Environmental Systems in Experimental Music

Organisation and Sound: environmental systems in experimental music

Nathan Thompson

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Art and Design The University of New South Wales 1 November 2016

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Thompson

First name: Nathan Other name/s:Peter

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD Art Design and Media Faculty: Art and Design UNSW

Title: Organisation and Sound: Environmental Systems in Experimental Music

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This thesis investigates how composers and artists have used self-organising systems to respond to nature. In particular, it examines how Cybernetic concepts used to describe the natural world entered experimental music between 1950 and 1970 through the compositions of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier. This research brings these observations into the contemporary context by exploring emergence and self-organisation through sound installations that combine steel, transducers and electricity to create adaptive audio feedback compositions. These installations produce sound from a recursive relationship between their networked materials and their spatial environment. In the 1950s cybernetic theorists Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson defined life by its ability to organise contingently and separated it from a world understood in terms of forces and impacts; according to Wiener Cybernetics began with the study of these isolated pockets of organisation. This organisation was defined through feedback and homeostasis and supported by physical systems that impacted conceptually and technically on the ways in which Cage, Tudor and Lucier developed compositions in response to nature. Their systems-based compositions not only introduced the sounds of the world back into music but produced sounds independent of the composer and the performer. In the process they placed an emphasis on listening to the systems that composed the environment. If, as Bruno Latour states, “we have no direct access to nature”, then artists and musicians have the potential to broaden our vision of nature. This thesis expands on this possibility by looking at the legacy of systems-based approaches to nature in the works of artists who have explored specific aspects of self-organisation. Included in this discussion are Maryanne Amacher, Nicolas Collins, Ted Kruger, Felix Hess and Allan Lamb. Their works contribute to a broader picture of nature through compositions and experiments that explore perceptual connections to the environment. Overall the thesis examines how Cybernetics’ emphasis on the organisational properties of nature has pervaded experimental music and asserts that this organisational approach contributes to a specific understanding of what nature might be.

ii Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

……………………………………..……………… 23 ………November.……………… 2017 …………………………………………………………… Witness Signature ……...…….… Signature Date

The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional circumstances and require the approval of the Dean of Graduate Research.

FOR OFFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements for Award:

ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

Signed ……………………………………………......

Date 10/11/2016

iii COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

'I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

Date

AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT

'I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.'

Date ...... Abstract This thesis investigates how composers and artists have used self-organising systems to respond to nature. In particular, it examines how Cybernetic concepts used to describe the natural world entered experimental music between 1950 and 1970 through the compositions of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier. This research brings these observations into the contemporary context by exploring concepts of emergence and self-organisation through sound installations that combine steel, transducers and electricity to create adaptive audio feedback compositions. These installations produce sound from a recursive relationship between their networked materials and their spatial environment. In the 1950s cybernetic theorists Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson defined life by its ability to organise contingently and separated it from a world understood in terms of forces and impacts; according to Wiener Cybernetics began with the study of these isolated pockets of organisation. This organisation was defined through feedback and homeostasis and supported by physical systems that impacted conceptually and technically on the ways in which Cage, Tudor and Lucier developed compositions in response to nature. Their systems-based compositions not only introduced the sounds of the world back into music but produced sounds independent of the composer and the performer. In the process they placed an emphasis on listening to the systems that composed the environment. If, as Bruno Latour states, “we have no direct access to nature”, then artists and musicians have the potential to broaden our vision of nature. This thesis expands on this possibility by looking at the legacy of systems-based approaches to nature in the works of artists who have explored specific aspects of self-organisation. Included in this discussion are Maryanne Amacher, Nicolas Collins, Ted Kruger, Felix Hess and Alan Lamb. Their works contribute to a broader picture of nature through compositions and experiments that explore perceptual connections to the environment. Overall the thesis examines how Cybernetics’ emphasis on the organisational properties of nature has pervaded experimental music and asserts that this organisational approach contributes to a specific understanding of what nature might be.

Acknowledgements

A PhD isn’t created alone. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor Caleb Kelly who gracefully critiqued my writing, recursively pointing out where error occurred and where details were being glossed over; the folly lurking behind the words interesting and important will follow my pen like twin wraiths. Learning to think like a writer has provided me with increased order in my thinking and research and has highlighted the histories of making that surround my work. My family has provided me with constant support and has waited long for this to be over. My partner Su Ballard has fed me with ideas and books and also put up with levels of dalliance and misdirection that would try the patience of a saint while smiling stoically through material that she more often than not had little interest in. Her input was invaluable and I simply would not have got there without her. She provides a generous and unflinching model of what an academic should look like and someone who constantly pursues her craft and the sharing and development of knowledge. My children also have put up with this PhD, with the refrain ‘is it finished yet’ taking on the comical proportions of a fifty thousand kilometer car trip. When this ends up in print then I guess I can say ‘yes we are there.’ Many others have also contributed. The solidarity of the Sound and Materials research group and collaborators Emily Morandini and Peter Blamey have provided intelligent conversation and critical discussion around electromagnetic and material interactions within the environment. Others whose thoughts and support have fed into this project include Anna Munster, Lucas Ihlein, David Haines, Joyce Hinterding, Jeff Henderson, Paul Greedy and Keith Ballard, and I would especially like to thank Douglas Kahn for his depth of knowledge and generosity. His suggestion that I read Alain Corban’s Village Bells was invaluable, providing a model of the inseparability of sound from recursive systems of life. I would also like to thank The School of the Arts, Media and English at the University of Wollongong and UNSW Art and Design for providing me with casual teaching which provided important financial assistance that enabled me to finish this research project. Thanks.

Contents

Abstract iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi List of Figures viii

Introduction 0.1 Music as Environment 1 0.2 Defining Nature 4 0.3 Cybernetic Definitions of Nature 7 0.4 Cybernetics in the Arts 11 0.5 Cybernetics in Experimental Music 18 0.6 Earth Systems 20 0.7 The Black Field Plates 22

Chapter One: Black Field Plates, Material Organisation and Sound 1.1 Emergent Music 25 1.2 Music as Environmental Engagement 28 1.3 Organisation, Feedback and Music 32 1.4 Sound, Rhythm and Environment 41 1.5 Sound Bleed: The Internal and External Environment 44

Chapter Two: Cybernetics, Nature and Self-Organising Systems 2.1 Nature as Organisation 51 2.2 The Macy Conferences: Nature as Information 52 2.3 Living in a World of Material Contingency 53 2.4 Feedback and Homeostasis 55 2.5 Gregory Bateson: Mind as Environment 58 2.6 Contingency: Causality to Energy 59 2.7 Noise 60 2.8 Mechanisms from the Natural World 62

vi 2.9 Ross Ashby Homeostat (1948) 65 2.10 W. Grey Walter Machina speculatrix (1948/49) 69 2.11 Gordon Pask Musicolour (1953) 73

Chapter Three: Nature in the Compositions of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier 3.1 Systems in Music: Mechanisms and Organisation 82 3.2 New Systems: New Music 83 3.3 John Cage: Systems-Based Detachment 86 3.4 Cybernetic Life: John Cage Variations 89 3.5 Nature as Organisation: Nature as Material 92 3.6 Nature as Silence 94 3.7 David Tudor: Nature, Organism and Environment 96 3.8 Electronic Networks as Composition: David Tudor Bandoneon! (1966) 98 3.9 Feedback, Organism and Environment: David Tudor Mesa (1966) and Microphone (1973) 101 3.10 A Society of Resonant Objects: David Tudor Rainforest IV (1976) 103 3.11 Alvin Lucier: Nature as Natural Phenomenon 105 3.12 Sonic Recursion and Animal Navigation: Alvin Lucier Vespers (1968) 106 3.13 Environmental Circuits: Alvin Lucier Music for Solo Performer (1965) 108 3.14 Feedback and Adaptation: Alvin Lucier Bird and Person Dyning (1975) 109

Chapter Four: Earthly Communications 4.1 Perceptual Systems and Environmental Communication 112 4.2 Ted Krueger: Observer Systems and Material Perception 115 4.3 Maryanne Amacher: Perception and Environment 119 4.4 Felix Hess: Environmental Sensitivity 123 4.5 Nicolas Collins: Feedback and Environment 126 4.6 Alan Lamb: Material Rhythms and Aeolian Transduction 130

Conclusion: Organisational Systems for Listening 136

Bibliography 144 Appendix A: Documentation of Work 2012-2017 154

vii

List of Figures

All Documentation photos and diagrams by Nathan Thompson unless otherwise stated.

Chapter 1.

FIGURE 1. Room layout for Black Field Plates, 2014. Audio Foundation, Auckland NZ, September 2014.

FIGURE 2. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, June 2016.

FIGURE 3. Pollen, with Andrea Caddy, SNO Gallery as part of the NOw NOw festival, January 2015.

FIGURE 4. In Fields, Group Exhibition with Emily Morandini, Peter Blamey and Nathan Thompson. 55 Sydnham Rd Gallery, Sydney, 2015.

FIGURE 5. Corporate Digital Shamans. Exhibited as part of Black Modular, MAP projects, Lawson NSW, June 2014. Curated by David Haines and Joyce Hinterding.

Chapter 2.

FIGURE 6. Claude Shannon, “Schematic diagram of a general communication system” from Warren Weaver and Claude Elwood Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1949), republished in paperback 1963.

FIGURE 7. Ross Ashby’s homeostat 1948. The four units in this image were networked together to demonstrate the principle of homeostasis. The system was networked in such a way as to generate stability against outside disturbance.

FIGURE 8. Diagram of Ross Ashby’s homeostat, 1948. Nathan Thompson (2016).

FIGURE 9. Grey Walter, ‘Tortoises’ Machina speculatrix 1948/49.

FIGURE 10. Gordon Pask, The Colloquy of Mobiles, 1968, Installation view, ICA London 1968,Cybernetic Serendipity http://www.medienkunstnetz.de

viii

FIGURE 11. Gordon Pask, Musicolour 1954, Bolton’s Theatre Club, South Kensington.

Chapter 3.

FIGURE 12. John Cage Variations VII 1966, presented at 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, the 69th Regiment Armory, New York, 1966. Photograph: Peter Moore http://www.medienkunstnetz.de

FIGURE 13. David Tudor Bandoneon! presented at 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, the 69th Regiment Armory, New York, 1966. Photo Peter Moore http://www.medienkunstnetz.de

FIGURE 14. David Tudor, Rainforest IV (1973), L'Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris, 1976. Photograph: Ralph Jones http://www.getty.edu

FIGURE 15. Alvin Lucier, Music for Solo Performer, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1965 http://joy.nujus.net/SAET/index.php?page=1966visions

Chapter 4.

FIGURE 16. Felix Hess, It’s in The Air, Haus Kenmore, Bochum, 1996, Photograph: Felix Hess.

Introduction

Nature is not a thing, a domain, a realm, an ontological territory. It is a way of organizing the division between appearances and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, history and immutability.

Bruno Latour1

0.1 Music as Environment

One night in a small town in the South Island of New Zealand I went to see a local rock band. The band held an international reputation based on their unique brand of distortion and feedback-induced noise combined with a pared-back song sensibility. A single chord could last long enough that even the most amateur guitarist could expect to be able to play any of the songs within the band’s repertoire. Each of the chords contained a microcosm of variations of tone and pitch that seemed to spring from the band’s array of amplification and effects pedals. The lead guitarist needed only to play a chord every once in a while to set this cascade of sound in motion, giving the impression that the music was produced as much by the equipment and the acoustic properties of the environment as by the musicians. On this occasion, my feeling that I was participating in a wider ecology of sound was substantiated when the guitarist broke into a distortion-fuelled improvised guitar solo that continued for minutes after he had accidentally knocked the lead out of his guitar.

The sender-receiver relationship of band to audience is disrupted by this kind of performance; the performance raised the question of where music comes from and how it is produced. On the one hand the band played their instruments and the audience

1 Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’” in New Literary History, no. 41 (2010): 476.

listened. On the other hand, the correlation between the band’s physical actions and the sounds produced was tenuous at best. The music arose from the environment. Thinking of music in terms of the wider ecologies that produce it raises the questions that form the basis of this research, not the least of which is what constitutes the sonic environment, and what can sound tell us about our connections to this environment.

This thesis draws together compositions and installations in which the environment plays an active role in the production of the music. In these works, the role of the composer is diminished in favour of the ecologies that connect composer, audience and environment. The band described in the first paragraph invests a lot of time broadcasting into the social and physical environment. These environments are no tabula rasa; they are engaged within a complex web of relations of which the band constitutes only a part. When sound organises into music it does so through an array of social and physiological systems. This is dramatically illustrated in John Cage’s 4’33” (1952) in which the music arises from the intersection of a socially demarcated duration of time, the audience’s attention and their physiological systems. Performances of both of these compositions demonstrate that sound is fundamental to the way in which people are simultaneously implicated in producing and understanding their world. In the explorations contained within the studio component of this thesis this is emphasised by implicating audience, architecture, electricity and material constraints of the work within feedback relationships that produce the sound of the installation. A concept of embeddedness is central to the distinction that I draw between approaches to nature as representation, and nature as generative engagement with the environment.

Musicians and artists have long drawn inspiration from the natural world. Instead of responding to the green leafy matter that we usually call nature, this thesis focuses on composers who have used systems-based composition methods to respond to the social and physiological systems that connect us to the natural world. I ask how these systems- based approaches have contributed to the ways in which these composers define ‘nature.’ The thesis demonstrates a distinct lineage of composers who respond to the systems that define our material and perceptual connections to our environment and, in doing so, rather than simply representing the natural world, contribute to an embedded vision of how we imagine nature. Fascination with the sounds of nature has tended to obscure the complex ecologies that compose the world and the manner in which the

materials and sounds of the world are engaged in constantly shifting, mutually defining processes. My own installations use sound to highlight how these feedback processes are located within spatial and material interaction rather through the electronic and digital analogies that have traditionally been used to define the natural world. This aspect of material interaction is the common thread by which I link my own work and the artists discussed in this thesis.

This thesis starts big — with the world — or more specifically, with how we conceptualise the systems that compose nature, and what role sound and music play in connecting us to these systems. It traces a lineage of composers who have incorporated processes of self-organisation into their compositions and, in doing so, produce compositions and installations that challenge the way nature is conceptualised. A common thread that connects these works is the way that these composers use systems to produce music from the acoustic properties of the environment.

These composers challenge the traditional role of the composer writing compositions that privilege listening to the environment over playing; this gives us the opportunity to move our attention beyond music produced by a composer to the wider issues of how we are connected to the world both socially and materially. This thesis focuses on compositional approaches that respond to the environment rather than document specific ecosystems and because of this I have tended to avoid artists and theorists who specifically identify with acoustic ecology.

Acoustic ecology tends to look at the effects of noise on humans, animals and insects and their environment, rather than at the recursive connections with which we construct the world. In the case of its leading theorist, R. Murray Schafer, moral distinctions are drawn between good noise associated with an idealised view of nature and bad noise that is viewed as sonic pollution which, in Schafer’s case, is produced as the result of industrial or mechanical processes.2 It is an overstatement to say that acoustic ecology deals exclusively with the effects of noise pollution on the human world. Acoustic ecologists David Dunn and James P Crutchfield’s analysis of the effects of climate change on the proliferation of Bark Beetles, for instance, provides valuable insight into

2 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Vermont: Destiny Books, 1977), 3.

our changing environment, but their definition of natural systems through the collection and correlation of scientific data lies outside the scope of this research.3

The compositions I am interested in do not attempt to collect data nor do they rely on cutting edge science to point to specific ecological concerns. Instead they use simple electronic means to organise sound from their material circumstances. The sound installations in this research utilise the positive and negative feedback processes that cyberneticists saw as ubiquitous within natural systems. These materially-based physical feedback relations were key to the way in which Cybernetics defined nature and concepts used by composers within this thesis, including myself, were derived from cybernetic definitions of nature.

Chapter One of this thesis explores the impact of systems-based definitions of nature on my own sound installation practice. I evaluate a range of definitions of nature as environmental feedback and document the feedback processes used in my own work. Chapter Two turns to cybernetic visions of the natural world. I detail how feedback processes were used to define nature within early Cybernetics. Chapter Three examines the impact of Cybernetics on the ways in which John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier dealt with their own particular versions of nature within their compositions. Chapter Four focuses on a continued lineage of artists who use systems-thinking to explore perceptual connections to earth systems. I end by looking at the ongoing impact of Cybernetics and the wider category of systems-thinking on musicians, including myself.

0.2 Defining Nature

It can be argued that the way artists define nature impacts on the works they produce and that the definition of nature is necessarily a personal and cultural construct. Philosophers such as Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton have demonstrated the extent

3 David Dunn & James P. Crutchfield, “Entomogenic Climate Change: Insect Bioacoustics and Future Forest Ecology,” Leonardo 42, no.3 (2009): 239-244.

to which our visions of ‘nature’ are constructed through cultural lenses.4 These cultural lenses mean that we have no direct access to the natural world and as a result what we define as nature (that to which we respond) is made from individual definitions.5 Doing this acknowledges not only the complexities of defining nature from an embedded position but also the way definitions of nature shift over time relative to language and culture.

In Keywords, Raymond Williams’ analysis of the word ‘nature’ demonstrates how difficult nature is to define. He writes: Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language. It is relatively easy to distinguish three areas of meaning: (i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings.6

Williams shows how the word ‘nature’ slips from referring to the essential quality and character of something, to describing an inherent directing force within matter, to denoting the material that the world is made of.7 The respective emphasis on these three aspects of nature varies with use and has changed significantly over time through cultural and disciplinary filters within the arts and sciences. Williams’ analysis becomes particularly significant for the consideration of cybernetic definitions of nature, which emphasise the directing forces of nature through concepts of self-organisation and emergent behaviour. Williams’ three aspects of nature can be further used to analyse definitions of nature in both Cybernetics and the experimental composition practices that adopted cybernetic ideas in the 1960s. Both these disciplines tended to focus on “the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both.”8

In Ecology Without Nature Timothy Morton outlines how our visions of nature emerge from our cultural and scientific formulations:

4 Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA. & London: Harvard University Press: 2007); Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA. & London: Harvard University Press, 2004). 5 Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’” 476. 6 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 219. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

Ecology Without Nature starts with a detailed examination of how art represents the environment. This helps us to see that “nature” is an arbitrary rhetorical construct, empty of independent, genuine existence behind or beyond the texts we create about it.9

For Morton, nature is constructed through literature and the arts as much as it is through science, and philosophers such as Bruno Latour and Thomas Kuhn demonstrate how both of these disciplines are defined equally by their language and methodologies as by observation. Latour sees nature as used to define the parameters of arguments while simultaneously providing the answers. He states: “On one hand scientists herald Nature as the only possible adjudicator of a dispute, on the other hand they recruit countless allies while waiting for Nature to declare herself.”10 For Latour these countless allies occur in the form of scientific equipment, the social structures of institutions and the myriad of systems that interact to form scientific methodology. This relationship between science, nature, and scientific equipment is also apparent in histories of science such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions where his documentation of major paradigm shifts shows science to be as much the product of its methodologies as that which it seeks to uncover.11

The fluid and complex way in which nature is composed through language, social and material systems of exchange is highlighted in the process based philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari provide an approach to the definition of nature that combines social, biological and perceptual links to the natural world. They offer images of the workings of the natural world that focus on its organisational properties and are directly relevant to compositions that arise from these same social, biological and perceptual properties. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari deploy their concept of ‘milieu’ to demonstrate the role that rhythm plays in forming the world in which we live.12 They state that: “Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction.”13 Milieux distinguish themselves through the co-production of materials, rhythms and codes. The milieu’s material and social rhythms allow it to define itself

9 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 21. 10 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 97. 11 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 9. 12 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1996), 314. 13 Ibid., 313.

against other milieux, separating them from chaos which Deleuze and Guattari define as the sum of all milieux. They state that: “Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus.”14 Individual aspects of the natural world distinguish themselves from wider chaos through rhythm. For Deleuze and Guattari, rhythm is defined by difference between milieux. The plane of imminence, which they alternately refer to as the plane of nature, describes the point at which a milieu separates itself from chaos through rhythm. This kind of understanding of organisation and pattern is core to the way that this thesis describes the relationship between music and nature.

0.3 Cybernetic Definitions of Nature

The electronic musical systems designed to evolve sound from their environments discussed in this thesis often did so with the help of devices that emulated organisational processes observed in the natural world. Cybernetics, a discipline that evolved to understand nature’s organisational properties, defined nature in terms of dynamically balanced positive and negative feedback systems. In the 1950s key concepts such as homeostasis, emergent behaviour and autopoietic systems were developed as ways to discuss reproduction, communication and social systems ranging from ant colonies to frog adaptation and the workings of the human brain. Organisational systems observed in the natural world were used to draw connections across a broad range of disciplines from biology to psychology to telecommunications.15 The way in which natural and social systems recursively exchange energy and information is key to the way in which a wide variety of cyberneticists including Ross Ashby, W. Grey Walter and Norbert Wiener and second order cyberneticists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela described nature.16

14 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313. 15 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory (New York: George Brazilier, 1969); Stanford Beer, Brain of The Firm (London: The Penguin Press, 1972). 16 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings (London: Sphere Books, 1968); Ross Ashby, Design For a Brain (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1960); W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain (London: Penguin Books, 1953); Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Cambridge, MA and London: Shambahla Publications, 1987).

Cybernetics drew operational similarities between biological systems, social systems and mechanical systems.17 For example, in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) Norbert Wiener uses reflexive processes to draw connections between political, social and neural systems while Stanford Beer’s notion of the VSM or ‘viable systems model’, outlined in his book The Brain of the Firm (1972), presents ecological models, distilled into ‘circuit diagrams’ designed to allow businesses to become more adaptive to change.18

In The Human Use of Human Beings Norbert Wiener coins the term Cybernetics to describe the organisational properties by which he defines life: But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds a home in these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development.19

Wiener contrasts this ability to organise against the backdrop of a universe governed by entropy in which energy and organisation dissipate until heat death is reached — the eventual fate of the entire universe.20 The organisational part of the universe exhibits the ability to counteract the dominant state of entropy and Wiener seeks not only to identify the processes by which organisation could occur but also to work out how organisational models can be used in the rapidly evolving technology and communication industries.

Although Wiener’s definitions of life and organisation are framed in abstract models of energy and information, these systems are still located in material interactions. This is highlighted in his descriptions of ant colonies that link the physical structure of the ant to its behaviour: “The physical strait jacket in which an insect grows up is directly responsible for the mental strait jacket which regulates its pattern of behaviour.”21 The material structure acts as a control system that defines the communication of the ant and, by extension, its behaviour. In nature communication cannot be separated from its

17 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 51; Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3. 18 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings; Stanford Beer, Brain of The Firm. 19 Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings, 15. 20 Ibid., 30. 21 Ibid.

structure. For a composer such as Cage this led to an understanding that the material from which a composition is made fundamentally affects the music that is made.22

English anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson also defines nature by its organisational systems, but for Bateson, nature is defined through the ability of the living environment to respond contingently and, because the observer is also responding contingently within that environment, his concept of the mind is inseparable from nature. He states that: “Mental Process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.”23 These chains of determination connect the natural world and the mind in a process of co-adaption. At the heart of his definition of mental process is the ability to perceive difference: “All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference.”24 Bateson extends this idea, stating that: “information consists of differences that make a difference.”25 This difference provides information that prompts action within the thing that perceives the difference. Bateson states that: To produce news of difference, i.e., information, there must be two entities (real or imagined) such that the difference between them can be immanent in their mutual relationship; the whole affair must be such that news of their difference can be represented as difference inside some information-processing entity, such as a brain or, perhaps, a computer.26

Bateson shows how our perception of nature is formed from recursive processes. His model of the mind is defined by material communication within the environment. By using the example of a crab, Bateson identifies how the perception of rhythm and pattern is key both to the material and perceptual formation of the mind and to how, through recursive systems, mind and nature are intimately connected.27

Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela specifically address the way perception and nature are fundamentally embedded within the material environment. Maturana and Varela define communication in terms of adaptive change between materials that are connected through recursive processes.28 Two cells, for instance, may

22 John Cage, For the Birds: In Conversation With Daniel Charles (New York: Marion Boyars, 1976), 36. 23 Gregory Bateson, Mind And Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 92. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 99. 26 Ibid., 68. 27 Ibid., 10. 28 Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, 95.

generate an electrical current between them that allows for structural change within both. In this model, communication is a material process not separable from its electromagnetic, chemical or biological processes. When such systems exhibit the ability to make choices that improve their continued viability, Maturana and Varela associate this form of communication with autopoiesis: a particular definition of the living. Living systems are forged through environmental connections that make individual systems incomplete within themselves. Their will to completion becomes a key driver of adaptation and therefore distinctions between the living system and their environment become arbitrary.29

Cybernetics describes nature’s organisational relationships in terms of positive and negative feedback systems. Negative feedback is associated with a wide variety of homeostatic systems that regulate everything from blood temperature to climate systems.30 Positive feedback systems on the other hand are described as open systems as they structurally require engagement with external energies in order to exist. The balance of these systems provides an organism with organisational stability and this is described as homeostasis.31 Cyberneticist Gordon Pask states that: “The crux of organisation is stability, for ‘that which is stable’ can be described.”32 Homeostasis provides an organism with material form and also a niche within its environment and in this way homeostasis is maintained through the combination of internal and external systems.

Within Cybernetics these feedback processes associated with the natural world were described using mechanical devices and these devices provided tangible engineering solutions as to how those processes may be adapted within a variety of fields from telecommunications systems to experimental music. Many of these devices attempted to provide mechanical analogies for the relationship between organisms and their environments. Cybernetics presented nature’s processes as mechanical systems. Processes such as homeostasis and emergent behaviour can be seen in the mechanical analogies constructed by cyberneticists to identify and isolate specific processes of biological, social and energetic exchange. This is particularly demonstrated in the devices

29 Ibid. 30 Ross Ashby, The Living Brain (London: Penguin Books, 1953); James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Penguin Books, 2007). 31 Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957), 85. 32 Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 11.

of Ross Ashby, W. Grey Walter and Gordon Pask that are discussed in Chapter Two. Ross Ashby’s ‘homeostat’ (1948) modelled biological processes and mimicked aspects of cognition, W. Grey Walter’s ‘Machina speculatrix’ (1948/49) demonstrated how emergent behaviour could arise from the combination of simple processes, and Gordon Pask’s ‘Musicolour’ (1948/49) facilitated adaptive behaviour between machine and human. While the devices of Ashby, Walter and Pask were made from laboriously constructed electronic circuits and mechanical devices, the interactions they performed were not based in this technology but in contingent interactions observed within the natural world. The models of interaction that they provide are central to the experimental compositions discussed in this thesis.

0.4 Cybernetics in the Arts

The recursive mechanisms that Cybernetics identified in nature were steeped in the cold war technologies of bomb guidance systems and capitalist economic models.33 This conversion of nature into electronic systems in the cause of efficiency and technological advancement meant that Cybernetics became synonymous with electronic systems rather than human interaction. However, in the 1950s the cross-disciplinary nature of Cybernetics also allowed for less technologically based interpretations of Cybernetic theory. Artists took Cybernetics in directions that were often critical of the status quo and focussed on social, political and environmental concerns; fundamentally systems of material interaction.34 Video artist Frank Gillette for instance focused on systems that drew recursive connections between people and their environment. This is a theme continued throughout the 1960s journal publication Radical Software in which he published.35

The movement in conceptual art from a focus on the object to an understanding of interaction is also highlighted in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 focuses on artists who make work that highlights systematic

33 George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 75. 34 Melissa Ragain, ed., Jack Burnham: Dissolve into Comprehension Writings and Interviews 1964 – 2004 (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2015), ix. 35 Frank Gillette, Matricies Loops and Circuits Radical Software 3, 1972 -73, accessed 7/6/2017 http://www.frankgillette.com/matrices-loops-circuits

connections between art, society and the environment. Lippard quotes an exhibition statement by Hans Haacke that demonstrates a shift from the sculpture as object to the sculpture as a complex social ecology: A ‘sculpture’ that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reaches beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relation that is better understood as a ‘system’ of interdependent processes. … A system is not imagined, it is real.36

Although Haacke is still using the term ‘sculpture’, he gives the system and environment that produce it equal weight. His movement to systems thinking was influenced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s book General Systems Theory, loaned to him by art writer and curator Jack Burnham.37 The book frames Cybernetic concepts such as feedback in biological terms, reinforcing how Cybernetic processes are not specifically technologically located. This emphasis on material and energetic exchange used to describe nature was reinforced by these material systems within the arts.

The curatorial approaches of two major exhibitions at the end of the 1960s demonstrated this split between Cybernetics (defined as technological tools for the advancement and expansion of the arts) and Cybernetics as the recursive relationships that socially and materially connect individuals to their environment. Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (1968), exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; and Jack Burnham’s Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (1970), exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York. Reichardt introduces Cybernetic Serendipity as an exhibition in which: “The exhibits showed how man can use the computer and new technology to extend his [sic.] creativity and inventiveness.”38 The exhibition centred on the implications of evolving computer technologies within in the arts and suggested that technology would extend creativity to groups of people not traditionally associated with the arts: “at no point was it clear to any of the visitors walking around the exhibition, which of the various drawings, objects

36 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Los Angeles: University of California, 1973), 36. 37 Ragain, ed., Jack Burnham: Dissolve into Comprehension. The link between feedback systems and nature is central to works by Hans Haake that emphasise the circulation of wind and water such as Blue Sail (1964-65) and Condensation Cube (1963–65). 38 Jasia Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, 1968), 11.

and machines were made by artists and which were made by engineers.”39 The exhibition presented works by forty three composers, artists and poets and eighty seven engineers, doctors, computer systems designers and philosophers and was premised upon the idea that technology would facilitate artistic contributions from a range of people not usually viewed as artists. Cybernetic Serendipity included Bruce Lacey’s radio controlled robots, Nam June Paik’s Robot K-456, two painting machines by Jean Tinguely, Alison Knowles’ The House (1968) and an electronic ear by John Billingsley that used recursive feedback mechanisms to turn towards sound within the gallery. The show also contained an installation and writing by prominent Cybernetic theorist and artist Gordon Pask whose work Colloquy of Mobiles consisted of a group of suspended interactive sculptures that used light, sound and simple recursive processes to facilitate an interactive environment which adapted through audience participation.40 The associated catalogue and vinyl LP placed sound composition techniques within a Cybernetic context while the catalogue included writing by Karlhienz Stockhausen outlining the use of generative algorithms in the production of his music and also reproduced the score to John Cage’s Fontana Mix with an extract from A Year from Monday in which Cage highlighted connections between his compositional processes and nature. 41 The catalogue placed these composers within a Cybernetic framework and promoted the idea that principles of feedback and recursion developed within Cybernetics could be used in an artistic context to broaden and democratise participation in the arts.

Burnham’s Software exhibition focused on the social implications of Cybernetics. Although an early adopter of computer technology, Burnham’s notion of ‘software’ consciously emphasised the idea that cybernetic feedback mechanisms were not technologically located by framing systems in terms of behaviour, ritual and performance.42 He metaphorically extended the term software from its technological base to represent aspects of physical and social systems. This interpretation of software was illustrated by the inclusion of Les Levine’s Systems Burn Off (1969) which presented

39 Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity, 11. 40 Ibid., 34. 41 Ibid., 24. 42 Burnham learned to use state of the art computer technology at Lincoln Laboratories at MIT between 1968 and1969. Edward A. Shanken, “Informing Software: Software, Structuralism, Dematerialization,” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts ed. Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 51.

thirty one thousand documentation photographs from the 1969 exhibition Earth Works as the ‘burn off’ of the media and organisational systems that produced the exhibition.43 Also featured was Hans Haacke’s News (1969) which used several teletext machines (hardware) that printed real-time media reports and news (software) onto an endless roll of paper that accumulated in the gallery.44

Burnham’s 1968 essay “Systems Esthetics” selectively applies ideas derived from Cybernetics and systems theory to contemporary art. He quotes Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s description of a system as a “complex of components in interaction comprised of material, energy and information in various degrees of organization.”45 Wiener’s Cybernetics also feature prominently in Burnham’s stated desire to place “contemporary control and communication techniques in the hands of artists” and for art to embody the “underlying structures of communication or energy exchange.”46 Where Wiener and von Bertalanffy identify specific control systems, the artists highlighted by Burnham such as Haacke and Levine were using notions of feedback to expose social, political, behavioural and environmental exchanges within art and society.47 These exchanges were located not within technology but within social exchange and this distinction was further emphasised in Kynaston McShine’s exhibition Information (1970) which took a non-technological approach to systems, emphasising political, social and economic issues.48 The artists in these exhibitions were using systems thinking to redefine how we see our place in the world and the intersection of Cybernetics and experimental music showed how sound could be used to make these connections audible.

