NY-170222.

docx

IMPROVISATION AND AGENCY

andrew pickering

Comparing Domains of Improvisation seminar, Columbia University,

New York, 17 February 2022

Thanks to Nicola for the invite -- it’s been interesting to have a reason to
organise my thoughts on improvisation and get some expert feedback on
that. Makes me realise that I’ve been talking about improvisation for a
long time, since my earliest work in science studies, without actually ever
using the the word. So this talk is me trying to sort my ideas out, and it
comes in three parts. First, I want to explore just how improvisation is
present in science. Then I want to think about how improvisation in
science is structured. Third, I want to move from science to art and
discuss some artworks in which improvisation is structured differently
from science.

So, science. We usually associate improvisation with the arts and

definitely not with science. It’s easy enough to think of science as the
antithesis of improvisation, and there’s something right about that. The
products of science—finished facts, theories, instruments, machines—are
more or less stable and detached from their creators, so there’s just no
space for improvisation there. However, if we look upstream from the
products of science to research practice or what Bruno Latour called
science-in-the making, a different picture emerges, so let’s think about
that.

My claim, going back to my book The Mangle of Practice is that

scientific research is a process of modelling, meaning open-ended trial-
and error variations on existing culture. The first example I discussed in
TMP was the history of Donald Glaser’s invemtion in the early 1950s of
the bubble chamber as a new instrument for detecting elementary
particles, and I can say a bit about that to pin the discussion down.
(Forgive the technicalities; there aren’t any more in the rest of the talk.)
The model in Glaser’s work was an already existing kind of particle
detector, the cloud-chamber. [PICTURE -- vapour condensing] He
wanted to make something like the cloud chamber but better, and he went
about that by building a series of devices that were like cloud-chambers
but different. These including trying to use polymerisation reactions to
form tracks and a continuously active so-called diffusion chamber, and
most of these just failed. They did nothing or were no improvement or
they exploded. But one variant in which the vapour filling the cloud

1
 NY-170222.docx

chamber was replaced by a liquid under pressure looked promising,

forming particle tracks when the pressure was released. This was Glaser’s
prototype for the bubble chamber, and he repeated the trial-and-error
process, now beginning from that as a new model. [PICTURES --
prototypes + bubble tracks]

One problem Glaser then faced was to find the very rare events involving
the so-called ‘strange’ particles that he was especially interested in. To do
so, he tried various techniques for triggering his chambers on the passage
of cosmic rays and again that failed, none of them worked. [too slow]And
his response to that was to move from cosmic-ray experiments to
particles produced in accelerators where timing was not a problem.
Another problem was that if bubble chambers were to be useful in
physics, Glaser needed to somehow scale-up his prototypes. He tried to
address this by using a denser substance as filling—liquid xenon—but the
xenon chambers in their turn just failed to produce any tracks. More
messing around and trial and error followed, ending up with the discovery
that the addition of a so-called quenching agent led to the successful
production of tracks. And after a couple of years, he finally arrivied at a
working and useful bubble chamber, for which he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 1960. [PICTURES -- Xe chamber & tracks]
Interestingly, the success of quenching also led Glaser to a new
theoretical model of bubble formation, so knowledge, too, was
transformed in this process.

That’s the end of the technicalities. What can we say about this sequence?
Glaser’s trial-and-errot research trajectory is what I’ve always called
modelling, but we could just as well call it improvisation. He improvised
in all sorts of ways on the theme of the cloud chamber and finally got to
the bubble chamber. So, generalising from this, we can say that scientific
research, science-in-the-making, not finished science, is the place to look
if you want to find improvisation in science. My argument is that this sort
of improvisation is, in fact, integral to scientific research, and I’m pretty
sure that it’s integral to creative activity in any field including the arts. In
this sense science isn’t so special or different from other fields of culture.
That’s an important finding if you were disposed to think otherwise—of
science as a process of logical unfolding, for example.

