What the Machine Didn’t Measure
Colony, a coincidence, and the limits of the apparatus
Colony was an array of small, autonomous objects — each roughly five inches across, imperfectly round, made by hand. The construction was simple: a hard plastic center housing a small motor with a counterweight and a AA battery mounted on the shaft, wrapped in strips of one-inch foam, covered in white duct tape, all by hand. Each object was unique in shape but similar to the others. When the motor ran, the counterweight caused the object to move — gently, unpredictably. Sometimes it would rock in place. Sometimes it would roll. Sometimes it would sit still until another object bumped it and set it off in a new direction. The motor produced a quiet purring sound from inside the foam. Twenty of them together sounded like a room full of small animals that didn’t exist.
I would deploy them in public spaces I had scouted — contained areas with a single point of entry, acoustically resonant, near spots where people congregated. I placed them without signage, without announcement, without any indication that what was happening was art. I would set them down, turn them on, and step back. The batteries lasted about ninety minutes. When they ran out, I gathered the objects and left.
What fascinated me was the encounter. People would notice something moving at the edge of their vision. They would approach. They would crouch down. Some would try to interact — nudging an object to see what it would do, placing obstacles in its path. Children were fearless. Adults were cautious. Everyone projected something onto the objects: they were alive, they were watching, they were playful, they were lost. No two people saw the same thing. No interpretation was correct. None was wrong. The objects simply moved, purred, bumped, and rolled, and the meaning was whatever appeared in the space between the object and the person looking at it.
I didn’t consider this a prank. I considered it an opening — though I didn’t have that word yet. What I wanted was direct, personal engagement with something unfamiliar, unframed, unexplained. I had grown tired of the conventional art world’s apparatus — the signage, the wall text, the press release, the critical framework that told you what the work meant before you had a chance to encounter it. Colony was designed to bypass all of that. The objects appeared. They did what they did. They disappeared. Whatever happened between them and the people who found them was the work.
One summer, during an artist residency in Berlin, I deployed Colony in a café after a talk. An anonymous afternoon — the objects purring and rolling across the floor while customers watched, interacted, projected. A few of them escaped onto the street. Passersby gently returned them to the site, as if this were a reasonable thing to do with small, rolling, purring objects that had appeared from nowhere.
A week later I was in a café on the other side of the city. Sitting alone, reading. A woman approached me, looked directly at me, reached into her bag, and handed me one of the objects. We didn’t share a language. She couldn’t explain how she knew it was mine or why she had been carrying it. There were no questions and no answers. No way to formally measure the encounter. She smiled and walked away.
I held the object — its motor dead, its foam slightly worn — and understood that the work had extended beyond every boundary I had set for it. Beyond the site, beyond the ninety minutes, beyond the city, beyond language. It had traveled through a stranger’s attention and returned to me without explanation. Colony had completed itself in a way I could not have designed.
Several years later I was a professor, teaching art and technology. My interest, in both my teaching and my practice, could be described as non-inevitability — pushing against the totalizing tendencies of technology, of the art market, of the institutional frameworks that convert every encounter into a recognizable category. I wanted my students to experience the moment when something appears that doesn’t fit — that resists the available labels, that can’t be explained by the methods they’ve been trained in, that simply is, stubbornly, before interpretation arrives.
I had read about the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program — PEAR — a lab within Princeton’s School of Engineering that investigated whether human consciousness could influence random physical systems. The research was rigorous, data-driven, and deeply unusual: subjects would sit in front of mechanical or electronic Random Event Generators and attempt, through intention alone, to influence outcomes that should have been statistically random. The lab had been running for decades. The results were controversial. I was curious whether bringing students to visit might complement the conceptual dimension of my coursework — not because I believed or disbelieved their findings, but because the lab occupied exactly the kind of non-inevitable space I was interested in: the edge where established science meets something it can’t quite account for.