Cybernetic ideas entered the arts in America and Europe through both digital and analogue means. One place that this occurred was at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey amidst the developments of electronic communications systems and where Wiener himself had worked on bomb guidance systems in the 1940s. Experiments in Art and

43 Shanken, “Informing Software: Software, Structuralism, Dematerialization,” 55. 44 Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” in The Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1968). 45 Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory, 17. 46 Jack Burnham, Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (New York: Jewish Museum, 1970); Burnham, “Systems Esthetics.” 47 Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 16. 48 Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford: Berg, 2006).

Technology (E.A.T) were a wide-ranging series of collaborations set up by Bell Laboratories engineer Billy Klüver, and artists Robert Rauschenburg and John Cage to 49 give a broad range of artists access to emerging electronic technologies. E.A.T. began in 1966 facilitating collaborations between artists, technicians and engineers at both IBM and Bell Laboratories and promoted a particularly technological view of Cybernetics. Links between artists and the evolving communications technologies at Bell Laboratories are documented in Mainframe Experimentalism.50 As Kahn outlines, amongst other activities, artist and engineer James Tenney taught classes in FORTRAN, an early computer language, to a variety of artists including Alison Knowles and Nam June Paik.51 E.A.T. established a relationship between artists and engineers whereby technicians bought cybernetic ideas into experimental music in a way not seen previously.

One of the most well-known of these collaborations was the multimedia event 9 Evenings, realised with the technical assistance and collaboration of Bell Laboratories. This technical assistance facilitated electronically recursive processes that connected audiences and the acoustic space through sound, movement and light sensors. 9 Evenings presented a technologically mediated environment in which boundaries between electronic technology, the audience, and the artist were conflated. Works in the event included John Cage’s Variations VII (1966) in which electronic systems were used to the sounds of various city locations within the composition. This was done through the use of ten telephone lines that introduced sounds from different city locations, and light sensors that responded to audience movement.52 Direct cybernetic connections with the environment were emphasised by the recursive use of available sound. Cage states: It is a piece of music, Variations VII, indeterminate in form and detail, making use of the sound system which has been devised collectively for this festival, further making use of modulation means organized by David Tudor, using as sound sources only those sounds which are in the air at the moment of performance, picked up via the communication

49 Douglas Kahn, “James Tenney at Bell Labs,” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, 137. 50 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “The Book of the Future: Alison Knowles’s The House of Dust,” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, 200-208 51 Kahn, “James Tenney at Bell Labs”, 137. 52 Catherine Morris, 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966 (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2006), 9.

bands, telephone lines, microphones, together with, instead of musical instruments, a variety of household appliances and frequency generators.53

This aspect of environmental recursion was a feature of many of the works in the event, including Lucinda Childs’ Vehicle (1966) which combined early sonar technology and dance and Alex Hays’ Grass Field (1966) which used a specifically designed back pack to pick up and make audible “brain waves, muscle activity and eye movement through electrodes placed on the body.”54 A dance piece by Steve Paxton entitled Physical Things (1966) was designed “to physically prompt spontaneous audience improvisation” by incorporating “everyday actions and reactions to visual and sound stimulation…” which subsequently transformed into dance movements.55 Robert Rauschenburg’s Open Score (1966) presented a tennis match between Frank Stella and professional tennis player Mimi Karnaraek in which sensors were attached to the rackets that set off lights and sounds that further impacted on the progress of the game. At times, performers would emerge onto the court to perform predetermined actions designed to confound the barriers between the performers and the audience.

These works reinforce Billy Klüver’s description of the event as an “organic process” which arose out of “three elements fighting. The artist, the engineers and the audience.”56 Klüver’s statement suggests that exhibition processes had taken environmental recursion far beyond the technological support that facilitated the exhibition. Variations VII provided material systems that connected the composition to outside environments, Grass Field used sound to externalise bodily functions, and in other works such as Open Score sound acted as a trigger which, in combination with sensors, worked to facilitate recursive connections between audience, performer and environment.

A fascination with approaches to electronic technology is apparent within exhibitions such as Cybernetic Serendipity and Software, and the E.A.T. but these exhibitions also demonstrate how in the 1960s technology was seen as much in terms of social and environmental systems as electronic interaction. For Reichardt in 1968 the focus was on

53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 14. 55 Ibid., 16. 56 Ibid., 9.

how electronic technology could expand participation in the arts, while for Burnham, only slightly later, what was at stake was how software and hardware were materially defined within social process. Large scale collaborations such as 9 Evenings also used electronic technology and recursive processes in ways that highlighted social and material connections to the environment. These ideas of environmental recursion that were central to the Cybernetic systems by which Bell Laboratories had created telecommunications systems also became central to many works produced by John Cage and David Tudor. (These compositions are discussed in more detail in Chapter Three).

Contemporary contexts for Cybernetics tend to draw upon this early work from the 1960s and 1970s. Re-evaluations of Cybernetics in art, such as the Tate Modern’s Open Systems (2005) and The New Museum in New York’s Ghosts in the Machine (2012), place an emphasis on experimentations in video and performance and tend to ignore sound.57 The omission of sound is odd because sound was such a prominent feature of large scale exhibitions such as 9 Evenings and Cybernetic Serendipity. The exclusion may be because, until very recently, visual modes have dominated our thinking in art galleries. Some artists are also extending Cybernetic ideas into practices that are not immediately recognisable as Cybernetic. For example, the Cybernetic lineage of sound and systems based thinking can be seen in contemporary artworks such as Celeste Boursier- Mougenot’s Cliname (2013) where floating ceramic bowls produce sound in response to water distribution systems, and Pierre Huyghe’s Living/Cancer/Variator (2016) in which Cancer cells, spiders and architecture freely interact to co-produce an installation environment. Both artists present systems that challenge the direct representation of nature.

In this thesis I shift my contemporary consideration of Cybernetics to sound itself, in order to demonstrate the ability of sound to enact the feedback loops that connect the social and physical environment. Firstly, I argue that sound was central to the way in which Cybernetic concepts crossed over into the arts via these influential exhibitions.58 I then go on to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Cybernetic concepts through

57 Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Camion-Murayari, Ghosts In The Machine (New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, 2012); Donna De Salvo, Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 (London: Tate Publishing, 2005); Etan J Ilfeld, “Contemporary Art and Cybernetics: Waves of Cybernetic Discourse within Conceptual, Video and New Media Art,” Leonardo 45, no.1, (2012), 57-63. 58 Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA. & London: MIT Press, 2004), 240.

the creation of sound installations that deliberately avoid the digital constructions of sound and computation, and instead emphasise simple materials, feedback and embodied experience.

0.5 Cybernetics in Experimental Music

Cybernetics impacted on experimental music in America in the 1960s through both conceptual and technical means.59 Technically Cage’s Variations IV (1966) used telephone communication systems developed and installed by Bell Laboratory technicians. Tudor’s Bandoneon! (1966) was a networked electronic system and his Vespers (1968) used echolocation equipment to imitate the navigational systems of nocturnal animals. For Cage, Tudor and Lucier, this technology allowed them to make compositions that drew more directly from the emergent ecologies of materials and people that formed the environment than could be allowed by the linear structures of western musical notation. In Cybernetics they found organisational languages and systems that allowed them to replace these traditional musical notational structures with the dynamic systems that they associated with the natural world.

Traditional forms of notation excluded the sounds of the world through defining music as a rigid set of tones and pitches which unfolded in a predesigned linear order. Frances Dyson notes that this system had its origins in Pythagorean harmony: “In the development of Pythagorean harmony, the tone was removed from its material sounding as consonant or discordant, and considered, like number, as a pure relation.”60 Trading relational tones for recursive systems meant that a musical system would replace the role of the composer and thus place an emphasis on listening over playing. The cybernetic compositional systems devised by Cage, Tudor and Lucier each emphasised different aspects of the natural world.

For Cage, “the manner and operation of nature” fused the telecommunications systems of Bell Laboratories with an approach to indeterminacy gleaned from a particularly

59 Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems 1950- 1980,” Science Technology and Human Values 35 (2010), 113. 60 Frances Dyson, The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy and Ecology (Cambridge, MA. & London: MIT Press, 2014), 5.

idiosyncratic reading of the I Ching.61 Cage’s concept of ‘nature’ also drew from Zen Buddhism in which a detachment from ego offers the potential for the individual to be one with the environment.62 Tudor, on the other hand, drew from Rudolph Steiner’s writings on music which also emphasise listening to the natural world, privileging the act of audition over what Steiner sees as the non-living structures of formalised music.63 For Tudor, Cybernetic technologies allowed him to make compositions that evolved like electronic musical organisms and were designed to be listened to rather than played. Lucier’s approach to nature tended to focus on making audible specific naturally occurring phenomena and in doing this he referenced scientific literature, including the work of Ernst Chladni, which explored the physics of sound waves, and John Tyndall who was a pioneer in the discovery of electromagnetism.64 For Lucier, Cybernetic technologies were used to make natural phenomena palpable.

Other authors have discussed the ways in which Cybernetic thinking impacted on American experimental music, but there is less writing on how specific concepts such as feedback mechanisms and homeostasis were used by composers to make direct links to the organisational properties of nature. For example, Charlie Gere outlines the relationship between Cage’s 4’33” and Marshall McLuhan’s theories of information and noise.65 Michelle Fillion’s biography of Gordon Mumma highlights the ways in which Mumma’s Cybernetic devices connected audio feedback with movement and space; and, Christina Dunbar-Hester reviews the impact of Cybernetics on electronic music in Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines.66 These authors have a particularly technological focus whereas the approach in this thesis is to examine the way in which these artists produced compositions that were dependent on their ability to adapt sonically and socially within their environment. I show how the links between Cybernetic objects and experimental music can be seen in a lineage of contemporary artists for whom

61 John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 31. 62 Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat A History of Sound in the Arts (Massachusetts London: MIT Press: 1999), 172. 63 Douglas Kahn, “Something More Than Interesting: David Tudor and The Sound of Anthroposophy” (unpublished paper by Khan presented at the conference “The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture, 2001”). 64 Alvin Lucier, “Origins of a Form: Acoustical Exploration, Science and Incessancy”, in Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 8 (1998), 9. 65 Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford: Berg, 2006). 66 Michelle Fillion, Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music: Gordon Mumma (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), xxi.; Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems 1950-1980,” Science Technology and Human Values 35 (2010), 113.

technology is not an end in itself but a way to explore material and perceptual connections to the natural world.

0.6 Earth Systems

The legacy of Cybernetics is largely a technological one framed within debates around artificial intelligence.67 Although Ashby and Grey used electronic analogies to identify methods by which homeostatic and adaptive mechanisms functioned, these systems occur in the natural world through biological and mineral interactions, and the Cybernetics of Bateson, Maturana and Varela is located within biological and social systems. Cybernetic feedback mechanisms have become pervasive within domestic technologies and robotics and through feedback processes that traverse the human and the technological. Katherine Hayles sees the legacy of Cybernetics as facilitating a move towards the posthuman. In her history of Cybernetics, How We Became Posthuman, she states that: In the post human there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals.68

For Hayles Cybernetics is mediated through technology and yet for writers such as Jack Burnham the mechanics of technology were grounded in social and perceptual systems rather than being specifically located within evolving electronic technologies. Burnham’s Cybernetics drew on Ludwig von Bertalanffy General Systems Theory where he states: Cybernetics, as the theory of control mechanisims in technology and nature and founded in concepts of information and feedback, is but a part of general systems theory; cybernetic systems are but a special case, however important, of systems showing self regulation.69

For Bertalanffy Cybernetics has more to do with the role that self-regulation and control mechanisms have within technology than with electronic execution, and this definition acknowledges that people are already embedded in a world engaged in its own array of

67 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (London: Penguin Books, 1999); Stefano Franchi, “Life, Death and Resurrection of W. Ross Ashby’s Homeostat,” in The Search for a Theory of Cognition: Early Mechanisms and New Ideas, ed. Stefano Franchi (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V, 2011), 3-52. 68 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3. 69 Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory, 17.

material communications. This approach is highlighted in the writing of artist Robert Smithson.70 Smithson proposes that the origins of technology are located in geological and mineral interactions; he states that: “The manifestations of technology are at times less ‘extensions’ of man, than they are aggregates of elements. Even the most advanced tools and machines are made of the raw matter of the earth.”71 Smithson drew connections between weather systems and mood, and between geological stratification and memory and technology, drawing a picture of technology located within earth systems. The idea of technology as an extension of our connections with earth systems is an undercurrent within media history and philosophy stretching back to Thoreau’s engagement with Aeolian phenomena and forward to Jussi Parikka’s media ecology and to Mitchell Whitelaw’s transmateriality.72 For these authors technology is grounded in material exchanges and within earth systems and ultimately becomes an extension of human perceptual connections to the world and is thus connected to the way people define nature.

In the final chapter, Chapter Four, I introduce a series of artists who use sound to explore the perceptual systems that connect people to the environment. Ted Kreuger’s deceptively simple experiments with steel plates and a sine wave generator present complex sound patterns that arise from material interactions not directly attributable to the steel plate, the oscillator or the environment. Kreuger uses the changing sound to speculate on the effects that his own engagement has on his experiments at a physical and perceptual level. Maryanne Amacher’s compositions can be divided into two broad categories. Firstly, there are works that overlay live feeds from two or more spaces on top of each other to highlight the subtle acoustic properties of the spaces; these works include Tone and Place (Work1) Pier 6 Boston Harbor (1973 - 1978). Secondly, Amacher’s compositions such as Corrale (1999) and Head Rhythm 1 (1999) demonstrate how the processes of hearing are constructed between the mind, the architecture of the ear and the material properties of the environment. Felix Hess makes sculptural sound

70 Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 100-113. 71 Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 100. 72 Douglas Kahn, “The Aeolian and Henry David Thoreau’s Sphere Music” in Earth Sound Earth Signal (California: University of California Press, 2013), 41; Parikka, A Geology of Media; Mitchell Whitelaw “Sheer Hardware: Material Computing in the Work of Martin Howse and Ralf Baecher,” Scan: Journal of Media Arts 2013, 10 no. 2. http://scan.net.au/scn/journal/vol10number2/Mitchell-Whitelaw.html accessed 18/8/2016.

installations that refine awareness of the senses to environmental fluctuations through recursive material processes. Hess’s It’s in the Air (1996) uses an array of miniature paper weather vanes to show fluctuations in the air produced by the movement of audience members that would normally be beyond their perceptual abilities. Hess’s installation Chirping and Silence (1987) uses sound and simple recursive electronic systems to imitate the complex interactions of swarms of frogs. Nicolas Collins has spent much of his forty-year career composing with feedback. Collins’ Peasoup (1974) uses audio feedback balanced through positive and negative feedback systems that draw direct links between the electronic components of the composition and the composition’s acoustic environment. Alan Lamb’s Night Passage (1998) uses oscillations recorded from disused copper power lines to make atmospheric patterns audible. In Lamb’s descriptions of the work he speculates that the oscillations produced by atmospheric phenomena and neural systems share common evolutionary origins. For him, this suggests direct connections between atmospheric exchanges of energy and the evolution of living systems.

Collectively these works draw attention to our perceptual connections to the world. The works in this thesis identify a lineage of connections and interactions that form our diverse visions of the natural world. They trace the idea that these visions are not exclusively mediated by science but are also located within the works of artists. When read together these compositional practices are based in systems that connect people with their environment. However, these connections are not fundamentally electronic relationships; they are perceptual and part of wider networks of earthly communications. In this last Chapter, I draw together a group of composers and artists that extend our vision of the natural world by making works that further highlight the material communication systems in which we are embedded and demonstrate the way in which our technologies are located within earthly processes and perceptual systems.

0.7 The Black Field Plates

The Black Field Plates series of installations comprises the practice-based component of this research. The works consist of hand-made steel plate microphones and speakers that are networked through copper cables. They produce audio compositions out of

shifting rhythms of feedback that evolve relative to the installation’s acoustic environment. The components are combined in different spaces producing sound that is particular to that environment and arrangement of components. Installations such as Pollen (2015) and The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has no Name (2016) are contained within a specific gallery space, whereas Corporate Digital Shamans (2014) occurred between the interior and exterior of a private house.

Musically the audience play a role in creating the environment they are listening to while, in return, the installation listens to and adapts to their presence. None of the components of the work is individually responsible for the sound and the sound produced is the result of recursive interactions between the steel, electricity, copper wire and piezoelectric transducers and the environment. The installations generate rhythms of sound through the use of positive and negative feedback systems and the combination of these types of feedback allows the sound to adapt between its environment and its material structure. Negative feedback is provided through the plate’s ability to diffuse audio signal into different registers through vibration. Positive feedback is provided by connecting the sound back into the networked system via the handmade microphones. The piezoelectric transducers are central to these feedback systems as they convert sound into electromagnetic energy and back again at various points within the installation.

Although my work shares something with contemporary installations such as British artist and designer Usman Haques’ Evolving Sonic Environment III (2007) and Australian artist Guy Ben-Ary’s CEIF (2015) in terms of environmental interaction, I have pared my installations back to the minimum mechanical and electromagnetic requirements to sustain adaption in order to maintain the focus on a systems-based understanding of nature. Haques’ Evolving Sonic Environment III (2007) presents an interactive gallery environment through the use of digital sensor technology. In CEIF (2015) Guy Ben-Ary grows a selection of his own brain cells in a petri dishes. Their activities trigger a sophisticated synthesiser system that is outputted through multiple speakers. Like Haques, Ben-Ary also relies on digital conversion of matter with the addition of an implied subjective link between the activities of brain cells in a petri dish and a sonic

representation of artificial intelligence.73 Despite its digital conversion Harques’ installation is reflective of its environment whereas the relationship between Ben-Ary’s biological material and the sound produced remains opaque; black boxed in an array of technology that ultimately becomes indistinguishable from a monophonic synthesiser.74

In contrast, my works prioritise sound that arises from its material circumstances rather than digital conversion. Rather than utilising increasing levels of electronic sophistication, I seek to demonstrate that systems of recursion and transduction are inherently located within earthly processes of organisation. In doing this the sounds of the Black Field Plates installations are directly reflective of the organisational properties of the material environment. Their components change and adapt through various installations and, rather than providing analogies for natural systems, the series presents a view of nature located in self-organisation and an approach to technology located within material interaction. Through these works I question the idea that the Cybernetic view of the environment was based exclusively on technological mediation. Instead, through a process of practice-based research, I propose the idea that technology itself is an extension of the organisational processes of nature and, in fact, it is these processes that Cybernetics sought to understand. I extend and explore these understandings through the production of a series of minimalist sound installations. The thesis as a whole articulates this approach to nature in a discussion of a history of works that have produced sound through recursive environmental engagement and the presentation of installations that directly highlight this aspect of the research.

73 Usman Haques, Evolving Sonic Environment III (2007). http://www.haque.co.uk/evolvingsonicenvironment.php accessed 13 July 2015; Guy Ben-Ary’s CEIF (2015) http://guybenary.com/work/cellf/ accessed 13 July 2015. 74 Another artist whose work could be considered in this context is American sound artist David Lee Myers. Myers also works with sound, feedback devices and simple technologies. His work differs from the pieces considered in this thesis because his focus is on the electronics rather than the spatial environment. See http://www.pulsewidth.com accessed 13 September 2017.

Chapter One Black Field Plates, Material Organisation and Sound

1.1 Emergent Music

Music is a function of complex environmental relationships rather than something that is manufactured by a composer and delivered to an audience. The studio component of this research grew out of a fascination with the ability of matter to organise and the idea that the feedback systems that produced this organisation could be used to make music that evolved from its material and social environment. This chapter outlines my approach to organisational systems in music. In order to provide local context the chapter begins with a discussion of Drawn from Sound an exhibition I was included in in 2012. I then identify a selection of musicians who deal with nature, and place them into three different categories. The first are artists who are directly responding to the motifs of nature; the second, are responding to feedback systems within electronics; and the third, are dealing with environmental feedback and human engagement. It is this third category where my own work fits. The remainder of the chapter places my work within this context.

In 2013 I was included in Drawn From Sound an exhibition curated by Perth based composer Cat Hope, that drew together musicians who were redefining the relationship between the graphic score and sound.1 The exhibition made connections between historical Australian composers such as Percy Granger and Warren Burt, and musicians and composers currently working in experimental music such Nigel Helyer and Amanda Stewart. While the show did not specifically address nature or feedback it included a

1 Cat Hope, Drawn From Sound (2013), accessed 8/6/2017, http://www.drawnfromsound.com/artists- and-works.html

significant range of Australian composers who are engaged in the translation of nature into sound.

Within Drawn From Sound two artists produced work that illustrated two different approaches to nature. Phillip Samartzis's work frequently derives from field recordings. The audio composition Davis Station (2011) is composed from recordings made during a residency in Antarctica which are subsequently mixed into an audio piece that is evocative of this environment.2 Samartzis's approach to nature creates a direct sense of being in a specific environment and emphasises a view of nature in which the listener is constructed as a separate entity listening to a nature that is framed by the recordings and located perpetually elsewhere.

In contrast, Warren Burt’s work Gravel (2011) represented nature in a different way. Gravel consisted of a photograph of gravel that was used as a score whose texture was interpreted by a computer program and translated into sound. For me this focus on turning visual texture into audio texture highlighted the way in which the score is often used to translate the aesthetic qualities of nature as opposed to responding to the systems that produced it. In Gravel nature is represented through the translation of pattern into sound. Where Gravel translates the observable features of the natural world into sound, Samartsiz uses the sounds of the natural world as source material. In response to this I was led to consider a third group of artists working in sound that were experimenting with the feedback systems which I associated with the organisational properties of nature.

The use of electronic feedback circuits has a lineage that can be seen in the work of German composer Roland Kayn. Kayn developed electronic instruments that produced internal feedback loops that in turn created sounds that were guided into music rather than specifically played. The results of this approach can be heard in his composition Cybernetics III (1969).3 The guidance of feedback within systems was also central to compositions by the San Francisco collective The Automatic League of Composers.

2 Gail Priest “Anthropo[s]cenic Antarctica” Realtime June 2017 (accessed 31/08/2017 ) https://www.realtime.org.au/anthroposcenic-antarctica/ 3 Thomas W. Patterson The Time of Roland Kayn’s Cyberntic Music, accessed 8/6/2017 http://www.thomaspatteson.com/uploads/7/3/8/8/7388316/the_time_of_roland_kayns_cybernetic_ music__thomas_patteson_.pdf

Between 1977 and 1983 the group, that included composers John Bischoff and David Behrman who later became associated with David Tudor's Rainforest compositions, experimented with networking early personal computers to produce audio feedback systems.

Much later, for Japanese composer Toshimaru Nakamura, feedback is explored through the internal circuits of an audio mixing board by feeding the input of the device into the output and harvesting the audio results. Nakamura's first album No Input Mixing Board (2000) is composed of slowly unfolding patterns of electronic sound edited and assembled from continuous recordings.4 In Nakamura's work there is no observable link to nature but because the work relies on material feedback to produce sound there are several direct links that can be drawn to the natural world. Nakamura’s mixing board produces sound from the combination of electricity, its material circumstances, and the manipulation of feedback that builds within the board. In this way Nakamura uses the board's material form as a constraint (negative feedback) against the audio feedback (positive feedback) consistent with Cybernetic definitions of nature. His mixing board presents a closed system and yet the realization of the work is still dependent on an open relationship with an audience and a performer.

Within the local Australian context there are sound artists and musicians whose work directly incorporates aspects of environmental feedback. For these artists, music is produced as much by constraints provided by handmade physical systems as by playing; locating the production of music directly within recursive interaction with the physical world. Lucas Abela is an Australian artist who designs and creates multi-user pinball machines out of a variety of materials including bells and electric guitars. Abela’s ‘pinball machines’ produce sound relative to the group dynamics of participants and their design and construction. The music is negotiated between the physical constraints provided by the object, and the social interaction inherent within its use. The machines are exhibited internationally under the title Temple of Din and variations in shape, size and the selection of construction materials and electronic components contribute to the individual sound of each work.5 Peter Blamey is a Sydney-based artist and musician who produces music

4 Toshimaru Nakamura, No Input Mixing Board (2000), Zero Gravity ZGV-026; compact disk. 5 Lucas Abela Temple of Din exhibited at Palis de Tokyo, accessed 8/06/2017 http://www.dualplover.com/templeofdin/

and sound installations in which photovoltaic panels are used to make music from feedback relationships with the immediate environment. In performances of his work Double Particle Ellipse (2012) Blamey uses two hand held photovoltaic panels to harvest energy from light sources including light bulbs, the sun, video screens and other available light sources.6 The sound results from a recursive interaction that integrates the performer, the light and the architecture of the space.

Blamey and Abela both overtly rely on direct environmental engagement. In Blamey’s installation light and the spatial dimensions of the environment are directly looped into the work and the sound becomes a reflection of these elements. In Abela’s work the social environment is directly linked into the production of the sound. Both works not only open themselves up to indeterminacy through these forms of engagement but to social and environmental systems that produce that indeterminacy

1.2 Music as Environmental Engagement

The Black Field Plates are a series of site-specific networks of suspended glass and black steel plate microphones and steel plate speakers. These are networked together to produce adaptive audio feedback compositions that create a dynamic equilibrium of sound in response to the acoustic space, the presence of audience members and their own networked components.7 This chapter introduces the studio research which draws on John Cage’s ideas on music as environmental engagement and Michel Serres’ framing of sound as information by which he demonstrates how sounds are effectively produced in between a range of social and environmental systems. Through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhythm, I develop a methodology for the discussion of these networked installations which implicate people and their environment in the construction of music. I extend this concept of rhythm into material interactions through Manuel DeLanda’s descriptions of the operations of thunderstorms, in which heat, movement and phase transitions produce complex yet ephemeral structures. My

6 Peter Blamey Double Particle Eclipse accessed accessed 8/06/2017 https://peterblamey.net/double- partial-eclipse/ 7 For descriptive details of each of the Black Field Plate installations refer to Appendix A. The general principles behind the works will be discussed in this chapter.

installations also produce sound from dynamic environmental relationships. The installations pair microphones with speakers to produce audio feedback and connect these microphone/speaker combinations into larger networks in which the material and spatial constraints of the installation produce adaptive sonic rhythms that are responsive to audience and environment.

The Black Field Plates installations produce sound from their environments and at the same time they rely on the Cageian idea that music is produced by the individual through listening.8 Defining music as something produced by the individual through listening brings into question the way in which we define the environment through our perceptual connections to it, because if, as Cage asserts, music is produced by “an attention to the activity of sounds”, then music is produced through an environmental engagement that includes the acoustic space, the hearing process, and the attention of the listener.9 In my installations I use audio feedback to produce music that adapts simultaneously to audience presence and to the acoustic properties of the space, creating sound that begins to emulate the shifting material relationships that produce the environment. The installations produce music through presence as much they do through listening.

The use of feedback systems to produce music means that the audience becomes engaged in a constantly shifting installation that parallels the mutually defining environmental engagement seen in the biological, energetic and elemental exchanges that connect people to their environment. Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela use the concepts of positive and negative feedback systems to describe the relationship between an organism and its environment, and philosopher Manuel DeLanda demonstrates in his descriptions of thunderstorms how environmental feedback systems can produce form from elemental exchanges.10 Although it seems odd to draw connections between steel plate feedback systems, biological systems and thunderstorms, I have done this firstly because processes of energy and material exchange contain procedural systems that are common to both organic and non-organic

8 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 9 Ibid., 10. 10 Manuel DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 9; Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Cambridge: Shambahla Publications, 1987).

material, and secondly because the sounds produced by my installations are influenced by the presence of people within the vicinity of the work. Because of this the sounds are effectively produced between a range of organic and non-organic social, mechanical and environmental systems.

In The Parasite, Michel Serres demonstrates how, like the sounds produced by these installations, the sounds of the world are implicated within its social and material fabric.11 While Cage believed that separating sounds from their original context allowed them to be themselves, Serres instead demonstrates how sounds occur as the result of complex social and material interactions and are in fact never themselves but are instead pieces of information produced at the intersection of the world and the mind, and the architecture of the ear.12 Serres describes the feast of two rats in a tale that demonstrates how sound operates through circuits that connect the social and material communication systems of the world. In the story, the city rat has put on a lavish feast of leftovers from the larder of a wealthy farmer for his friend; a sound interrupts the two rats as they sit down on a Persian rug to enjoy their feast. Serres writes: “The two companions scurry off when they hear a noise at the door. It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information.”13 But, asks Serres, “Was the noise really a message?”14 In order for the sound to be a message the rats must already know what a door sounds like and therefore it could be argued that the message is not specifically located within the door or the rats. The sound that makes the rats flee occurs in a network of associations that demonstrate how sound is not a signal transferred from sender to receiver but instead occurs in an ambient field of histories situated simultaneously in the moment by the listener. The attention of the rats is produced as a memory that includes the wooden floorboard creaking, which they identify with the farmer, which in turn signals danger or fear. The noise produced by the farmer standing on the floorboard as he is disturbed from his slumber is a specific sound event and as such occurs not as noise, but as information, part of a network of associations that connect the rats to locations, shared histories and materials.

11 Michel Serres, The Parasite (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 3. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.

The sounds that make Serres’ rats flee can be seen as information produced instantly at the intersection of attention, memory and the material fabric of the house but this information is also produced though constant social and environmental feedback relationships. In the Black Field Plates installations, the transition from sound to information occurs on three levels: the connections between the linked components behave causally as electrical current moves through the circuits of the installation, then the sound propagates outwards forming a field from which, lastly, individual meaning is drawn as a confluence of mental associations and the formation of music. In these installations all these elements are in constant flux as audience and feedback co-adapt to the space through movement, boredom and tolerance to audio feedback.

The shifting complex relationships between causal systems, field dynamics and networks of association in these installations are closer to the lived experience of sound and this is illustrated by Alan Corbin’s descriptions of village bells in eighteenth and nineteenth century France.15 Corbin states that: “Bells were credited with the power to drive away thunder, thunderstorms, and tempests, and cleanse the air of every infernal presence.”16 This ability of the bell to clear infernal presence relies on direct associations made between sound and an intricate set of shared beliefs, but it also relies on feedback relationships that connect these shared beliefs with the sound of the bell. As the bell is struck its sound radiates out from a point and as its sound dissipates through space, the memories and cultural associations of the village motivate the village to continue to ring the bell. The Black Field Plates installations rely on similar social and spatial circuits by using feedback to connect the audience and the space in the production of music. Using feedback in this way produces sound that is the result of environmental self-regulation rather that something created as the result of sound sent from a performer to an audience member.

1.3 Organisation, Feedback and Music

15 Alain Corbin, Village Bells (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 16 Ibid., 102.

In these installations self-regulation is facilitated by the combination of positive and negative feedback interactions. Within Cybernetics the combination of these types of feedback is extensively theorised in the description of living systems.17 Negative feedback is associated with mechanisms that create stability against outside perturbation and is central to homeostatic systems in both living organisms and electrical componentry. A heater, for instance, will maintain homeostasis within its environment by shutting off and turning on to maintain a specified temperature. Similarly, a blood system will use negative feedback mechanisms to regulate body temperature. In my installations, the steel plate, copper wire, and spatial arrangements of the plates combine to regulate the positive audio feedback. Positive feedback is associated with exponential growth; an input is fed into an output and the result is an uncontrolled increase in signal within a system. In my installations, placing a microphone in proximity to a speaker generates audio feedback and the sound adapts through splitting and distributing this feedback through a material network. Within Cybernetics the combination of positive and negative feedback is used to describe adaptive relationships that occur between organisms and their environment. More generally the combination of positive and negative feedback can cause a wide range of elemental and environment adaptations.

The Black Field Plates installations imitate aspects of homeostasis and adaptation by networking components into systems that balance positive audio feedback against the material constraint of the system; an idiosyncratic microphone listening to an erratic speaker. The installations maintain dynamic stability in three main ways. Firstly, in contrast to the usual design of microphones and speakers (which are generally designed to reproduce sound accurately) the microphones and speakers are designed to colour the incoming sound with their own resonant properties. This happens as the plates vibrate. As signal enters a speaker it vibrates, building a changing resonance pattern within the steel. The sound picked up by the microphones is also coloured by the different sizes of the plates; the larger the plate the more reverberation. Secondly, the placement of the microphones relative to speakers regulates how much sound enters the system and how much of the sound produced by the speakers will be combined with

17 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Sphere Books, 1968); W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain (London: Penguin Books, 1953); Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979); Heinz von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979).

the ambient noise of the environment. Thirdly, each installation contains several different microphones and speakers and these are arranged in such a way that no single feedback sound is allowed to dominate the installation. As one tone gets louder, this increase in volume is distributed to other speakers and microphones within the installation. The entire system limits and regulates the output of a single speaker's feedback. Technically, what happens is that the environment interferes with the purity of the signal. The other speakers, being a part of the overall system and environment, dissipate the energy of the first speaker. By making small adjustments to the volume and settings on the amplifiers and the compression and phaser pedals the positive audio feedback is balanced against the material constraints of the installation.