Glaser’s route to the bubble chamber was stretched out over a couple of
years and extensively documented along the way in notebooks, reports,
publications, grant applications and so on. So his work is much more

2
 NY-170222.docx

easily dissected and analysed than, say, a five-minute jazz solo, and we
can think further about it now. I want to discuss three elements of
Glaser’s practice that were not themselves improvisational but that
structured his improvisation.

1) Improvisation does not happen in a cultural vacuum. It trades on pre-

existing structures. Glaser’s research grew out of the cloud chamber—it
constituted variations on the theme of that specific object (variously
described). New culture thus comes from old—this must also be a general
feature of creativity. For a different sort of example, think about
biological evolution, in which existing species mutate endlessly into new
variants. The history of life on earth is itself a history of improvisation.

2) Improvisation is not a self-contained, sui generis activity. It has the

dialectical structure of a back-and-forth with an other. We tend to think
of it as a specifically human activity, something we choose to do, a
manifestation of human agency. But the point then is that acts of
improvisation in science call forth responses as manifestations of the
nonhuman agency of instruments and machines. We could say that nature
improvises back. Throughout the course of his research, Glaser would set
up his apparatus in different configurations (improvisation, human
agency) and then he would stand back with a movie camera to record
what the latest set-up would do (nonhuman agency). And then, as I just
described, he would react to that, reconfiguring the apparatus to find out
how its behaviour would change, and so on, back and forth in what I call
a dance of agency between himself and his apparatus.

Two aspects of this dance are worth noticing. First it is decentred—

meaning that it is not controlled by either its human or its nonhuman
partner; it is a joint product of both. And second it is emergent in the
brutal sense that no-one, including the improviser, can know in advance
where it is heading and what its outcome will be. Which means, amongst
other things, that far from controlling the show, improvisation and its
specific contours are caught up and mangled in the flow of becoming. We
end up, then, with a posthumanist account of improvisation and creativity
more generally.

3) There’s something about the bubble chamber story that’s so obvious

that I didn’t even mention it in TMP. It is that the over-riding aim of this
dance of agency was to bring itself to an end. Glaser didn’t especially
enjoy improvising and the back and forth with the material world. He
wanted to get out of it by creating a free-standing machine that could
operate independently of him—that he and other people could simply use

3
 NY-170222.docx

in experiments. That is what he eventually succeeded in and that is what

he won the Nobel Prize for. We could say that the telos of his practice,
and of science in general, was to make the world more dual in a Cartesian
sense—to split us off from a predictable and obedient machine while at
the same time putting us in charge of it. This is the process that Bruno
Latour calls purification and which he sees as characteristic of modernity.

And recognition of this dualising aspect helps explain why we don’t think
of science as improvisational. We admire scientific knowledge, say, as if
it were a map of a world that exists independently of us, and we admire
scientific machines and instruments for their nonhuman agency and
performance, and the improvisations that lie upstream of them quickly
seem irrelevant.

That’s basically what I wanted to say about science, but some more
points are worth making. One is that the specific improvisations that
make up passages of research are not as irrelevant to their final products
as you might imagine. I argued in TMP that the evolution of scientific
culture is path-dependent—meaning that where scientists end up depends
on the specific paths they take to get there. This is evident in the
prevalence of controversies in science and in the incommensurability of
different fields of scientific machines and knowledges. This is a big point
in philosophical discussions of realism, though it seems pretty obvious in
the arts—of course change in the arts is path-dependent—so I won’t take
it any further here.

A second point concerns the question of whether improvisation in science

ever really stops. The answer is, no. Glaser’s bubble chamber was a kind
of punctuation of his practice—a point where he could take a break and
hand the chamber on to others to use, but it was also a kind of bridgehead
for more improvisation. On the one hand, Glaser’s chambers became in
turn models for the development of other kinds of bubble chamber,
including a massive six-foot chamber at Berkeley filled with liquid
hydrogen.

