stated in the Brainwave Prospectus, a 1977 document that was produced to solicit private investment in the Oilm. Michels and Morphett promise that “BRAINWAVE is a pre-enactment of what will be the most controversial scientiOic experiment of the 1980’s.” They envisioned both the Oilm and the actual expedition to work hand-in-hand to further their goal of achieving interspecies communication. See “Brainwave Prospectus,” Box 52, Folder 5, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. 138 Erik Davis uses the term “uncanny connections” to describe the visionary experiences of a variety of counterculture Oigures in the 1970s, including science-Oiction authors Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson as well as ethnobotanist Terence McKenna. Davis derives this term from critic Stephen Paul Miller’s understanding of the 1970s as the “uncanny decade” and Lacan’s notion of the Real or as Davis puts it "the impossible all-and-nothing that structures the realm of the symbolic, of culture and consciousness, while remaining beyond—or Beyond—the reach of articulation and analysis.” See Davis, High Weirdness, 383. 204 of inquiry in the 1970s that were central to architectural discourse.

Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, originally published in 1978, articulates a methodology for combining fact and fabulation appropriated from Salvador Dali. Koolhaas used this “Paranoid Critical Method” as a foundational stratagem for architecture where “unprovable speculations” are “grafted” onto the real world, “so that a ‘false’ fact takes its unlawful place among the facts.”139 Koolhaas goes as far as deOining architecture as “the imposition on the world of structures it never asked for and that existed previously only as clouds of conjectures in the minds of their creators.”140 This deOinition gives architecture an inherent otherworldliness, an ontological mismatch where architecture exists only at the inOlection point between conjecture and realization. Delirious New York functions as a fabulation based on the island of Manhattan, a revisionist history, and as Koolhaas highlights in the title, a “retroactive manifesto.”

Paranoia plays a key part here. Acting as the Olipside to Michels’s hierophany, where the outside is revealed to the inside, paranoia is entirely about the inside, where through

“conceptual recycling” and “fabrication of evidence,” history and reality are re-used, intensiOied and made new.141

Although Delirious New York and Dolphin Embassy are far removed from each other in intent and execution, the fundamental conceit behind both, hinging on systems of promiscuous interconnections, sought a deliberate elision of fact and Oiction.142 Whether

139 Koolhaas, Delirious New York , 241. 140 Koolhaas, 246. 141 Koolhaas, 241. 142 It should also be noted that Koolhaas had a brief career as screenwriter in the late 1960s and early 1970s, co-writing two screenplays with Rene Daalder. One screenplay was produced and released in 1969 as the The White Slave, a campy exploitation Oilm that Daalder and Koolhaas described apocryphally as “the most expensive but also the least successful popular Oilm in Holland’s Oilm history.” See Daalder’s account in Rene

205 through paranoid critical method or uncanny connections, both projects attempted to press architecture to its discursive limits, not as a path to building, but as an ontological subversion. The fact that both Koolhaas and Michels found the vehicle for this in the form of the ship is perhaps startling, if not inexplicable. In examining Koolhaas’s work in the late

1970s and early 1980s, Ingrid Böck refers to a “maritime analogy” that permeates his work: from the allegory of the Oloating pool with Constructivist architects swimming across the time and space of the Atlantic at the end of Delirious New York, to the Maison à Bordeaux and Villa dall’Ava.143 Böck understands this maritime analogy as a lineage that goes through

Le Corbusier, with his appropriation of the cruiseliner Aquitania as the prototypical

“machine for living” in Toward an Architecture, but that also intersects with Ernst Bloch’s theorization of the ship as a metaphor for “venturing beyond the known world.”144

Dolphin Embassy engages all of these tropes, even going as far as to underline its embrace of fabulation commingled with fact in the absurdist rendering of the craft alongside a Loch Ness monster (see Oigure 4-16). But the project goes one step further. If

Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto was a re-ordering of the past through the paranoiac lense of surrealism, fantasy, and a theorization of a body of work that did not yet exist, Dolphin