In this way the sound of the installation regulates itself through its material, spatial and electrical limits. If these limits fail to control the audio feedback, the installations are further augmented with two types of effects pedals. Phaser pedals are used to add an oscillation to the feedback and compression pedals are used to keep the sound within a specific dynamic range so the sound will continue to adapt while not becoming excessively loud. When set up and adjusted, the installations settle into an adaptive rhythm in which electricity and metal produce a constantly changing series of sounds. In later works such as The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name (2016), I made the operations of these three elements as transparent as possible by replacing electronic pedals with physical materials such as glass bells. This emphasised the idea that technological devices are predicated on material exchanges.

While the material constraints and dimensions of each of the installations dictate the sounds produced, aesthetic choices also determine the viewer experience of the works. The flat black steel plates are reminiscent of the black staff cars of cold war politics, and the monolith from Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but they also talk to the hard edge black monochromatic paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and Ad Reinhardt. The common conceptual thread drawn through the use of black is one of concealment, and yet this is a concealment hidden in plain view. A viewer can walk behind the steel plates but unlike the black boxes that typically conceal electronic componentry the reverse side conceals little — a transducer with exposed copper wire or a simple speaker coil — the effect is of sound emerging from a void. Through the aesthetic choice of black for the plates I draw a direct connection between ambience

and void; both are spaces of no fixed position. The glass domes are transparent and yet the way in which they produce sound through feedback also makes it difficult for the audience to ascertain where the sound is coming from. This aesthetically adds to the sense of concealment in plain sight. The pseudo-minimalist design of the installations also creates geometric links with architecture and presents the installations as an extension of the space in which they are exhibited. Again, there is an aspect of concealment created through a lack of markers as to where the work ends. The combination of minimal steel or glass domes and copper wire gives the feel that the work could be formed from the insides of a machine or an appliance, however, the internal mechanical or electronic components are replaced by the space in which the audience is located leaving them looking for what it is not there.

There is also a link between concealment and absence in these works: the amplifiers and the colour black allude to a heavy rock aesthetic and yet the amplifiers allow no place for a musician to plug in an instrument. This represents a rock aesthetic in the absence of the musicians, leaving the installation plus the environment to perform the role of musician. The concealment of the musician is also conceptually apparent in the presence of black 'fun fur' domes. Originally these were designed to conceal effects pedals, and now they appear to mimic the back of a person's head, no matter which angle they are viewed from. They became a human element in the installation. This idea of the replacement of the individual with more ambient systems of production also functionally references the interdependence of systems found in nature.18

18 David George Haskell The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors, Penguin Random House, New York, 2017; Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think; Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human, University of California Press, Berkley, 2013.

FIGURE 1. Room layout for Black Field Plates, 2014, Audio Foundation, Auckland NZ, September 2014. Nathan Thompson, https://vimeo.com/109674872

Black Field Plates at the Audio Foundation in Auckland (2014) became the namesake of the series of exhibitions that followed. It was a sound installation that adapted to its environment, responding to audience presence and movement within the space as well as to its own internal dynamics. In this installation I developed the basic feedback circuit that I extended in later exhibitions. The installation contained two sets of paired microphone and speaker plates: a large set and a small set that were located at opposite ends of the gallery (see Figure 1).

The sound produced by the speakers was slightly different at each end of the gallery due not only to the different dimensions of the speaker/microphone pairs but also to the acoustic properties of the space, which were a mixture of concrete and particleboard, and the long and narrow gallery (around ten meters by four meters), which also impacted on the sound. For this installation the circuit was augmented by two phaser effect pedals and two compression pedals; again in pairs, these were located under the speaker plates covered by black fur covers. By tuning the effects pedals through a process of trial and error, the sound was balanced into a dynamic audio feedback

relationship within the space. This circuit was the first iteration of the speaker/microphone pairing that was used in more complex installations such as Pollen, discussed later. The sound of Black Field Plates ebbed and flowed as resonances built and dissipated within the gallery. As one speaker increased in volume it would vibrate, dissipating the feedback and producing new rhythms in the space. Sometimes a speaker would vibrate while appearing to make little sound, indicating energy produced outside of hearing range. The installation could subsequently reincorporate this energy as sound at another point within the circuit. In this way the installation used feedback to make sound energy that lay beyond the range of human hearing visible.

After the initial experiments I worked to develop material feedback systems that produced music though recursive environmental engagement. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name was an audio feedback installation that at times did very little; often just enough to let the audience know that it was capable of doing something. The title of this exhibition was taken from cyberneticist Heinz Von Foerster’s book of the same name, the central theme of which revolves around the way the world, our perception of it and the concepts we use to describe it are inseparable.19 Von Foerster states that: “The world or the environment contains no information. The world is as it is. That means that observation or the observer is inseparably part of every beginning.”20 The implication of the observer in the construction of reality is a central theme within second order Cybernetics.21 The exhibition played with the idea that the environment contains no information and therefore music is produced through engagement with sound – in this case sound that changed in relation to the audience.

19 Heinz von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name. 20 von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name.2. 21 von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name, 1; Bateson, Mind and Nature, 68.

FIGURE 2. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, June, 2016. Nathan Thompson, https://vimeo.com/190031756

The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name was the first use of the glass bell microphones that replaced some of the effects pedals used in earlier installations and this mitigated audio feedback by adding the resonant properties of the bells to the installation. I reduced the system’s reliance on invisible componentry in order to make the installation as transparently part of the physical environment as possible. This enabled me to demonstrate the idea that technological components are fundamentally predicated on electromagnetic and material exchanges. I revisit this idea in relation to material and perceptual systems through the writings of Jussi Parikka and Robert Smithson in Chapter Four.

Perhaps as a result of the reduction of effects pedals, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name had a greater sensitivity to its environment than earlier installations and reacted vigorously on the second day of the exhibition when a fire alarm was accidentally set off within the building. Sometimes the network would react to audience members or currents of airflow; at other times it seemed to respond to its own internal

dynamics. The combination of positive and negative feedback systems gave the installation the feel of being alive, creating the illusion that it somehow had a will of its own and at times audience members would whisper instead of talking at normal volume as if they were waiting for the installation to perform. Other audience members spontaneously felt the need to touch the work in an attempt to encourage it to do something. The work separated the ‘whisperers’ from the ‘touchers’, or those who saw the installation as a thing or instrument that should do something from those who were prepared for it to be a part of the environment.

The self-organising aspects of the natural world are defined through their ability to organise on a material level rather than through their ability to exhibit choice and this is apparent in The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name. Robotics researcher Vito Trianni identifies key qualities of self-organisation: “In such systems interactions among individuals take place following rules of thumb that in general require (i) a limited cognitive ability and (ii) a limited knowledge of the environment.”22 The implication of these robotic systems is that many of the automated systems that we engage with on a day-to-day basis lead us into increasingly mechanistic interactions with the world. Although prominent promoters of Artificial Intelligence such as Ray Kruzweil suggest that intelligent machines have the potential to usurp human agency, many of the systems that we engage with on an everyday basis have already done this and through means that need not be more sophisticated than simple material recursive systems.23

In both the Black Field Plates exhibition and The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name, audience members affected the sound of the environment subtly through their presence, but in Pollen (2015) I had the opportunity to see if the sound of the installation could be guided and whether the sound produced could then be listened to by a musician who could in turn respond to this sound. By doing this the installation could facilitate a co-adaptive relationship between the acoustic environment and a performer and this enabled me to think further about the relationship that sound had to music and how the environment contributed to this relationship.

22 Vito Trianni, Evolutionary Swarm Robotics and Evolving Self-Organising Behaviors in Groups of Autonomous Robots (Rome: Springer, 2008), 45. 23 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (London: Penguin Books, 1999).

FIGURE 3. Pollen, with Andrea Caddy, SNO Gallery as part of the NOw NOw festival, January 2015. https://soundcloud.com/expansion-bay/pollen-with-anthea-caddy

As cellist Anthea Caddy set up her cello within the installation, a semi circle of people formed around her and as she played people listened not only to the cello but also to the relationship between the cello and the plates. By the time she packed up her cello at the end of the performance, the sound of the plates had taken on new rhythms that blended with the sounds of people talking and entering and leaving the space. Having a musician in the installation focussed attention on the sound; people became quiet and they faced the performer and yet what they were listening to was the result of an environmental engagement that preceded and followed the arrival and departure of Caddy and this demonstrated how music is as much a product of the listening conventions that surround a performance as of what is played. Through these exhibitions I began to think about the way that sound was able to blur the boundaries between performer, audience and environment and the way in which listeners made use of sound, actively implicating them within their environment.

In Pollen I also began to expand the networked components. This installation contained one plate system similar to the one in the Black Field Plates exhibition and a second networked system that used the same circuit except that, through the use of resonators and traducers, it turned a wall and a window of the gallery into speakers and microphones. The sound was produced in between two independent systems and for a few hours included a musician who further blurred the line between performer, environment and system. Installations with one network mediated between the environment and installation. Having two networks and a person produced a three-way dialogue, and even without Caddy the systems would independently develop rhythms that would transfer between the two unconnected networks. This idea of blurring boundaries between discrete systems with sound was also explored in a group show, In Fields (2015). This show consisted of three sound works by Emily Morandini, Peter Blamey and myself designed to highlight how technological systems were grounded within electromagnetic and electrochemical exchanges. My work, Folkloric Rainbow Distributions, consisted of networking Morandini’s and Blamey’s works through a feedback system which produced a sound composition that included their works, the environment and the feedback resonances produced by the network. The sound was balanced between the original sounds of the works but also picked up and incorporated ambient sound from the gallery environment. This installation placed otherwise unrelated works in a dialogue that, as with the twin systems in Pollen, could cross- pollinate independently of human participation.

FIGURE 4. In Fields, Group Exhibition with Emily Morandini, Peter Blamey and Nathan Thompson. 55 Sydenham Rd Gallery, Sydney, 2015. https://vimeo.com/154576534

1.4 Sound, Rhythm and Environment

Deleuze and Guattari have theorised the role that sound plays in the formation of listeners and their environment. In their chapter “1837: Of the Refrain”, sound and rhythm play a key role in the composition of the environment — birds mark territory through song, children sing to calm anxiety, radios and televisions mark suburban territories.24 For Deleuze and Guattari sound marks territory in different ways: “Radios and television sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories.”25 These sonic demarcations mark territory spatially, biologically and socially. The territory marked by the suburban radio, for instance, is linked as much to the acuity of the neighbours’ hearing as to whether or not they enjoy the sound. Through sound, the owner of the radio has negotiated territory in collaboration with their neighbour. Territory is marked by the stabilisation of chaos: A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as

24 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1996), 311. 25 Ibid.

best he can. The song is a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, centre in the heart of chaos.26

In the child’s song sound creates order from chaos and it is the ordering of chaos that Deleuze and Guattari define as rhythm. They state that: “Rhythm is the milieus’ answer to chaos.” 27 Rhythm is defined by its ability to claim territory by ordering chaos.

Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of rhythm provides a direct link between the organisational properties of the natural world and the installations produced in this thesis. In the Black Field Plates rhythm, territory and order are always negotiated in- between, as a provisional relationship with the world. The installations constitute milleu through their multiple interacting parts. Rhythm is formed at the speaker rather than broadcast from somewhere else. The sound that is ordered in Black Field Plates and other compositions discussed in this thesis such as Collins’ Peasoup is produced as rhythm at the fault line of spatial and material milieus. Unlike compositions that represent the natural world these works constantly renegotiate their relationship with that world. Spatially the sound expands and reduces the territory of the installation as it responds to the sound of trucks or fire alarms and audience members. This expansion and contraction is effected by the rhythmic qualities not just in the exhibition but in the surrounding environment. If the sound of the installation is mistaken for a sound produced by a local engineering firm, then the radius of the installation can expand as it does not disrupt order within the environment. If on the other hand the sound is unfamiliar the environment will be disturbed and the neighbours may intrude. Because of the dynamic nature of these installations, this sound can increasingly participate in the world of the living.

Deleuze and Guattari use a forest to demonstrate the way living systems are composed between a wide variety of processes. In many of these, sound is key in constructing the environment through a rhythmic relationship that crosses social and material form.28 In their description they provide criteria by which a living system differentiates itself from its surroundings through rhythm. This differentiation is produced at the point where one milieu meets another and can be seen in the way a bird call in a forest maintains a

26 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311. 27 Ibid., 313. 28 Ibid., 314.

set of social relations that allow it to occupy a niche within its environment. Deleuze and Guattari state: Every Milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it.29

For Deleuze and Guattari a living system is always composed provisionally at the confluence of a list of actions, substances and energies and in this they promote a world of co-dependent systems where matter produces form through rhythm. Viewing the world in terms of form and rhythm allows for a wider definition of what constitutes life. This is highlighted in recent research by biologist Kenneth Nealson. Nealson is part of a research team at the University of Southern California that has discovered organisms which feed and evolve directly off electrical current rather than biologically by converting sugars into food.30 The similarities between these creatures and living systems can be drawn not only because their material circumstances produce behaviour that resembles that of an organism, but also because this behaviour produces form in relationship with the creature’s environment making the creature a product of its material organisation. Deleuze and Guattari directly associate the ability of milieux to organise with the plane of immanence which they alternately refer to as the plane of nature. They state: “We therefore call it the plane of nature although nature has nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction between natural and artificial.”31 Their “plane of nature” is that from which movement, materials and rhythms produce perceivable form; this is rhythm’s answer to chaos.

29 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313. 30 Catherine Brahic, “Meet the Electric Life Forms That Live on Pure Energy,” New Scientist, 16 July 2014, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894-meet-the-electric-life-forms-that-live-on-pure-energy/ accessed 16 July 2016. 31 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 266.

1.5 Sound Bleed: The Internal and External Environment

The works discussed so far were all contained within galleries. In Corporate Digital Shamans (2015), I experimented with an installation that moved beyond the white cube and maintained its identity solely through the connections it made to a pre-existing structure. The work consisted of two resonators that were attached to two external steel wall panels that were architectural features of a house in the Blue Mountains. This installation was an attempt to make a work whose edges differed significantly in relation to the locations of listeners. A key aspect of this work was the production of sound that was latent within the house’s construction. The resonators were looped with two transducers on opposite panels. The installation used audio feedback to combine the resonant qualities of a house with the sounds of the outside environment and by positioning components of the work inside, outside and within the fabric of the house, the installation had no fixed location; in one of the rooms in the house, for instance, localised patches of vibration could be felt in the floor a significant distance from the source of the sound.

FIGURE 5. Corporate Digital Shamans, exhibited as part of Black Modular, MAP projects, Lawson NSW, June 2014 Curated by David Haines and Joyce Hinterding.

Part of the reason for doing this was to make an installation that was visually as well as structurally integrated into its environment. Integrating a work into the fabric of a house aligns the work with the feedback systems that simultaneously connect and separate an organism from its environment through rhythm. Having little material form of its own, the operation of the installation was completely produced by a sonic niche in which the sound was separate from yet completely dependent on its environment.

The different iterations of the Black Field Plates privilege different modes of listening and audience engagement. In the Black Field Plates installation at Auckland's Audio Foundation sound changed relative to audience presence and while the audience were not necessarily aware of this fact they were implicated within the production of the sound. Pollen, operated independently for most of the exhibition and with a performer for just one hour. While the exhibition operated independently audience members entered and left the exhibition space, listened for as long as they felt, with little sense that they were influencing the sound. The installation tended to increase in volume as more people entered the room and decrease a little over time as they left. When a performer was introduced to the gallery the audience arranged themselves in a semicircle around the performer, sat down on the floor, and moved little. The cello and installation interacted and the listening experience went from an ambient experience to a situation of shared attention, focused on the performer’s interaction. This focus was produced not only by the performer but as a combination of the interaction, its containment within a one-hour timeslot, the acoustics of the space and the lack of audience movement. The installation Corporate Digital Shamans was different again, here, the audio was further decentralized. As described, the sound of the installation was produced within the fabric of the house and audience members drifted from inside to outside creating sound that was not produced from a fixed location or a fixed listening position. In this situation the audience had a greater control over what they heard through their ability to move fluidly between the internal and external spaces. The agency of audience members in forming music was different again in installations such as The Beginning of Heaven and Earth has no Name where the movement of audience members contributed to a more obvious change in the sound causing some listeners to change their movements to effect the sound. These different installations emphasise that although music, as Cage asserts, is created by attention; attention is created socially,

materially and spatially and in this way sound connects these installations into the ecologies of their environment.

For biologists Maturana and Varela living systems are defined through environmental connections. They state that: Living systems are units of interaction; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it.32

While they describe the relationship between the living system and its environment in biological terms, the concept of the niche operates through a relationship between open and closed systems regulated through positive and negative feedback. Closed systems maintain the integrity of the organism whereas open ones allow for adaption. Maturana and Varela state that the living systems are “organized in closed causal systems that allow for evolutionary change in the way that circularity is maintained, but not for the loss of circularity itself.”33 The nature of this circulation is maintained by a partially closed relationship between material, form and recursion.

The works in this thesis cannot represent nature as they are inseparable from the environment and act recursively. These installations are regulated by their materials and spatial location and paradoxically it is this quality that makes them more like the organisational properties that occur in nature. From an organisational point of view the sound of the installation is defined through what Maturana and Varela call a niche; they state that: “The niche is defined by the classes of interactions into which an organism can enter.”34 These interactions are defined between the circulatory interactions of the organism and its environment. They continue: “A living system defines through its organization the domain of all interactions into which it can possibly enter without losing identity, and it maintains its identity only as long as the basic circularity that defines it as a unit of interactions remains unbroken.”35 As biologists they use their concept of the niche to describe how living systems maintain themselves through

32 Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: D. Reidel Publishing, 1979), 9. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Maturana & Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 9.

internal and external relationships. These principles of maintenance can be extended to any aspect of the environment that maintains material form through feedback mechanisms and their living system is fundamentally a system of material adaptation. The Black Field Plates installations maintain themselves in a similar way by mediating between their internal electronic circuits and their external audio feedback and, although they are not in themselves living, they are produced through emergent processes that are integral to materially and spatially connected living systems. In Corporate Digital Shamans, the sound of the installation was defined by the material constraints of the house, the material construction of the work, its environment and its electricity supply.

In Philosophy and Simulation Manuel DeLanda outlines how complex structures can be produced through simple material interactions. His description of a thunderstorm demonstrates how the internal and external feedback systems that maintain structure within the environment are not specific to living organisms. In earlier books such as A New Philosophy of Society and A Thousand Years of Non Linear History, he extends these ideas of organisational processes to social and geological structures.36 He begins his description of the thunderstorm with the concept that materials create difference through their capacity to store energy at different rates to other materials, stating that: “The capacity of intensive differences to act as energy storage devices will play such a prominent role in the explanation of emergence in many other examples that it will be useful to have a term for them. We will refer to them as gradients.”37 The term gradient could be applied to anything from gasoline to an electric battery and, in the case of his description of a thunderstorm, the sun fulfils the role of a gradient. Energy released by a gradient causes movement; DeLanda states that: “This circulatory flow, referred to as a convection cell, is produced by the gradient as the means to cancel itself even as the imposed constraints prevent it from doing so.”38 In the case of a thunderstorm a gradient cancels itself by turning energy into movement as the sun heats the water. The water in the thunderstorm is also subject to phase transitions. In the thunderstorm these occur through temperature change. Water becomes steam that becomes ice. These

36 Manuel DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London and New York: Continuum, 2011); Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 2000; Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006). 37 DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation, 9. 38 Ibid., 9.

phase transitions are in turn affected by other convection cells and energy gradients. The relationships between gradients, convection cells and phase transitions are central to chaos theory. However, in the current research these relationships highlight the fact that a representational view of nature differs from an organisational one.39 By using material feedback systems these installations produce changing sound that directly incorporates relationships between material, heat, and movement. They are not representational. DeLanda’s thunderstorm demonstrates how many feedback systems associated with living systems articulate matter and energy across environmental and social boundaries proposing an environmental model in which no aspect of nature can entirely separate from another. The installations in the Black Field Plates series store and release energy through the steel plates. Some of this energy is converted into sound and some is dissipated through the environment. The transducers allow sound to convert into electromagnetic energy and transform back and forth relative to the audio feedback levels within system.

The relationship between matter and energy is central to Douglas Kahn’s framing of sound. Artists that Kahn discusses such as Alvin Lucier, Joyce Hinterding and Peter Blamey produce works that make audible these transition points in ways that reveal specific aspects of their material environment.40 Kahn coins the term ‘Aelectrosonic’ to describe the transduction between energy and sound and states “The Aelectrosonic involves transduction across two major states of energy, converting electromagnetic activity into the mechanics of audible sound.”41 Transduction is central to the way the Black Field Plates installations regulate their dynamic equilibrium with their environment; as energy builds in the installation the transducers and speakers take energy back and forth to balance sound and current within the system.

In the introduction to this thesis I discussed how Wiener and Bateson each identify how matter behaves in two distinct ways, through forces and impacts and contingently.42 The

39 A.V. Getling, Rayleigh-Bènard Convection: Structure and Dynamics (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Ltd, 1998), 2; Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Chaos and Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 40 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 2013). 41 Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 55. 42 Carl Gustav Jung, The Seven Sermons to the Dead [1916], http://gnosis.org/library/7Sermons.htm accessed 5 November 2014; Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (St Alban: Paladin, 1973), 430.

Black Field Plates are made of materials and circuits that rely on causal interactions but, because of their use of positive and negative feedback processes, they behave contingently, or, put another way, difference is responded to by further difference.43 My installations draw from the idea that matter organises into form, pattern and rhythm through reacting contingently and further I have explored how that is reflective of environmental interactions. The sound produced by these installations arises out of organisational systems observed within nature and described in the writings of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The gradients, convection cells and phase transitions identified in Manuel DeLanda’s descriptions of thunderstorms demonstrate how complex behaviour associated with living systems has its origins in environmental fluctuations, temperature and differences in spatial and material composition. These variations in heat and material composition result in emergent behaviour and demonstrate how matter and energy can produce emergent behaviour. By using electricity and metal, transduction and positive and negative feedback systems the installations in this research not only exhibit simple emergent behaviours but also extend their boundaries to include audience members who are reflected in the sound that they produce.

Media theorist Ronan Hallowell states that the relationship between the brain and consciousness has never been satisfactorily explained.44 The processes of self- organisation that have been used to attempt to explain cognition in the work of Grey Walter and Ross Ashby will be covered in the next chapter. But while the devices that they produced attempted to explain cognition with contingent systems that exhibited organisation through the combination of multitude of minor interactions, this way of producing order is a more general feature of matter. The Black Field Plates do not attempt to explain cognition; instead they highlight the extent to which cognition is dictated by material interactions.45 Although not alive, the Black Field Plates demonstrate how feedback systems confound absolute demarcations between the living and the non- living. This studio research uses feedback systems to make music and raises further questions of how sound facilitates our interactions with the world. In the following

43 Bateson, Mind and Nature, 94. 44 Ronan Hallowell, “Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Contribution to Media Ecology: Autopoesis, The Santiago School of Cognition, and Enactive Cognitive Science,” Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, vol. 10 (2009), 146. 45 Vito Trianni, Evolutionary Swarm Robotics and Evolving Self-Organising Behaviors in Groups of Autonomous Robots, 45.

chapter, I explore these ideas as understood by composers. Tudor, Cage and Lucier saw nature as being heavily defined by its organisational properties and used feedback systems in their works to reference nature in their compositions. Much of this thinking arose out of theories developed within Cybernetics that identified and isolated the feedback mechanisms by which these natural systems operated. In chapter two I turn to the details of cybernetic thinking about living systems. As introduced here, the Black Field Plates continue this fascination with the organisational systems that produce the natural world and the role of sound within these systems.

Chapter Two Cybernetics, Nature and Self-Organising Systems

The anatomy of the crab is repetitive and rhythmical. It is like music, repetitive with modulation.

Gregory Bateson.1

2.1 Nature as Organisation

In this chapter, I will assemble a picture of how the key theorists of cybernetics defined nature through its organisational processes. Firstly, I will look at the way that Cybernetics, from its inception, proposed theories of organisation that drew connections across a wide variety of seemingly unrelated social and biological systems. The nature of these modes of material interaction highlighted the ways in which the environment was engaged in relentless feedback processes that maintained material form. It is this material approach to feedback that connects artists that produce sound that occurs as a result real-time engagement with the environment to my own work.

The first section of this chapter will focus on how Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela who developed cybernetic concepts to define the natural world through feedback and environmental engagement. Cybernetic models of the way nature worked drew both physically and theoretically from engineering, electronics and evolving concepts of systems and information theory in order to describe biological, physiological and ecological systems. Wiener drew from information theory, mathematics and thermodynamics and the recursive systems he developed were used to develop automated defence mechanisms such as The DEW line (Distant Early Warning System) at the same time as bomb guidance systems. Wiener was directly

1 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 10. 51

involved in this work through Bell Laboratories, and, through their art-science collaborations, the organisational processes behind these technologies entered experimental music. Bateson, with his background in psychology and anthropology, used concepts of recursion inherent within this technology to describe the formation of the mind. In a biological context, Maturana and Varela demonstrated how multiple contingent systems also dictate biological form through adaptation. Secondly, I will look at how these organisational concepts used to describe nature were converted into mechanical analogies for social and biological systems. This second section looks at physical devices designed by Ross Ashby, W. Grey Walter and Gordon Pask that were used to identify self-organising processes with which they defined nature. These physical devices were produced as mechanical analogies for self-organising processes such as homeostasis and are key to connections drawn between social, physiological and environmental systems. Whereas many models of the natural world present nature in hierarchical terms, these physical devices instead emphasised its bottom-up organisational systems. When these systems are integrated within compositions, they decentralise the role of the composer and emphasise the role of the environment and the material arrangement of the composition in the production of sound. This chapter focuses on the organisational systems that Cybernetics used to define nature before turning to a consideration of how these ideas and mechanisms impacted on the music of John Cage, Alvin Lucier and David Tudor in Chapter Three. I then move on in Chapter Four to look at artists who continue this legacy of responding to nature’s organisational systems.

2.2 The Macy Conferences: Nature as Information

The Macy Conferences (1945–1960) marked the beginning of Cybernetics. The conferences collected together a range of mathematicians, scientists and anthropologists including Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Gregory Bateson, Margret Mead and John von Neumann who began with the intention of identifying social and biological communication and control systems and defining these organisational systems in terms of mathematical and informational formulas.2 Rather

2 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 50. 52

than presenting papers, participants instead contributed topics of interest from their individual disciplines with a view to finding organisational similarities between disciplines.3 As N. Katherine Hayles notes, the cross-disciplinary nature of the conference led to metaphorical connections being drawn across a wide range of social, biological and material systems.4 Hayles notes that these links were primarily formed through mathematical and technologically formulations that ignored the material circumstance of the information that these formulations sought to represent.5 For instance, this is reflected in John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour which drew organisational parallels between information theory, economics, evolutionary adaptation and intelligence, and in Claude Shannon’s information theory which measures information in terms of mathematical probability.6 Other participants such as Gregory Bateson saw information as being fundamentally located in the perceptual faculties of the observer.7 The second order Cybernetics of Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask and Gregory Bateson emphasised that information was produced between the observer and their relationship to the material world.8 This focus on the experience of the observer is reflected in compositions in this research that promote the idea that music is produced by the perceptual faculties of the listener rather than by the musician or composer.

2.3 Living in a World of Material Contingency

In The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener identifies the defining quality of life as its ability to organise. He states: [W]hile the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life

3 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 50. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 51. 6 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944); Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Sphere Books, 1968), 31. 7 Gregory Bateson, “Form Substance and Difference,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1972), 434. 8 Heinz von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). 53

finds a home in these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development.9

Wiener contrasts this ability to organise against the backdrop of a universe governed by entropy in which energy and organisation dissipate until heat death is reached—the eventual fate of the entire universe.10 Wiener defines material organisational in terms of information which he describes mathematically. He states: The notion of the amount of information attaches itself very naturally to a classical notion in statistical mechanics: that of entropy. Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organisation, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganisation.11

Although Wiener talks about the world in terms of exchanges of energy and information measured in degrees of organisation, these exchanges are located in physical form. The word information is derived from the Latin ‘informare’ which has the dual meaning of ‘to inform’ and ‘to give form to’ and as such information is always embodied in material form.12 This is reflected in Wiener’s description of insects in which physical form acts as a control over their patterns of behaviour: “The physical strait jacket in which an insect grows up is directly responsible for the mental strait jacket that regulates its pattern of behaviour.”13 The body of the insect, in relationship to its environment, provides stability that regulates both its thinking and its form; Wiener goes on to link this with material communication: “Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization.”14 Through the ant, Weiner demonstrates how in nature form and behaviour are materially linked.

Bateson also associates nature with contingent organisation. This organisation is only perceivable through the perception of difference. Bateson cites Carl Jung’s notion of the ‘creatura’ and the ‘pleroma’ to distinguish the aspects of the world that evolve contingently from those that behave causally. Bateson states that: “The pleroma is a

9 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Sphere Books, 1968), 15. 10 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 30. 11 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Technology Press, 1948), 18. 12 Latdict, Latin Dictionary & Grammar resources http://latin-dictionary.net/definition/23684/informo- informare-informavi-informatus, accessed 22 April 2016. 13 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 52. 14 Ibid., 22. 54

world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no ‘distinctions’ whereas in the creatura effects are brought about precisely by difference.”15 For Bateson the ability to respond to difference contingently is central to the way in which he defines both nature and the mind.

2.4 Feedback and Homeostasis

Wiener and Bateson present a view of nature as produced by feedback relationships between matter and organisation which exhibits increasing similarities to life through the interaction of multiple contingent systems. In this model nature fights entropy with feedback mechanisms that result in the maintenance and reproduction of physical form.16 Negative feedback is associated with a wide variety of homeostatic systems that regulate everything from blood temperature to climate systems.17 Positive feedback systems on the other hand are described as open systems as they structurally require engagement with external energies in order to exist. Positive feedback can be seen within the feedback relationship between an amplifier and a microphone, where sound is amplified before returning to its source to be further amplified collecting more sound in an endless exponentially increasing loop. A positive feedback system increases the output signal of the system while a negative feedback system stabilises a system.18 The combination of the two types of feedback has the capacity to simulate the adaptive processes that occur between an organism and its environment, negative feedback maintaining the internal functioning of the organism while positive feedback maintains environmental connections that facilitate adaptation.19 These types of feedback are commonly used to describe a wide variety of environmental systems.20 Positive and negative feedback mechanisms featured in avant-garde composition in a variety of ways, ranging from Tudor’s electronic works to scores by Cage that relied on environmental

15 Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 68. 16 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 30. 17 Ross Ashby, The Living Brain (London: Penguin Books, 1953); James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Penguin Books, 2007). 18 Danto Sanfilippo, “Turning Perturbation into Sound, and Sound into Perturbation,” Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture, http://www.interferencejournal.com/, accessed 28 July 2015. 19 Sanfilippo, “Turning Perturbation into Sound, and Sound into Perturbation.” 20 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia. 55

recursion to works by Iannis Xenakis that used computer generated stochastic processes.

Homeostatic processes rely on negative feedback and are central to the way in which Cybernetics defined nature. Wiener states: “The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis.”21 Homeostatic systems were central to the devices produced by Ashby and Walter. As these devices demonstrated, homeostasis––although an inherent part of all living systems––can be seen as a process connecting both living and non-living systems to their environment. As demonstrated later in this chapter in discussion of Ross Ashby’s homeostat, homeostatic systems are maintained through the combination of multiple materially- located stochastic processes.

