The Organizing Committee
The Central Memory: Making a Cyborg Pop Record
Back in 1971, the idea of socialist cybernetic folk music was developed as part of a campaign to educate the people of Chile about Project Cybersyn: Salvadore Allende’s system of direct democratic participation in which people at home would use small devices, equipped with dials, to respond to social policies that would be broadcast on TV and radio. These devices — called “algedonic meters” — were part of a vast agenda of cybernetic democratic socialism co-developed by Cyberneticist Stafford Beer, which was cut short by the fascist Pinochet coup in 1973. At least one song in this campaign was recorded: Angel Parra’s “Litany for a Computer and a Child Yet to Be Born.”
A slide from a broadcast in which Cyberneticist Stafford Beer described the public awareness campaign for the Chilean “Project Cybersyn” system.
Allende, as head of a state, ended up with a coup, but if he had become head of IBM, we’d be lauding his innovative management ideas. Beer, the architect of Allende’s system, went on to become a hero (though it took 20 years) for his design and articulation of several radical organizational strategies, with watered-down elements eventually finding their way into today’s “lean" startups and pretty mainstream management certification programs. But the books themselves speak to an almost diametrically opposed way of thinking about our (American) development of corporate-controlled technologies and the organization of organizations.
The Central Memory imagines what a populist awareness campaign for Cybernetic Socialist Democracy might look like if it were realized today, in some version of 2020 that is yet to exist. It’s a science fiction story made from technology that already exists, imagining that it might all be used in some better way.
Cyborg Pop
What is a cyborg pop record? I’m defining it as an attempt to co-write an album with a variety of machine learning models, allowing techniques of generation, prediction, and synthesis to determine how a song comes together, from its structure to its lyrics, without giving those systems full control. I collaborated with the AI the way I would with a human collaborator.
The music makes use of various samples I produced using the OpenAI Jukebox GAN in Google Collab. Specifically, I asked Jukebox to produce new samples from libraries that created music in the style of Francois Hardy, but in the genre of Experimental Hip-Hop, which from what I can tell means a music model trained on Death Grips records. I took these generated pieces (which were maxed out at 1:20 seconds long), cut them up and reassembled them — the same way old records might be sampled for any other hip-hop record. This would form the basis of a handful of these tracks, though in some cases the generated samples were removed from the final product after serving as “stems” from which the rest of the song would be built. (This was pop music, not a disciplined experimental exercise). For reference, here is an unused sample of a Francoise Hardy/Experimental Hip Hop track generated by the system:
Given that this was a weird kind of pastiche, I opted to continue in this direction, making the record “rhizomatic” in the sense that it consistently points outward and “borrows” quite heavily from a variety of texts, in terms of sound (there’s also a playlist of personal musical influences I created for Spotify, a mixtape/playlist called Attenuators) and lyrics.
The lyrics were created by taking specific, single-line slogans or aphorisms — particularly from Jenny Holzer, The Xenofeminist Manifesto, and the Situationist graffiti — which were “fed” to the OpenAI GPT-2 to generate longer lyrics. Rather than using the oft-problematic output of the GPT2, I used Inferkit to introduce some additional bias to the model with my own training library, which included complete texts from Deleuze and Guattari’s 1,000 Plateaus, Stafford Beer’s Designing Freedom, Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics, Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, The Xenofeminist Manifesto, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, Slavoj Zizek’s How to Read Lacan, all of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms and the list of graffiti’d Situationist slogans from the 1968 uprising in Paris.
Those texts would be personally mangled into something comprehensible by me, a human, fitting them to the space I had for lyrics. Two tracks are just direct, modified quotes from Alphaville, because an early concept was to create Alphaville: The Musical. In the end I’ve lost track of which lyrics I wrote and which came from the GPT-2.
Francoise Hardisk
The lyrics are performed by Vocaloid, a software-based synthesizer from Yamaha that is used to create human-sounding vocal tracks. The synth is famous for creating the Japanese crowd-sourced pop star, Hatsune Miku, with additional tools for amateurs to create music videos out of their creations as well (see right). I was excited to bring Hatsune Miku into a cybernetic punk context because she was the original cyborg pop star. Unfortunately, the vocal synth for Hatsune Miku is limited to Japanese, but I found the English-language synthesizer setting “Amy” to work just as well. I did start thinking of the voice as Francoise Hardisk, but I’m not sure that’s as clever as I think it is.