Daalder and Rem Koolhaas,The White Slave (Berlin: Fiktion, 2016), EPUB, 6-44. Koolhaas in a 2006 interview claims that his second unproduced screenplay, Hollywood Tower (written in 1974), was intended for director Russ Meyer. Koolhaas summarizes the bizarre Oilm in architectural terms: “At the Oirst level, wealthy Arabs buy up the Hollywood Oilm archive and build a computer with which any star can be put back on the screen. The second level deals with the Nixon administration, which spends a fortune helping out-of-work actors – including Lassie – get jobs in the movies again. Finally, the third level is about Russ Meyer, of course, who is shooting a porn Oilm – the last form of humanism.” See Rem Koolhaas, "Evil Can also be Beautiful,” by Matthias Matussek and Joachim Kronsbein, Spiegel Internationa, March 27, 2006, https://www.spiegel.de/ international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-with-dutch-architect-rem-koolhaas-evil-can-also-be-beautiful- a-408748.html 143 See Ingrid Böck, Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas: Essays on the History of Ideas (Berlin: Jovis, 2015), 171-175. 144 Böck, 175. Böck also notes that Michel Foucault uses the ship as the exemplar of the heterotopia, the provisional utopia that he details in the 1967 essay “Of Other Spaces.” 206 Embassy takes an entirely different tack. The energy of Dolphin Embassy is more centrifugal, extending outwards and away from the center of the architectural discipline, away even from normative assumptions about the structure of reality. The communicational gambit at the center of the project is essentially about the failure or impossibility of communication, or an excommunication, so to speak. Eugene Thacker notes, “excommunication is a double movement in which the communicational imperative is expressed, and expressed as the impossibility of communication.”145 Even in Brainwave, the Oictionalized version of interlock between Jane and Prince occurs in a state beyond technological mediation or surveillance.

Video and electroencephalography can only indirectly assess the stream of telepathic images being exchanged between teenager and dolphin. Jane, as the human side of the equation, is unable to articulate anything about the images she is assumed to be seeing in her head.

For a project that was deOined by the inability to communicate, Michels and his collaborators produced voluminous correspondence, videos, photography, press releases, and proposals in this period; Dolphin Embassy was a profoundly apophatic project, a black box writ large across an immense archive of media. The impossibility of actual communication between species is reinscribed at every stage of the project. It Oits uneasily into a genre that Thacker describes as “weird media,” where the act of mediation “indicates a gulf or abyss between two ontological orders.”146 In Thacker’s typology, disconnection, silence, opacity, noumenal “nothing,”and immanence are the ruling qualities.

For Michels, the concept of interspecies communication became an obsession that he

145 Thacker, “Dark Media,” 80. 146 Thacker, 133-134. 207 returned to throughout his career, until his untimely passing in 2003. The project evolved into a dolphin space station concept called Bluestar, which was the foundation of a Loeb

Fellowship at Harvard GSD in 1985.147 Remarkably the Bluestar concept almost became a

CD-ROM video game for the 3DO platform in the mid-1990s. Literary agent Toby Eady, in

1976 correspondence with Chip Lord about a possible book related to Dolphin Embassy, notes that Michels “could sell a hindleg to a donkey.”148 Yet this persuasive power was no match for the uncanny connections, the benevolent cetaceans, and the weird media of this

“journey into uncharted psychic territory” that was at once absurd, beguiling, and frustrating.149

147 For an example of Michels’s output from the Loeb Fellowship see Doug Michels, “Projects: Blue Star Project (Peter Bolinger, Production Designer) Future Idea Manifesto,” Perspecta 29: 28–33. 148 See Toby Eady to Chip Lord, letter, September 1, 1976, Box 27, Folder 36, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. 149 This quote comes from a 1976 Dolphin Embassy proposal. See Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, 6. 208 Conclusion

Each of the four chapters in this dissertation has examined a facet of the collision of the sciences of the brain with media practices. This dissertation’s orthogonal approach to this material has been to situate these collisions as an architectural practice, in which the model of the black box has been used in its literal sense, as the site of media projection and visualization, but also as an epistemological puzzle.