Bateson offers a basic definition of stochastic process that is aligned with the way composers have used these processes in material compositions. He defines a stochastic process as: “a sequence of events that combines a random component with a selective process so that only certain outcomes of the random process are allowed to endure.”22 Systems researcher Danto Sanfilippo notes that stochastic processes produce adaption by being unpredictable and yet not random as they “predicate future change on their immediately preceding state.”23 Compositions such as Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning Chapter 7 (1971) demonstrate how stochastic processes can be used to generate sound that is regulated between performers and the acoustic space of the performance.24

Homeostatic processes occur across multiple internal and external systems connecting organisms to and defining them against their environments. In Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela clearly articulate this relationship when they state that: “Living systems are units of interactions;

21 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 85. 22 Bateson, Mind and Nature, 230. 23 Sanfilippo, “Turning Perturbation into Sound, and Sound into Perturbation.” 24 Cardew scored this composition for a variable number of singers who begin by singing a word or short phrase adapted from selected writings of Confucius. Each performer chooses their own pitch and sings their word eight times at their own speed before moving to the next word, which they proceed to sing at the pitch of the note that they can hear closest to them. If the performer cannot hear the note or the note is out of their vocal range, they move onto the next line and choose a note at random. As the piece progresses the pitch of the entire piece moves into the vocal range of the group. See Tony Harris, The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew (London: Routledge, 2013). 56

they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact – the niche – nor can the niche be defined independently of the living systems that specify it.”25 The niche from which the living system emerges is produced by a wide variety of homeostatic systems that combine movement and materials. The complexity of these relationships is demonstrated in Maturana, McCulloch and Lettvin’s analysis of the perceptual abilities of a frog: The frog does not seem to see or, at any rate, is not concerned with the detail of stationary parts of the world around him. He will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement. He will leap to capture any object the size of an insect or worm provided it moves like one.26

In this passage the frog is defined by his choice of food to which his vision has become tailored and which in turn shapes its form. The concept of the niche separates two distinct ways in which composers such as Cage responded to nature. Firstly, Cage often sought to make the invisible sounds of nature heard; this is demonstrated in compositions such as Inlets (1977), Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) that involve isolating and amplifying aspects of plant materials. In contrast, in compositions such as Fontana Mix (1958), Variations III (1963) and Variations VII (1966), nature is not being amplified and instead processes are used to create a niche.27 I tend to refer to my own installations as environments rather than describing them as embodying specific aspects of nature, and my use of the word ‘environment’ acknowledges the way that humans construct nature as part of their niche. I will explore this division between environment and nature further through the music of Cage in the next chapter.

Maturana and Varela use the term ontogeny to describe the relationship between process and form, stating that: Ontogeny is the history of structural change in a unity without loss of organization of that unity. This ongoing structural change occurs in the unity from moment to moment, either as a change

25 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979); Heinz von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 9. 26 H.R. Maturana, W.S. McCulloch and J.Y. Lettvin, “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain”, Proceedings of the Institute for Radio Engineers (1959), 1. 27 John Cage, Fontana Mix (1958), Variations III (1963), Variations VII (1966). 57

triggered by interactions coming from the environment in which it exists or as the result of its internal dynamics.28

In their vision of nature, information is a material process and an organism is not separable, chemically, biological or electromagnetically, from its environment. This inseparability of organism from environment is central to the way Cage’s 4’33” functions. In the composition the question of the authorship of music dissolves as sound is produced within the individual. In Lucier’s Vespers the insurability of participant and environment was structurally integrated into the composition allowing animal navigational processes to be directly instantiated within performers.

2.5 Gregory Bateson: Mind as Environment

Where Cage extends the production of music into the mind, Bateson extends the material ecology of the world into the construction of the mind.29 For Bateson the mind is formed through the recursive material connections that form our perception of our environment. He uses the example of a blind man to describe this relationship. He states: “Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded at my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick?”30 He states that: “Mental Process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.”31 These chains of determination connect the environment and the mind in co-adaptive evolution. At the heart of Bateson’s definition of mental process is the production of information through the perception of difference. He states that “Information consists of differences that make a difference,”32 and goes on to define how difference produces information: To produce news of difference, i.e., information, there must be two entities (real or imagined) such that the difference between them can be immanent in their mutual relationship; the

28 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Massachusetts: Shambahla Publications, 1987), 74. 29 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: D. Reidel, 1979). 30 Gregory Bateson, “Form Substance and Difference”, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1972), 434. 31 Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 68. 32 Ibid., 99. 58

whole affair must be such that news of their difference can be represented as difference inside some information-processing entity, such as a brain or, perhaps, a computer.33

For Bateson, the mind is formed through material contingency and difference and, because of this, necessarily exists beyond the biological confines of the brain and is functionally produced in the moment though environmental interaction. The idea of a provisional mind formed contingently with the environment divides compositions that respond contingently to their environment from those that are executed from a score that correlates graphic notation to specific pitches. 34

2.6 Contingency: Causality to Energy

This division between the fixed and the contingent coincides with a major change in the description of the natural world that occurred in science in the Twentieth Century. Wiener points out that Newtonian laws of cause and effect do a good job of predicting the motions of planets, but a poor job of describing other phenomena such as weather and living systems (and for Bateson, the mind) that operate contingently and combine an array of tangentially connected systems.35 For Wiener the complexity generated by living systems is better described in terms of information and energy transfer measurable in terms of statistical probability rather than causal equations. Terms such as clouds and turbulence, that are associated with weather, are, as Wiener states, “all terms referring not to one single physical situation but to a distribution of possible situations of which only one actual case is realized.”36 Contingent systems are open to the world, multiple and interconnected, and range freely between the living and the non-living. In Energy to Information, Bruce Clark identifies the shift between the Newtonian world (which was described in terms of closed systems of predictable causes and effects) to a thermodynamic one in which contingent system are described in terms of energy exchange. The thermodynamic description of the Universe in which leaky systems dissipated energies not only offers predictions for the behaviours of contingent systems

33 Ibid 68. 34 The way in which the mind, the brain and the environment produce music through recursive interaction is dramatically illustrated in the music of Maryanne Amacher discussed in Chapter Four. 35 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1948), 33. 36 Ibid. 59

but also describes aspects of adaption.37 As Bruce Clark states: “What dissipative systems can do is bootstrap their physical entropy into form, self-organize on the basis of their own noise.”38 Clark uses the word noise to describe energy that is made available for the organisation of form through dissipation. This particularly biological definition of noise also separates compositions that utilise self-organising processes from those that require a specific correlation between and score and sound.

2.7 Noise

In Cybernetics, noise was defined alternately as the interruption of signal and as a field from which meaning is produced by an individual entity, and these opposing theories of noise have had direct impact on the way sound has been used within the music compositions in this thesis. For biologists and anthropologists such as such as Varela, Maturana and Bateson, noise is a productive driver of self-organisation, while for Wiener, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, who worked in the evolving information and telecommunications industries, noise is understood as something that is associated with entropy and the corruption of signal and organisation. Figure 6 shows what is now known as the Shannon/Weaver model of communication in which noise is aligned with entropy manifesting as the disintegration of signal.

In Shannon and Weaver’s diagram, noise is not productive and is directly aligned with the degradation of signal. As media theorist Charlie Gere notes, “Shannon’s concept of communication is the exact inverse of Cage’s strategy in 4’33”, in that Cage seeks to show that, in Shannonian terms, noise is signal.”39 Cage’s model of communication has more in common with the complex interactions that form the world as opposed to the linear transactions of telecommunications systems. In the biological models presented by Varela and Maturana and in Bateson’s concept of mind, noise is a creative aspect of communication and key to the way that living systems and the mind adapt. As Peter Harries-Jones notes:

37 Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “From Thermodynamics to Virtuality,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 17-33. 38 Clarke and Dalrymple Henderson, “From Thermodynamics to Virtuality,” 28. 39 Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 97. 60

Bateson’s own ‘ecology of mind’ by contrast, assumed that noise generation was creative. In Bateson’s reinterpretation, noise was playful and creative; it became looped back into the overall system as part of the creation of new patterns. Bateson regarded noise as the equivalent to novelty, an analogue of playfulness.40

Bateson’s creative noise assumes that the world is populated with an array of multiple overlapping communications systems of both material and electronic communication. In this model of communication, noise becomes a field from which meaning is drawn by an observer. Ross Ashby demonstrates how noise is defined differently when viewed from the perspective of the sender or the receiver. If noise is defined from the perspective of the receiver, it becomes a productive field from which meaning is drawn.

FIGURE 6. Claude Shannon, “Schematic diagram of a general communication system”, from Warren Weaver and Claude Elwood Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1949), republished in paperback 1963.

If, on the other hand, we view noise from the perspective of the sender, we see it as the corruption of signal (as in the Shannon/Weaver model). Ashby used the example of a telephone system to illustrate this: “In a telephone system the meaning of the message

40 Peter Harries-Jones, A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 113. 61

received depends on the sender; in a sensory system the meaning depends on the receiver.”41 Noise, as a productive force, becomes a key difference between compositions that abandon the composer as the definitive sender of information and compositions that unfold adaptively in relationship to their material constraints and their environment and are turned into music by listeners. Compositions such as Cage’s 4’33” are directly aligned with a view of nature in which noise is productive by locating the production of the music within the listener rather than the musician.

2.8 Mechanisms from the Natural World

So far I have outlined how Cybernetics defined nature through feedback, homeostasis and thermodynamic systems. Now I will turn to the mechanisms that Cybernetics used to create analogies for these organisational processes. These devices not only provided physical and electronic analogues for systems seen in nature, but also presented mechanical ways to use structured processes to deliver indeterminate outcomes. Many of these analogies focused specifically on the relationships between organisms and their environments. As media theorist Jussi Parikka notes: Indeed, a whole cybernetic zoo emerged after the Second World War, ranging from William Grey Walter’s robot tortoises to Norbert Wiener’s moth automata that reacted to light (the moth working towards the light, the bug running away from the light) and Claude Shannon’s maze-solving rat devices to the interest in ant and bee communication that emerged in the midst of the Macy conferences.42

Connections between feedback, control systems and the natural world were used to define different types of connections to the world. Ross Ashby’s homeostat (1948) modelled biological processes and mimicked aspects of cognition, W. Grey Walter’s Machina speculatrix (1948/49) demonstrated how emergent behaviour could arise from the combination of simple recursive processes, and Gordon Pask’s Musicolour (1948/49) facilitated adaptive behaviour between machine and human. Homeostatic and stochastic processes in these devices turn up in a variety of compositions in the 1960s. These objects all generated behaviour associated with the natural world from physical

41 Ross Ashby, The Living Brain (London: Penguin Books, 1953). 42 Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota, 2010), 123. 62

materials, and by today’s standards were constructed from simple electronics. The works provide a basic material language that is easily adaptable to a compositional framework.

The three objects referred to in this section created metaphorical connections between self-organising processes and natural systems. Rather than collecting data, they presented metaphorical representations of biological processes. When discussing these objects, N. Katherine Hayles points out that metaphors can point to similarities only because in other respects their concepts are very different.43 The evidence that these systems governed the organisational aspects of the physical world was drawn from behavioural similarities between devices designed to replicate natural systems rather than from their ability to generate empirical measurable data. Hayles goes on to point out that metaphors are often used in very different ways within the arts and the sciences. Within science, metaphors are generally used to formulate theories that are validated through their predictive power. Within the arts, metaphors are more often used to generate poetic meaning between established forms and this is a key difference between the ways in which composers and scientists use these Cybernetic systems.44 Using these contingent systems within an experimental music context offers the possibility for more diverse ways to imagine the natural world.

The behaviour of these devices was the direct result of their material construction, and their operation was not separated from the world by digital representation. They were analogue and as such they operated under the same material circumstances as those who experienced them. Media theorist Sean Cubitt draws a distinction between analogue media and digital media, stating that: “Analogue media like photography create an analogy with the world observed by establishing a one-to-one correspondence between, in this example, light falling on a surface, and the light responsive chemicals applied to it.”45 Digital media, on the other hand, use a different system: “Instead of tracking the real in the manner of a phonograph needle agitated by the vibrations of the air, digital devices sample

43 N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 32. 44 Ibid., 36. 45 Sean Cubitt, “Analogue and Digital,” Theory, Culture and Society 23 no. 2/3, May (2006), 250. 63

ambient sound in discrete packages.”46 Cubitt frames the difference between the digital and analogue systems as the difference between a system that is inseparable from the world and a system that presents a representation of that world. The works that are at the centre of this research produce sound (like DeLanda’s thunderstorm discussed in the previous chapter) as the result of physical processes such as heat or movement or material composition. While computer compositional tools such as Iannis Xenakis’s GENDYN program (1991) use stochastic systems and algorithmic programming in a generative manner, they exist within computer environments and do not possess the power to respond materially within their environment. Xenakis's work depends on the need for digital computing to isolate itself from the environment. Digital computers convert sound into data and in order to access that sound the data has to be specifically correlated with a predesigned sound output. Because the voices of materials and spaces within the environment are not specifically active within this relationship, digital computing is beyond the scope of this research. This is further illustrated by Walter’s tortoises whose behaviour could not be computer modelled as it grew directly out of the physical environment. As Walter notes: “The system is extremely sensitive to small rhythmic transients.”47 These rhythmic transients were produced through environmental interaction –– a loose floorboard may subtly alter the course of a tortoise producing a significant change in its future interactions –– and because of this, what the tortoises did was inseparable from what they were made of, their environment, and their patterns of spatial exploration. In this sense Walter made a clear argument for material rather than digital modelling of environments.

While the Cybernetic devices of Ashby, Walter and Pask sought predictive power through analogy they were in themselves physical devices with their own material relationships to their environment. For composers such as Lucier, Cage and Tudor direct analogy was not relevant, instead their organisational systems offered the possibility of abandoning traditional musical structures in favour of processes observed in the natural world. Because the compositions discussed in this thesis developed out of

46 Cubitt, “Analogue and Digital,” 250. 47 Walter, “An Imitation of Life,” 45. 64

purpose-built physical systems — usually made on a composition by composition basis — it is worth considering the key material systems used within Cybernetics to identify these organisational processes observed within the natural world.

2.9 Ross Ashby homeostat (1948)

Ross Ashby’s homeostat was a system designed to produce stability against outside disturbance. Ashby presented his device as analogous to a variety of self-regulating biological systems, aspects of social interaction and processes of human cognition.48 The homeostat demonstrated how a simple system of networked electronics could approximate the workings of a variety of natural processes. The device did not operate hierarchically; instead it produced stability from the decentralised interaction of multiple parts. The device self-regulated its behaviour and, like the processes it sought to imitate, was reflective of its material circumstances rather than the will of its inventor.

FIGURE 7. Ross Ashby’s homeostat (1948). The four units in this image were networked together to demonstrate the principle of homeostasis. The system was networked in such a way as to generate stability against outside disturbance.

48 Ross Ashby, Design For a Brain (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1960). 65

The homeostat consisted of four networked units arranged in a square formation. Each unit was made from a series of magnets, potentiometers, commutators and stepping switches and each contained a pivoted bar magnet which, if disturbed, would send a DC current proportional to the angle of the magnet to the other three identical units. This current would alter the angle of the other three magnets which would in turn relay a proportional current to their neighbours. If the whole system tended towards instability (all the magnets tilted beyond a pre-set limit) the excess current that this generated would trip a uniselector switch that would introduce one of twenty-five random current values to the system. This would effectively reset the system, which would in turn react to these values in an attempt to maintain stability. Together the system worked to stabilise the angles of all the magnets, creating what Ashby called “an ultra stable system.” (see figure 8).49

FIGURE 8. Diagram of Ross Ashby’s homeostat 1948. Nathan Thompson (2016).

Although the homeostat contained no central processing unit, through these two processes it maintained a dynamic equilibrium, providing a model of a decentralised system that maintained stability within its environment.50 Ashby

49 Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain, 80. 50 Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 105. A more detailed description of the homeostat is included in Ashby, Design for a Brain, 100. 66

created the homeostat within the context of psychiatry and believed that the device provided an analogy for a wide range of cognitive, biological and social processes. While the device seemed to describe the way in which a number of physiological systems operated, many had difficulty with the idea that it described cognition. Within the Cybernetic community, Warren McCulloch, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Karl Lasley and Julian Bigelow found the idea that this device was anything like an organism that modelled organic behaviour or survival problematic. They asserted that an organism was inherently goal-seeking and that “the homeostat strove to do nothing.”51 Furthermore, Ashby’s claims that the homeostat described cognitive processes were not substantiated by the key physiologists whose work he drew on, including Claude Bernard and Walter Cannon who developed theories of homeostasis to describe “lower level automatic functions” within biological systems.52 Peter Asaro also raises a key issue with Ashby’s use of the word ‘adaption’ pointing out that Ashby conflates adaption with equilibrium. Asaro asserts that: “The idea of equating adaptation and equilibrium appears to be unique to Ashby, though it bears strong similarities to ideas such as ‘negative feedback’ which were being developed by other cyberneticists at the time.”53 Ashby’s conflation of adaption, equilibrium and negative feedback allows him to selectively combine language from Wiener’s information theory and Cannon’s theories of biological homeostasis in order to explain cognition in terms of a series mechanical exchanges. Hayles, who writes extensively on the problematic relationships between mechanical metaphors and biological processes within Cybernetics, draws attention to several assumptions inherent within the links Ashby made between the homeostat and cognition. Among them are, firstly, the problem that Ashby used a simple machine to describe the functioning of extremely complex organisms, and secondly, that the homeostat simultaneously represented both organism and environment in such a

51 Stefano Franchi, “Life, Death and Resurrection of W. Ross Ashby’s Homeostat,” in The Search for a Theory of Cognition: Early Mechanisms and New Ideas, ed. Stefano Franchi (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V, 2011), 13. 52 Ibid., 13 and 15. 53 Peter M. Asaro, “From Mechanisms of Adaption to Intelligence Amplifiers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby,” in The Mechanical Mind in History, ed. Phil Husbands, Owen Holland & Michael Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 160. The other Cyberneticists referred to include Norbert Wiener and John Von Neumann. 67

way that the organism could never adapt outside of its system.54 Although Ashby identified a mechanism that produced stability, the biological processes that he sought to represent were (unlike the device) materially linked to a multitude of other systems. When later used within a musical context, the mechanical representation of nature or cognition was less of an issue as the compositions never sought to directly replicate these processes in mechanical form.

Current interest in Ashby’s work still revolves around the premise that increasingly complex use of stochastic and algorithmic processes can provide an uncanny bridge between what are defined as living and non-living systems. Ashby’s homeostat is still cited in fields such as robotics, physiology and neuroscience as a forerunner of machine cognition. This can be seen in the in the robotics work of Ezequiel Di Paolo and again in the computational cognition of Tom Froese and Peter Asaro whose work continues to locate Ashby’s homeostat within debates around cognition and artificial intelligence.55

Stefano Franchi uses Ashby’s homeostat to discuss issues of machine cognition as he acknowledges the homeostat has more to do with the organisation of materials than with cognition. At the heart of the system, Franchi identifies a double feedback loop that mediates exchanges between organism and environment. He states that: “The primary feedback loop takes care of the system’s reaction to the environment in ordinary circumstances; the secondary time-delayed feedback loop changes the parameters of the primary loop in order to accommodate the system to changes in the environment.”56 Franchi frames his description of the double feedback loop in terms of organism and environment, as Ashby did, but what he is describing bears more resemblance to Bateson’s definition of stochastic process as “a sequence of events that combine a random component with a selective process so that only certain outcomes of the random process are allowed to endure.”57 The sense that Ashby’s homeostat represents an organism and its environment works, not because the system necessarily describes a particular

54 N. Katherine Hayles, “Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics,” Configurations 2, no. 3 (1994), 454. 55 Franchi, “Life, Death and Resurrection of W. Ross Ashby’s Homeostat,” 11. 56 Ibid. 57 Bateson, Mind and Nature, 230. 68

cognitive or biological function, but because the homeostat enacts a process that suggests behavioural similarities across living and mechanical systems. The composers in the next chapter do not use homeostatic feedback to represent cognition, but the ability of these processes to behave like living systems is central to the way in which they reference nature.

2.10 W. Grey Walter Machina speculatrix (1948/49)

This theme of a self-organising mechanical nature was continued in the work of W. Grey Walter. Walter’s Machina speculatrix, or electronic tortoises as they were referred to, demonstrated how the complexity seen in the natural world could be generated by multiple simple contingent processes. As media theorist Jussi Parikka identifies, this change in focus within cybernetics represents a shift from “intelligence as the information processing of an intelligent machine, to intelligence as a result of numerous simple parts interacting.”58 The concept of intelligence as the result of multiple interacting elements, as opposed to a singular complex machine, continues to play a prominent role in the way in which people interact with their world, whether this occurs on a physiological level or on a social one. Nevertheless, the idea of of the individual as an autonomous decision maker persists. Walter’s tortoises not only framed intelligence as something produced by multiple interacting parts but also defined intelligence in terms of movement or what these devices do. If we sidestep the animal analogies and the assertion of social behaviour and mating rituals that Walter overlaid onto his tortoises, they highlighted the way in which material devices could simulate adaptive behaviour.59

Walter’s electronic tortoises used a combination of movement and recursive feedback processes to enact relationships with each other and their environment. The tortoises, which Walter proclaimed as “a new inorganic species,” were built

58 Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010), 135. 59 W. Grey Walter, “An Imitation of Life” Scientific America, 182, no. 5 (1950), 42 69

between 1948 and 1951.60 He built the first two in 1948 and named them Elsie and Elmer and in 1951 six more were built.61 They were small-wheeled objects that looked like the body of a vacuum cleaner with two back wheels and one front wheel that were driven by an electric motor with a steering spindle.62 When a tortoise hit an object its outer shell would flex, connecting a circuit and triggering an oscillating motion that would send the device in a new direction. Attached to the steering spindles were photo-sensitive cells and a light allowing them to project and receive light from the direction in which they moved. The varying quantities of light received from other tortoises altered the speed and direction in which individual tortoises moved. Moderate light would cause a tortoise to move slower and bright light would cause it to swerve. The tortoises were also equipped with recursive processes that would change their behaviour in response to inclined surfaces.63

Because of his background in psychiatry, Walter overlaid a variety of social values onto his devices, stating that: “Although they possess only two sensory organs and two electronic nerve cells, they exhibit free will.”64

60 Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1. 61 Ibid., 43. 62 Ibid. 63 W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain (London: Penguin Books, 1953), 241. See also Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, 43. 64 Walter, “An Imitation of Life,” 42. 70

FIGURE 9. Grey Walter, ‘Electronic Tortoise’ - Machina speculatrix 1948/49

Walter extends this description of free will into social and even courtship rituals while at the same time acknowledging the ease with which reflexive mechanisms can be used to draw similarities across psychological and ecological boundaries. He states that: “Any psychological or ecological situation in which a reflexive mechanism exists, may result in behaviour which will seem, at least, to suggest self-consciousness or social consciousness.”⁠65 Although Walter designed his tortoises to describe aspects of social behaviour, it is the rhythms and patterns produced by the reflexive mechanisms that he uses to draw connections between the devices and cognition. He draws direct connections between rhythm and thought stating that: “The alpha rhythms are certainly associated with the forms of ideas, with the nature of the images set up by the thinking brain.”66 Walter never really demonstrates how the alpha rhythms of the brain are

65 Walter, The Living Brain, 86. 66 Ibid., 134. 71

connected to images, thoughts and, more generally, cognition; instead he shows physiological connections between emotion and the rhythms of brain waves. In discussing Walter’s work, media theorist John Johnston avoids Walter’s extrapolation of free will and mating rituals, instead placing emphasis on the connections Walter makes to natural systems at a design level. Johnston states that: “Walter pursues his design principle at the material level of the specific components and mechanisms that he works with, and that nature often does the same — hence a parallelism rather than a form of biomimeticism.”67 Walter used pattern and rhythm to draw connections across material and human systems, not just through the tortoises but with his early use of EEG technology this technology. This design extended beyond the components and mechanisms to visual connections drawn between individual activity and oscilloscope patterns.68

In contrast, American composer Alvin Lucier made use of EEG machines in his composition Music For Solo Performer (1965) to turn alpha waves into music. For Lucier, the fact that the electromagnetic activity of the brain could be externalised and potentially controlled formed the basis of the composition and any patterns generated were open for subjective interpretation by the audience.69 Music For Solo Performer uses sound to present connections between individual activity and environment without the overlay of specific images or behaviours, demonstrating that the significance of pattern and rhythm is found in the fact the composition can demonstrate the way an individual is connected to the environment. This work is discussed in more detail in chapter three.

Through their devices and compositions, both Walter and Lucier promote a view of the mind as environmentally and materially located and perceivable through pattern and rhythm. Walter acknowledges the significance of pattern and rhythm that result from his cybernetic devices when he states that “pattern is the raw material of order” and “where there is pattern there is significance.”70 In contrast, for Lucier, it is enough that a device can show a responsive connection between brain and environment.

67 John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics and the New AI (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 51. 68 Walter, The Living Brain, 63. 69 Lucier’s Music For Solo Performer involves using an EEG machine to harvest alpha waves from the brain and output them to actuators that play a series of percussive instruments. This composition is discussed in more detail in Chapter Three. 70 Walter, The Living Brain, 65 and 67. 72

As with Ashby’s homeostat and Lucier’s Music For Solo Performer, the rhythms and patterns that Walter associates with the living are dependent on spatially located physical materials that present the natural world as recursively constructed between the mind and its environment.

While the tortoises may not have provided an accurate representation of a tortoise or the variety of mating rituals that Walter associated with them, they serve to highlight the way in which contingent material systems decentralise individual agency and produce behaviour unique to their material composition. If, as Johnson asserts, these tortoises were intelligence produced by physical design then Walter’s work also demonstrates the extent to which recursive material connections impact on the decisions that individuals make on a day-to-day basis. What Walter failed to acknowledge was his own role in assigning meaning to systems that he created. Cybernetist Gordon Pask, on the other hand, created devices that implicated performers and observers within their operational structures and in this respect they share more in common with compositions such as Lucier’s Vespers.

2.11 Gordon Pask Musicolour (1953)

Pask developed a series of devices that used organisational systems to produce emergent behaviour. Rather than attempting to provide direct analogies for physiological processes, these devices enacted co-adaptive relationships between the device, the participant and the environment. Through devices such as Musicolour, Colloquy of Mobiles and his experiments with chemical computers, Pask identified concepts that underpinned self-organisation and that he applied across social, material and biological forms.71 He developed terms such as “relevance criteria,” and “aesthetically potent environments” to apply cybernetic thinking across material and social systems.72 For Pask, relevance criteria and aesthetically potent environments became regulating processes that he used to describe ion rich chemical solutions and performance venues and as such they provide useful tools with which to view compositions that also utilise

71 Peter Cariani, “To Evolve an Ear: Epistemological Implications of Gordon Pask’s Electrochemical Devices,” Systems Research 10, no. 3 (1993), 10. 72 Cariani, “To Evolve an Ear,” 2; Gordon Pask, “A Comment, A Case History and a Plan” Cybernetics, Art and Ideas ed. Jasia Reichardt (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 77. 73

aspects of environmental self-organising systems. Producing music through systems that rely on environmental engagement was central to the way compositions such as Lucier’s Vespers brought animal navigational systems into music and, likewise, Lucier’s For Solo Performer drew scalar connections between electromagnetic alpha waves and electromagnetic earth systems.73

FIGURE 10. Gordon Pask, The Colloquy of Mobiles, 1968, Installation view, ICA London 1968, Cybernetic Serendipity. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de

Pask, working within cognitive research, was primarily interested in creating devices that facilitated learning through symmetrical adaptation. For Pask, symmetrical adaptation meant developing devices or environments that changed behaviour in relation to participants or audiences. This meant he was interested in co-adaptive relationships between the device, the participant and the environment. Because of the ability of cybernetic concepts to cross disciplinary boundaries and Pask’s interest in the theatre and the arts, several of his devices found homes within art environments. Colloquy of Mobiles (1968) was exhibited in Jasia Reichardt’s influential art and technology show

73 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 83. 74

Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) and Musicolour was toured though a series of English theatres.74

Pask explored the idea of symmetrical adaptation through a variety of devices both organic and inorganic, computer and social. Through his chemical computers he demonstrated how a chemical solution could develop basic hearing faculties through electrochemical systems that recursively rewarded the recognition of specific pitches with ion rich solutions.75 Concepts of symmetrical adaptation were also developed through early computer devices, such as SAKI and Eurcates, that taught typing and general knowledge proficiency.

One of Pask’s devices used music to promote symmetrical adaptation. Musicolour facilitated a co-adaptive relationship between performers and their environment through the use of sound and light. It is different to later devices such as SAKI and Eurcates because it was not designed with specific educational goals in mind. As Andrew Pickering points out: “A Musicolour performance had no fixed goal beyond the very general one of achieving some synesthetic effect, and Pask made no claim to understanding what was required for this.”76 This lack of a specific goal made the device behave more like compositions by Cage and Tudor which were designed to produce ‘new music’. Musicolour was exhibited within music clubs and theatres, debuting at the Pomegranate Club in 1953, and was subsequently toured through Northern England.77 Although the piece took the form of an immersive sound and light show, Pask was far more interested how light and sound and movement could be synthesised to create a co-adaptive environment.78

The basic version of Musicolour consisted of a microphone that picked up the sound of a performer or group of performers and fed this sound through a series of audio filters that were tuned to specific frequencies. From here, these sounds were assigned to a

74 Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, 320. 75 Cariani, “To Evolve an Ear,” 29. 76 Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, 320. 77 Ibid., 316. 78 Ibid., 315. 75

combination of light forms that were projected in different colours and intensities onto a large screen located in front of the audience and performers.79

The machine would repeat the performer’s musical notes in a sequence of these projections and then individual performers, could repeat the sequence on their instrument. Using a series of electronic filters and capacitors, after a few repetitions, the device would become ‘bored’ triggering an electronic circuit that would randomly alter an aspect of the sequence. Ralph Glanvile points out that boredom was a key facilitator of adaption within the system: “Thus, boredom would drive a change, and the lights and musicians would come to perform as an ensemble, jointly fighting Musicolour’s boredom construction and the musicians’ wish for an audio-visual coherence.”80

FIGURE 11. Gordon Pask, Musicolour 1954, Bolton’s Theatre Club, South Kensington.

Functionally, Musicolour used a stochastic process to promote adaptation. The repetition of sequences maintained the engagement of the performers until boredom promoted adaption through the addition of random variation. By changing the sequence in response to repetition, while at other times following the performer’s lead, the device used symmetrical adaption to produce music that neither device nor participant could produce on their own. Interaction designer and artist Ursman Haque notes that:

79 Pask, “A Comment, a Case History and a Plan,” 77. 80 Ranulph Glanville, “And He Was Magic,” Kybernetics 30, no. 6 (2001), 652 - 673. 76

“Musicians who worked with it in the 1950s treated it very much like another onstage participant.”81 The device had a variety of iterations. In the version at London’s Bolton Theatre, the device also responded to the movement of a series of marionettes and, at a subsequent show at Valerie Howden’s Theatre Club, the device was reconfigured to interact with a troupe of dancers.82 In this way, symmetrical adaptation becomes the process that allows the work to cross media and disciplines while still maintaining itself as a discrete performance.

Pask thought of these performances as environments and Musicolour forms part of a specific investigation in what he called “aesthetically potent environments.”83 Pask defined an aesthetically potent environment as an environment that facilitated symmetrical adaptation while providing enough variety to maintain the engagement of participants.84 An aesthetically potent environment must fulfil certain requirements. It had to offer “sufficient controllable novelty” while not swamping the observer with too much novelty and it must contain forms that could be interpreted or reacted to and these must in turn engage the participant in a form of adaptive dialogue.85

To facilitate this environment, Musicolour translated Ashby’s homeostatic processes into an environmental musical system. Incorporating musicians within the operation of the device implicates them in a network of interacting systems or, as systems researcher and writer Peter Cariani describes it, “a network of elements (a society of actors) adaptively constructing their own observables, their own ways of seeing the world, as they interact and communicate with each other.”86 In this society of actors, distinctions between musician and device are blurred as each actively composes the behaviour of the other. Cariani continues, stating that in Musicolour, “the currency is food rather than electrical current”, emphasising the way in which the device was maintained by the calories and energy that fed the human elements of the device.87 Musicolour used light and sound in a way that placed emphasis on the role of environmental interaction in constructing experience. Pask notes that musical devices that engage in this kind of environmental

81 Usman Haque, “The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask” Architectural Design 77:4 (2007), 56. 82 Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, 317. 83 Pask, “A Comment, a Case History and a Plan,” 77. 84 Pask, “A Comment, a Case History and a Plan,” 77. 85 Ibid. 86 Cariani, “To Evolve an Ear,” 29. 87 Ibid. 77

adaptation decentralise the role of the composer by positioning the production of music as a conversational process. He states that: “It does not seem useful to make a rigid distinction between the types of mental process that go on when a man occupies these different roles ... The composer is, in some sense, mentally akin to the performer and the listener; the man who views a picture is mentally akin to the artist who painted it.”88 Pask’s “aesthetically potent environments” adapted Ashby’s “law of requisite variety” which Ashby associated with any system that exhibited adaption into aspects of lived experience.89 Ashby’s gridded sets of potential possible outcomes for specific situations became an environment of unspecified unrealised possibilities designed to maintain engagement and facilitate adaptation.90 Pask’s “aesthetically potent environments” presented performance environments in which observers and participants were embedded in webs of homeostatic processes and feedback systems. Musicolour enacted networks of perception, knowledge and physical materials, providing a model for musical production that was directly implicated within the patterns and rhythms of the world.