Below is a list of the tracks with a few liner notes. As a “dance music dissertation” (which this is not) the project is perilously close to plagiarism, because attributing texts really messes with the flow of a groove. This page is linked on all electronic copies of the record and serves as “liner notes” and “works cited.”
It contains lyrics, liner notes, and any additional media, such as the music videos I produced for the project. It’s long and disorganized, designed to skim and shuffle. Hope you dig it.
Track 1
“The Social Forms the Consciousness”
These lyrics were taken from AI-generated text from the training set of analytic / critical theory and cybernetics texts. This one seems to have borrowed heavily from Althusser.
Track 2
“Now Their Dream’s A Part of You”
These lyrics were partially generated from the prompt, "There is still a policeman inside our heads. He must be destroyed," a bit of Situationist graffiti also used in Adam Curtis’ brilliant 2015 documentary for the BBC, "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace." You will also note the video is a nod to Curtis as well. The vocal line and musical loop, "And Now the Dream’s a Part of You" came out of a track generated by the OpenAI Jukebox in response to a prompt to create a Francoise Hardy song in the style of Experimental Hip Hop.
The video is clips from the Internet Archive, but is mostly built around old IBM training videos and “Design for Dreaming,” which was created for General Motors in 1956. In “just one of those things,” I honestly had no idea that Adam Curtis used the clip for another documentary, but here we are.
Track 3
“The Human Use of Human Beings”
"The Human Use of Human Beings" takes its title from the 1950 book by Norbert Weiner, who coined the term “Cybernetics” in the first place. The lyrics are taken from notes I made while reading the book, with some “next lines” generated by the GPT-2.
Commands through which
we exercise control
Are a story we feed to birds
Disorganized and incoherent
We are all alone
in our collection of feedback
Alone in the futile exercise of control
We seek new, we seek new instruments
To listen, not to command
Listen not command
We seek new instruments to listen,
not to control.
Track 4
“Casiotone Conspiracies”
“The essence of the so called ‘capitalist world’ or the ‘communist world’ … is not an evil volition to subject their peoples to the power of indoctrination or of finance, but simply… the natural ambition of any organization to plan all its actions.”
The Central Memory of the Alpha-60 mainframe, supercontroller of the city of Alphaville, played by a flashing Westinghouse Lightbulb in the 1965 Godard film.
Two tracks in a row use lyrics directly lifted from Alphaville, a remnant of my initial plan to release it as a musical re-interpretation of Godard’s 1965 sci-fi film. I consider that one too many to get away with. Godard was influenced by cybernetics, though not positively. Nonetheless, a French cyberneticist, Jacques Sauvan, dug the film, praising it as depiction of all control and no communication, a city without feedback: not “cybernetics” as an engineering project taken to its logical extreme, but precisely what “cybernetics” as a philosophical endeavor was intended to curtail.
Fun fact: The video for The Cranberries’ “Linger” was an homage to Alphaville. Who knew?
Before any evil intent
to subjugate men -
through power
of indoctrination
or even finance -
There is simply
a natural desire
to plan.
Minimize
unknown factors
to plan activities.
Capitalism (Oooh!)
Communism (Oooh!)
Before any evil intent
to subjugate through
power of finance
or indoctrination,
there is only
a desire to plan.
“The Central Memory”
Track 5
More from when the album was conceived as "Alphaville: The Musical," these lyrics are taken from a political prisoner about to be assassinated in the 1965 Jean-Luc Godard film "Alphaville." The rest are from a speech from Alpha 60, the computer at the center of the film that espouses political wisdom and orders that are carried out by police.
I consider the line “we must advance to live, aim for those you love” to be such a sad one, speaking from a socio-technical logic (“we must advance to live!”) and pairing it with a profoundly human desire to connect (“aim for those you love!”) both in the sense of direction but also in the sense of your loved ones being targets — just as massive media platforms have monetized and rendered our interactions into consumable data for advertisements, but also in the way that love can be transformed into all forms of compromised labor. It is both misguided and, given the current social moment, an option that has seemed inescapable, assuming one is even aware of it.