It is worth coming back to Warren S. McCulloch, who has been a liminal Oigure in the course of this dissertation. McCulloch appeared as a background Oigure in the last three chapters, as co-creator of the neural net model of the brain that informed Will Burtin’s analog simulation of the human brain for Upjohn, and also as a kind of intellectual resource for Pulsa, who claimed the power of “parallel processing,” a networked model of computation and collaboration that was reOlected in the non-hierarchical structure of their collective as well as in the tools they used to produce, as they put it, “environmental phenomena.”1 As for Dolphin Embassy, Michels and his collaborators clearly used John C.

Lilly’s work as a touchstone for the project; Lilly owed a clear debt to McCulloch, taking his schema of the brain as an assembly of computational circuits to self-reOlexive extremes. If

McCulloch and his collaborator Walter Pitts in 1943 had created a mathematical model of the neuron in the brain as a type of Oinite-state computational machine, then Lilly took this mechanistic model one step further to claim that the human brain could literally be programmed, via a process that resembled psychotherapy executed via isolation tank and

1 See Pulsa, “Notes on Group Process.” It should be noted that McCulloch’s work with Walter Pitts on the neural net model was foundational for parallel processing or connectionist models of machine learning. See Michael A. Arbib, “Warren McCulloch’s Search for the Logic of the Nervous System,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43, no. 2 (2000): 193–216. 209 doses of LSD and ketamine. It is this pivot from mechanism to psychedelics that provides the inOlection from Burtin’s didactic simulation of the brain for Upjohn to Pulsa’s stroboscopic manipulations of sound and space. Similar to Lilly, Pulsa understood consciousness as actively programmable through the manipulation of the environment.

Dolphin Embassy, in its embrace of Lilly’s speculative ideas about interspecies communication and his understanding of the mind as a type of spatialized computer, pushes these explorations into a realm that pressed at the limits of communication.

At this point it is important to recognize that McCulloch himself was not a Oigure entirely external to architecture. McCulloch appears to have been a critic for a lighting design seminar in the Department of Architecture at MIT in 1954.2 More importantly he was a panelist for the closing discussion at the Yale Conference on Computer Graphics in

Architecture in April 1968, just a few weeks before the opening of Pulsa’s An Experiment in

Light and Sound Environment as part of Project Argus. Along with Charles Moore, Louis

Kahn, and Steve Coons (a mechanical engineer at MIT who had done early work in computer graphics), McCulloch was posed a question about the future of computer-aided design. In a very pointed manner, McCulloch refused to answer the question. His transcribed and edited remarks, published in the conference proceedings, show a greater concordance with Moore’s and Kahn’s hesitation about the computer as an aid to design than with Coons’s more Whiggish optimism about the progress of technology.

In his evasion of the question, McCulloch manages to make several salient points that establish his own particular genealogy in relationship to the fundamental logic of human

2 See Laboratory of Lighting Design, Progress Report #2, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, July 15, 1954, Warren S. McCulloch Papers, American Philosophical Society. 210 perception. He recounts in pedantic detail his undergraduate research measuring the human ability to distinguish what he calls the “just noticeable difference,” or JND, between objects of similar proportion. This was an experiment in determining which rectangular ratio was most preferred in his small number of test subjects. Unsurprisingly the preferred ratio was very close to the golden ratio; more surprising was that the JND was invariant across length, area, and volume. If a subject showed a JND of 2% in terms of length, the JND was inevitably measured at 2% for area and volume as well.

McCulloch then immediately jumps into a brief account of the Greek temples at

Paestum, Italy. He observes, ”I never saw a smaller entasis on any building and it looks perfectly straight to your eye.”3 His reference to entasis, or the convex curve found in the columns of Greek temples, evinces an interest not in neo-classicism, but in the constants of human perception. The ability to perceive minute differences in proportion, or conversely to perceive the optical illusion of entasis in a Doric column, indicates for McCulloch a common cognitive apparatus underlying all perceptual phenomena.