Another key concept explored in Pask’s aesthetically potent environments was the concept of ‘relevance criteria.’91 Relevance criteria were the choices made within aesthetically potent environments that would allow individuals to solve real world problems and Pask was interested to see if devices could be constructed that would not only make choices to further their own goals but would also actively evolve the sensory capacities to do this.92 This research resulted in his development of “chemical computers”. Through these chemical computers, Pask demonstrated how metal ions could perform in ways usually associated with organic matter.93 Pask’s chemical computers used a system in which current was passed though an aqueous solution that would fix metal ions in the solution forming metallic tendrils that would grow off wires that were suspended in the solution. A system was set up so that tendril growth in response to sound would be rewarded with the enrichment of the solution with higher concentrations of metal ions, thus further stimulating growth. The system was refined to the point where a microphone was attached and the system caused it to develop tendrils

88 Pask, “A Comment, A Case History and a Plan,” 76. 89 Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1957), 206. 90 Ibid. 91 Cariani, “To Evolve an Ear,” 2. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 3. 78

in response different tones. Pask had demonstrated that through recursive processes a chemical solution could evolve its own sensors, in this case something similar to an ear.94

While Pask’s chemical computers managed to evolve the capacity to respond to specific pitches, the wider concept of how relevance criteria are evolved socially began to be explored in Musicolour. For Pask the success of Musicolour was defined by its ability to produce “musical coherence” which Pask defined as a requirement to sustain the engagement of musicians.95 Musicolour created music by spreading its relevance criteria between multiple participants all fighting the same device to achieve a negotiated ‘musical coherence’ and, as such, Musicolour represents a fundamentally different approach to aleatoric musical composition. Musicolour evolved its own relevance criteria through a process of symmetrical adaptation that occurred between participants, the device, and the their relationship to each other but the overall success of the device was still judged according to Pask’s notion of what constituted “musical coherence,” and Pask claimed that the device struggled to achieve this.96

Musicolour represents a Cybernetic system in which relevance criteria evolve in relation to an environment and produce music that could not otherwise have been produced. The adaptive processes identified in Musicolour and electro-chemically in Pask’s ‘chemical computers’ demonstrate how an environment can produce a degree of organisational autonomy independent of individuals. Ironically, for musicians such as Cage, Tudor and Lucier musical coherence was less of a concern, as they sort to either bring sounds that were outside of music into music, or to highlight processes associated with the natural world. Cage, in particular designed compositions that used Cybernetic systems to destroy a concept of musical coherence in order to break the musical habits of performers but as with Musicolour using Cybernetic systems provided a way to make music that adapted beyond individual performers.

Cybernetics defined nature in terms of its organisational properties and it is this propensity towards self-organisation that Cage, Lucier and Tudor capitalise on in the

94 Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, 324. 95 Cariani, “To Evolve an Ear,” 20. 96 Ibid. 79

links that they draw between composition and nature discussed in the following chapter. Wiener defined life in terms of a tendency toward increased complexity through the relationships forged between multiple contingent systems. Bateson divided the world into systems of contingency (cretura), which he associated with the living, and systems that behaved causally though forces and impacts (pleroma). Both described nature in terms of information systems that drew materially from thermodynamic energy exchanges. The Cybernetic devices in this chapter all embodied aspects of energy and information exchange derived from these Twentieth Century scientific descriptions of the world. The world of contingent systems and self-organisation was at the heart of Cybernetic descriptions of life. The primary systems that facilitated life were homeostatic. These systems provided the stability upon which adaptation was built.

Ashby’s early development of the homeostat provided a mechanical analogy that he used to describe a variety of life processes, including aspects of cognition. While not really explaining cognition, it provided a model that demonstrated how material systems could operate non-hierarchically. The idea of using self-organising systems to interrogate philosophical and spatial connections in the environment was central to the way these systems were used by Cage, Tudor and Lucier. Walter’s tortoises were one of a number of devices within Cybernetics used to promote the idea that life could emerge from the combination of multiple simple recursive processes and this was another theme central to cybernetic descriptions of the natural world. The concept of music that was emergent from multiple interacting parts can be seen in many Twentieth Century compositions.97 Pask distilled concepts such as homeostasis and emergent behaviour into mechanical forms that questioned where people start and the environment begins. His devices were part of a second order Cybernetics that proposed a view of nature in which people are not separate and are materially implicated within how and what they see, and echoed Bateson’s description of mind as something that exists in-between the body’s physiological systems and its interactions with the world. This concept of the individual as actively implicated within their construction of the world is also highlighted in Cage’s 4’33” in which audience members actively construct their own music through listening. Cybernetic ideas entered avant-garde music through both philosophical and technological channels. In the next chapter, I look specifically at how multiple recursive

97 Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians (1978) ECM 1129 2301 129, compact disc; Tony Conrad, Four Violins (1964 released 1996), Table of the Elements 17, vinyl LP. 80

systems were used by Lucier to produce music that engaged directly with environmental systems. Concepts of self-organisation implicit within Cybernetics and their mechanical representations of the natural world were used in different ways by Cage, Tudor and Lucier for different reasons and I will explore this in the following chapter.

Chapter Three Nature in the Compositions of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier

3.1 Systems in Music: Mechanisms and Organisation

This chapter looks at how cybernetic mechanisms and concepts entered the compositions of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier and how this contributed to a view of nature that was defined in terms of its organisational properties. Through the use of physical systems their compositions integrated aspects of self-organisation that embodied the indeterminate systems that they associated with the way nature operated. Their compositions borrowed technically and conceptually from Cybernetics and information theory.

On a technical level, cybernetic mechanisms entered the work of Cage and Tudor through assistance provided by Bell Laboratories who at the time were looking to artists to provide ideas for the use and development of new electronic technologies.1 Bell Laboratories employed prominent figures within Cybernetics such as Norbert Wiener but also composers such as James Tenney who ran workshops for artists in computer programming.2 Through these connections, artists and composers became familiar with early algorithmic and stochastic programing derived from natural systems. Cage also relied on technical assistance from early electronic music pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron who were also drawing connections between technology and nature. As music writer Thom Holmes states, “They were both influenced by mathematician Norbert Weiner’s book Cybernetics: or Communication and Control in the Animal and Machine (1948) and his connections between nature and technology are carried over into their approach to circuit design”, and this is reflected in their descriptions of electronic circuits as

1 Douglas Kahn, “James Tenney at Bell Labs” in Mainframe Experimentalism ed. Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 135. 2 Ibid, 131.

“peculiar nervous systems.” 3 This connection between nature, neural activity and self- organisation can also be seen in Tudor’s descriptions of his electro-acoustic compositions in which components exhibit personality within electronic ecosystems, and in Lucier’s appropriation of cybernetic technologies to respond to animal navigational systems.4 For Cage, cybernetic technologies allowed him access to life’s organisational systems. Yet, as Douglas Kahn notes, technology also allowed Cage to bring increasingly smaller and smaller unheard sounds into the realm of music, audibly expanding the range of the perception of nature and, in the process, creating a version of nature that was dependent on electronic mediation.5

On a conceptual level, debates within Cybernetics about whether noise should be defined as the degradation of signal or as a productive field from which meaning was drawn are central to the change in the location of the production of music from the performer to the listener that is inherent within Cage’s compositions such as 4’33”. These debates further contributed to Cage’s consideration of noise in his formulation of silence.6 Cage’s writing on the interdependent nature of form, organisation and method has echoes within the interdependence of form and organisation used to describe living systems in the writings of Weiner and the biological cybernetics of Maturana and Varela.7

3.2 New Systems: New Music

Cybernetic concepts and technologies allowed Cage, Tudor and Lucier to develop new musical systems that responded directly to the indeterminate complexity they saw

3 Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music (New York: Routledge, 2002),105. 4 David Tudor, “David Tudor and Larry Austin: A Conversation April 3, 1989, Denton, Texas,” accessed 3 November 2015, http://davidtudor.org/Articles/austin.html ; Alvin Lucier, Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 84. 5 Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press: 1999), 160. 6 Peter Harries-Jones, A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 113. A 1969 issue of information theorist Marshal McLuhan’s the Dew line newsletter came with a deck of playing cards called ‘The Distance Early Warning Deck’, each card with a quotation from an artist or thinker. A card dedicated to Cage contains the inscription: “[S]ilence is all the sound of the environment at once.” Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford: Berg. 2006), 101. 7 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Sphere Books, 1968); H.R. Maturana, W.S. McCulloch, J.Y. Lettvin, “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain”, Proceedings of the Institute for Radio Engineers (1940); John Cage, For the Birds: in Conversation with Daniel Charles (New York: Marion Boyars, 1976), 36.

reflected in the natural world. Each produced compositional systems that produced music through recursive connections between people and their environments. This presented a radical departure from traditional forms of musical composition. Traditional forms of musical notation were based on Pythagorean harmony and could not produce music that responded adaptively to its environment. Listening to the sounds of blacksmiths hammering anvils, Pythagoras had separated sounds from their materials and divided them into the mathematical ratios that formed the basic structure upon which western music developed. Frances Dyson notes that: In the development of Pythagorean harmony, the tone was removed from its material sounding as consonant or discordant, and considered, like number, as a pure relation. This allowed it to pass between actual materiality–avoiding any designation of pitch or frequency, for instance, and operating instead on a purely arithmetical plane–as a relation between different frequencies that would be considered harmonic or dissonant.8

This arithmetical annexation of sound amounted to an artificial separation of sounds as can be considered music from the sounds that made up life. Although Dyson mistakenly conflates intervals and tones, the standardisation inherent within the European system of notation gave music reproducibility and portability while separating it from the materially located rhythms of life. From Pythagoras forward, any music written about anvils or blacksmiths would have more to do with these numerical ratios than with the sounds and rhythms of metallurgy. Allowing sound to self-organise from its material constraints and placing it in a context where it can be considered as music is a way to recuperate the rhythms of the world as music.

Abandoning compositional systems that correlated mathematical ratios to the sounds of life for the processes that organised life had immediate ramifications. In the compositional methods discussed in this chapter the individual sounds produced were indeterminate; dictated by a process unfolding in real-time. This placed the composer, performer, and audience in a situation where they would all hear the sound produced by the performance for the first time. This shifted the focus of a performance from playing to the experience of listening to a process unfolding. As Kahn notes, 4’33” shifted “…the production of music from the site of utterance to that of audition.”9 Compositions whose form unfolded in real-time also necessarily varied from

8 Frances Dyson, The Tone of our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy and Ecology (London: MIT Press, 2014), 5. 9 Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, 58.

performance to performance. The radical split between the composition as a device that facilitated the reproduction of sound and the composition as a generative device that promoted listening to the environment is highlighted in Pierre Hughye’s 4’33” (2003) in which the sounds produced during a performance of Cage’s 4’33” were recorded before being transcribed and performed on a flute.10 Cage’s original composition was designed so that music would be created by the audience’s attention to the sounds that surrounded them. By transcribing the sounds back into musical notation, Hughye exposes the rupture between music that is generated from its environment and individual notes that are specified as music by the composer. This highlights how 4’33” was not only a radical attempt to introduce the sounds of the world into music but a definitive line in the sand between these two ways of composing music. These new compositions generated musical form through their execution, the musical language of each composition was written on a composition by composition basis and performances often relied as much on their physical construction as on their graphic notation as scores increasingly incorporated circuit diagrams and materials lists.11

Once Cage had included all the sounds of the world into music conceptually it seemed there could be very little room for new music. Yet within the territory that lay in the wake of 4’33”, systems that generated music in relation to the environment took many different forms. While Cage, Tudor and Lucier adopted musical systems that, as Cage put it, sought to “imitate nature in its methods and organization,”12 the diversity of the natural world and the social and cultural frameworks from which they viewed it meant that their visions of nature would always be partial. All three made compositions that emphasised different aspects of nature. Cage’s definition of nature, for instance, combined his readings in Zen Buddhism, in which a detachment from ego offers the potential for the individual to be one with the environment, with Cybernetic definitions of noise.13 He was also influenced by the writings of Nineteenth Century naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who held a particular vison of nature that drew distinct lines

10 Caroline Christov-Bakargiev, Pierre Huyghe (Italy: Skira, 2004), 186. 11 Sounds produced by compositions such as Bandoneon! and Variations IV included in 9 Evenings were reliant on their site-specific material construction; Catherine Morris, 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966 (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2006), 9. 12 John Cage, For the Birds: In Conversation With Daniel Charles, 36. 13 Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: Penguin, 2012).

between the human subject and the natural world.14 Tudor, on the other hand, referenced Rudolph Steiner’s writings on music that emphasised listening to the natural world and privileging the act of audition over what Steiner saw as the non-living structures of formalised music.15 Tudor’s approach to nature is reflected in his electroacoustic compositions that used audio feedback to produce sound through recursive interactions with the environment. Lucier’s compositions also used feedback, but in order to highlight connections between specific naturally occurring phenomena such as electromagnetism, neural activity and atmospheric systems and performances such as Vespers relied on navigational systems that utilised ‘relevance criteria’ at both a personal and group level.16 Cage, Lucier and Tudor exploited organisational systems that they derived from science to describe what they saw in nature and although the sources that they drew from were diverse the material systems that feature in their compositions were philosophically and technically influenced by Cybernetic concepts.

3.3 John Cage: Systems-Based Detachment

John Cage used Cybernetic organisational systems in his compositions to draw together often seemingly disparate philosophical influences. His approach to Zen Buddhism emphasised oneness with nature though detachment from the ego; Cage states: “The taste of Zen for me comes from the admixture of humour, intransigence, and detachment.”17 His detachment from ego was achieved by incorporating indeterminate processes that he saw in nature into his compositions and thus Cage’s ‘nature’ becomes directly aligned with this notion of detachment. Cage picked up on this idea of nature as something accessible through detachment in the writings of David Henry Thoreau. In the preface to Empty Words entitled “Lecture on Weather,” Cage discusses Thoreau’s approach to listening to the sounds of nature. Emphasising the importance of approaching sounds with an empty mind, he states: “Other great men have vision. Thoreau had None. Each day his eyes and ears were open and empty to see and hear

14 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 93. 15 Douglas Kahn, “Something More Than Interesting: David Tudor and The Sound of Anthroposophy” (unpublished paper by Khan presented at the conference “The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture, 2001”). 16 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal (California: University of California Press 2013), 83. 17 John Cage, “Autobiographical Statement” John Cage.org. (1990), accessed 27 July 2016. http://johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html

the world he lived in.”18 Cage identifies in Thoreau the idea that in order to apprehend nature all one has to do is empty one’s mind, allowing nature to fill the vacuum. This concept of nature entering the empty mind assumes a separation between the mind and nature. This is reinforced by Cage’s often repeated desire to allow sounds to be themselves, which assumes that sounds somehow occur outside of the hearing mechanisms and the social and perceptual biases from which they are created. The sounds that he produced through his compositions were never ‘themselves’: they were produced as a result of the systems that generated them. The concept of the separate nature that Cage and Thoreau promote through their writings is familiar to anyone who has purchased a bottle of filtered water with a mountain on the label. Thoreau states: “Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn or pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land.”19 Although they also regard it as something we should attempt to get closer to, Thoreau and Cage both present this view of nature in the wild as nevertheless sullied by our presence. Nature will be nature only if we leave it alone.

For Cage, self-organising processes that delivered indeterminate outcomes were used to extend his concept of nature into politics. He argued that Thoreau’s sense of conscience was missing from the political leadership of the time and that the issue of conscience in politics was best dealt with by replacing people with process. He believed in providing people with access to ‘utilities’, such as water and electricity, in order that they might become self-governing. Consistent with Thoreau’s statement “[t]hat the government that governs best governs least”, Cage proposes self-organisation as a way to fight political corruption. 20

For Cage, the systems of nature were also understood through the lens of science. The phrase “art should imitate nature in its manner and operation”, which he adapted from art writer Ananda Coomaraswamy, is often quoted; less quoted is the following sentence in which nature should also be understood in relation to advances in science. Cage states:

18 John Cage, “Preface to Lecture on Weather,” in Empty Words (Middletown USA: Wesleyan Press, 1973), 3. 19 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, 93. 20 Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or Life in the Woods and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience [1849] (Sunnyvale California: Loki's Publishing, 2012); John. Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 83.

I have for many years accepted, and still do, the doctrine about Art occidental and oriental, set forth by Ananda Coomaraswamy in his book The Transformation of Nature and Art, that the function of Art is to imitate Nature in “her manner and operation.” Our understanding of “her manner and operation” changes according to advances in science.21

Cage’s understanding of nature was changing according to advances in both information theory and Cybernetics, but this science was also changing. In Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Bruno Latour argues that science and nature become mutually defining. The instruments that science develops to measure nature are validated by nature’s ability to confirm their predictions, thus affording their continued use.22

Cage was inventing musical systems by selectively drawing on the recent science of Cybernetics that was also in the process of inventing its own way to define nature through its protocols, social institutions and instruments. In An Attempt at a Compositionalist Manifesto, Latour points out how social and political ecologies also defined the milieu of experimental music into which Cage brought these ideas. In particular, Latour singles out the way that 4’33” relied on the avant-garde paradigm of overturning the past to reveal a deeper truth, which implied notions of progress by signposting who was more ‘progressive’ and who was more ‘reactionary.’23 Kahn also points out that 4’33” relied on classical music traditions and expectations of what constituted music in order to produce its silence.24 While Cage relied on the conventions of the concert hall to produce his music, once he had abandoned traditional musical notation he began to describe his music in terms of organisation, rhythm, structure and form, language that he borrowed from the biological sciences.25 In an interview with Daniel Charles, Cage states that: “I considered form as the aspect of mystery in which the life of an organism sometimes cloaks itself.”26 He goes on to link the organisation of form with the survival of his compositions: “I only keep the amount of organisation

21 Cage, A Year from Monday, 31. 22 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4. 23 Bruno Latour “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’,” in New Literary History, no. 41 (2010), 476. 24 Douglas Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” The Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1997), 556-598. 25 Cage discusses abandoning tonal composition for systems that organized the structure of sound within his compositions. John Cage, For the Birds: In Conversation with Daniel Charles, 73. 26 Cage, For the Birds, 36.

that is useful to survival.”27 For Cage organisational systems were used to regulate the composition in a similar way to that in which an organism maintained its survival through its own regulatory processes.28 Through systems that regulated themselves within their material constraints, a composition could never repeat itself, producing music that would, like Bateson’s description of the form of a crab, maintain an identity and yet never repeat itself.29 In leaving behind traditional musical notation in favour of systems that directly engaged with nature, Cage’s music inevitably became entangled with social and scientific systems.

3.4 Cybernetic Life: John Cage Variations

Cage’s composition Variations VII highlights this regulating relationship between organisation, structure, form and material. Presented as part of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York in 1966, the composition consisted of ten telephone lines installed in the Armory. These lines were connected to various places in New York City including: an Aviary, a power station, the ASPCA lost dog kennel, The New York Times press room, and Merce Cunningham’s studio. Magnetic pickups on the telephone receivers fed these sound sources into a networked system of electronics.

27 Cage, For the Birds, 47. 28 Ibid., 35. 29 H.R. Maturana, W.S. McCulloch, J.Y. Lettvin, “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain,” Proceedings of the Institute for Radio Engineers (1959), 1.

FIGURE 12. John Cage Variations VII 1966, presented at 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, the 69th Regiment Armory, New York, 1966. Photograph: Peter Moore http://www.medienkunstnetz.de

These sound sources were complemented by six contact microphones attached to the performing platform itself and a further twelve contact microphones on household appliances such as a blender, a juicer, a toaster, and a fan that were on tables on the platform. The composition also incorporated twenty radio channels, two television channels, and two Geiger counters. Thirty photocells and lights were mounted at ankle level around the performance area; as audience members disrupted the light the different sound sources were activated. The sounds were mixed by David Tudor, David Behrman, Antony Gnasso, Lowell Cross and John Cage who stood behind a large table arranged in a ‘U’ shape.

The responsive electronics in the composition connected the local environment of the Armory with the larger environment of the city. This adaptive environment incorporated indeterminacy through both audience interaction and the complexity of the system. The electronic systems provided by Bell Laboratories gave Cage an electronic parallel for his organisational vision of nature and this composition presented nature as a vastly distributed system. Rather than being the sound of a single location, Variations VII used electronic systems to bring the wider sounds of the city into one location. By conflating many sound sources, the total noise of the city became the total silence of information as each sound source fed in one sound, and the sounds of the

city, rather than being themselves, were the sound of a single node in a wider network, temporarily defined by the location of the Armory.

Cage’s vision of nature was always more about organisation than electronics and in an earlier work, Variations III (1963), the recursive electronic systems that produced indeterminacy in Variations VII appear as a score that organises indeterminate behaviour in a space, the sound of which is presented as music. The score consists of two Mylar sheets of forty-two circles with a set of instructions that specify that the circles should be cut out, tossed in the air, and allowed to land. Once the circles have settled performers are instructed to correlate the intersections created by the overlapping circles with actions chosen randomly in the moment; as a result, the sounds produced by the score unfold at the speed at which the performers interpret them. The score of Variations III specifies that the composition should be performed amongst the sounds of everyday life. This idea draws on the work that Cage undertook alongside Fluxus practices. From 1950 to 1960 Cage taught at the New School for Social Research, and his students included Allan Kaprow and George Brecht, key people in the Fluxus movement.30 Variations III fits within Ken Freidman’s description of “Fluxus [as] a way of viewing society and life, a way of creating social action and life activity.”31 In this case the speed at which the score is interpreted creates a new rhythm to the actions of everyday life and juxtaposes these against the temporal rhythms of life. The composition relies on this separation to highlight life’s structured indeterminacy against the contingent indeterminacy of everyday life.

In this way the composition is an investigation into life’s organisational processes as much as it is a piece of music. Although the score specifies the use of any number of players performing any actions, to be performed amongst other everyday activities, the composition tends to be performed by professional musicians in a space that conforms to the protocols of the concert hall. When performed in this way the organisational properties of the environment are overshadowed by the presentation and expectations of ‘music’. In a 2003 performance of Variations III by the Motion Ensemble, professional musicians used conventional instruments and this is reflective of the

30 Owen Smith, “Developing a Fluxable Forum: Early Performance and Publishing” ed. Ken Friedman, The Fluxus Reader, Academy Editions (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 5. 31 Ken Friedman, “Introduction: A Transformative Vison of Fluxus” ed. Friedman, Ken, The Fluxus Reader, Academy Editions (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), ix.

environment in which the composition is usually performed.32 Music writer Rob Haskins reviewed the performance, noting that “the members of the Motion Ensemble make many choices for their realizations that speak to the authority and conviction of their mastery.”33 The mastery of classical musicians has little to do with indeterminately chosen actions and even less to do with the unselfconscious contingency of everyday life. By ignoring the aspect of the composition that specifies that indeterminately chosen actions should be performed amongst everyday life, this performance undermined the aspect of the composition that explores the perceptual connections that regulate the actions of people within their environment. The sounds produced by this composition self-organise from the combination of the score and the spatial and material constraints of the venue. Because of this the sounds produced are reliant on listening to the contrast between life, and life regulated by organisational system rather than playing, and this composition presents the manner and operation of nature as something that is not, in the end, separable from the systems that connect people to it.

3.5 Nature as Organisation: Nature as Material

Cage’s Fontana Mix (1958) uses complex procedural systems with a score that consists of ten sheets of paper and twelve transparencies. The sheets of paper and the transparencies contain a series of drawn lines, randomly distributed points and a transparent grid that is used to measure distances between the points and lines on the randomly overlaid transparencies.34 These measurements are correlated to a range of values that are then used to execute precise edits on pre-recorded reels of tape which contain recordings gleaned from a variety of environmental sources.

Music writer Benjamin Piekut makes the observation that Cage’s indeterminate scores actively produce the world which they purport to discover and this is made obvious by the way Fontana Mix uses the indeterminate processes of life to produce a composition that is frozen in time.35 As music writer Thom Holms notes: “A magnetic tape

32 Motion Ensemble 2003 CD, John Cage Variations I-III/ Lecture on Nothing (1962), mode 129. 33 Rob Haskins, Classical Listening (London: Rowman & Little Field, 2016), 90. 34 John Cage, Fontana Mix (New York: Henmar Press, 1958). 35 Benjamin Piekut, “Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature,” Cultural Critique 84 (2013), 136.

composition, no matter how it was conceived, remains forever fixed as a recorded performance in time.”36 Cage’s scores create their own worlds in two district ways: compositions such as Fontana Mix use chance procedures, whereas other compositions such as Variations VII react to the world contingently. Alvin Lucier notes that in Fontana Mix: “Even though the determinations were generated by chance procedures, the manual work was exact and not subject to chance at all.”37 It is this strict adherence to the score that produces a rhythmic structure that Cage associates with nature, but it is this same adherence to the score that separates the sounds from the contingent chaos of the world.

Cage explores his conception of nature from both a material and an organisational direction. While scores have the capacity to organise sound, the structural form that materials take also defines their capacity for organisation. This is illustrated by Inlets (1977), which is a score for three musicians playing water-filled conch shells accompanied by one musician blowing a conch shell with circular breathing techniques alongside the pre-recorded sound of fire. The three performers are instructed to tilt their water-filled conch shells repeatedly to produce indeterminate gurgling sounds while a fourth performer blows a conch shell and plays a recording of the sounds of fire. Although the performers could be seen to be improvising on the shells, the composition emphasises the exploration of the two different sounds that the shells have to offer rather than how they are played. This focus on the relationship between the form of the shells and their sound-producing potential is provided by removing sounds from their rhythmic context and location, creating the difference from the world which identifies them as a part of a composition. Although it is possible that one might hear a shell gurgling on the beach it is unlikely that this would be the only sound competing for one’s attention. This technique of revealing the unheard sounds of nature through changing their context was a device used by Cage in compositions such Child of Tree (1975), which is scored for amplified cactus. In this piece the spines of a cactus are plucked and amplified; rather than being an improvisation, the performer coaxes the limited range of possible sounds out of the cactus and, in the process, reveals the unheard sounds of nature, but this is a version of nature that is inclusive of the actions of the performer. In this way, both compositions demonstrate how nature is composed

36 Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music (New York: Routledge, 2002), 117. 37 Alvin Lucier, Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 9.

through the convergence of material and organisational systems and the result of our perceptual engagement with it.

3.6 Nature as Silence

In Fontana Mix Cage aligned a score that generated indeterminate outcomes with nature, in Variations VII and Variations III he contrasted the organisational processes of life, with life. Inlets and Child of Tree highlighted the mutually interdependent nature of organisation, material, form and sound. For Cage, indeterminacy, organisation and form were intimately linked to his changing conceptualisation of silence. Cage’s changing view of silence moved from a compositional tool, to a conceptual device that implicated the individual and listener and the production of music. Eric De Visschner identifies that this change occurred between 1948 and 1952 during Cage’s writing of his book Silence.38 In early works such as The Perilous Night (1942-45), the I Ching was used to determine relationships between notes, and silence separated clusters of notes from one another.39 In 4’33” (1952), silence became a perceptual phenomenon that located music in the act of listening, as Douglas Kahn notes, “silence turned into its opposite: sound.”40 With all of the sounds of the world incorporated within a single word - ‘silence’ - it would seem that, in presenting silence as music, conceptually music could have little else to do, but Cage made a number of silence pieces and each explores aspects of the way in which people are perceptually connected to the world through sound. In Silent Prayer (1948), Cage proposed three minutes of silence to be inserted into the muzak of a shopping mall, in effect interrupting silence — as sound unlistened to — with silence as absence. Silent Prayer creates silence through the perception of difference, as without the change from one silence to another neither can be perceived as silence: all the sounds of the world are, after all, still present. In Silent Prayer, Cage used silence as a structuring device that included the contagious proliferation of the natural world, presenting us with a version of the world, which is inseparable from our perception of it. The composition presents a version of the world consistent with Deleuze and

38 Eric De Visscher, “There's No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage's Poetics of Silence,” Writings About John Cage (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1993); John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 39 John Cage, For the Birds, 35. 40 Douglas Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” The Musical Quarterly 81 no. 4 (1997), 558.

Guattari’s plane of immanence (alternately defined as the plane of nature).41 Deleuze and Guattari use 4’33” as an example of this expanded definition of nature: It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks an absolute state of movement.42

Defining silence simultaneously as “sonorous rest” and “absolute movement” implies that sound is that which is perceived by the individual through the act of listening, and silence becomes the sum total of all sound that can be perceived. As Kahn notes, in Cage’s redefinition of silence, “loud sounds too could be silence.”43 In 4’33” Cage presents a silence that is on one level a conceptual and physical impossibility and on another directly located in physical world and the perceptual processes by which we produce it. Redefining silence as a field from which sound is drawn aligns silence with Bateson’s definition of noise as that from which the individual creatively produces meaning through difference and selection.44 In Bateson’s view of nature, the world is only perceivable through this process of selection. Ten years after 4’33, Cage composed a third response to the concept of silence. The title of the composition 0’00” (1962) suggests that silence can be described at the focal point of two axes; no sound can occur within no time. The score to 0’00” specifies a single action chosen by the performer to be performed at maximum amplification. To take the composition to its logical conclusion, the title implies that the action involves all sound and should occur in no time. In this it demonstrates a silence that, like nature, must remain perceptually beyond our grasp.45

The three pieces discussed here demonstrate three different approaches to the perception of nature. In 4’33” silence is a period of time that we are aware that we are entering into, and sound becomes a function of listening produced between ourselves and the world. In Silent Prayer silence is produced by difference, a rupture to the

41Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1996), 266. 42 Ibid. 43 Kahn, “John Cage: Silence and Silencing,” 558. 44 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 92. 45 John Cage, “4'33” # 2 (0”00”)” Solo to be performed in any way by anyone for Yoko Ono and Toshi Ichiyanagi (New York: Edition Peters, 1962); James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

environment that produces silence through awareness. 0’00” uses the axes of time and maximum volume to demonstrate that access to nature will always be partial. Through the development of indeterminate systems and silence as a concept, Cage outlined a view of nature located in the perceptual and physical systems that connect people to their environment. This work was supported electronically through Cybernetic compositions and conceptually through Cybernetic definitions of noise. Connections between nature’s organisational systems and the perception of the environment can also be seen in the Cybernetic compositions of David Tudor that explored relationships between organism and environment, and in Alvin Lucier’s compositions which explored more specific natural phenomena.

3.7 David Tudor: Nature, Organism and Environment

I’m very interested in natural process, and when I come to something which I can call my work it’s always a discovery of some kind in the natural world.46 Tudor’s compositions represent a sustained engagement with what he calls natural process. The discoveries in the natural world that are revealed in the works are done so through the similarities in pattern and rhythm that occur between the natural world and the sounds produced by his networked electronic compositions.

According to Tudor, audio feedback compositions such as Microphone (1973) were at their most successful when they sounded like aspects of the natural world — in this case the rhythms of birds on the seashore.47 The compositions discussed in this section explore Tudor’s use of feedback, networked electronic components and material compositions which he used to explore his concept of nature.

Before the development of his electronic works, Tudor was a pianist who worked closely with a variety of avant-garde composers including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and John Cage. His interest in compositions that behave like nature can be traced back to an engagement with their works. Tudor

46 Victor Schonfield, “From Piano to Electronics: Interview with David Tudor,” Music and Musicians 20 (1972), 25. 47 David Tudor “Interview with David Fulleman, David Tudor.com Stockholm May 31, 1984,” http://davidtudor.org/Articles/fullemann.html accessed 11/4/2015.

noted that Boulez’s compositions contained “no counterpoints, no second voices at all, and you couldn’t subordinate any voices at all, as there was nothing leading, nothing on which the music centred itself.”48 This decentralisation can be seen as a link between the multiple overlapping systems that compose the environment. Tudor’s work reflects this in large decentralised electronic compositions in which multiple components interact beyond the direct control of the performer. There are two major aspects to Tudor’s engagement with the environment. Compositions such as Rainforest IV (1976) presented multiple handmade sound objects that operated together like organisms in an ecosystem, and works such as Microphone (1973) used audio feedback to directly explore the relationship between the composition and its acoustic space.

Tudor’s first electronic composition, Florescent Sound (1964), was composed for a theatre performance designed by Robert Rauschenburg.49 The composition involved attaching contact microphones to seventy-five fluorescent tubes that lit the performance space and which were switched on and off, simultaneously creating the soundtrack and the lighting for the performance. This composition produced sound from a direct engagement with the performance environment. This is reflected in later compositions such as Rainforest (1968) and Bandaneon! (1969), in which electronically networked ensembles of objects produced music though their engagement with their environment. These compositions made the sounds of their increasingly self-governing systems audible, and, as with compositions by Cage, shifted Tudor’s music from a process of playing to one of listen and response. Douglas Kahn discusses how Tudor’s view of nature was influenced by Rudolph Steiner’s writings on Anthroposophy.50 Kahn notes that for Steiner “music is no substitute for the larger world of audition” and in Steiner’s Knowledge of Higher Worlds nature also becomes comprehensible through the act of listening.51 Steiner states that:

48 Schonfield, “From Piano to Electronics,” 24. 49 This work was commissioned by Robert Rauschenburg for a dance performance as part of “5 New York Nights” on September 13, 1964 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and was a light switching system that controlled the fluorescent lights of the theatre. Contact microphones were attached to these lights and amplified to produce sound for the performance. Teddy Hultberg, “An Interview with David Tudor,” davidtudor.org Dusseldorf May 17 1988, http://davidtudor.org/Articles/hultberg.html, accessed 25 November 2015. 50 Douglas Kahn, “Something More Than Interesting: David Tudor and The Sound of Anthroposophy.” 51 Ibid., 5.