On the other hand, like all complex machines—my car, for example—
bubble chambers require servicing and repair to keep them going, and this
calls forth more improvisatory dances of agency—figuring out what
requires attention and what needs to be done and whether it’s worked.
This kind of improvisation in use is clearly at a much smaller scale than
in the research phase and it has a stable target to aim at, so we could say
that improvisation necessarily has a fractal structure, with small
improvisations as parasitic on big ones—which finds an echo in the arts

4
 NY-170222.docx

in the gap between composition and interpretation in music. And in

science at least, the fractal structure extends to bigger as well as smaller
scales. An early Harvard-MIT bubble chamber exploded killing several
people and blowing the roof off a building. Here nature improvised a new
sort of unexpected behaviour which required all sorts of very drastic
improvisations to put right. It’s hard to think of any equivalent to that sort
of scaling up in the arts. though you could maybe think about provocative
performances like the Dadaists and Situationists setting off riots . . .

The last point I want to note is that Glaser’s improvisations extended

beyond material and conceptual transformations to the social too. Glaser
liked the small-scale individualistic style of cosmic-ray research, which is
where he began. But his move into accelerator physics brought him into
the world of postwar big science: he became the leader of a large and
expensive team of researchers in a bureaucratic regime. He bcame a new
sort of person in a new sort of organisation. This, from one angle, was his
least successful improvisation. He disliked big science so much that he
eventually left physics for biology.

OK -- that’s enough about science. I could extend the story beyond

machines to facts, theories and mathematics, which would bring in the
important idea of disciplinary agency, but that’s all in my book and I
won’t go into it now, except just to note that it occurs to me now that it
would be easy to get from talking about disciplinary agency to algorithms
and thence to computer-generated and AI artworks. Anyway, now I want
to tak about something else. I’ll try to use my remarks on improvisation
in science as a blueprint for thinking about the arts.

The first observation is that the overall story of science-in-the-making

must be true of the arts too. Artworks don’t pop out of a vacuum; they are
modelled on prior achievements and we can follow the open-ended
evolution of artistic biographies and genres just like scientific or
biological ones. Likewise, it seems clear that making art involves
improvisational dances of agency—trying this and that, seeing what
works and building on that and so forth. Willem de Kooning’s style of
continuously smudging paint around exemplifies that nicely. And again
art-in-the-making aspires to make the world dual—it aims at a finished
painting or a musical composition, say, that can stand on its own in an art
museum or concert hall, independent of its creator.

5
 NY-170222.docx

But having said that, we can widen the frame. One aspect of the picture
I’ve been sketching strikes me as optional. All creative activity is open-
ended modelling, I think, but what about the telos of making dual? I’ve
been talking about modern science and modern art in Latour’s sense of
modernity as aiming at purified products, split off from their creators. But
what if we abandoned purification? Could we imagine a paradigm-shift
that, in a sort of gestalt switch, foregrounded processes rather than
products, improvisation rather than what it leads up to?

This is a question that’s fascinated me for a long time. In science, it

would take us from conventional sciences like physics and chemistry to
sciences of complexity like cybernetics. I’ve written a book about that—
The Cybernetic Brain—which I won’t go into now. But what about
nonmodern arts? The rest of the talk is about them.

How do you foreground improvisation in the arts? The obvious answer is

that you just declare the improvisation to be the artwork. We could make
a list of examples of this tactic, which would include things like action
painting, happenings, live-coding in music; the classic example would be
solo improvisation in jazz. And three topics come up here. First, it’s
worth noting that these artforms are all very different from their modern
counterparts (inasmuch as they even have any). Happenings, say, are
quite different from conventional theatre—they look different, they are
staged differently, you have to appreciate them differently, the gap
between performers and audience disappears. This is worth noticing, and
it is what I meant by describing the move from modern to nonmodern art
as a paradigm shift. As Thomas Kuhn put it talking about revolutions in
science, bringing improvisation from the background to the foreground in
art is like moving between different worlds.