His Oinal anecdote tells the story of his apparent inability to correctly perceive the asymmetry of pine cones. Inspired in part by his conversations with his former teacher Jay

Hambidge, whose controversial analysis of Greek vases in the 1920s inOluenced Le

Corbusier’s and Rudolf Wittkower’s understanding of proportional systems, he notes that pine cones offer the illusion of symmetry, yet as a mathematical object are inherently

3 Warren McCulloch, “Panel Discussion: The Past and Future of Design by Computer,” in Computer Graphics in Architecture and Design: Proceedings of the Yale Conference on Computer Graphics in Architecture, Held in New Haven, Connecticut, April 1968, ed. Murray M. Milne (New Haven, CT: Yale University School of Art and Architecture, 1969), 101. 211 asymmetrical.4 The two interwoven spirals of bracts on a pine cone correspond to a

Fibonacci sequence and cannot be divided into mirrored halves. The pine cone is useful for

McCulloch because it is an object that has a clear mathematical structure, while at the same time is constantly misconstrued by the human perceptual apparatus. The pine cone is also an example of a natural object that has illusory properties similar to the entasis of a column. The mathematical order is clear, but as McCulloch notes, “I’ve never seen the carving of a pine cone that was right. They muff the point.”5

The implication here is that McCulloch found the antecedents for much of his later research in these observations about human perceptual constraints. Even more to the point, within this homology between nature and architecture, between pine cone and the entasis of a Doric column, McCulloch found the insight that, at least in part, enabled him eventually to conceive of the human brain as being governed by massive networks of neural nets. Subtle as it is, the insinuation here is that architecture embodied the origin of digital computation. So, immersed within a conference devoted to consideration of the technical novelty of computer-aided design in architecture in 1968, McCulloch with a sly indirection let the cat out of the bag.

McCulloch’s provocation at the Yale Conference on Computer Graphics in Architecture also underlines his use of models as a proxy for how he did science. Despite that fact that he

4 Wittkower identiOies Hambidge’s writings in the 1920s as originating the idea that logarithmic spirals based on the root rectangle were a “law of nature” that were imitated by Greek artists and architects. See Rudolf Wittkower, “The Changing Concept of Proportion,” Daedalus Winter (1960): 199–215. More interestingly, Wittkower acknowledges the implication that proportional systems found in nature may be indicative of the structure of the human mind. He quotes Lancelot Law White: "If biology recognizes that all organic processes are ordering processes, then thought itself may be understood as a special kind of ordering process." See Wittkower, 213. 5 McCulloch, “Panel Discussion,” 102. 212 fancied his multidisciplinary research practice as an “experimental epistemology,” his most inOluential contributions function as highly incisive and portable models—theoretical models that, as McCulloch’s biographer Tara H. Abraham notes, represented “how the brain and mind might possibly function, rather than how they actually functioned.”6 Abraham links this to biological models that eschew empirical accuracy, but that perform in a more projective way by suggesting new possibilities.7 The fact that McCulloch and Pitts’s model of the neural net had such broad tractability, not only in computer science, cybernetics, and the neurosciences, but also in an expanded domain of media practices and architecture, indicates its power both as a scientiOic model and as a model that stimulates new forms of thinking about media and architecture.

It bears emphasizing that the McCulloch/Pitts model also produced a state that was effectively psychotic in its orientation. As Orit Halpern notes, this was a “pathology of temporal and spatial organization.”8 As a model, neural nets have no mechanism to account for the past; only the present and future exist. McCulloch himself understood these pathologies, noting that the brain, conceived as a logic machine, was still prone to the dysfunctional looping behavior of neurosis and what he describes as unruly “gremlins.”9

Whether it was Burtin and Upjohn attempting to simulate brain function in their spectacular but confusing simulation; Pulsa using audiovisual systems to delineate an

6 Abraham, Rebel Genius, 151. 7 Abraham uses David Resnik’s understanding of the use of “how-possibly explanations” in the biological sciences. Theories that do not initially have strong empirical support yet are generative of new frameworks for inquiry fall into this category. Resnik uses the example of Louis Pasteur’s germ theory or Gregor Mendel’s theory of genetic inheritance. See David B. Resnik, “How-Possibly Explanations in Biology,” Acta Biotheoretica 39, no. 2 (1991): 141–49. 8 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 146. 9 McCulloch, “Brain as Computing Machine,” 5-6. 213 environment that appeared to exist simultaneously in the viewer’s head and the A&A