Through her resounding tones, the whole of nature begins to whisper her secrets to the student. What was hitherto merely incomprehensible noise to his soul becomes by this means a coherent language of nature.52

Tudor’s electronic compositions can be seen as an attempt to set up systems by which we can hear this coherent language revealed in feedback systems and electronic and material communication processes. Compositions such as Bandoneon! (1966) and Mesa (1966) (Tudor’s collaboration with Gordon Mumma) were directly reliant on Mumma’s cybersonic consoles. These electronic devices incorporated recursive feedback processes to create music from acoustics drawn from the performance space and sounds produced by performers. Michelle Fillion states in her biography of Mumma that for Mumma: “The technical term [cybersonics] was related to ‘cybernetics’ as the automatic control by feedback principles facilitated by the emerging transistor technology.”53 This is a particularly electronic interpretation of Cybernetics but what Mumma was trying to make, according to Fillion, was a device in which live acoustic sounds were fed back into a system that would modify sound relative to characteristics of the sound itself. For Mumma the term was also a social metaphor for the interaction of people, instruments and the theatre environment.54 His development of the cybersonic console and feedback systems that connected people and their environment are central to the way compositions such as Bandoneon! enacted the relationship between an organism and its environment.

3.8 Electronic Networks as Composition: David Tudor Bandoneon! (1966)

Bandoneon! is an example of a networked composition that contains elements of environmental adaptation that Tudor associated with the natural world. The Bandoneon is an instrument invented by Carl Friedrich Uhlig in Germany around 1834. It is a large concertina with hand-operated bellows, and was popularised in Argentina in the 1890s

52 Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of Higher Worlds [1923] (London: Rudolf Stiener Publishing Company, 2007), 44. 53 Michelle Fillion, Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music: Gordon Mumma (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), xxi. 54 Fillion, Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American.

through its use in Tango performances.55 Tudor used it in a series of compositions including Bandoneon!, Mesa, Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon (1964) and in the performance of Stanley Lunetta’s Bandoneon With Strings (1966).56 The instrument is an ideal choice for use within a networked composition as it already embodies the multiplicity of the network. The system of reeds within the Bandoneon is designed so that every note produced is a simultaneous combination of two notes. This means that the instrument does not produce a singular original sound source. Tudor exploited this aspect of the instrument in both Bandoneon! and Mesa by using contact microphones to separate the notes before dissolving their sounds into the wider connections of the network.57

There were several iterations of Bandoneon! The most famous was presented at 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (the 69th Regiment Armory, New York, October 14-18 1966). The composition incorporated a wide variety of components that challenged not only what an instrument was but also the boundaries between where an instrument ended and its environment began. The material composition was assembled on a platform measuring five by seven meters: the Bandoneon, itself played by Tudor; five speakers on remote-controlled carts; a vochrome, developed by collaborator Robert Kieronski and made from a set of harmonium reeds fitted with contact microphones; twelve hand-made speakers; an oscillator designed and played by Lowell Cross and made from an adapted television set; and a ‘control system’ that consisted of a series of frequency modulators, amplifiers and oscilloscopes designed and played by Fred Waldhauer.

55 Alejandro Marcelo Drago, Instrumental Tango Idioms in the Symphonic Works and Orchestral Arrangements of Astor Piazzolla Performance and Notational Problems: A Conductor’s Perspective, PhD Thesis (Mississippi: University of Mississippi, 2008), 16. 56 Jonathan Goldman, “The Buttons on Pandora’s Box: David Tudor and the Bandoneon,” American Music 30, no.1 (2012), 32. 57 Goldman, “The Buttons on Pandora’s Box,” 30-60.

FIGURE 13. David Tudor Bandoneon! presented at 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, the 69th Regiment Armory, New York, 1966. Photo Peter Moore http://www.medienkunstnetz.de

The output of this ‘control system’ fed back into the system, affecting audio parameters.58 Tudor and his Bandoneon were situated within a network of systems that distributed air, sound and electrical current.59 In the process, air systems (like those of the Bandoneon and the vochrome) were converted into electronic systems that were converted into audio and fed back into the environment through a variety of eccentric handmade speakers which were mounted on remote controlled carts, and added their own resonances to the composition. Once set up, the performer’s roles were not specifically improvisational; instead the performer tended and adjusted sounds that evolved within the wider network which was not always directly responsive. Like any living system, Bandoneon! maintained a kind of homeostasis where stability was upheld by balancing its internal systems with the performer’s actions and its relationship to its environment. This environmental negotiation is central to Tudor’s view of the natural

58 David Tudor “Bandoneon! (A Combine) (Performance)” The Daniel Langiois Foundation http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=583, accessed 8 April 2015. 59 Goldman, “The Buttons on Pandora’s Box,” 30-60.

100

process where a finite set of circumstances could, as he states, “lead to something completely open.”60 This sense of openness is dependent, a recursive process of listening and guiding the system rather than directly playing it.

3.9 Feedback, Organism and Environment: David Tudor Mesa (1966) and Microphone (1973)

Where Bandoneon! presented a sprawling ecology of performers, electronics and instruments, Mesa and Microphone progressively reduced this material ecology to reveal the feedback systems at the heart of Tudor’s complex approach to composition. Both works directly addressed connections between the individual and their environment by drawing connections between the landscape and the mind. Mesa was a collaboration between Tudor and Mumma commissioned by Merce Cunningham for a dance composition entitled Place, which premiered at the Foundation Maeght in St.-Paul-de- Venice in France in 1966. Mumma states that the title Mesa referred to “that butte-like landscape unique to the southwestern United States” and that Place “was a simultaneous, intuitive coming together of an unpremeditated idea of ‘place’ – places of landscape, of musical continuity, of stage, of the mind.”61Mesa presented this relationship between landscape, stage and mind through a Cybernetic relationship between a performer and a performance space that made up part of a wider dance composition. In Mesa Tudor played the Bandoneon which was networked through Mumma’s cybersonic console via a series of contact microphones.62 Mumma’s cybersonic console processed and combined instrumental and ambient sounds through combinations of feedback circuitry. The Bandoneon produced a note through the combination of two reeds and the resulting signal was divided again, creating four channels, two of which were processed by the cybersonic console and sent to two speakers located in the corners of the room, and two of which were outputted to another two speakers located in opposite corners of the room — creating a quadraphonic composition.63 Jonathan Goldman notes that: “In effect, in Mesa two signals act on each other, creating a kind of

60 Schonfield, “From Piano to Electronics,” 25. 61 Gordon Mumma, Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music (Illinois: University of Illinois, 2015), 117. 62 Ibid. 63 Goldman, “The Buttons on Pandora’s Box,” 49.

101

exponential stereophony.”64 While Goldman describes a signal split within the Bandoneon instrument the ‘signals’ are heard within a three dimensional environment in which the spatial location of speakers, electronics, and the actions of the performer are all in flux. This means that the sound arises out of this milieu rather than through the actions of one signal on another. Although there is little record of Tudor talking directly about Cybernetics, the homeostatic and adaptive mechanisms in Mesa use sound in a way that presents environmental adaptation through Cybernetic adaptation.65

In Microphone (1973), the focus on the relationship between people and environment is pared back further by the removal of the instruments. Microphone was originally performed live at the Centre for Contemporary Music, Mills College California. In this composition Tudor used two microphones to create an audio feedback loop that was split though a series of modulating filters that altered the output of two reverb chambers, and the resulting sound was the direct result of a mediation between the ambient environment and the material componentry of the composition. 66 The composition made the environment active and, in an interview with John Fullerman, Tudor notes that: “That piece was vulnerable to traffic and whatever came into the space.”67 This made the composition directly reflective of its environment, but, as Tudor also notes, the composition was at its most successful when its acoustic properties resembled the sounds he associated with nature: “Eventually you felt like you were on a barren seashore, listening to birds coming and going occasionally and there’d be a silence for a long period.”68 Tudor’s definition of success in this quote rests on his understanding that similarities in the aural patterns and rhythms of the shoreline could be produced through electronic feedback. For Tudor, these feedback rhythms were at their most successful when their patterns and rhythms were evocative of spaces that Tudor directly associated with nature. Nature’s organisational systems only occasionally matched Tudor’s view of nature. The way he defined nature and the 'success' of his compositions was to adjust the feedback in his compositions to conform to the sounds he associated with nature. For Tudor, a successful composition sounded like his ideal of nature, rather than a direct field recording of nature. The composition’s use of feedback

64 Goldman, “The Buttons on Pandora’s Box,” 49. 65 Gordon Mumma, Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music, 117. 66 David Fullemann “Interview with David Tudor Stockholm May 31 1984,” http://davidtudor.org/Articles/fullemann.html, accessed 11/4/2015. 67 David Fullemann “Interview with David Tudor Stockholm May 31 1984.” 68 Ibid.

102

demonstrates how our connections to nature go much further than the sounds of birds and are connections between rhythm and selection.

3.10 A Society of Resonant Objects: David Tudor Rainforest IV (1976)

Where Microphone reminded Tudor of the seashore, the sound of Rainforest is evocative of forest relations. Rainforest achieves its sound by presenting an ensemble of interacting resonant sculptural speakers. The Rainforest series began as a composition devised by Tudor for multiple hand-made speaker instruments and existed in four identifiable versions. Collaborator Matt Rogalsky notes that there is difficulty in separating one version from any another.69 This is partly due to the way that Rainforest evolved out of a set of modular components designed by a variety of people that reappeared in different works at different times. The compositions can be identified by the different inputs that are fed into the sound sculptures; Rainforest I (1968) uses an oscillator as an input, Rainforest II (1972) involves various taped material and Rainforest III (1973) a series of microphones that introduced live voice into the mix.70 The versions allow for a progressively wider variety of input from collaborators until Rainforest IV in which all the elements are developed out of a collaborative workshop environment.71 Performances of Rainforest IV allow audience members to move freely among the sculptures thus creating a sound mix similar to that of walking through a forest.72 The individual components are played by a group of performers who send and receive audio signals to and from the objects through a mixing desk. Rainforest IV introduced new elements to the Rainforest series, expanding the composition to include between sixteen and forty suspended sculptural speakers. The sound sculptures, which up until this point had been small (designed to fit in suitcases to make them portable for touring), became larger, up to 3.5 meters in height. The length of performances also increased from one

69 John Driscoll and Matt Rogalsky, “David Tudor's Rainforest: An Evolving Exploration of Resonance,” Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004), 25-30. 70 Driscoll & Rogalsky, “David Tudor's Rainforest,” 27. 71 Rainforest IV evolved out of the two-week workshop, ‘New Music in New Hampshire’, that involved instrument building courses run by David Behrman, Gordon Mumma and David Tudor with students John Driscoll, Ralph Jones, Bill Viola and Martin Kalve. Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music (New York: Routledge, 2002), 230. 72 This performance by NO-ensemble shows audience members moving among resonant objects – Factory festival June 2013, Nantes France, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6ry8BcxIAE accessed 4 July 2016.

103

hour to between three and six hours and, when combined with the increased size and spacing of the sculptures, began to resemble the spatial layout and omni-directional soundscape of a forest.73

FIGURE 14. David Tudor, Rainforest IV (1973), L'Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris, 1976. Photograph: Ralph Jones http://www.getty.edu

Rainforest IV continues the decentralisation of the forest metaphor on social, spatial and audible levels as it continues to expand to this day through the dedication of Tudor’s group, Composers Inside Electronics, who perform and maintain the work.74 Rainforest IV has become a socially adaptive organism that has progressively expanded to incorporate wider communities of makers and their objects, outliving Tudor himself.75 Although Composers Inside Electronics maintain and perform the composition, the composition can no longer be tied together by specific objects: firstly because they will

73 Performer and collaborator John Driscoll offers this description of Rainforest IV: “Rainforest IV is an electro-acoustic environment conceived by David Tudor and realized by the group Composers Inside Electronics. Each composer has designed and constructed a set of sculptures that function as instrumental loudspeakers under their control and each independently produces sound materials to display their sculpture’s resonant characteristics. The appreciation of Rainforest IV depends upon individual exploration; the audience is invited to move freely among the sculptures.” Driscoll & Rogalsky, “David Tudor's Rainforest,” 28. 74 Rainforest IV was recently installed at Serralves em Festa in Porto, Portugal 2014. 75 Driscoll & Rogalsky, “David Tudor's Rainforest,” 25-30.

104

wear out and need replacement; secondly because new performers will eventually take over the composition; and, thirdly because people becoming aware of the composition will need build their own objects in order to perform the composition.

In this way the composition is adapting like an organism through gaining the ability to evolve beyond its constituent parts. Its identity is now attached to the collective activity of a shifting array of performers rather than to a score. Where compositions by Cage such as Fontana Mix produce sound through excerpting control through the use of detailed instructions, by contrast Rainforest IV produces sound through collective activity and its material and spatial circumstances and, like an organism, has become self- making.76

Tudor also associates the concept of life with the ability of the components within his compositions to adapt within their environment. He states that: “They have personalities, that only I see, because of my use of them. It’s an act of discovery. I try to find out what’s there and not to make it do what I want but to, you know, release what’s there.”77 The life that Tudor released from his components was produced as much by networking them into compositions as by their inherent capacities, and the resulting sonic rhythms were produced as much by material interaction as by his own perception of their activity. In this regard, he presents a view of nature that expands beyond the confines of the body and is composed within the niche that connects the organism within its environment.

3.11 Alvin Lucier: Nature as Natural Phenomenon

Hammering and shaping materials never feels right to me…. I’m concerned in music with exploration and discovery, rather than manipulation and control.78

76 Maturana and Varela identify the ability to become self-making as a key criterion in their writing on autopoiesis, a term that they use to describe the ability of a living system to evolve independently within its environment. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979). 77 David Tudor, “David Tudor and Larry Austin: A Conversation April 3, 1989, Denton, Texas,” http://davidtudor.org/Articles/austin.html, accessed 3/11/2015. 78 Arthur Margolin, “Conversation with Alvin Lucier,” Perspectives in New Music 20, no. 1 (1981), 58.

105

The compositions by Alvin Lucier discussed here relied on constraints provided by their material construction and spatial location, they use the patterns of sound produced from these constraints to draw links to aspects of nature. The difference between Tudor and Lucier is that, rather than exploring environmental interaction through ensembles of interacting components, Lucier instead focused on making audible specific naturally- occurring phenomena. Music for Solo Performer (1965), Vespers (1968) and Bird and Person Dyning (1975) are compositional systems that highlight complex environmental systems by repurposing existing scientific technology such as Sondols and ECG machines to reveal invisible electromagnetic processes.

Lucier referenced scientific literature including the work of Eighteenth Century physicist Ernst Chladni, which explored the physics of sound waves, and Nineteenth Century physicist John Tyndall, who was a pioneer in the discovery of electromagnetism.79 Like Chladni and Tyndall, Lucier developed devices that made natural phenomena palpable. Vespers, for instance, made audible the navigational systems of nocturnal animals; Whistlers, electromagnetic natural radio created by lightning; and, For Solo Performer, electromagnetic brain activity. These compositions replaced conventional musical instruments with scientific equipment and this equipment was used in a way that implicated the performers within a system of communication highlighting organisational, electromagnetic and material connections within the environment.80

3.12 Sonic Recursion and Animal Navigation: Alvin Lucier Vespers (1968)

In Vespers, four blindfolded performers use echo-location equipment in order to navigate a space with a Sondol, a tool which emits a sonic click that changes its echo in relationship to a participant’s distance from a wall or an object. Performers realise the composition through navigating the space recursively and adjusting their movement to the changing length of the echo.81 As the blindfolded participants move through the space, the sound of the repeating clicking of their Sondols increase in frequency until they encounter a wall or object and change direction. Participants gain an awareness of

79 Alvin Lucier “Origins of a Form: Acoustical Exploration, Science and Incessancy,” Leonardo Music Journal 8 (1998), 5-11. 80 Stuart Marshall, “Alvin Lucier’s Music of Signs in Space,” Studio International 192, no. 984 (1976), 284. 81 Alvin Lucier, Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 84.

106

the space through sound and movement. This turns listening into an active experience directly linked to the participant and the acoustic properties of the environment. Writer and video artist Stuart Marshall points out that any preconceived musicality or improvisation effectively makes navigation impossible and destroys the performance. He states that in Vespers “musical codes are replace by communicational codes.”82 The result is a form of music that evolves in direct response to the environment. Lucier states that Vespers “pays tribute to all those animals who live and work in the dark, who over a long period of time have developed an extraordinary facility in audio and have to get around by sound information.”83 Rather than constructing a metaphorical representation of an animal navigational system, Vespers implicates performers within the process of navigation.

Vespers demonstrates the productive role that indeterminacy and sound play in animal navigational systems. Lucier stated that the work could be produced using any clicking sound but the composition used the same principle of complex behaviour generated by multiple simple interactions observed in Grey Walter’s electronic tortoises. The indeterminacy at the heart of this navigational system produced sounds that were evocative of animals that use sound to communicate. In a performance at Festival Dag in de Branding in The Hague (2010), the sound was reminiscent of cicadas. This is not because individual sounds sound like cicadas but because the rhythms created by the navigational process are reminiscent of the rhythms of insect communication.84 The work makes a process of adaptation audible and demonstrates how rhythm and pattern can be used in both music and Cybernetics to make connections between electronic systems and a wide variety of animal and material communications systems.

Vespers supported a view of the natural world as one that evolves through indeterminacy, organisation and contingency, and Lucier’s compositions achieve this through concepts of recursion embodied within the technologies used in the compositions. In Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings, James Tenney identifies the way in which Lucier was also trading the language of music for the language of systems, stating:

82 Marshall, “Alvin Lucier's Music of Signs in Space,” 286. 83 Gordon Mumma and Alvin Lucier, Proceedings of the American Society of University Composers 4 (1969-1971), 92. 84 Alvin Lucier, Vespers, performed at Alvin Lucier in Den Haag, Festival Dag in de Branding, The Hague (NL) Korzo5Hoog, May 2010, performed by Pepe Garcia, Joey Marijs, Juan Martinez and Niels Meliefste of Slagwerk Den Haag. https://vimeo.com/89093088 accessed, 20 September, 2015.

107

“In most of his pieces the sounds we hear are the result of complex interaction and mutual interference (convolution, confrontation, collision) of two or more systems– mechanical, electrical or biological.”85 Through the language of Cybernetics, Vespers audibly demonstrates how the spatial and material and perceptual communications that connect the environment are located between an array of material and organisational systems and these are inherent, not entirely located within the Sondols or their operation.

3.13 Environmental Circuits: Alvin Lucier Music for Solo Performer (1965)

Lucier’s compositions such as Music for Solo Performer use electromagnetism to draw similarly direct connections between the alpha waves of brain activity and the environment. This connection is also mediated through Cybernetic technology. In Music for Solo Performer Lucier uses an ECG machine as part of a wider electroacoustic system to harvest alpha waves as the performer reaches a state of relaxation. When the performer reaches a state of relaxation, the alpha waves are routed through a series of amplifiers and filters and emerge as vibrations through speaker cones that are used to play a variety of instruments including drums and cymbals and tin cans. Through electromagnetic rhythms, the ECG machine draws direct connections between the internal systems of the body and the external systems of the environment. The composition uses a Cybernetic device to draw scalar connections between brainwave and earth systems through the otherwise imperceptible medium of electromagnetism. Douglas Kahn points out that: “Brainwaves too were natural electromagnetic sounds that, with whistlers, formed for Lucier an electromagnetic spatiality from the scale of the individual to earth magnitude.”86 Kahn goes on to discuss the way in which Music for Solo Performer creates a circuit using sound and electricity to link the performer directly into these larger systems.

85 Alvin Lucier, Reflections, Interviews Scores Writings (Germany: MusikTexte, 1995), 442. 86 Whistlers are electromagnetic disturbances within the atmosphere caused by lightning that can be listened to with radio equipment. Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 83.

108

FIGURE 15. Alvin Lucier, Music for Solo Performer, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1965 http://joy.nujus.net/SAET/index.php?page=1966visions

Lucier acquired the ECG machine through the physicist Edward Derwent and the device and concepts of environmental recursion provided an important turning point in his approach to composition.87 By importing scientific equipment into a discipline that dose not require this equipment to provide definitive answers, Lucier provides a broader picture of how we might define nature without providing the precise data that the equipment was designed to produce.

3.14 Feedback and Adaptation: Alvin Lucier Bird and Person Dyning (1975)

In Bird and Person Dyning, Lucier combines a biaural microphone with a speaker and an electronic toy bird to create an audio feedback loop that uses sound to guide the movement of a performer. The composition’s name is a play on the phenomenon of heterodyning which is an acoustic effect heard when two distinct tones are combined to create a third through phasing effects produced within the ear. In Bird and Person Dyning,

87 Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 86.

109

the combination of the electronic bird and the feedback produce heterodyning effects as the feedback and the sound of the electronic bird go in and out of phase. The biaural microphone is worn by the performer and consists of two microphones in a stereo formation located adjacent to the ears, mounted on a headset. These microphones are designed to make recordings that replicate the stereo space of the listener, but in Bird and Person Dyning, the sound picked up by the microphones is fed into an amplifier and out into two loudspeakers, creating a feedback circuit. The electronic bird is placed in the room and its sound is amplified within the circuit. The amplifiers are set to a level such that they will pick up the sound of the bird, creating audio feedback in relation to the performer’s proximity to the bird and the speakers. In order to control the feedback, the performer must subtly move relative to both. The result is a dialogue of bird song produced between an electronic reproduction of a birdcall and its reply, produced recursively by the performers manipulation of feedback through movement. The performer walks an invisible path sculpted through their relationship to audio feedback. As Lucier states, the piece is created by “mapping the acoustic characteristics of the space in terms of pitches, intensities and shapes of the encountered strands of feedback.”88 The composition is a Cybernetic control system that conflates the aesthetic preferences of the performer with movement and dramatically illustrates how a birdcall made recursively through environmental interaction is more evocative of a birdcall than a fixed electronic recording of one.

Lucier’s compositions demonstrate the extent to which our understanding of the world is facilitated recursively through sound. Where Music for Solo Performer uses electromagnetism to draw connections between the performer and the environment, Bird and Person Dyning demonstrates the role that sound plays in the formation of that same environment. In this case the focus is the result of engagement with process as the result of revealing an electromagnetic connection to the environment. Bird and Person Dyning highlights the way in which connections to environment are effectively manufactured as a result of perceptual and materials processes and therefore proposes a view of nature as not something that exists separately to ourselves.

88 Alvin Lucier and Douglas Simon, Chambers (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 148.

110

This chapter has explored the work of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier in order to show how concepts from Cybernetics made their way into avant-garde musical practices in the 1960s. I have demonstrated that this was not a straightforward transference or adoption of ideas from Cybernetics, but rather a nuanced and experimental approach that did not illustrate nature, but sought to provide alternative views and experiences of the natural world as recursive, dynamic, and unpredictable. The following chapter will show how these concepts developed further in the work of contemporary artists and musicians.

111

Chapter Four

Earthly Communications

The tools of technology become part of the earth’s geology as they sink back into their original state. Robert Smithson1

4.1 Perceptual Systems and Environmental Communication

John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier used Cybernetic systems in their compositions that presented a view of nature not only based on, as Cage put it, nature’s manner and operation, but in which the individual was implicated technologically, spatially and perceptually in nature’s operations. This stands in contrast to the prominent tradition of acoustic ecology. Acoustic ecologists such as R. Murray Schafer separate the sounds of technology and industry from the sounds of the natural world.2 While the separation drawn between nature and technology by acoustic ecologists is important in the analysis of changing ecological systems and the damage caused by human exploitation of these systems, the works in this section instead highlight the difficulties of defining people as separate from their technological and social and environmental systems. At the beginning of the new millennium there has been an

1 Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 104. 2 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Vermont: Destiny Books, 1977), 3. 112

increased interest in the natural world by artists and composers in Australia and New Zealand. Artists including Sally McIntyre and Hayden Fowler work with the sounds of birds in ways that reflect the radical changes within local biodiversity echoed in many places around the world and frame nature in terms of environmental loss.3 The ‘nature’ defined as pristine elsewhere inherent within the acoustic ecology of R. Murray Schafer continues to be fostered though Antarctic residencies in which men and women of courage and competent grant writing abilities venture into extreme environments to bring back their recordings and impressions of ‘nature’ to those who stayed at home. In the introduction to Antarctica: Music Sounds and Cultural Connection Arnan Wiesel presents a list of composers sent to experience and record the chilly sounds of the Antarctic including prominent sound artists Phil Dadson and Phillip Samartzis.4 The book, and the residencies that sent these artists to Antarctica rest on the assumption that nature is an unsullied elsewhere. Samartzis writes in his journal of boisterous elephant seals, glacial ice drifts and the gurgling of the incoming tide.5 The character and sounds of this version of nature is to a large extent decided before a microphone has been unpacked from its travel case by grant committees, and relies on an aesthetic version of nature already historically located and extensively describe by authors from Thoreau to Schafer.6

Works by artists who respond to the technological, biological and perceptual feedback systems that connect us to the world challenge the way we understand nature presenting a version that goes beyond representation highlighting the embedded nature of our interactions with the environment.7 This chapter draws together a selection of artists who have devised compositional systems that use sound to highlight material and perceptual connections to the environment. The artists do not produce works that specifically address themes associated with the wilderness but have been chosen because their works highlight the recursive connections between the material environment and people and how these connections contribute to an expanded understanding of nature.

3 Su Ballard, “Signal Eight Times: Nature, Catastrophic Extinction Events and Contemporary Art” Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture 7, 2015, 70-94. 4 Music Sounds and Cultural Connection ed. Bernadette Hince, Rupert Summerson and Arnan Wiesel Australian National University Press 201,xi. 5 Phillip Samartzis, Antarctic Journal, accessed 8/6/2017 http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about- antarctica/antarctic-arts-fellowship/alumni/2000-2009/philip-samartzis-2009 6 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 7 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. 113

The systems based version of nature that I see in their work feeds into and informs my studio practice.

The title of this chapter, ‘Earthly Communications’, is loosely based on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s concept of material communication and the chapter connects a lineage of artists who have made compositions and installations that address systems of material communication and energy exchange. This engagement with energetic and material systems can be seen in arts from the work of Marcel Duchamp to Jack Burnham to Martin Howse.8 The inseparability of technology from these systems is central to Jack Burnham’s notion of software as an extension of social processes and also features in Robert Smithson’s concept of abstract geology which drew links between geology, memory and technology.9 Smithson reminds us that: The manifestations of technology are at times less ‘extensions’ of man, than they are aggregates of elements. Even the most advanced tools and machines are made of the raw matter of the earth.10

This concept of geologically-based technology is continued in the writing of Jussi Parikka and Mitchell Whitelaw, who extend the materiality of technology into the digital realm.11 Parikka promotes the idea that the procedural structures of our communications technologies are dependent on mineral extraction. Through an analysis of the work of Martin Howse and Ralf Baecker, Whitelaw also explores how digital environments are grounded in electrochemical and electromagnetic processes. Both these artists connect the operation of digital technology to raw materials and organisational systems through open circuity and connections drawn between earth systems and code.12 Maturana and Varela’s material communications, Burnham’s software as mental process, Smithson’s technology of geology, Whitelaw’s and Parikka’s materially located technology and Kahn’s electromagnetic Earth systems paint a picture

8 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Jack Burnham, Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (New York: Jewish, Museum, 1970); Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford: Berg, 2006). 9 Smithson, Robert Smithson: Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 10 Ibid, 100. 11 Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 12 Parikka, A Geology of Media, 75; Mitchell Whitelaw “Sheer Hardware: Material Computing in the Work of Martin Howse and Ralf Baecher,” Scan: Journal of Media Arts 2013, 10 no. 2 http://scan.net.au/scn/journal/vol10number2/Mitchell-Whitelaw.html, accessed 18 August 2016. 114

of the natural world that is based in energetic exchanges and material interactions.13 This chapter focuses on artists who foreground the recursive processes through which these material exchanges are mediated and produce works that use sound to make audible the systems that perceptually and materially link us to the environment.

Ted Krueger’s simple experiments with a steel plate oscillator demonstrate the complex material connections that link people and to their environment. This concept of perception through material adaptation is explored in the compositions and writings of Maryanne Amacher, whose compositions Tone and Place (Work1) Pier 6 Boston Harbor (1973 - 1978) and Head Rhythm 1 (1999) specifically explore the co-adaptive relationship between the perception of sound, the architecture of the ear and the environment. Felix Hess’s installation It’s in the Air (1994) uses a delicately arranged field of 150mm high paper flags to make audible and visible tiny air movements that lie outside normal human perception, while Nicolas Collins’s composition Pea Soup (1974) uses feedback to create a composition that adapts in relation to its location. Slightly later, in 1986, Alan Lamb made sound recordings from abandoned sets of power lines from which he drew connections between the Aeolian rhythms of the wires and biological and electromagnetic systems of the environment and the body. Together these artists highlight the systems and materials that illustrate what I refer to as ‘earthly communications’.

4.2 Ted Krueger: Observer Systems and Material Perception

Ted Krueger’s research revolves around interactions between the human and the environment through a materials-based enactive approach to cognition and perception. Krueger’s deceptively simple experiments use a steel plate, sound and an oscillator to demonstrate the complexity inherent in the adaptive relationship between humans and the environment. His work is simultaneously informed by an acoustic and material

13 Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal; Smithson, Smithson: The Collected Writings; Parikka, A Geology of Media; Whitelaw “Sheer Hardware: Material Computing in the Work of Martin Howse and Ralf Baecher”. 115

approach to architecture and the experimental music practices of La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros, whose compositions emphasise sustained environmental listening.14

Krueger’s plate measures around 60mm by 120mm and is suspended within a frame by two steel hooks. An audio signal of 38Hz is applied to the plate via an oscillator and an amplifier, and a speaker coil attached to the face of the plate.15 The constant tone applied to the plate is not reflected in the sound produced by the material qualities and dimensions of the steel. Sometimes the plate maintains a similar tonal range and volume for long periods of time, before transitioning to new patterns and frequencies.16 The changing sound is not specifically located within the individual components of the system. Within a seven minute recording, Krueger notes sound transitions at 1:50, 3:35, 5:08, and 5:43 minutes, but at other times these changes can occur at a scale outside of comfortable human endurance with standing tones or patterns lasting for as much as nine hours. While the signal remains constant, resonances build within the plate that mean the sound evolves in relation to the combination of these resonances and outside perturbations. While there is no singular identifiable reason for the shift between one pattern and another, the sound also cannot be attributed to any one of the components; the sound is the result of material interactions that include the presence of Krueger himself.

Krueger used the complex changing sound to speculate on the relationship formed across the material system, including his own experience of listening, presenting this as an observer-based rather than a strictly empirical description. He states that: “The attempt to build such devices is grounded in the frameworks developed as alternatives to the information based cognitivist or computationalist perspectives that have dominated studies of cognition and perception.”17 Krueger aligns the operation of the system with enactive theories of cognition which “acknowledge the active role of the agent in the activity of perception and the active role of the environment within cognition.”18 His system eloquently demonstrates the co-adaptive relationship between material and perception. Although it is not clear why the changes take place, Krueger

14 Ted Krueger, “This is Not Entertainment: Experiencing the Dream House,” Architectural Design 78 no. 3 (2008), 12-15. 15 Ted Krueger, “38Hz.,7.5 Minutes,” Inflections 5, Simondon: Milieu, Techniques, Aesthetic (2012), 12-28. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Krueger, “38Hz.,7.5 Minutes,” 12. 18 Ibid. 116

notes many aspects of both the system and his own presence within the room that could account for the complex oscillations within the plates. These changes are not random; they are contingent on indeterminate interactions that occur between all the elements in the systems including the plate, its physical location, its material constraints and ultimately what Krueger notices. What initially appears to be a causal relationship between a static oscillator tone and a sheet of steel is instead a complex environmental interaction in which neither the environment, the system nor the observer is a passive receiver, but all are active participants in the production of the sound. At one point in his research Krueger turns off the plate, letting it rest before turning it on again. Rather than starting with the same sound as it did when the system was first switched on, the plate instead begins with the sound that it produced when it was switched off, inviting speculation that the steel contains a kind of physical memory. Krueger states that he does not like to assign the term memory to the steel because of the term’s “cultural baggage” and instead he thinks of materials as having the ability to carry a residual disposition.19 This concept of residual disposition bridges both material and social registers and, while Krueger’s materials may not remember, Krueger does remember and notes the change, thus becoming implicated in the patterns generated by the system.