I scheduled a visit and met with Brenda Dunne, one of the lab’s founders. She showed me several of the Random Event Generators. The largest was a wall-mounted contraption where wooden balls fell through a series of channels and collected in one of two chambers. The device was designed to produce statistical randomness mechanically. During experiments, subjects would sit in front of it and researchers would observe whether the distribution of balls deviated from chance in the subject’s presence.
What struck me first was the object itself. The REG was sculptural — the wooden balls falling through their channels with a rhythm and sound that was almost musical, the mechanical unpredictability of each ball’s path producing a visual texture that was, in its way, alive. Brenda mentioned that some of the smaller REGs had been exhibited as artworks. I could see why. The resemblance to Colony was immediate: bounded systems producing open outcomes, mechanical objects behaving unpredictably within constraints, the interplay of the designed and the emergent.
Brenda had me sit in front of the large REG and turned it on. It ran through one cycle — louder than I expected, the wooden balls clattering through their channels with a percussive insistence that filled the room. She explained that it took several rounds of measurement to establish whether consciousness was influencing the distribution. She pushed a button to reset the machine, which apparently took some time, and suggested we go to lunch while it prepared itself for the next cycle.
But the framing was entirely different from Colony. Colony was anonymous, unframed, deployed and retrieved. It produced encounters without measuring them. The REG was instrumentalized — embedded in an apparatus of statistical control, wired to computers that recorded every deviation, every ball, every data point. The same kind of mechanical unpredictability, the same bounded openness. But Colony disclosed. The REG measured. And measurement, I was beginning to sense, was itself a form of closure — a way of framing the unframeable that, in the act of framing, converted the open into the known.
Brenda took me to lunch. We talked about consciousness — what it is, whether it can be studied without reducing it, where the boundary lies between the measurable and the lived. At some point I mentioned Julian Jaynes, the psychologist whose controversial work on the origins of consciousness had been important to me — his argument that introspective awareness is not a fixed feature of the human mind but a historically and culturally emergent phenomenon. Brenda’s eyes lit up. She told me that the last person with whom she had discussed Jaynes was the composer Pauline Oliveros, who had contacted the lab and visited a year or two earlier.
I knew Pauline. I had worked with her as a sound engineer during my graduate school years. And Pauline and I had also discussed Jaynes — his ideas about consciousness, about the voices that once organized human experience, about the contingency of the inner life we take for granted. Three people, connected across different years and different contexts by the same obscure thinker and the same set of questions about what consciousness is and what it isn’t.
Neither Brenda nor I had been in touch with Pauline recently. She was elderly and we both wondered whether she was in good health. Brenda suggested I reach out — perhaps we could imagine a project together, the three of us.
We returned to the lab after lunch. Brenda went to speak with the lab manager about scheduling. The REG had finished resetting — it was ready for another cycle. I wandered over and stood in front of it.
The wooden balls were still, waiting. The machine was prepared to measure. But I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about Colony — the small objects purring and rolling across a plaza somewhere, each one moving according to its own counterweight, each path unpredictable, each encounter between object and passerby unrepeatable. I thought about how Colony had been designed to produce exactly the condition PEAR was trying to measure: the moment when consciousness meets something it didn’t produce and can’t control. But Colony produced that moment by removing the apparatus — no measurement, no framework, no explanation. PEAR produced it by adding apparatus — instruments, data, protocols, statistical analysis. The same question, approached from opposite directions. One direction opened. The other closed.
The machine sat ready. The next cycle never happened.
Brenda emerged from the back office. She was holding a piece of paper — a phone message from the lab assistant.
“You need to see this,” she said, walking toward me.
The message read: Pauline Oliveros called. Nothing urgent. She just had a feeling to contact you.
Pauline had called while we were at lunch. While Brenda and I were sitting in a restaurant discussing consciousness and Jaynes and Pauline herself — wondering about her health, imagining a collaboration — Pauline had picked up a phone and called. Not in response to anything. Not because anyone had contacted her. She just had a feeling.