“Oh, Builder!”
Track 6
A scene from R.U.R.
Jenny Holzer, “Truisms,” in New York City.
Here’s one with lyrics co-created with the GPT-2 from the prompt, "Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise," one Jenny Holzer’s Truisms. The line "Oh, Builder, what do you do when you are uneasy?" and it's answer, "I build," comes from the 1920 Karel Čapek play, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots) which is where the term "Robot" came from. The Commodore 64 speech synthesizer (“I build”) is just terrible and I love it. I am not sure what it means: the computer’s logic is to build, of course, and building doesn’t always solve problems. But the exasperation of that line from the play to a robot: “Oh, builder, what do you do when you’re uneasy?” was so relatable to me in 2020, and the answer seemed sort of hopeful. We can build taller skyscrapers, sure, but we can also build new movements, new organizations, new mobilizations, new politics.
Abuse of power
comes as no surprise
A future exchanged
for once-upon-a-time
Oh, Builder!
What do you do
when you're uneasy?
(I build)
Abuse of power
comes as no surprise
State violence incurs
self-inflicted wounds
Violence is a task,
empty and pathetic.
Oh, Builder!
What do you do
when you're uneasy?
(I build).
“You Are Not Automatic”
Track 7
Started with the phrase “You are not automatic” and “You are not a selfish gene” and fed it to the GPT-2, which started generating some completions for the sentence. I just wanted to catalog every cop-out people use to make excuse to give up on ideas of social change and transformation, from reducing others to reducing themselves.
You are not automatic
You are not an automaton
Not an automaton
You are not data
You are not instinct
You are not helpless
You are not engineered
You are not a selfish gene
Or a machine
You are a human being
Stuck with complexity
You are not an animal -
well, maybe, but
you still have responsibilities.
You are not automatic
You are not an automaton
Not an automaton
You are not mechanistic
You are not an automaton
Not an automaton.
“Lacan Parle”
Track 8
"Lacan Parle" is, musically, one of the two tracks closest to raw output from the Jukebox music generation model. I added some melodic elements following its lead, and extended it with my own beats and chops in the latter half. The underlying musical sample for the first 30 seconds of the piece was created using OpenAI's Jukebox, which was asked to produce music as Francoise Hardy in the style of experimental hip-hop (trained on albums by Death Grips).
I also added samples from the eponymous 1972 documentary film by Françoise Wolff. The film caught Anatole Atlas' 1972 Situationist action against Lacan, where Atlas interrupted the lecture by pouring some sort of baking powder over Lacan's papers. Lacan intervenes as Atlas is being removed and incorporates a response into his lecture.
The album version cuts the longer Lacan vocal sample because I am a copyright coward, but it is presented on video where it isn't monetized and can be positioned as fair use for educational purposes.
Lacan and Atlas are a clash of two worlds for me. Though Lacan makes Atlas seem kind of dumb, I relate to them both. It seemed evident that if I was doing a record about organizing society in new kinds of ways, then I would want to find some synthesis of the two.
“Oligarchic Ganglions”
Track 9
"Oligarchic Ganglions" is a phrase used by British Cyberneticist Grey Walter to argue that there is nothing biological in humankind's tendency to organize society in hierarchies:
“We find no boss in the brain, no oligarchic ganglion or glandular Big Brother. Within our heads our very lives depend on equality of opportunity, on specialisation with versatility, on free communication and just restraint, a freedom without interference. Here too, local minorities can and do control their own means of production and expression in free and equal intercourse with their neighbours.”
It’s a quote that has been used to promote the idea of a cybernetics of anarchy, but I think just saying “cybernetics” is the same thing as whatever “cybernetic anarchy” is supposed to be, which is a balance of social organization and social freedom. The rest of the lyrics come from my notes on Stafford Beer's writing on the Viable Systems Model as described in "Designing Freedom," the 1974 pressing of which partially inspired this album's cover (see final note).