Krueger’s experiment maintains both open and closed systems. The sound is able to adapt to its environment because on one level the system is closed, maintaining homeostasis — in this case through the connection between the electricity, the amplifier, the oscillator and the steel plate — but on another level it relies on open engagement with the environment. The system both receives and dissipates energy into this environment and, as science historian Bruce Clarke notes, “dissipative energy is a requirement of self-organisation.”20 A system that does not dissipate energy cannot change or adapt but in order to avoid continual energy loss it must also draw from its environment. The experiment demonstrates how steel, electricity and environmental engagement can enact processes of homeostasis and dissipation to create adaption between environmental, material and social factors. In his introduction to How Nature Works, physicist Per Bak poses the question: “How can the universe start with a few types of elementary particles at the big bang, and end up with life, history, economics,

19 Krueger “38Hz.,7.5 Minutes,” 9. 20 Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “From Thermodynamics to Virtuality,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 19. 117

and literature?” and Krueger’s experiments offer a tangible example of how complexity can evolve from simple elements. 21 Krueger’s experiment is typical of chaotic systems in that it generates complex and unpredictable patterns from predefined variables and, as N. Katherine Hayles points out, a key feature of chaotic systems is their ability to turn minute fluctuations into unpredictable large scale changes over time, producing change that is irreversible and can only be read retrospectively.22 The way sound evolves in Krueger’s system is not only unpredictable but evolves with his observations of it and because of this it is directly aligned with a range of natural systems which produce form from their material constraints.

Kruger extends this material and social co-adaptation in a similar way to Bruno Latour’s observation that scientific definitions of nature are defined through both social and technical systems.23 In his lecture Instrumentation and Instrumentality, Krueger asserts that “[i]nstrumentation holds out the promise of objectivity” before explaining that the reason the instruments of science fail to achieve objectivity is because what they do evolves in relation to the thing that they measure and the intention of the person measuring.24 In his own experiment this relationship is reflected in the combination of descriptions of boredom with material properties and the sound of the work.25 Krueger references connections with Ralph Glanvile, a Cyberneticist who worked with Pask’s observer systems such as Musicolour (discussed in Chapter Two). In Krueger’s experiment boredom is located within the observer and can motivate the observer to shift attention, whereas in Musicolour boredom is structurally integrated into the adaption of the work.

Krueger highlights the status of attention and movement as defining qualities of continuous works in his description of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s work The Dream House (1993).26 In his article Krueger describes the ability of a

21 Per Bak, How Nature Works (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996), 1. 22 N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 12. 23 Bruno Latour Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1987). 24 Ted Krueger, “Instrumentation and Instrumentality” (paper presented at the DataWolk Hoeksche Waard workshop, DEAF, 1998), http://www.nomads.usp.br/, accessed 20 September 2015. 25 Krueger “38Hz., &.7 Minutes,” 1. 26 The full title of this work, commonly referred to as “The Dream House”, is: The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 118

fixed tone to change in relationship to movement and environment. Young and Zazeela’s composition consists of a house in which a complex singular polyphonic tone has been played continuously for over 20 years with specific colours of light designed to complement the sound. Krueger notes that the sound changes as the direct result of the listener’s movement within the space, which produces changes in tone and pitch that occur as the combined result of the architecture, the location of the listener and the ear. Although the tone is fixed, the sound of the composition is ‘played’ by the movement of the individual through the space as they respond to the different sound and light frequencies caused by the architecture of the space. On the other hand, in Krueger’s experiment there is anticipation of change; Krueger has listened to his system for nine hours in the expectation that change will occur. In The Dream House, as the full title dictates, there will be no change and the difference between the two will affect the duration of the listening experience. In Krueger’s experiment one waits for change and in Young’s change is produced perceptually within the listener. Krueger’s experiment uses sound and recursive process to demonstrate how material relationships connect people perceptually to their environment and the role that hearing plays in these connections.

4.3 Maryanne Amacher: Perception and Environment

Experimental musician Maryanne Amacher’s compositions have also used sound in ways that highlight perceptual connections to the environment. Her compositions specifically explore relationships between acoustic space, the architecture of the ear and the mind’s perception of sound. Her compositions divide into two broad categories: those that use sound to explore spatial relationships to the environment; and those that explore perceptual relationships formed between the ear and the brain. This concern with the perception of space is directly addressed in her City Links series which is comprised of 22 compositions including Tone and Place (Work1) Pier 6 Boston Harbor (1973 - 1978), in which she uses microphones and transmission equipment to overlay

279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119. 119

one acoustic space upon another in order to highlight differences in the experience of space, and the role of the ear and the mind in the perception of space. In other works such as Corrale (1999) and Head Rhythm 1 (1999), she vibrates the physical mechanism of the ear through the use of specific sounds, in a way that draws attention to the physical process of hearing. Through these two approaches, Amacher’s compositions locate sound in between the closed systems of the body and recursive feedback interactions with the world.

Tone and Place (Work1) Pier 6 Boston Harbor demonstrates a direct engagement with the way people understand their spatial environment tonally. This work consisted of a microphone that transmitted the sounds of the Boston harbour to Amacher’s studio at the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, twenty-four hours a day for two and a half years. The harbour transmission continued to be broadcast to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, from 1976 until 1978. The work facilitated concentrated listening to the differences in the acoustic qualities of two alternative spaces.

Living Sound (1980) is part of a series of compositions for sound-joined-rooms commissioned by the Walker Arts Centre for the New Music America Festival in Minneapolis (1980). The original performance of Living Sound used musicians whose performances were distributed throughout the house of conductor Dennis Russel Davis and filmmaker Molly Davis in an attempt to incorporate room sound into a performance.27 Amacher developed these spatial experiments into a series of radio compositions in which transmissions of multiple spaces were mixed to form live compositions, expanding the experience of the city to reveal the different acoustic properties that could only be heard through mixing between one space and another.28 Over long periods of listening to the acoustic overlay of one space onto another, her attention was drawn to the contrast in the overall tonal values of the two spaces and the way that the ear tends to filter out such differences in the acoustic properties of spaces. She discovered instead that there was a focus on the specific sounds that provide us with direct information about a

27 Description of Living Sound by Amacher for Sound as Text blog http://sound-art- text.com/post/34332890147/maryanne-amacher-1938-2009-living-sound-for accessed 23 August 2016 28 http://maryanneamacher.org, accessed 23 July 2015. 120

space. Perceiving the differences between the spaces required long periods of listening for the mind and the ear to learn to distinguish specific room tones. This is the kind of knowledge of sound that cannot be gained empirically, but instead is evolved over time within individual listeners who are implicated in the creation of the sound.

By drawing attention to tonal contrasts between spaces, compositions such as Tone and Place (Work1) Pier 6 Boston Harbor demonstrate how the ear and brain are engaged in complex filtering processes. In this installation, Amacher does this by mixing out individual sounds to reveal the ambience of the room and in the process demonstrates how hearing is regulated by attention that reduces all sound to a singular experience for the individual in the moment. As with Cage, Amacher’s installation demonstrates the impossibility of silence. This is also supported by her discovery of ‘Otoacoustic’ tones in the writing of biophysicist David T. Kemp.29 Kemp was able to prove that in order to hear, the ear broadcasts a 15 Hz tone and that hearing occurs as a result of two sounds meeting. As a result of this observation, hearing can no longer be understood in terms of how the mechanisms of the ear process the sounds of the outside world; instead sound is produced between the sound of the world, the sound produced by the ear, and its interpretation in the mind. In the language of information theory this was the equivalent of signal being fundamentally dependent on noise for its transmission rather than noise being a disruption of signal. This means that hearing is the result of the productive use of noise.30

Amacher defines her approach to composition as perceptual geography, which she describes as “the interplay, the meeting of these tones, our processing of the given.”31 Perceptual geography proposes that human sonic engagement with the world occurs at the juncture of ambient sound, the architecture of the ear, and

29 David T. Kemp “Otoacoustic Emissions: Their Origin in Cochlear Function, and Use,” The British Medical Journal 63, no. 1 (2002), 223, http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/1/223.full, accessed 6 August 2015. 30 Noise as a productive agent within adaptation is discussed in: Peter Harries-Jones, A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 113. 31 Maryanne Amacher, “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of Perceptual Geography” in Arcana III: Musicians and Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Hips Rd, 1977), 16. 121

construction of this sound within the mind. Amacher uses the term ‘ear tones’ or ‘additional tones’ to describe sounds that are specifically produced by neither the ear nor the world. Compositions such as Corrale (1999) and Head Rhythm 1 (1999) represent part of a sustained effort to isolate and make audible these tones that are produced within the ear. Amacher uses specifically chosen high-pitched pure tones to make a composition that essentially plays the architecture of the ear. The sensation of listening to Corrale is that the sound is being produced within the head of the listener.

Through The City Links series and compositions such as Corrale, Amacher uses sound to demonstrate (consistent with Gregory Bateson’s view) that the mind is actively produced through adaptive relationships with the physical environment.32 For Amacher, training herself to hear and then compose with ‘ear tones’ demonstrates how sound is implicated within biological evolution, through connections between the mind and the perception of space; she poetically states that: ...the young nerve cells were restless–so they began producing sonorities and rhythms inside their minds to satisfy them. Mind became an instrument they played, creating the colours and rhythms of voices and stories. For there was nothing outside to match neural rhythms and movements, no corresponding shapes to complete their patterns of “aliveness” (as music provides). And the young receptors needed partners complementing their existence.33

Amacher’s concept of adaptive hearing is maintained through recursive feedback that has the ability to, over time, refine the physical architecture of the ear. This process of sound refining the architecture of hearing was also demonstrated by Pask’s chemical computers in which electro-chemical solutions could evolve the ability to respond to sound. Amacher’s research extends the functional aspects of listening into social feedback systems by drawing connections between music and the biological aspects of hearing. She demonstrates how hearing always occurs in between the material interactions of the world, the physical architecture of the ear, and the productive use made of sound by the mind. She divides these processes into first order suppositions, in

32 Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1972). 33 Maryanne Amacher, “Cage’s Influence: A Panel Discussion,” in Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry and Art, ed. David W Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 180. 122

which sound arises from the mechanical interactions of the cochleael fluids, and second order suppositions which meet these processes with neuro-electric rhythms generated within the brain.34 Yet when looked at in detail, neither sound nor hearing is produced within any of these individual locations thus, as Amacher ascertains, the relationship between the cochleal fluid and its electromagnetic transfer into the rhythms of neural signals and their subsequent feedback into the social sphere is not straightforward. Like Krueger’s plate experiments, sound is perpetually located in a kind of non-space, in between the elements that produce it. In her break down of the hearing process, hearing can only be located finally in rhythm. Amacher’s compositions are not only an exploration of the relationship between the environment and sound but use sound as a recursive tool for refining listening and ultimately the evolution of hearing itself.

4.4 Felix Hess: Environmental Sensitivity

B.S. Your electronic beings are cybernetic systems. What is essential in the organisation of these machines? F.H. The main part is that they listen. Interview between Felix Hess and Bernard Schultz 35 Felix Hess is a physicist who became an artist and while his installations are informed by physics they produce experiential knowledge rather than empirical knowledge, by involving processes that draw attention to the way sound participates in the sensory perception of the environment. Hess’s interest in physics originated in a desire to know how the world worked and his transition into the arts was facilitated by the realisation that understanding the empirical knowledge of the world was grounded in experiential systems and that this aspect of understanding was not accounted for in physics.36 This focus on perceptual experience is reflected in his installations, which use Cybernetic and material organisational systems to allow audience members to refine their sensitivity to the environment of the gallery. The recursive processes of hearing are central to installations such as Chirping and Silence (1987), How Light is Turned into Sound (1996) and It’s in the Air (1994). The installations refine the senses in two ways: firstly by

34 Maryanne Amacher “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of Perceptual Geography,” in Arcana III: Musicians and Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Hips Rd/Tzadic, 1977), 19. 35 Bernard Schultz, Felix Hess: Light as Air (Heidelberg: Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, 2003), 33. 36 Schultz, Felix Hess: Light as Air, 32. 123

rewarding detailed listening; and secondly by making audience members aware that their presence within the installation subtly changes the exhibition environment.

Hess’s installation Chirping and Silence places particular emphasis on Cybernetic connections to the environment. The work consists of an array of between 40 and 100 small suspended electronic devices that each contains a speaker and a microphone. Each of the devices uses feedback to emit an electronic chirping sound in response to room sound and each other. Each electronic ‘creature’ contains a simple circuit that sorts between “more or less desirable sounds” and filters these into two types of ‘call’; the first, ‘eagerness’, increases the frequency of chirping and the second, ‘shyness’, produces increasing lengths of silence.37 The installation coalesces into homeostatic patterns of call and response that are affected by each other and the ambient sounds within the environment. Hess notes that the installation crew, upon installing the work, began to write a detailed list of all of the systems that produced sound within the building to gain an idea of what was having an effect on the installation. This extended the detailed listening encouraged by the work into the wider environment of the installation.38 Through the use of an array of simple recursive electronic systems the gallery crew were drawn into activities that involve detailed listening to an environmental interaction.

In How Light is Turned into Sound, Hess adapts the basic electronic creatures in Chirping and Silence to include solar panels so that the installation also responds to light. This has the effect of making the installation one degree more responsive. The inclusion of light adds another connection to the environment and makes the installation produce sounds that Hess associates with the living.39 Like Walter’s electronic tortoises and Lucier’s Bird and Person Dyning, this ability of organisation to produce likeness to living systems relies on the ability to draw significance between the patterns and rhythms produced by the electronics. In doing this these

37 Schultz, Felix Hess: Light as Air, 46. 38 Ibid. 39 Schultz, Felix Hess: Light as Air, 47. 124

works use sound to draw attention to those aspects of the living that are dictated by recursive processes.

FIGURE 16. Felix Hess, It’s in The Air, Haus Kenmore, Bochum, 1996, Photograph: Felix Hess.

Installations such as Chirping and Silence and How Light is Turned into Sound highlight the role of rhythm and pattern in the perception of the environment. In It’s in the Air (1994) simple material systems can extend the perception of the gallery environment. The installation at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken in 2001 consisted of an array of 500 miniature Japanese rice paper vanes mounted on the floor. These were designed to move in relation to subtle differences in air pressure and created visual and sonic evidence of air movements that existed beyond the human sensory threshold. This installation extends the concept of environmental sensitivity through non-technological means, but it also demonstrates how simple materials can make people aware of aspects of the environment that are otherwise beyond their perceptual abilities.

It’s in the Air was very quiet and Chirping and Silence louder yet both the installations were dependent on audience movement and on listening for their completion. 125

The way Hess defines listening is directly aligned with Gregory Bateson’s concept of information as the ability to perceive difference and select meaning from noise.40 Hess states that listening involves “throwing away, all sounds that are deemed to be irrelevant, as having no meaning, turning them into mere noise, making them unnoticed.”41 Like Bateson, Hess divides information from noise though its productive use by an observer, and what is heard changes relative to the listener and the changing material circumstances of the installation.42 This produces an exhibition whose experience is never singular; because of this it is also an experience that is located within the perceptual faculties of individual audience members. Chirping and Silence, How Light is Turned into Sound and It’s in the Air make audience members aware of subtle sensations that are always in flux, either appearing or disappearing on a journey into something else. This absence of a definitive experience locates the installation more in its engagement than in its material manifestation.

4.5 Nicolas Collins: Feedback and Environment

The works of Krueger, Amacher and Hess draw material and perceptual links to the environment; Nicolas Collins has used audio feedback in ways that make audible spatial and material connections in real time by making feedback central to the performance of his compositions.

Collins has worked extensively with material and audio feedback systems to create his electroacoustic compositions. For example, Niche (1978) is a performance environment constructed of sails and winches that moves as the music adapts to the acoustic space, and Waterworks (1980) combines audio feedback systems with water systems and is constructed from a series of containers and pumps.43 Feedback (1975) is scored for any number of woodwind instruments that are miked

40 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 68. 41 Schultz, Felix Hess: Light as Air, 41. 42 Ibid. 43 Nicolas Collins “At the tone the time will be...,” in Musik im Dialog III (2000.) www.nicolascollins.com, accessed 23 October 2015. 126

and amplified to the point of feedback.44 The performance requires performers to fight against the effects of this feedback through movement by adjusting the keys of their instruments in order to execute the composition.45 In these compositions sounds, people and materials co-adapt against their material constraints to produce the performance.

Pea Soup (1974/software version 2011) has been regularly performed over the last forty years and is a composition that evolves directly out of the ability of audio feedback to respond to its environment. Collins describes the piece: In Pea Soup a self-stabilizing network of analogue circuitry (originally three Countryman Phase Shifters) nudges the pitch of audio feedback to a different resonant frequency every time the feedback starts to build.46

Pea Soup uses three microphones that are fed into a preamplifier and then through an audio limiter, an envelope follower, a phase shifter, an equaliser, and an amplifier, and out into a speaker where the signal re-enters the microphones.47 Together these components and circuits balance the audio feedback to produce an adaptive composition in which softly echoing high-pitched tones rise and fall in volume, creating a shifting soundscape in response to the acoustic dimensions of the acoustic space. Pea Soup behaves in a similar manner to Walter’s electronic tortoises in that the environment and the electronic componentry act as a control system for the composition. The composition models the internal versus external relations that Maturana and Varela identify with the maintenance of an organism. The internal circuit of the composition maintains homeostasis while the external audio feedback produces adaptation in relation to the environment. In this composition, audience members are effectively inside these systems that maintain the composition.

44 Nicolas Collins, Feedback score (1975) http://www.nicolascollins.com/texts/feetbackscore.pdf, accessed 21 September 2016. 45 Nicolas Collins, “All this and Brains Too: Thirty Years of Howl Around,” Resonance Magazine 9, no. 2 (2002). 46 Nicolas Collins, “‘Pea Soup’–A History,” http://www.nicolascollins.com/texts/peasouphistory.pdf, accessed 27 July 2015. 47 Collins, “‘Pea Soup’–A History.” 127

In an iteration of Pea Soup entitled For Elisabeth (2004), the piece is expanded to include a skipping CD and a trombone.48 In this iteration, the audio feedback system of Pea Soup sets the tone of the piece as it recursively settles on a tonal range in response to the acoustic properties and dimensions of the concert hall. The trombone is subsequently performed in an improvised fashion within the tonal range of the piece and the sound of the skipping CD is then brought in to complement the overall sound. In this iteration the composition is responsive to its environment; it is also simultaneously led by the performers who contribute sound into the environment, which in turn becomes absorbed into the adaptive mechanism of Pea Soup. Collins states that Pea Soup has helped him evolve new music through the direct relationship between feedback and materials: Through this work and other feedback pieces I learned that new instruments and sound materials often suggest new musical forms – the architecture determines the tuning and scale, for example -- at the same time that they rule out conventional ones.49

The way in which Collins uses feedback means that the selection and organisation of tones and pitches made by the composition’s relationship to the environment become absorbed into new compositions. Ultimately these form the basis of the selection of material for other compositions. As with Hess, there is a sense that not only are materials and systems being used to refine sensitivity to the environment through listening, but also Collins takes this a step further in that the results are fed back into aesthetic decisions made on subsequent compositions. There is a movement here from sound as audio feedback to sound as social feedback. He notes that: Perhaps the most elegant aspect was the responsiveness of the sound itself: one ‘played’ this system not by twiddling knobs or pushing buttons, but by moving or making sounds within a field of the feedback.50

48 Collins refers to the sound of the CD as “skipping” ; see Feedback score www.nicolascollins.com/. However, as Caleb Stuart notes, at the time Collins was actually experimenting with modifying the componentry of the CD player itself rather than the disc, causing the player to misread the disc rather than the disc to skip. This process possibly led to a potentially more controllable error; see Caleb Stuart, “Damaged Sound: Glitching and Skipping Compact Discs in the Audio of Yasonao Tone, Nicolas Collins and Oval,” Leonardo Music Journal 13 (2003), 48. 49 Collins, “All this and Brains Too: Thirty Years of Howl Around,” 7. 50 Collins, “‘Pea Soup’–A History.” 128

Collins goes on to say that, because of this, feedback is “a natural phenomenon with social overtones.”51 The social overtones of feedback occur because of the capacity of feedback to form an adaptive field that expands into the acoustic space, connecting the audience with their acoustic environment.

The relationship between sound, movement and aesthetic selection facilitated by feedback in Pea Soup embeds the composition within the systems that compose the environment. Political philosopher William Connolly identifies self-organising systems as the building blocks that connect the systems of capital to environmental systems.52 The social implications of compositions that use feedback become implicated within these systems. Connolly identifies the presence of self-regulatory feedback systems as linking environmental processes to social forces and evolutionary patterns, insurance schemes, political systems, biological systems and computer networks. Such diverse links can be drawn because, as Connolly states, these systems are: Persistently incomplete within themselves, and periodically facing shifting internal and external environments, they unconsciously search and strive beyond the scope of their current organisation without having a precise end initially in sight.53

The incompleteness of self-organising systems means that small fluctuations effect large change in systems that may otherwise be unrelated. This gives compositions such as Pea Soup the ability to extend through material and social registers. Because the work is responsive to movement, it is not only affected by drafts and minor disturbances, but the causes of these — door charges, transport issues, and other chains of events — radiate far beyond the composition.54 In this way, feedback compositions reflect the presence of those who are present and in this the sound of Pea Soup is simultaneously a social and a material work.55

In a composition that amplifies minor events from its material circumstances, the exchanging of the analogue circuitry for a digital equivalent should have made a

51 Collins, “All this and Brains Too: Thirty Years of Howl Around,” 7. 52 William Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (London: Duke University Press, 2013), 86. 53 Connolly, The Fragility of Things, 86. 54 Nicholas Collins, “Pea Soup History.” 55 N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 12. 129

difference to the sound. In 2011 Pea Soup was modified due to the three analogue Countryman phase shifters at the heart of the composition becoming unavailable. This required that an aspect of the composition be replaced by software. While the tone of the composition remains the same, the work is now part analogue and part digital. In a paper entitled “Semiconducting - Making Music After The Transistor”, Collins outlines why the digital components behave in a similar manner to the analogue circuits.56 Collins points out that: “In software most action is sequential, all sounds queue up through a linear pipeline for digital to analogue conversion,” whereas in a three-dimensional world sound radiates in every direction, like “syrup spreading over a waffle.”57 By trading analogue phase shifters for a digital processor, Pea Soup nevertheless behaves as it did because the digital hardware maintains a structural and material similarity through the soldered point to point connections of the previous analogue circuitry. The change demonstrates the extent to which the performance of digital and analogue technology is maintained through similarities of material form that are functionally linked to material structures. On the other hand, the environment (upon which the work relies for its completion) is consistently variable, both spatially and materially. Because of this, the environment cannot have a digital equivalent. In Pea Soup the sounds arise from material interactions both inside and outside the composition and as a result this is a composition that is embedded in and reflective of its environment.

4.6 Alan Lamb: Material Rhythms and Aeolian Transduction

Musician Alan Lamb uses the resonant frequencies produced by the wind as it moves across disused electricity wires to draw connections between biological and environmental systems. He states that “The wires sing, and I listen. Nature and all its rhythms play upon the wires…”58 For Lamb this is a way of drawing links between the patience of listening and the rhythms of the planets. Lamb’s Night Passage (1986) was

56 Nicolas Collins, “Semiconducting: Making music after the Transistor,” http://www.nicolascollins.com, accessed 29 July 2015. 57 Ibid, 3. 58 Alan Lamb, “The Metaphysics of Wire Music,” NMA ed. Ross Bolleter (Melbourne: NMA publishers, 1991), 4. 130

composed from recordings made from a set of abandoned power lines stretched between twelve poles on a farm near the Fitzgerald National Park in Western Australia. The sounds were recorded using contact microphones harvested from piezoelectric elements from record player cartridges. Due to their length, the wires were exposed to wind, as well as to physical contact with birds and insects. These generated resonant harmonic frequencies as a result of the wire’s ability to turn minor vibrations into complex emergent patterns. These sounds were extensively recorded and edited into compositions.

In 1985 Lamb pursued postgraduate research into neural circuitry at the University of Western Australia and he is particularly interested in connections between the physical oscillations in the wires and electromagnetic oscillations occurring within the brain and other living systems. He draws links between the Aeolian rhythms of the power lines, environmental evolution, and human biology by highlighting the rhythms of the wires and the oscillations of neural signals in the brain.59 In looking for connections between the brain and the environment, Lamb, like Amacher, asserts a kind of co-adaptive tuning process performed through rhythm and matter. In Lamb’s writing, this is directly correlated to measurement. He states that: There is a band of frequencies in the series which is identical to the resonant frequencies of the electrical pulse generated by the brain during states of coherence, the delta (2Hz), theta (4Hz), alpha (7Hz) as well as higher frequencies more difficult to detect. These frequencies are generated by the deeper and more ancient levels of the brain transmitting to the cortex, suggesting a common origin of atmospheric and neural oscillations from the beginning of evolution, at least since the origin of our nervous systems.60

Lamb implies a Pythagorean-tuning of the universe by which ratios and proportions connect the frequencies produced by Aeolian resonance to neural activity. Through similarities in these ratios, significance is drawn across a diverse collection of otherwise unrelated phenomena and a view of nature is proposed based on vibration and tuned matter.

In Night Passage Lamb proposes that, through proportion and harmony, music is hardwired into the material interactions of the universe. If such a view is adopted,

59 Lamb, “The Metaphysics of Wire Music,” 3. 60 Ibid. 131

grounds for such comparisons can be found in similar electromagnetic frequencies generated by the atmosphere and the brain. Alpha waves, which occur in the brain between 7.5 and 12 Hz, are in the same frequency range as the Schumann resonance which is a naturally occurring electromagnetic oscillation of 7.83 Hz generated by the cavity between the ionosphere and the earth.61 The Schumann resonance is caused by differences in the magnetic composition of the earth causing current to flow through the earth. Alpha waves are generated when the mind is at rest. Drawing a connection between the two measurements suggests that we are most relaxed when we are electromagnetically in tune with the atmosphere. By attributing significance to the behaviour of copper wires and electromagnetic activity within the brain, through dividing sound into discrete ratios, Lamb draws poetic connections that imply we are inseparable from energetic and material composing forces that simultaneously produce ourselves and our environment.

The question of whether music is produced by recognition of rhythms that are already within human biology, or by human endeavour, is raised by Lamb’s speculations on the relationships between the Aeolian and the neuro-electric worlds. In “The Aeolian and Henry David Thoreau’s Sphere Music,” Douglas Kahn discusses the relationship of the wind and wires to tease out arguments over human agency in music.62 Kahn singles out Eighteenth Century music writer Eduard Hanslick, for whom music was the direct result of human endeavour: “The Aeolian was ‘mere noise’ for Hanslick and anything musical it might offer would not come from nature, but only from the artfulness of special instruments built to wrench beauty from it.”63 For Hanslick music was constructed by the composer and the performer and delivered to an audience whether they made productive use of the sound or not. Kahn also discusses the work of late Nineteenth Century German music writer Carl Engel and naturalists John Muir and Thoreau, for whom the natural world behaved more like a giant orchestra whose sounds were distinguished through the way the wind played the different physical forms within nature. Kahn highlights how, for Engel, Muir and Thoreau, music was an inherent aspect of the environment that could be perceived through attentive listening and in this listening the music of nature would be revealed.

61 Hans Volland, Handbook of Atmospheric Electrodynamics, Volume II (London: CRC Press), 1995. 62 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal (California: University of California Press: 2013), 41. 63 Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 42. 132

Thoreau and Lamb both heard music in the action of wind on power lines and Kahn identifies two forms of energy in Thoreau’s descriptions—the Aeolian and the Alectrosonic: “The Aeolian and the Alectrosonic are manifestations of naturally occurring energies, the former rooted in the physical states of mechanics and the latter in electromagnetism.”64 This transduction of physical energy into electromagnetic energy and back again is fundamental to human perception of the environment as it describes the hearing mechanism by which physical energy is turned into neural signal, where it is subject to comparison and selection in the mind. Kahn points out that naturally occurring electromagnetic processes have become associated with technology while the Aeolian has become associated with nature, while in fact both processes are equally located within the natural world.

Lamb’s harmonic ‘nature’ is produced in the transduction between these two states of energy. Nature is thus located in the space between the recording process and the hearing process because it is at these junctures that rhythm becomes information.65 The transducers placed on the wires transcribe the qualities of the wires and the piezoelectric transducers as much as they do the wind. The recordings are reflective of an intersection of these different elements. The process of transduction from wire to signal is mirrored by the hearing process itself, which converts the recorded sound back into neural signal.66 There are two selection processes at work here. In the first, although Lamb does not play the wires, he performs the role of the musician editing and mixing the recording’s relative interest. The second selection process is performed by the listener who interprets the recordings relative to their own understanding of what they are of. Without this interpretative knowledge the sound could be compared to any number of electroacoustic or resonant phenomena. As Heinz von Foerster points out, the environment contains no information.67 This is illustrated by Lamb’s Night Passage, in which the sounds of nature are composed through a combination of significance and selection understood through the effects of material transduction and the environment. The view of nature presented in Lamb’s Night Passage cannot be attributed to any one of

64 Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 53. 65 See my discussion of Bateson’s concept of difference as information in Chapter Two. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 68. 66 Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 64. 67 Heinz von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 2. 133

these elements and instead is formed by comparisons of rhythms and patterns of sound that occur between what we understand nature to sound like and the sounds that are presented as recordings of the wind in the wires. Night Passage highlights the ways in which transduction between electromagnetic and physical forces composes our perceptual connections to the world. This approach is central to how we understand nature through sound. By recording sound produced at the intersection of a large abandoned telecommunications structure and the wind, Night Passage confounds distinct divisions between people, nature and technology, pointing instead to a view of nature based on similarities between pattern and rhythm drawn between the natural world’s ability to organise.

When placed together, the compositions and installations by the artists discussed in this chapter paint a picture of nature composed between material interaction and the embedded perception of that material interaction. The installations and composition by Krueger, Amacher, Hess, Collins and Lamb demonstrate this inseparability by stimulating thought about the significance of the listening process in the perception and definition of nature. The works in this chapter highlight the recursive nature of listening and identify sound as a facilitator of these connections rather than something within itself. In this way sound is used as a tool with which we can gain an experiential knowledge of the world.

Krueger’s steel plate experiments demonstrate how our perceptual connections to the world are composed of multiple complex overlapping systems. These systems link observers with their perception of the systems. Through listening, his steel plate experiment defies a simple relationship between sine wave and steel by showing that these elements exist within a network of chaotic material systems that are interpreted socially within human timeframes which are affected by patience, interest and personal disposition. Amacher’s music draws attention to the way in which the listening process is located in between the mind, the physical architecture of the ear and the environment and extends this idea to the way in which sound is implicated within evolutionary processes. Felix Hess’s installations simultaneously refine sensitivity to the environment and draw attention to the material communication processes that occur outside the range of our perceptual faculties. In doing this he draws attention to how the limits of our perceptual

134

abilities define our engagement with the world. Nicolas Collins’ Pea Soup provides a direct audio connection with the environment and demonstrates the complex recursive mapping that can be produced through the combination of positive and negative feedback systems. In this, his work echoes the description of the living systems (positive and negative feedback relationships) presented in the writing of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. In Lamb’s Night Passage (1986), wires produce resonant oscillations that are used to draw connections between living and non-living systems, allowing us to consider the way that energies and composing forces connect us to the earth through similarities in rhythm. Lamb’s use of transduction draws attention to the material and electromagnetic infrastructure that underpins our perception of that world. This is a selection of artists for whom sound is a tool in revealing our structural and perceptual connections to the environment. Their works show how listening and making sense of sound is an adaptive negotiated process and highlight the role that sound plays in sculpting biological, social and material systems.

135

Conclusion Organisational Systems for Listening

Far from being a system for warning about distant events, art must respond to what is happening right now, to events and situations that have potentially apocalyptic meanings and consequences, and which, like nuclear catastrophes the DEW Line was supposed to anticipate, radically alter our relationship with time and history. Charlie Gere. 1

This research began with the idea that music is formed through engagement with the environment and was developed through the Black Field Plates installations which produce sound through material interactions with their environment.

Through this research I have identified that although many artists and composers respond to nature, there is a distinctly different body of work created by those that respond to nature’s organisational systems that contrasts with the work of those that seek to represent the natural world (such as the work of acoustic ecologists). As I have shown, a Cybernetic world-view argues that the systems that compose the natural world are defined by connection and cannot be easily isolated. This interconnectivity is a key link between the systems that Cybernetic thinkers used to describe nature, the work of early musicians who drew Cybernetic ideas into their practice, and the works presented in this thesis. Through practice-based research, I have proposed the idea that technology itself is an extension of the organisational processes of nature and, demonstrated that by using a minimum of electronic componentry and a black box aesthetic it is possible to show how Cybernetic understandings of music were brought into being by forms of material organisation that were broader than simply technological mediation.