I looked at the message. I looked at the REG — the elaborate, carefully engineered apparatus designed to detect the influence of consciousness on random events. The machine that had been built to measure exactly this kind of thing. It had reset itself while we were at lunch. It was ready. It was waiting for the next cycle.
The most extraordinary convergence of consciousness, attention, and connection that I had ever experienced had just occurred in the same room, entirely outside the apparatus, undetected by every instrument in the building.
The REG, which a moment earlier had seemed fascinating and sculptural, suddenly looked rather contrived — a mechanism of closure standing silently in front of an opening it was never designed to recognize.
I have thought about that afternoon for many years. Not about whether PEAR’s research was valid — that question belongs to scientists and statisticians, and I have no stake in it. What I think about is the contrast between the two events that happened in the same room on the same day: the apparatus that was designed to detect the influence of consciousness on physical systems, and the phone call that demonstrated it — if that’s what it was — without being designed to demonstrate anything at all.
Colony worked because it had no frame. The objects appeared, encountered whoever was there, and disappeared. Whatever meaning arose in the encounter belonged to the encounter, not to the apparatus. The REG didn’t work — not because the science was flawed, but because the frame was the wrong instrument for what it was trying to find. You cannot measure the moment when three people’s attention converges across time and distance. You cannot quantify a feeling that makes someone pick up a phone. You cannot design an apparatus to detect what happens when consciousness meets the world without an apparatus between them.
What happened that afternoon was not reproducible, not statistically significant, and not evidence of anything that could be published in a journal. It was simply an encounter — a convergence of attention, memory, and presence that exceeded every instrument in the room. The machine sat silent. The phone rang.
I think about the artists I know who are drawn to obscure scientific frontiers — quantum mechanics, retrocausality, multiple universes. I was one of them. What attracts us is rarely the ideas themselves, the details, the mathematics. What attracts us is the feeling the ideas produce: a sense of vastness, of disorientation, of standing at the edge of something the mind cannot contain. We want our work to evoke that feeling — to carry the implication that what is being encountered exceeds ordinary experience, that the viewer is in the presence of something immense and strange. The strangeness of physics becomes an atmosphere rather than a discipline, a quality of feeling imported into the studio without the burden of actually inhabiting the ideas that produced it. And the result, however visually compelling, can function as a managed encounter with contingency — the sensation of non-inevitability without the exposure to it. The vastness is observed, admired, even aestheticized. But it is not confronted. The dislocation becomes performative, even when the performer and the audience are the same person.
To an extent, this was my engagement with Jaynes. His ideas about the historical emergence of consciousness were genuinely disorienting — the suggestion that the inner life we take for granted is not a permanent feature of the human mind but something that arrived, contingently, and could in principle be otherwise. I carried that disorientation with me to Princeton. But carrying disorientation is not the same as inhabiting it. The deeper question — the one I wasn’t yet asking — is what one believes one is being dislocated from. If the world is not just a backdrop but the space that structures and makes sense of our existence, the space we are always already in, then the feeling of dislocation is not a departure from that world. It is a way of holding the world at arm’s length — observing its contingency as a spectacle rather than standing inside it as a condition.
PEAR, for all its rigor and sincerity, may have been doing something structurally similar: using the apparatus of science to approach the unframeable, and in the approaching, converting it into data — which is to say, into something frameable after all. The lab’s instruments were sophisticated. The protocols were careful. The question was genuine. But the answer, when it came, arrived by telephone — unannounced, unmeasured, and addressed to someone who wasn’t in the room.
Colony knew this from the beginning. The objects had no instruments. They measured nothing. They simply appeared, moved, purred, and disappeared. Whatever happened between them and the world happened without a frame. And when a woman in Berlin reached into her bag and handed me one of the objects a week later, across a city, without a shared language — that encounter, too, escaped every apparatus I could have designed for it.
The machine was ready. The phone rang. Sometimes that’s the only condition under which anything can appear at all.
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