Second, I should admit that thinking this way creates a problem for me. I
argued that scientific improvisation involves a dance of agency with an
other. But we tend to think of jazz performance, say, as the
accomplishment of a single human being, so who is the other here? There
must be an answer to this, but I’m useless at music so I’ll just leave the
question open—maybe we can talk about it later.

And third, there’s the question of aesthetics: what distinguishes a good

passage of improvisation from a poor one? I’ve tried asking artists about
this without getting very far, and I haven’t found much in the literature,
either. Probably I’ve been looking in the wrong place or asking the wrong
question, but I can just note that thinking about dances of agency might
be useful here. On the one hand, we could think about the range of moves

6
 NY-170222.docx

and resources brought into passages of improvisation. Though I didn’t

emphasise it, this is what was so impressive about Glaser’s passage from
the cloud chamber to the bubble chamber—the variety of variants on the
cloud chamber that he came up with; the range of materials and
understandings; the change of social roles and locations. To speak of
imagination and creativity would be a shorthand for that. And conversely
another criterion would be not getting stuck and not knowing where to go
next. I’m sure that a lot of scientific research just leads nowhere—the
improvisation unravels or fizzles out. In music, I like the Grateful Dead,
and in some recordings you can hear Jerry Garcia wandering into a dead
end and just skipping back to some earlier phrase and starting again. Or
think about chess and realising you’ve had it: it’s mate in three whatever
you do.

OK—I can go a bit further with this line of thought. Gordon Pask, one of
the cyberneticians I’ve written about, suggested that appreciation of any
genuine artwork entails a kind of implicit conversation with it, a back-
and-forth exploration of specifics, a dance of agency in my terms. This is
another angle on improvisation, now at the reception end. But Pask also
argued that it might be interesting to externalise the conversation, as he
put it, to make the conversation visible and foreground it, and there’s a
whole tradition of artworks that do just that. I can quickly run through
some examples. This will take us into George Lewis territory (if he’s
here), but I hope it’s interesting to cross it from a different angle.

My first example is a mobile robot call Petit Mal, built by the artist-
engineer Simon Penny in the 1990s. [PICTURE] Petit Mal featured an
array of sensors that served to couple its motions to those of human
spectators—which made the spectators into participants, of course.
Moving around the robot would induce it to move around. The
participants quickly caught on to this coupling and reacted in turn to
whatever Petit Mal was doing, which would react to them, and so on. So
that, in effect, the assemblage of the robot and its human partners literally
and strikingly staged what I’ve been calling a decentred dance of agency.
This is the kind of thing Pask had in mind as externalising and
foregrounding the conversation. [VIDEO]

Here we can think more about aesthetics. In what sense was Petit Mal a
good or satisfying art object? I can think of two features. First we need to
think about speeds. It was crucial to its success that it did not react too
quickly or slowly. It had to act and react at human speed in order that
people could dance with it. This is pretty obvious, but this gearing
together of human and nonhuman improvisations—latching on to the

7
 NY-170222.docx

other—seems to me a key feature of this sort of artwork, and also a

difficult one to engineer.

Second, it’s interesting that Petit Mal’s sensors were mounted on a

double-pendulum arrangement. Double pendulums are chaotic and
unpredictable, which meant that the robot’s actions were themselves
unpredictable. However much one interacted with it one could never
know how it would react next. This is the sense in which the machine was
itself an improviser, and this was what made it fun to interact with—
another key aesthetic aspect of this sort of improvisational art.