1 Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 102.

136

The Black Field Plates installation exhibited at the Audio Foundation (2014) was a networked series of steel plates that generated sound from the interplay of positive feedback and the material constraints of the installation. The basic system provided a unit on which other installations were built. Rather than using sophisticated electronics to facilitate dynamic sonic adaptation, the installation instead pared environmental adaptation down to its basic material foundations; in this case steel, electricity, and piezo-electric transducers. The idea that technology was reliant on material organisation became a recurring theme within later exhibitions. The group show In Fields (2015) was curated around the concept that the organisational and material processes upon which electronic technology is based are fundamentally located within electro-chemical and electro-magnetic interaction. The exhibition demonstrated this by networking together works that foregrounded the ability of copper crystal and discarded electronics to interact with the social and electromagnetic environments. Other installations such as Pollen (2015) simultaneously explore how audience and performer are also implicated within these material systems by placing two recursive systems in a gallery with an audience and a performer.

My installations and the compositions discussed in this research present musical systems that connect people with their social and material environments. They do this by either directly utilising contingent processes or by exploring the perceptual and social processes that connect us to the environment. I argue that these compositions present a specific view of nature based on its organisational systems and that these systems create compositions that are directly reflective of the listener, the environment and the artist. Compositions that utilise organisational systems observed in nature reference nature through the way they behave rather than their ability to represent the motifs of nature through traditional musical notation. Music that is produced through systems of self- organisation places direct emphasis on the act of listening as sound evolves in real-time as the result of a system designed to produce it. This music is formed through the physical, social and ultimately the political implications of being in the world and this happens because, as William Connolly points, out systems of self-organisation

137

perpetually rely on the interconnection of social and material systems for their completion.2

The social and material implications of music located within the systems of the living are particularly evident in John Cage’s compositions where nature was located not only in these perceptual connections, but within a particular material and political definition of nature and, as Charlie Gere points out, the Cybernetic and historical frameworks of the Twentieth Century.3 Cage’s representation of nature both as an unsullied wilderness and also as the perceptual systems by which we imagine it exposes the political nature of defining the natural world and highlights how nature cannot be defined as one thing, nor can it be defined as separate from ourselves.

Using the systems that connect us to the natural world to define nature will always involve the individual inclusion and exclusion of aspects of the world and in this regard Cage’s 4’33” becomes a recurring theme within this thesis as it marks a definitive shift from music produced by the composer to music produced as a negotiation between the individual and their environment. Gere asserts that Cage’s composition is simultaneously a similar length to a pop song and the length of warning time that the American Government’s Distant Early Warning (DEW) System could provide between nuclear attack and destruction.4 The contrast mirrors a change from composer to listener in the shift from the top down politics of the Cold War to the politics of self- organisation that allow a pop song to rise through the charts.5 Cage used the politics of self-organisation to loosen the control structures of his own musical tradition and also to further his view that individuals should be increasingly self-governing within society.

On one level, trading the composer for systems of self-organisation emphasises the power of the individual in the creation of music, but, on another level, as I have shown in this thesis, recursive systems do not require human input. Instead they trade any cognitive ability for the simple operations of small individual elements and as such cannot directly serve the intention of the composer–this is because they do not serve.

2 William Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (London: Duke University Press, 2013), 86. 3 Gere, Art, Time and Technology, 102. 4 Ibid., 101. 5 Ibid., 102.

138

As Heinz von Forester states: “Nature chooses nothing. There isn’t a great selector sitting there with his tweezers and his tongs, meticulously removing the dinosaurs from the playing field; they just disappeared.”6 The lack of agency inherent within systems that produce indeterminacy makes 4’33” as relevant to the neo-liberal economic environment of the Twenty-first century as it was to the Cold War politics of the Twentieth century. As political philosopher William Connolly notes, neo-liberal politics heavily reference systems of self-organisation as a kind of “Darwinian moral law” and the side effect of introducing recursive systems into the economic and social sphere is that, by their very nature, these systems cannot care for those that use them.7

Cybernetics described nature with recursive systems and these were used to draw wide ranging connections across disciplinary borders and otherwise unrelated aspects of life. This impacted both theoretically and technologically on the way in which Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier responded to nature in their compositions. The side effect of this is that the compositions became defined by their environment and in this there is a direct link between Gordon Pask’s notion of the “aesthetically potent environment” as a space that generated experience through engagement and works in this thesis that generate music through environmental engagement.8

Cybernetics primarily defined nature as a distributed feedback network that reduced the natural world to positive and negative feedback systems. When used in compositions, feedback systems can be used to directly implicate performers and audience members in the construction of the work. Feedback systems allow for adaptation between organisms and environments and, for Gregory Bateson, these feedback relationships mean that the world and the mind are mutually defined through difference and rhythm.9 In this view of the world, music becomes a product of a co-adaptive relationship with the material and social environment and this is particularly evident in Maryanne Amacher’s explorations of otoacoustic phenomena.

6 Heinz von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 84. 7 Connolly, The Fragility of Things, 14. 8 Gordon Pask, “A Comment, A Case History and a Plan,” Cybernetics, Art and Ideas, ed. Jasia Reichardt (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 77. 9 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979).

139

Compositions that rely on environmental engagement for their completion are operationally aligned with the way in which Bateson and Wiener defined life. Both divided the world into inert matter that obeyed predictable laws, and life, which behaved contingently. Key to this contingency was the productive use of noise by living systems and this is central to compositions that use feedback. The compositions in this thesis emphasise this particularly biological definition of noise and this is because, like the relationship between an organism and its environment, they are necessarily realised materially in three dimensional space. Maturana and Varela define living systems through their concept of the niche in which material feedback systems maintain stability and growth between the internal systems of the organism and the external systems of the environment. But a niche is not specific to organic matter, and, as my installation Digital Corporate Shamans demonstrates, a niche can be created as a function of material interaction; in this case through feedback between a house and its environment.10 The installation illustrates how the feedback processes that define the relationship between organism and environment are located within elemental exchanges and the ability of and electromagnetism, movement and material sound to produce dynamic change.11

In the terms of this research, Cybernetic devices identify specific processes that provide mechanical models for how natural processes of interaction can be made audible. This has the result that these experimental compositions are best understood through Cybernetic models of environmental relations rather than through the usually argued approach to improvisation and pre-defined scores which emphasise the role of the composer and performer in music that involves high degrees of indeterminacy and contingency. Ross Ashby’s homeostat provided an early example of a device that self- organised to produce stability as a result of material constraints. Homeostasis is also central to the way that devices such as Grey Walter’s electronic tortoises adapted to their environment and to Gordon Pask’s Musicolour which demonstrated how music could be produced as the result of co-adaptation between an electronically mediated environment and people. Systems that facilitate homeostasis, emergent behaviour and the implication of the individual within their construction of the world can produce music that is uniquely representative of its environment and presents a view of nature

10 Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Massachusetts: Shambahla Publications, 1987), 95. 11 Manuel DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 9.

140

that can never be viewed as separate from ourselves or as the result of the hand of a single individual. By constructing a lineage of composers and artists whose work is formed through its sonic engagement with its environment, I have shown how music is not only tied to attention, but is produced relative to location. This consideration of the individual as implicated within the construction of their environment both physically and socially is central to the ‘Dark Ecology’ of Morton and the critiques of neoliberal politics presented by Connolly.12 The Black Field Plate installations operate in this context, where the individual cannot be thought of as separate to their environment, and furthermore I propose that this kind of work allows audience members to consider their own place as embedded within the environment at large.

This embededness is directly reflected in the compositions by Cage, Tudor and Lucier discussed in this thesis. While Cage’s 4’33” introduced an expansive version of nature inclusive of all of the sounds of the world, all three composers made compositions that emphasised different aspects nature. For Cage, systems-thinking and information theory impacted on key concepts in his work such as his approach to indeterminacy. Variations VII functioned through recursive interactions and used a material system to make music that connected the wider city environment with the movements of audience members. In contrast, Fontana Mix strictly adhered to procedural systems in order to produce the indeterminacy that Cage associated with nature’s selection processes. This contrast between scored indeterminacy and organisation as material constraint divides Tudor’s electronic compositions from Cage’s scored compositions in that it allowed Tudor to use sound to explore the material connections that formed the environment. Microphone used audio feedback to explore relationships between a device and its environment, Bandoneon! and Mesa directly implicated a performer with limited agency within a wider Cybernetic system, and the Rainforest series demonstrated how multiple networked resonant objects could behave like an electronic ecosystem. Lucier’s compositions also relied on sound that evolved from material constraint but within his works nature’s organisational systems were used to highlight specific aspects of natural phenomena. This was done through the appropriation of devices from scientific contexts such as the Sondols used in Vespers and the EEG machine in For Solo Performer. An organisational

12 Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics; Connolly, The Fragility of Things.

141

view of nature is inherent within the operation of these scientific devices and their systems become a feature of the way these compositions reference nature.

These works present a view of nature as an organisationally connected web of social, cultural and material phenomena. As Bruno Latour notes, nature is often understood through the technological and social apparatus of science, and the technologies with which science understands nature are fundamentally located within nature’s organisational processes.13 Jack Burnham, Robert Smithson, and more recently Jussi Parikka have argued for the inseparability of nature and technology.14 Burnham presents technology as a function of the body dividing mind and body along the lines of software and hardware. Smithson on the other hand draws connections between technology, geology and memory. The idea that technology is an extension of social, material and earth systems becomes apparent in Ted Krueger’s steel plate experiments that make the relationship between contingency, mind and the material environment audible, and in the work of Amacher, in which the architecture of the ear, its perception and the environment also demonstrate the technology as something located between physical form, perception and meaning. The idea that experiential knowledge gained through the hearing process can be refined through listening is extended in Felix Hess’s It’s in the Air in which fields of small paper weather vanes extend sensitivity to the environment by materially connecting the hearing process to the environment. These artists utilise organisational systems to engage and refine the senses to the environment and this is fundamentally different from attempting to represent the form that nature’s organisation takes. Audio feedback provides a similarly reflexive mechanism that is directly aligned with the operation of natural systems and Nicolas Collin’s Pea Soup demonstrates how feedback can enact a dialogue with the environment that goes beyond the world of improvisation by allowing the environment to regulate sound in response to the acoustics of the performance space.

Audio feedback is also central to my own work but, rather than a direct engagement between an electronic system and the acoustic space, feedback is produced in between a

13 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 97. 14 Jack Burnham, Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (New York: Jewish Museum, 1970); Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

142

decentralised field of environmental relationships. This also means that the individual components are endlessly reconfigurable and that installations can be spatially and acoustically tailored to each location. In The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name (2016), for instance, a range of steel plates and glass bells were installed, whereas in Corporate Digital Shamans (2014) the feedback system mediated between a house and its environment, creating rhythmic sound at the intersection of the two. Music that arises out of pre-existent conditions is also a feature or Alan Lamb’s Night Passage where Aeolian rhythms are drawn from abandoned wires from which he makes connections to alpha rhythms in the brain, implying, like Amacher, that these rhythms are part of a biological adaptation that connects people sonically to their environment.

The sounds produced by the installations and compositions in this research draw direct connections to the contingent processes of life. Together they present a view of nature that is defined by engagement with social, environmental and organisational systems. They do this by implicating the artist and the audience within these organisational systems, converting nature into a form of environmental listening. These organisational systems foreground our perceptual connections to the environment and illustrate a view of nature from which we are not separate. By doing this, the works in this thesis demonstrate the selective and political nature of listening and how these processes of selection ultimately define how we frame the natural world as nature.

143

Bibliography

Abela, Lucas. Temple of Din exhibition at Palais de Tokyo (2015) http://www.dualplover.com/templeofdin/ (accessed 8/06/2017).

Amacher, Maryanne. “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of Perceptual Geography.” In Arcana III: Musicians and Music, edited by John Zorn, 9-24. New York: Hips Rd, 1977.

–––––. “Cage’s Influence: A Panel Discussion.” In Writings Through John Cage’s Music Poetry and Art, edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, 167-190. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

–––––. Description of Living Sound by Amacher for Sound as Text blog http://sound-art- text.com/post/34332890147/maryanne-amacher-1938-2009-living-sound-for (accessed 23 August 2016).

–––––. http://maryanneamacher.org (accessed 23 July 2015).

Asaro, Peter M. “From Mechanisms of Adaption to Intelligence Amplifiers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby.” In The Mechanical Mind in History, edited by Phil Husbands, Owen Holland & Michael Wheeler, 149-184. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.

Ashby, Ross. The Living Brain. London: Penguin Books, 1953.

–––––. An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman and Hall, 1957.

–––––. Design For a Brain. London: John Wiley & Sons, 1960.

Bak, Per. How Nature Works. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996.

Ballard, S. “Signal Eight Times: Nature, Catastrophic Extinction Events and Contemporary Art” Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, Issue 7 Risk, (August 2015): 70-94.

144

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. St Alban: Paladin, 1973.

–––––. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979.

Beer, Stanford. Brain of The Firm. London: The Penguin Press, 1972.

Ben-Ary, Guy CEIF (2015) http://guybenary.com/work/cellf/ (accessed 13 July 2015).

Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. General Systems Theory. New York: George Brazilier, 1969.

Blamey, Peter. Double Particle Eclipse (2014) https://peterblamey.net/double-partial- eclipse/ (accessed 8 June 2017).

Brahic, Catherine. “Meet the Electric Life Forms that Live on Pure Energy.” New Scientist, (16 July 2014) https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894-meet-the- electric-life-forms-that-live-on-pure-energy/ (accessed 16 July 2016).

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. “The Book of the Future: Alison Knowles’s The House of Dust.” In Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. Edited by Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn, 200-208. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012.

Burnham, Jack. Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. New York: Jewish Museum, 1970.f

–––––. Great Western Salt Works: Essays on The Meaning of Post-Formalist Art. New York: George Brazilier, 1974.

Cage, John. Fontana Mix. New York: Henmar Press, 1958.

–––––. “4'33” # 2 (0”00”)” Solo to be performed in any way by anyone for Yoko Ono and Toshi Ichiyanagi. New York: Edition Peters, 1962.

–––––. Variations I-III/ Lecture on Nothing (1962). Performed by Motion Ensemble 2003. mode 129, compact disc.

–––––. A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage. London: Calder and Boyars, 1968.

–––––. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

–––––. Empty Words. Middletown USA: Wesleyan Press, 1973.

–––––. For the Birds: In Conversation With Daniel Charles. New York: Marion Boyars, 1976.

–––––. “Autobiographical Statement.” John Cage.org. (1990), http://johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html (accessed 27 July 2016).

145

Cariani, Peter. “To Evolve an Ear: Epistemological Implications of Gordon Pask’s Electrochemical Devices.” Systems Research 10, no. 3 (1993): 19-33.

Christov-Bakargiev, Caroline. Pierre Huyghe, Rome: Skira, 2004.

Clarke, Bruce, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “From Thermodynamics to Virtuality.” In From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature, edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 17-33. California: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Collins, Nicholas. Feedback score (1975). www.nicolascollins.com (accessed 22 September 2016).

–––––. “Pea Soup History.” http://www.nicolascollins.com (accessed 29 July 2015).

–––––. “At the tone the time will be...” In Musik im Dialog III (2000.) www.nicolascollins.com (accessed 23 October 2015).

–––––. “All this and Brains Too: Thirty Years of Howl Around.” Resonance Magazine 9, no. 2, (2002): 6-7.

–––––. “Semiconducting: Making music after the Transistor.” http://www.nicolascollins.com (accessed 29 July 2015).

Connolly, William. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. London: Duke University Press, 2013.

Corbin, Alain. Village Bells. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Cubitt, Sean. “Analogue and Digital.” Theory, Culture and Society 23, no. 2/3, (May 2006): 250.

De Salvo, Donna. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970. London: Tate Publishing, 2005.

De Visscher, Eric. “There's No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage's Poetics of Silence.” Writings About John Cage . Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

DeLanda, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone, 2000.

–––––. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006.

–––––. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. London and New York: Continuum, 2011.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press, 1996.

146

Drago, Alejandro Marcelo. Instrumental Tango Idioms in the Symphonic Works and Orchestral Arrangements of Astor Piazzolla Performance and Notational Problems: A Conductor’s Perspective, PhD Thesis, Mississippi: University of Mississippi, 2008.

Driscoll, John and Matt Rogalsky, “David Tudor's Rainforest: An Evolving Exploration of Resonance.” Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004): 25-30.

Dunbar-Hester, Christina. “Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems 1950-1980.” Science Technology and Human Values 35 (2010): 113-139.

Dunn, David & James P. Crutchfield. “Entomogenic Climate Change: Insect Bioacoustics and Future Forest Ecology.” Leonardo 42, no. 3 (2009): 239-244.

Dyson, Frances. The Tone of our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy and Ecology. Cambridge, MA. & London: MIT Press, 2014.

Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines. London: Penguin Books, 1997.

Fillion, Michelle. Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music: Gordon Mumma. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2015.

Foerster, Heinz von. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Franchi, Stefano. “Life, Death and Resurrection of W. Ross Ashby’s Homeostat.” In The Search for a Theory of Cognition: Early Mechanisms and New Ideas, edited by Stefano Franchi, 3-52. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V, 2011.

Friedman, Ken. “Introduction: A Transformative Vison of Fluxus” ed. Ken Friedman. The Fluxus Reader, Academy Editions. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

Fullemann, David “Interview with David Tudor Stockholm May 31 1984, ” http://davidtudor.org/Articles/fullemann.html (accessed 11/4/2015).

Gere, Charlie. Art, Time and Technology. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

Getling, A.V. Rayleigh-Bènard Convection: Structure and Dynamics. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Ltd, 1998.

Gioni, Massimiliano and Gary Camion-Murayari. Ghosts In The Machine. New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, 2012.

Glanville, Ranulph. “And He Was Magic.” Kybernetics 30, no. 6 (2001): 652 - 673.

Goldman, Jonathan. “The Buttons on Pandora’s Box: David Tudor and the Bandoneon.” American Music 30, no. 1 (2012): 32.

147

Hallowell, Ronan. “Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Contribution to Media Ecology: Autopoiesis, The Santiago School of Cognition, and Enactive Cognitive Science.” Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, vol. 10, (2009): 143-158.

Haque, Usman. “The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask.” Architectural Design 77, no. 4 (2007): 54-61.

Haque, Usman. Evolving Sonic Environment III (2007). http://www.haque.co.uk/evolvingsonicenvironment.php (accessed 13 July 2015).

Harries-Jones, Peter. A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.

Harris, Tony. The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew. London: Routledge, 2013.

Haskell, David George. The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors. New York: Random House, 2017.

Haskins, Rob. Classical Listening. London: Rowman& Little Field, 2016.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. London: Cornell University Press, 1990.

–––––. “Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics.” Configurations 2, no. 3 (1994): 441-467.

–––––. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Higgins, Hannah B. and Douglas Kahn, eds., Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Holmes, Thom. Electronic and Experimental Music. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Hultberg, Teddy. “An Interview with David Tudor, Dusseldorf May 17 1988.” Davidtudor.org, http://davidtudor.org/Articles/hultberg.html (accessed 25 November 2015).

Ilfeld, Etan J. “Contemporary Art and Cybernetics: Waves of Cybernetic Discourse within Conceptual, Video and New Media Art.” Leonardo 45, no. 1 (2012), 57-63.

Johnston, John. The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics and the New AI. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

148

Jung, Carl Gustav. The Seven Sermons to the Dead [1916]. http://gnosis.org/library/7Sermons.htm (accessed 5 November 2014).

Kahn, Douglas. “John Cage: Silence and Silencing.” The Musical Quarterly 81 no.4 (1997): 556-598.

–––––. Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999.

–––––. “Something More than Interesting: David Tudor and The Sound of Anthroposophy” (unpublished paper by Khan presented at the conference “The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture, 2001”).

–––––. Earth Sound Earth Signal. California: University of California Press, 2013.

Kemp, David T. “Otoacoustic emissions, their origin in cochlear function, and use.” In The British Medical Journal 63, no. 1 (2002): 223, http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org (accessed 6 August 2015).

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think; Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkley: University of California Press, 2013.

Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. Writings About John Cage. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Krueger, Ted. “Instrumentation and Instrumentality.” Paper presented at the DataWolk Hoeksche Waard workshop V2 Institute for Unstable Media, Hoeksche Waard Island 1998. www.nomads.usp.br (assessed 10 September, 2015).

–––––. “This is Not Entertainment: Experiencing the Dream House.” In Architectural Design 78 no. 3 (2008): 12-15. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ (accessed September 13, 2015).

–––––. “38Hz.,7.5 Minutes.” In Inflections 5, Simondon: Milieu, Techniques, Aesthetic, (2012): 12-28.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. London: Penguin Books, 1999.

Lamb, Alan. “The Metaphysics of Wire Music.” NMA 9. Edited by Ross Bolleter. Melbourne: NMA Publishing (1991): 3-6.

Larson, Kay. Where the Heart Beats: John Cage Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists. New York: Penguin, 2012.

149

Latdict, Latin Dictionary & Grammar resources http://latin- dictionary.net/definition/23684/informo-informare-informavi-informatus (accessed 22 April 2016).

Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

–––––. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA. & London: Harvard University Press, 2004.

–––––. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’” New Literary History, no. 41 (2010).

Lee, Pamela M. Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA. & London: MIT Press, 2004.

Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Los Angeles: University of California, 1973.

Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia. London: Penguin Books, 2007.

Lucier, Alvin. Reflections, Interviews Scores Writings. Germany: MusikTexte, 1995.

–––––. “Origins of a Form: Acoustical Exploration, Science and Incessancy”, in Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 8 (1998), 9.

–––––. Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

Lucier, Alvin and Douglas Simon. Chambers. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

Margolin, Arthur. “Conversation with Alvin Lucier.” Perspectives in New Music 20, no. 1 (1981): 50-58.

Marshall Stuart. “Alvin Lucier’s Music of Signs in Space.” Studio International 192, no. 984 (1976): 284-289.

Maturana, H.R. , W.S. McCulloch, J.Y. Lettvin, “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain.” Proceedings of the Institute for Radio Engineers. (1959): 1940- 1951.

Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979.

–––––. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Shambahla Publications, 1987.

150

Morris, Catherine. 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering 1966. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA. & London: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Mumma, Gordon and Alvin Lucier. Proceedings of the American Society of University Composers 4. 1969-1971.

Mumma, Gordon. Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music. Illinois: University of Illinois, 2015.

Neumann, John von, and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944.

Parikka, Jussi. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

–––––. A Geology of Media. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Pask, Gordon. An Approach to Cybernetics. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.

–––––. “A Comment, A Case History and a Plan.” In Cybernetics, Art and Ideas, edited by Jasia Reichardt, 76-99. London: Studio Vista, 1971.

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Piekut, Benjamin. “Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature.” Cultural Critique 84 (2013): 134-163.

Pritchett, James, The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Ragain, Melissa (ed.). Jack Burnham: Dissolve into Comprehension Writings and Interviews 1964 – 2004. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2015.

Reichardt, Jasia. Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts. New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, 1968.

Sanfilippo, Danto. “Turning Perturbation into Emergent Sound, and Sound into Perturbation.” Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture 3 (2013) www.interferencejournal.com (accessed 29 July 2014).

Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Vermont: Destiny Books, 1977.

151

Schonfield, Victor. “From Piano to Electronics: Interview with David Tudor.” Music and Musicians 20 (1972): 24-27.

Schultz, Bernard. Felix Hess: Light as Air. Heidelberg: Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, 2003.

Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Shanken, Edward A. “Informing Software: Software, Structuralism, Dematerialization.” In Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts edited by Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn, 51-64. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.

Smith, Owen. “Developing a Fluxable Forum: Early Performance and Publishing.” In The Fluxus Reader, Academy Editions edited by Ken Friedman. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

Smithson, Robert. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects.” In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, 100-113. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

–––––. Robert Smithson: Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Steiner, Rudolf. Knowledge of Higher Worlds [1923]. London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company, 2007.

Stuart, Caleb. “Damaged Sound: Glitching and Skipping Compact Discs in the Audio of Yasonao Tone, Nicolas Collins and Oval.” Leonardo Music Journal 13 (2003): 47-52.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.

–––––. Walden: Or Life in the Woods and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience [1849]. Sunnyvale, California: Loki’s Publishing, 2012.

Trianni, Vito. Evolutionary Swarm Robotics and Evolving Self-Organising Behaviors in Groups of Autonomous Robots. Rome: Springer, 2008.

Tudor, David. “Bandoneon! (A Combine) (Performance).” The Daniel Langiois Foundation http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=583 (accessed 8 April 2015).

–––––. “Interview with David Fulleman, Stockholm May 31, 1984.” http://davidtudor.org/Articles/fullemann.html (accessed 11 April 2015).

–––––. “David Tudor and Larry Austin: A Conversation April 3, 1989, Denton, Texas.” http://davidtudor.org/Arricles/austin.html (accessed 3 November 2015).

152

Volland, Hans. Handbook of Atmospheric Electrodynamics, Volume II. London: CRC Press. 1995. von Foerster, Heinz. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Waldrop, Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Chaos and Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Walter, W. Grey. “An Imitation of Life.” Scientific America, 182, no. 5, (1950): 42-45.

–––––. The Living Brain. London: Penguin Books, 1953.

Whitelaw, Mitchell. “Sheer Hardware: Material Computing in the Work of Martin Howse and Ralf Baecher.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts 2013, 10 no. 2 http://scan.net.au/scn/journal/vol10number2/Mitchell-Whitelaw.html (accessed 18 August 2016).

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1948.

–––––. The Human Use of Human Beings. London: Sphere Books, 1968.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

153

Appendix A: Documentation of Work 2012-2017

154 Black Field Plates Exhibited at Audio Foundation in Auckland NZ, October 2014.

Four suspended steel plates measuring 600mm by 1200 mm in a gallery that was around 10m by 6m. The plates were paired – a microphone and speaker with a 100mm gap. The circuit was completed by cables, 10 watt amplifiers, two compression pedals and two phaser pedals. These pedals were covered by two sculptures made of black fun fur.

The Black Field Plates exhibition in Auckland became the namesake for the series of installations discussed within this thesis. This installation produced a dynamic audio feedback composition that changed and adapted to its environment. The configuration of the plates became the basic unit upon which other installations were based. The compression pedals kept the feedback within a tonal range at a low volume. The phaser pedals were used to disrupt the feedback by recursively phasing the effect off the last plate/pedal combination. The pedals were adjusted until the feedback was balanced into a dynamic rhythm.

Video documentation of this exhibition can be found here: https://vimeo.com/109674872

155

microphone 1 microphone 2 speaker 1 speaker 2

amp 1 amp 2 phaser compressor

phaser compressor

Circuit diagram of Black Field Plates exhibition at Audio Foundation. Nathan Thompson 2014.

156 Corporate Digital Shamans Exhibited as part of Black Modular, MAP projects Lawson NSW, June 2014. Curated by David Haines and Joyce Hinterding.

Two resonators, two transducers, amplifiers, two compression pedals, two effects pedals, fun fur, cables, electrical insulators.

Corporate Digital Shamans turned the steel panels of Haines’ and Hinterding’s house into resonant speakers that made music feedback that connected the indoor and outdoor ambient sound and the material properties of the house. The insulators provided counterweights that held the resonators against the steel panels and the transducers were placed around 1500mm from the resonators to include the resonance of the panels within the feedback circuit. The work also picked up vibrations within the house and the feedback also created areas of vibration that could be felt at specific location within the house. This created a composition that was emergent from the house, the sound of which came from no specific location.

157 Pollen Exhibited as part of the NOw NOw festival January SNO Gallery, Sydney, 2015.

Resonators, suspended steel plates, cables, amplifiers, fun fur, four phaser effects pedals, two compression pedals, electrical insulators. With Anthea Caddy.

Pollen contained two systems. The first one was the same as the Black Field Plates installation at The Audio Foundation in Auckland and the other was a similar circuit that turned a wall of the gallery and a window on the opposite side of the gallery into speakers and microphones. Anthea Caddy (pictured in the top photograph) played cello with the work for an hour during the exhibition, creating a composition that included two circuits and a performer. The installation adapted to Caddy’s cello and she was able to lead the sound as well as respond to it, producing a composition in which the environment played an active role.

Audio Documentation of Anthea playing with Pollen: https://soundcloud.com/expansion-bay/pollen-with-anthea-caddy

Video documentation of this exhibition can be found here: https://vimeo.com/128442176

158 Distant Early Warning System Redlands Art Award, National Art School Sydney, April – May 2014.

Resonators, suspended steel plates, cables, amplifiers, fun fur, effects pedals, wire, transducers, one phaser pedal, one tremolo pedal.

This feedback system used stiff wires to physically transfer vibration from two speakers to two different sized microphone plates. The work picked up sound from the reverberant environment and another sound composition nearby.

amp 1 amp 2

speaker 1 speaker 2 phaser tremelo

Distant Early Warning System – installation circuit diagram. Nathan Thompson 2014.

159 The Begi nni ng of Heaven and Earth Has No Name Firstdraft Gallery, June 2016.

Suspended steel plates, cables, amplifiers, fun fur, compression pedal, graphic equaliser pedal, delay pedal, wire, glass bells, steel shelving rack, 5 framed drawings (ink on paper).

This installation was the first iteration in which glass was used to mitigate audio feedback and this added a resonant quality to the installation. T-shaped wire hammers extended from the floor speakers upward to a variety of different shaped suspended glass objects including a cheese cover, a glass cover from a hurricane lamp and a beer glass. These were selected for their resonant qualities. The three speakers created a network that diffused the intensity of the feedback by percussively vibrating the hammers within the glass bells. In the rack was a microphone/speaker plate combination that was connected to the glass bell system and also to a plate speaker at the far end of the room. The sound of this speaker was delayed a little to mitigate feedback. The installation combined the acoustic properties of the triangular shaped room, with the resonance of the glass, sound produced by the audience, and the feedback produced by the system.

Video Documentation can be found here https://vimeo.com/190031756

160

The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name was accompanied by 5 framed A3 ink drawings that sought to expand the engagement with environmental recursion into the social and material networks that dictate aspects of daily life. The first image consisted of a list of handwritten set up and trouble-shooting procedures required for an online system that allowed me to become part of a casual teaching workforce. The second documented a similar set of procedures required to connect a television to a service provider and the third dealt with the process required to get natural gas turned off in my rented house and a procedural anomaly that identified 97 cents worth of leaked gas that the company’s automated accounting system found to simultaneously exist and not exist. Two of the drawings were produced by drawing closely spaced horizontal lines across a page with a brush and mapped their own creation as the paper absorbed moisture, affecting the pattern of subsequent lines.

161 In Fields Group exhibition at exhibition 55 Sydenham Rd Gallery, Marrickville, Sydney 2015. Various media

Emily Morandini, Lithosferics (2015). Peter Blamey, Flux Calculators: Particulate Sunset and Foke & Smog (2015). Nathan Thompson, Folkloric Rainbow Distributions (2015).

This exhibition was a collaboration between Peter Blamey, Emily Morandini, and myself. The exhibition was proposed as a way to explore connections between technology, environment and energy. We shared a common interest in using sound as a tool for revealing energetically coded processes that go undetected in our technologically saturated world and the way in which technological systems are based on electromagnetic and electrochemical exchanges that are already a located within ecological systems.

My work Folkloric Rainbow Distributions consisted of a feedback system that balanced the original sounds of the Morandini and Blamey’s works with the processed resonant properties of the environment. I reused a large and a small suspended microphone and made two long black strips of steel measuring 2000mm by 100mm that had a resonator at one end and a transducer at the other, conflating microphone and speaker into the one object.

Video documentation of this exhibition can be found here: https://vimeo.com/154576534

162 The Crystal Order UNSW Art and Design, February, 2017 Amplifiers, Speakers, Glass Bells, Wire

The Crystal Order was a feedback system that incorporated five glass bells connected in a pentagon formation and was the final installation in this PhD research. The installation drew energy from its environment and produced sound in relation to the movement of audience members and ambient noise. Although enclosed by the gallery space it at times responded to ambient external sound.

Video documentation of this exhibition can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctd_Y8uxxbY

163 Expansion Bay – Black Field Plates Below is a link to a self-released album produced from a selection of plate recordings made between 2012 -2016. The original album was released on CD in an edition of 50 with woodblock printed covers.

Track 1. Black Field Plates, 2014. Constructed from audio recordings made at 33 The Grove Austinmer in 2014.

Track 2. Angels in the Atoms, 2016. Constructed from audio recordings made at 33 The Grove Austinmer in 2014.

Track 3. Corporate Digital Shamans, 2016. Constructed from audio documentation from the Firstdraft exhibition The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name 2016. https://expansionbay.bandcamp.com/album/black-field-plates

164