It was really exciting to write a song with very boring lyrics about organizational structures and management philosophies that Beer was advocating as pretty bold stuff back in the 70s. Organizing and managing systems should never have become a boring topic. It is an inherently political process; how we organize industry and finance is literally how we define entire political systems. I liked bringing this back to music, because it seems (to me, a biased audience) to regain some sense of urgency about management structures when you bother to sing about. If you liberate the structure of organizations, you move significantly closer to liberating the workers within that organization.
The video is made from footage from an IBM-sponsored KQED (San Francisco Public Television) series on computing from 1962, with animations by Wayne Ensrud. The singing animation is a “deep fake” created by singing the lyrics into a webcam by myself into the First Order Motion Model using Runway ML and transferring the facial gestures over to this thing on the right, an illustration of a computer-generated face found in a 1982 issue of Byte Magazine by Kevin Baker. It was intended (according to the caption) to animate a text-to-speech program, so I figured it would be perfect at adding life to the music video to add some life to the Vocaloid musical performance.
Computational Abstraction
Track 10
One of my favorite moments in creating this thing was co-writing a song about how computers do not understand reality but force us to adjust to its abstractions of reality. Then the computer took the idea and wrote better lyrics than I did. The GPT-2 was fed some lines about computational abstraction inspired by reading through Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain. It generated the lines about flowers, stems and petals on its own, and they’re the best lines in the song.
Our world lost to digitalization
A desire to demystify
Binary models of stems and petals
Are not the flowers that they signify
The truths of this world are unknowable
That does not mean they cannot be seen
The struggle for perfect explanations
We call science, we call poetry.
The experience of sublime beauty
Must be discovered
Again and again and again.
“item_0”
Track 11
This track is the most nakedly AI-generated thing on the whole record. Once again I was working with Francoise Hardy on OpenAI’s Jukebox. It usually spits out three options (item_0, item_1, item_2) of any number between 0-2 will be hissing, pulsing sounds (the last five seconds of “Now Their Dream’s a Part of You” is this noise). All of a sudden it just spit out this piano piece. I wanted it to go on forever but it was already told only to generate 58 seconds, and the Collab Notebook running the model tends to crash if you push it further. To extend it, I reached back to some of the earliest uses of “experimental studio technologies” I remembered hearing and reading about as a kid — The Beatles’ Revolution No. 9. So I did what I could with this track, bringing back the “most cutting edge” studio techniques with one of the earliest: I played it backwards and sped it up.
Track 12
“Music for an Eagle and Three Satellites”
This was a term one project for my Applied Cybernetics masters at the 3A Institute, and you can read much more about that process here. Briefly, it is music generated by GPS drift — the distance between the location of a Golden Eagle and the spot where a sensor on it’s leg thought the eagle was supposed to be. I’ve cleaned up the volume for this release. Since this project was conceived as a way of circumventing computational abstraction, it seemed a fitting place to finish the album.
There’s some Eno influence here, and it’s worth mentioning a historical footnote that Stafford Beer was very eager to have Brian Eno “take over” the mantle of cybernetics from him, and that while Eno was inspired by the project (and used it to make similarly generative music), in the end he turned Beer down.
Album Art
Early version of the cover, based on the Beer book cover.
The album art blends two landmarks in computing from the late 1960s & early 1970s.
The first are the red cabinets, pulled from advertising materials for the IBM 360, a mainframe the company produced between 1964 and 1978. I found them to be pretty stunning in their mod-60’s glory.
The second element was the somehow both striking-and-banal cover of Stafford Beer’s 1974 book, Designing Freedom. I don’t know what it is supposed to represent — clearly something with punch card holes, and it looks a bit like Space Invader dropping bombs down onto an 8-bit city. (The cover pre-dated Space Invaders and was changed, though I don’t know when). It was such a weird piece of early abstract computer art that I was drawn to it. I tried looking for information about the design but couldn’t find anything at all, and even the book didn’t acknowledge the cover design in its interiors.
Initially I was just going to use that image as the cover, but then opted to spice it up a bit. I cut out the round red/orange segment. But I had a change of heart and tried overlaying the IBM 360 unit into the image, which cut out everything but the punch holes. That was it. I laid over it with some color halftone to make it more “of its time” and uploaded it.
The final cover.
The IBM 360 unit.