Building; or Dolphin Embassy straddling the boundary between scientiOic expedition and sci-Oi Oilm without ever attaining the status of either reality or Oiction; these ontological gremlins are loose. It is thus notable that when grappling with the stateless temporal condition of the neural net model, all of these projects produced some kind of genealogical relationship to the past. When Upjohn exhibited The Brain at Italia ’61, it was presented as enmeshed in the totality of human evolution. Likewise, Pulsa committed themselves to an understanding of architecture through a Hegelian lens that emphasized the spatial endlessness and anteriority of architecture. Michels and his collaborators on Dolphin

Embassy appropriated Aboriginal myths and temporalities as a way to situate the project within an ontology that did not distinguish between dolphin and human.

As the Oinal coda to this dissertation, it is useful to look at a descendent of the histories and genealogies examined in this dissertation. Artist Pierre Huyghe is remarkable in this sense, since he directly claimed Dolphin Embassy as a precedent for his own work— speciOically A Journey That Wasn’t, from 2005, the sprawling documentation and re-creation of an expedition to Antarctica. In a 2007 interview with Chip Lord (referred to in chapter four) Huyghe confesses that he stumbled upon Dolphin Embassy drawings in preparation for his expedition in Antarctica.10 Huyghe is fascinated with the basic hypothesis that he calls an “irrational desire to speak with another life-form.” He also lauds the way the project provided “the means to produce a reality that would allow this hypothesis to take shape, not so much to resolve it but to turn it around in a distracted way.”11 It is Dolphin Embassy’s

10 See “Chip Lord and Pierre Huyghe, Conversation,” in Ant Farm, 45-46. 11 Ibid. 214 incompletion and failure that attracts Huyghe. This failure produces an entire body of work and documentation that almost culminates in a Oictionalization of the original “hypothesis” of human-dolphin communication. It is this kind of nested mediation that Huyghe mirrors in A Journey That Wasn’t. The three main components of the work—an actual expedition to

Antarctica in search of new mutant fauna created by global warming; a re-creation of the voyage in Central Park using only sound, light, and a model; and a non-linear video of the two events—work together to create an entirely new reality. Mark Godfrey observes,

“Huyghe created a spectacular environment not to disarm or overwhelm his viewers but to reinforce the critical point at the center of the work: that an elsewhere and an Other can be contacted but not represented.”12

This is a deliberate and enigmatic failure of communication, which at the same time renders a world that seems to hover between virtuality and actuality. Huyghe’s previous work, particularly the three-room installation at the 2001 Venice Biennale, which Benjmain

H.D. Buchloh called “a rumination on the inextricably intertwined condition of architectural space and electronic media” and Huyghe himself dubbed the “Château de Turing,” underline a continued interest in the imbrication of computation and space,13 where fact functions more as fabulation than context. Yet this failure to communicate is not a dead end, but a feedback loop between architecture and computation, model and Oiction. Loops that reverberate with even more urgent tensions today.

12 Mark Godfrey, “Pierre Huyghe’s Double Spectacle,” Grey Room, no. 32 (October 13, 2008): 55. 13 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Control, by Design,” Artforum, September (2001): 163. 215 Bibliography

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Figure 1-2. Q-2, Semicircular presentation room view 2, rendering by Henry Dreyfuss.

Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, Entry 99, 1a. From “History of Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft)” Records of the Office of Strategic

249 Figure 1-3. Plan of Q-2. From “History of Figure 1-4. Trylon and Perisphere at the Presentation in OSS (Preliminary Draft),” 3. 1939 New York World’s Fair. Photo by Samuel H. Gottscho.

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250 Figure 1-6. “Theme Center - Democracity - Model of towns and countryside” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1935 - 1945.