Pask himself designed and built interactive artworks that would similarly
externalise dances of agency, including his Musicolour machine from the
early 1950s, an interactive theatre set up in the early 60s in which the
audience could influence the unfolding of the action in a play, and his
Colloquy of Mobiles, a dynamic structure of five interacting robots
exhibited at the famous Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968.
[PICTURE: INTERACTIVE THEATRE -- joan littlewood: ‘inventive
clowns’ -- another aspect of improv]

Pask also contributed importantly to the development of interactive

architecture in his work on the design of the so-called Fun Palace in the
early 1960s. Although never built, the Fun Palace was intended as a large
public building with moveable elements that could be configured for all
sorts of uses. Pask’s role was to design a cybernetic control system which
would react to whatever uses people were making of the building. The
building would thus accommodate itself to such uses or, in the case of
excessive repetition, it would get bored and either cease to respond or do
something else, prodding the participants to try something new. So, just
like Petit Mal but in a different register, the building and the people could
improvise with each other. [PICTURES: fun palace & control system --
modified people -- sinister: brainwashing -- improv w/selves]

Last in this list, I’ve always been amused by Alvin Lucier’s Music for
Solo Performer from 1965. Here an array of noise-making equipment
including drums, cymbals, gongs and a waste-paper basket, was
controlled by Lucier’s brainwaves via an EEG readout. [PICTURE] The
produced sounds acted as part of a biofeedback circuit to which Lucier in
turn could react, externalising a conversation between him and his own
brain. It is worth noting that the brain here figured as a performative
rather than cognitive partner, much like Petit Mal and the walls of the
Fun Palace. The distinctive feature of Music for Solo Performer, as I
understand it, was that the sound system was only active when Lucier

8
 NY-170222.docx

achieved a meditative, alpha-wave dominated, state, so we could say that

Lucier had found a way of improvising directly with his own inner being
(in contrast with the physical movements in the previous examples).
Improvisation, then, can go much deeper than we usually imagine it.

Finally we can extend the frame again. I’ve been stressing that
improvisation in both science and art involves an other—often a machine,
a nonhuman partner. So, the remaining question is: could we imagine
getting rid of the human altogether and making art that foregrounds not
the human improviser but improvisation in the material world, in nature
itself? Of course, I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think we can. There are many
examples, but let me run through just one to illustrate the idea of what I
call agency realism.

Since the early 1970s, Chris Welsby has been making movies and videos
that foreground the unpredictable agency of nature, usually the weather.
His trick is typically to bring this out in different registers at once. One of
my favourites is a film from 1974 called Seven Days. [VIDEO] This is a
time-lapse movie of a piece of hilly Welsh countryside taken over a
week, and it confronts us with the agency of nature in three forms, all at
once. The first is visual and shows us the changing landscape: we see the
varying light and rainfall, including splashes on the camera’s lens.
Second, the soundtrack is an audio record of gusts of wind and the rain
splashing. The third is the clever part: the weather controls the orientation
of the camera. When the sun is out, the camera points down at the
ground, showing us running water and grass and trees blown by the wind.
When the sun shines, the camera points upwards at the clouds racing
overhead. The upshot is to bring home in a multi-sensory experience the
unforeseeable fluctuations of nature, from minute to minute, throughout
the day and the week. Nature improvises would be the motto of Welsby’s
art.

At the beginning of this talk I said that I hadn’t talked about

improvisation before in my work. By my count, I’ve now used the word
67 times . . . To close, I should recognise that the title of this series is
‘comparing domains of improvisation.’ I haven’t been very explicit about
comparisons in this talk, but I think there’s plenty to dwell on. There’s
the basic comparison of art and science, more particularly the topic of
different temporalities and the question of who is the other in

9
 NY-170222.docx

improvisation—including machines, which I’ve talked about a lot, and

other people, who I haven’t said much about. We could also think about
what’s at stake in improvisation: usually a scientific or artistic object, but
also social roles and relations and selves and inner states. Then there’s the
aesthetics of improvisations as distinct from finished works, which
connects to comparisons in terms of making dual as backgrounding
improvisation or foregrounding improvisation and letting go of finished
objects. There are also other topics I just touched on, like the fractal
structure of improvisation, algorithmic practices and the aesthetics of
latching on. Probably there’s more, but that’s what I’ve come up with so
far. Thanks.

10