World Stage
Our society is at a at very dangerous stage of interaction with machines and from which there may be no turning back.
This stage is cybernetic-the signals passing from the nerve endings of humans into a reactive machine and back-a feedback loop.
What is surprising is the role that Rock music has had in introducing this interaction of man and machine.
After World War Two a major technological and cultural push came with the introduction of television. The assassination of President Kennedy and the introduction of the Beatles, immediately following, focused people on television and began a narrative which has not ceased since.
Television focused the population's collective mind on what the programmers decided with all their backlog and brand new mind tricks. Rock music, starting with the Beatles, was one initiative.
The Scene
Although the latter part of the 1960's had many U.S. bands, it was the initial British Invasion that set the scene.
The Beatles were part of a London scene which included The Rolling Stones and The Who.
A number of these fledgling rock stars came out of the thriving art schools flourishing in England at the time.
Pete Townshend attended Ealing Art College as a budding musician and was heavily influenced by the teachers and visiting artists.
The person in charge of the curriculum at Ealing Art College was a newcomer, Roy Ascott, who in 1961 had a "Eureka!" moment of inspiration about Cybernetics, inspired by his research. (This via the article "Cybernetis and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960's", by Edward A. Shanken)
The teachers and the artists he brought in reflected this new awareness. Other future rockers attending Ealing at the time included Ronnie Wood (of the Rolling Stones), Freddie Mercury (of Queen) and Ruskin Spear (of the Bonzo Dog Dooh-Dah Band). Roy Ascott also taught Brian Eno later on at Ipswich.
Artist Stephen Willats attended Ealing at the same time, and in his bio for the Raven Row art gallery it states:
"1963: Gordon Pask gives a lecture at the Groundcourse [The curriculum designed by Ascott] . ‘Pask’s lecture was a big event, everyone from the art school attended, including the staff. After the lecture the staff locked themselves in a studio to discuss how they could implement cybernetic ideas on the course and in their own work.’ Willats observes the influence of this on the school: ‘By employing ideas of notation and feedback, the teaching staff saw how the Groundcourse might influence their own practices. They subsequently implemented ideas derived from cybernetics into the course directly.’ This is Willats’ first contact with cybernetics, which from this point on exerts a powerful influence on his work. "
Cyber Communist
One visiting artist, Gustav Metzger, especially influenced Townshend with his "auto-destructive" art. Metzger was a committed communist as many of these artists were.
Modern art schooling comes out of the Bauhaus and the whole movement was communist. A former English student at the Bauhaus, Wilfred Franks, said on the World Socialist Website:
"Weidensee was a lovely person, very genuine and quiet. He was the person who actually told me, “You will have to become a communist, if you want to make the most of our teaching, because it's all based on that. The world revolution has begun in Russia."
Pete Townshend himself was a Young Communist.
The relationship of Cybernetics to communism is not a casual one, although cybernetics was initially rejected by communist leaders on the grounds that the intelligent machine might put the worker out of a job.
"When the computer enters our home . . . there will be no need to call a doctor; the machine will tell you what to do. Students will not have to go some place and listen to hideous lectures of old pensioners, who know nothing; programs will be optimized and you will have connections with a machine, which will come to your home, as water and light did. . . . If someone does not believe it, let him commit suicide. This is the future, and we will fight for it, and we will weed out anybody who would interfere."
Berg also said, in "Cultures of Control", page 253:
"...we will build communism on the basis of most broad use of electronic machines...these machines, aptly called 'cybernetic machines'...will provide the solution of the problem of permanent optimal planning and control."
1965 radio interview on Cybernetics with Dr. Alice Mary Hilton
One of Pete Townshend's favorite artists from the time is Peter Blake, who, with his wife, designed the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album cover. "The Target" was one of his paintings and this is reflected in the t-shirt designed by Townshend for Keith Moon to wear. (Peter Blake was suggested to do the cover of Sgt. Pepper by gallery owner Robert Fraser -also of Indica notoriety- who associated with Sir John Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world at the time.)
The name of the band "The Who" also has a strange connection in all of this. First there is the World Health Organization, which is an arm of the United Nations. Then there is the television show "Dr. Who" which premiered November 23, 1963, the day after the Kennedy assassination. The name on its own makes no sense, except reversed it is a WHO doctor, that is, a World Health Organization Doctor. The weirdest and most interesting connection is a 1974 film called "Who?" about a Soviet defector whose face is concealed by a cybernetic mask and his torso and left arm are similarly mechanical.
The Who say their name came about because it was a unique, mysterious name and worked well on posters (fewer letters = bigger name).
An interesting title of a Norbert Wiener book is called "God an Golem, Inc." This man had a clear idea just what he was aiming at, for it is not hyperbole when he is speaking of designing machines that in the words of Rudi Volti, via "Society and Technological Change", are
"...a method of controlling a system by reinserting the results of its past performance." That is to say, a living machine, one that has a memory.
Hillel J. Kieva says of the Golem in Jews of Eastern Europe:
"The notion in Jewish culture that a particularly righteous person, possessed of esoteric wisdom, could create an artificial human being out of inorganic matter—and thus imitate the Divine—has literary roots in the Talmud and early kabbalistic ideas."
1909 Cyborg
Pete Townshend wrote a futuristic rock opera in 1971 entitled "Lifehouse" which failed to pan out but the concepts he wrote about show a thorough understanding of a totally systematized society brought about by Cybernetics.
In the Lifehouse future people live totally isolated lives where everything is brought to them, food, medicine, air and life experiences through a "lifesuit". The lifesuit is a virtual reality device that simulates experiences that allow the users to live out many lifetimes in the span of a single life.
This premise is similar to that of the 1909 story by E.M. Forster, "The Machine Stops." E.M. Forster was a leading member of the Cambridge and British Humanist groups, with such interesting names as Toynbee and Huxley amongst them...
"Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.
Vashanti"s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one"s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month"
"Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die"
This is increasingly the world we are experiencing, in fits and starts. A question is why would such a world be desirable to a controlling entity? One possible reason may be that human beings have souls and for the machine to exist at all there must be a soul, or group of souls, on which the machine feeds off of.
Also
Roy Ascott studied under Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore. Hamilton designed the interior of the Beatles' White Album and this, like the Peter Blake Sgt. pepper cover, was at the suggestion of gallerist and Beatles' friend Robert Fraser. These are very tight social circles going on.
(Fraser also gave Paul McCartney the "Apple" painting by Magritte)
Hamilton also appeared in the 1968 Brian DePalma film "Greetings" where Hamilton discusses a postcard artwork with an early JFK assassination conspiracy theorist (at 27 seconds in):
We Are There
Cyborgs independent of humans exist, these in the form of rat brain cells used to control a robot using inputs and outputs connected to the cells:
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