251 Figure 1-7a. “Room of Our Time” by László Moholy- Nagy, as reconstructed by Kai-Uwe Hemken and Jakob Gebert and installed in the KunstLichtSpiele exhibition, Kunsthalle, Erfurt, 2009. Photo by Sabine Bielmeier.

Figure 1-7b. Detail of “Endless Belt” (left side of image) in “Room of Our Time” by László Moholy-Nagy, as reconstructed by Kai-Uwe Hemken and Jakob Gebert and installed in Guggenheim, New York. Photo by Gail Worley.

252 of Strategic Services 1940-1946, Record Group 226, National Archives at College Park, MD. Figure 1-8. Sketch plan of presentation rooms for Combined Chiefs of Staff Building. Office

Figure 1-9. Photo of main conference room in Combined Chiefs of Staff Building. From “U.S. High Command Plans Strategy in Map-Filled Sanctum,” 73.

253 Figure 1-10. Top photos: main conference room; bottom photos: small conference room. From “U.S. High Command Plans Strategy in Map-Filled Sanctum,” 74.

254 Figure 1-11. Plan of projection apparatus and screen. From Jacobj, “Visual Instruction and the Projection,” 258.

255 Figure 1-12. Page S-14 from Air Force Manual No. 20: Gunner’s Information File, Flexible Gunnery. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 1-13. Page S-15 from Air Force Manual No. 20: Gunner’s Information File, Flexible Gunnery.

256 Figure 1-14. Photo of Integration, central table and wall representing “Reality of science.” Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 1-15. Photo of Integration wall representing “Reality of light, color, texture.” Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

257 Figure 1-16. “Small scale model of the exhibit Integration,” 1948. Photo by Ezra Stoller. From “Integration: The New Discipline in Design,” 230.

Figure 1-17. Designer diagram. From Integration, An Exhibition, 3.

258 Figure 1-18. “Will Burtin Exhibit for the A-D Galleries, drawing 1 of 4,” 1948. Drawing by The Displayers. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology

Figure 1-19. Plan diagram. From Integration, An Exhibition, inside cover. 259 Figure 1-20. Photo of Integration wall representing “Reality of man.” Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 1-21. Photo of Integration, close-up of wall representing “Reality of light, color, texture.” Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

260 Figure 1-22. Photo of Integration, center table and partial view of wall representing “Reality of space, motion, time.” Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Figure 1-23. Photo of Integration wall representing “Reality of science.” Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

261 Figure 1-24. Photo of Will Burtin and Integration wall representing “Reality of science.” Photo by Arnold Newman. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

262 Figure 2-1. Insert from The Upjohn Company. A Moment at a Concert. Kalamazoo, Michigan: The Upjohn Company, 1961.

263 Figure 2-2. From Upjohn “Brain” Exhibit_Action Sequence_13 October 1960 Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

264 Figure 2-3. Page S-5 from United States Army Air Forces, Training Aids Division and Army Air Forces Instructors School Gunner’s Information File : Flexible Gunnery.

Figure 2-4. Page S-17 from United States Army Air Forces, Training Aids Division and Army Air Forces Instructors School Gunner’s Information File : Flexible Gunnery.

265 Figure 2-5. Brain scale model. Early version, c. 1960. Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

266 Figure 2-6. Brain scale model. Early version, c. 1960. Photo by Ezra Stoller. Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

267 Figure 2-7. Image of the Brain c. 1960 from the Smithsonian Science Service Historical Images Collection.

Figure 2-8. Image from back cover of A Moment at a Concert promotional booklet for Upjohn. 268 Figure 2-9. The Brain on display in Upjohn’s Building 41 Warehouse in Kalamazoo, Michigan. c. 1960. Photo from http://upjohn.net/other/brain_cell/brain_cell.htm, accessed October 5, 2020.

The Brain, standing inside the centrencephalic system of the model at the AMA Convention, June 25, 1960. Photo from FigureWill Burtin 2-10. Papers, Dr. A. G. RIT MacLeod, Libraries: scientific Graphic designer Design Archives.of 269 Figure 2-11. Photograph of The Brain at the AMA Convention, June 25, 1960. Photo from Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives.

270 Figure 2-12. Upjohn Brain installation at AMA convention, 1960. Image from “Lighting up the Brain Waves.” Life 49, no. 8 (1960): 68.

271 Figure 2-13. Control panel for IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting Machine), International Business Machines Corp., image from: https://www.moma.org/ collection/works/1491, accessed October 5, 2020.

Matter and Memory, 143.

Figure 2-14. Diagram (fig. 3) from Henri Bergson, 272 Figure 2-15. Photo of Growth and Form exhibition. From Richard Hamilton, 2014, 25.

Figure 2-16. Photo of Growth and Form exhibition. From Richard Hamilton, 2014, 24.

273 Figure 2-17. Image of interior of Palazzo del Lavoro, from “E.I.L.: Momenti Di Uno Spettacolo, Prima Dell’apertura.” Domus 380, no. 7 (1961): 1–18.

Figure 2-18. Perspective and photograph of Palazzo del Lavoro from Peter Blake, “Concrete Parthenon.” Architectural Forum 112, no. 5 (1960): 122-25.

274 Figure 2-19. Map from Man and Communications. Washington D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1961.

Figure 2-20. Contact sheet image of entrance to the Upjohn Brain installation at Italia ‘61. From Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. 275 Figure 2-21. Contact sheet image of Upjohn Brain installation at Italia ‘61. Spectators shown using LecTour device. From Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

276 Figure 2-22. Upjohn Brain installation at Italia ‘61. Photo by Paolo Monti from “Italia ’61 a Torino: Immagini Della Esposizione Del Lavoro Immagini Della Mostra Delle Regioni.” Domus 381, no. 8 (1961): 1–19.

Figure 2-23. Upjohn brain construction, 1960. Photo by Jerry Cooke. From Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

277 Figure 2-24. Upjohn brain construction, 1960. Photo by Jerry Cooke. From Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.

278 FromFigure David 3-1. Pulsa, Rumsey/Pulsa New Haven Group Loft (AttributionInstallation, 4.0Detail International, of Light-sound Creative field, Commons)Fluorescent at tubes archive.org/details/Image-PulsaNewHavenLoftInstallationDetailOfLight-soundField.and loud speakers activated with amplified analogue signals stored on magnetic tape, 1967.

Figure 3-2. Pulsa, New Haven Loft

tubes and loud speakers activated with Installation, Light-sound field, Fluorescent magnetic tape, 1967 From David Rumsey/ Pulsaamplified Group analogue (Attribution signals 4.0 stored International, on Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/ Image-PulsaNewHavenLoftInstallationLight- soundFieldFlorescentTubes.

279 Figure 3-3. Pulsa Installation – Research Studio – New Haven – 1967-1968, in Crosby, Pulsa Installations 1967 - 1969, n.p. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/ CrosbyPulsa.

Figure 3-4. Pulsa Loft New Haven, CT Fluorescent Patterns, 1967. From David Rumsey/ Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/ Image-PulsaLoftNewHavenCtFluorescentPatterns1967.

280 Figure 3-5. Pulsa Loft with Participants New Haven, CT, 1967. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-Puls aLoftWithParticipantsNewHavenCt1967.

Figure 3-6. Pulsa Loft Installation New Haven CT with People Interacting, 1967. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/ details/Image-PulsaLoftIstallationNewHavenCtWithPeopleInteracting1967.

281 Figure 3-7. Pulsa invitation to Project Argus light and sound event, Yale School of Art and Architecture, May 1968. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-PulsaInvitationToProjectArgusLightAndS oundEventYaleSchoolOf.

Figure 3-8. Elevation and plan of Project Argus from Smith, “The Revolution in Interior Design: The Bold New Poly-Expanded Mega Decoration,” 152. 282 Figure 3-9. Pulsa Installation - School of Art and Architecture – Yale University April to September, 1968, in Crosby, Pulsa Installations 1967 - 1969, n.p. From David Rumsey/ Pulsa Group (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/CrosbyPulsa.

283 Figure 3-10. Photo of Experiment in Light and Sound Environment. Bill Crosby and David Rumsey can be seen operating the electronic control system. May 10, 1968. Photo by Joel Katz. From Katz, “Pulsa: Light as Truth,” 44-45. (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0, Creative Commons)

284 Figure 3-11. Photo of Experiment in Light and Sound Environment. May 10, 1968. Photo by Joel Katz. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-PulsaInstallationProjectArgusYaleSchoolOfArtAnd Architecture.

Figure 3-12. Photo of Experiment in Light and Sound Environment balcony. May 10, 1968. Photo by Joel Katz. From Katz, “Pulsa: Light as Truth,” 44-45. (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0, Creative Commons), from the third-floor

285 Figure 3-13. Photo of Pulsa music session, Harmony Ranch, Oxford, Connecticut, ca. 1969. Maryanne Amacher (second from left) and Alvin Curran (center, playing horn) with members of Pulsa. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-PulsaMusicSessionHarmonyRanchOxfordConnecti cutCa.1969.

Pulsa Boston Exhibition Announcement, Sept 1968. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (AttributionFigure 3-14. 4.0Plan International, and specifications Creative of Boston Commons) Public at Gardenarchive.org/details/Image-PulsaBost installation, reproduced in onExhibitionAnnouncementSept1968 286 Figure 3-15. Photo of Boston Public Garden installation, 1968. From David Rumsey/Pulsa Group (Attribution 4.0 International, Creative Commons) at archive.org/details/Image-Puls aBostonDemonstrationdetailBostonPublicGarden1968.

287 Figure 4-1. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy by Curtis Schreier. From “Embassy to the Dolphins,” Esquire 83, no. 3 (March 1975): 83.

288 Figure 4-2. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy by Curtis Schreier. From “Embassy to the Dolphins,” Esquire 83, no. 3 (March 1975): 84.

289 Figure 4-3. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy by Curtis Schreier. From “Embassy to the Dolphins,” Esquire 83, no. 3 (March 1975): 85.

290 Figure 4-4. Plan of Communications Research Institute, from Lilly, The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography, plate before 134.

291 Figure 4-5. Image from pg. 4, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-6. Image from pg. 7, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

292 Figure 4-7. Image from pg. 5, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-8. Image of Frequency Image Synthesizer from pg. 6, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. 293 Figure 4-9. Diagram from Einhorn, “Dolphins challenge the designer,” Electronic Design 15, no. 25 (1967): 52.

Figure 4-10. Diagram showing “man-dolphin coder” and “dolphin-man coder” from Einhorn, “Dolphins challenge the designer,” Electronic Design 15, no. 25 (1967): 61.

294 Figure 4-11. Image from Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers. This image was taken from pg. 304 of Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land; 2; Anthropology and Nutrition, edited by Charles P. Mountford, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960).

295 Figure 4-12. Illustration by Curtis Schreier, n.d. From a folder titled Dolphin Embassy - Log: 1976-1978 (Assembled 2003, unbound), Box 27, Folder 37, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

296 Figure 4-13. Dolphin Embassy plan, dated May 16, 1977. From Drawer 3, OVS Folder 19, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-14. Enlargement of lower

elevation of Dolphin Embassy and cameraright corner boom of protruding figure 4-13 from showing roof.

297 Figure 4-15. Timeline from pg. 8, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

298 Figure 4-16. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy exterior from Contact, September 1977. Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-17. Illustration of Dolphin Embassy interior from Contact, September 1977. Doug Michels Architectural Papers. 299 Figure 4-18. Scale model of Dolphin Embassy/Oceania from Contact Newsletter, March 1978. Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-19. Polaroid of Alexandra Morphett and Dolphin Embassy/Oceania scale model c.1978. From Box 5, Folder 15, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

300 Figure 4-20. Triptych illustrating stages of dolphin/human communication, Curtis Schreier. From pg. 5, Dolphin Embassy [proposal], 1976, Box 27, Folder 11, Doug Michels Architectural Papers.

Figure 4-21. Advertisement teasing Brainwave, from pg. 2 Cinema Papers #16 [Cannes Special], April 1978.

301