Remain in Light

The first computers were people. Often working in teams to calculate complex equations, measuring motion and distance in astronomy, and later for navigation, engineering and finance. Large numbers of computers were employed for military purposes during the first and second World Wars, most of them women. They were gradually superseded by electronic computers, which were explicitly developed as instruments of war, and nearly every innovation in modern computing has at its origin a military purpose. Until the rise of personal computers in the 1980s, this was the backdrop of digital technology, computers were used by manufacturing industries, the military and universities that relied on military funding.

In 1950, Project Whirlwind began limited operation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before being officially launched the following year. Whirlwind was the first computer with a video screen that displayed text and graphics and was developed for the US Navy, who had approached MIT with the idea of creating a flight simulator. Whirlwind also had a ‘light gun,’ which could select or highlight points of information on the screen. By 1957, engineer Ben Gurley had refined this into the ‘light pen’ for Whirlwind’s successor the TX-0, which could be used to interact with and draw directly onto the display, a bit like a touchscreen.

In 1961, to cut back on spending, the US Air Force passed responsibility for its mammoth Q-32 computer, part of the SAGE air defence system which also included Whirlwind, to the recently founded Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense. Put in charge of this project was Joseph Carl Robnett Licklidder, a psychologist who had become interested in information technology and had established a department at MIT focussing on cognitive science. He met an engineer there called Wesley Clark who had helped build the TX-0 and was then working with its successor the TX-2, and Licklidder had become interested in the idea that someone could interact with a computer without needing to know the complexities of programming it. Licklidder strongly believed in the transformative power of technical progress and after also being introduced to the concept of time-sharing in 1959, by its British inventor Christopher Strachey, where a number of users could access a single computer from individual terminals, he had published a paper the following year, evangelizing the role computers could play in society, titled ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis.’ In it he conceded that programming speed, programming language and storage memory were not yet sufficient for this symbiosis, but was confident that in a few years “the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” When Licklidder took on his role at ARPA, he had two main aims, to find ways of networking separate computers in different locations, and to research ways of interacting with computers using graphics. ARPA was a major source of military research funding, and that networking idea would ultimately result in the creation of ARPANET, the foundation of the internet, in 1969.

Ken Olsen, who led the design of the TX-0 at MIT, had gone on to co-found Digital Equipment Corporation and in 1962 they released a computer aided design system called Digigraphics. The following year, back at MIT, Ivan Sutherland wrote a groundbreaking programme called Sketchpad, the first to use a complete graphical user interface, and in 1964 Sutherland took over from Licklidder when he left ARPA to work for IBM.

With funding from ARPA, the RAND Corporation then developed the Grafacon, which allowed the user to write “in a natural manner” with a stylus on a flat tablet with the results displayed on the monitor, unlike a light pen which needed to be pointed at the screen and was uncomfortable to use for an extended period of time. The Grafacon didn’t immediately catch on though, and by 1965 Doug Engelbart, Bill English and Bonnie Huddart had published a report for NASA mentioning what they believed was a superior device, invented by Engelbart, which they called the ‘mouse.’ This report, on their work at Stanford Research Institute, aimed to increase the “intellectual effectiveness of problem-solving human beings” and focussed on exploring concepts via language and symbols in the form of a system designed for the manipulation of text and graphics on a computer, building on work they had done for the US Air Force.

Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain had invented the fax machine in 1843, an idea which was refined and reimagined over time and in 1920 Harry Bartholomew and Maynard McFarlane created the Bartlane system which could transmit digitized newspaper images over long distance cable lines. In 1936, Alexander Murray and Edward Roy Davies at Eastman Kodak published the Murray-Davies equation, used to calculate ink density for half tone printing, and in 1937 Murray and Richard Morse created the first analogue colour scanner, to create colour separations for printing images. The first image scanner for computers was built in 1957 by Russell Kirsch for the US National Bureau of Standards, the scanned image made up of what would later become known as ‘pixels,’ the basis of the raster graphics formats which are now the foundation of most digital images and graphics.

German inventor Rudolf Hell had created the first dot-matrix printer in 1925, laser printers would appear in the late 1970s, based on Chester Carlson’s 1942 dry printing process Xerography. The Haloid Photographic Company had changed their name to Xerox after their success with Carlson’s process, engineer Gary Starkweather had added the laser in 1969 and they released the first high quality laser printer in 1977. Meanwhile the Monotype Corporation launched the first laser-based typesetting system, Lasercomp, in 1976 with some graphic capabilities which were vastly improved in its second generation version in 1981, the precursor to the desktop publishing which would take off at the end of the 1980s.

In a 1961 paper titled ‘Mosaic Guidance for Interplanetary Travel,’ NASA engineer Eugene F Lally introduced the idea of digital photography. Describing a system where a sensor on board a spacecraft would capture a mosaic of information, which would be combined to form images of stars and planets to aid navigation. The required technology didn’t yet exist, but in 1969 Willard Boyle and George Smith created the CCD sensor, which was described as “an electronic eye” when they were later awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, and this would be the basis for subsequent cameras produced by Fairchild and by Kodak, mainly for use by the US Army, Navy and NASA, and ultimately digital cameras a few years later. Separately, Thomas McCord and James Westphal had built the first digital camera in 1971, for use in astronomy, and McCord’s lab at MIT were developing digital processing techniques to analyse the images the following year.

Steven Sasson built the first portable digital camera for Kodak in 1975, but Kodak chose not to pursue it as a commercial product. By 1979 when National Geographic photographer Emory Kristof became the first journalist to use an electronic camera, which had been developed by RCA, digital images were still publicly perceived as a novelty. Defined by the simple shapes in early arcade video games like Pong (1972) or Space Invaders (1978), or by the CASI Computer Portrait System (1977), where a visitor to a shopping mall could have their portrait captured by a video camera, then converted into a digital image made up of typographical symbols and printed on a t shirt or a poster. But computers, while still mainly the domain of the military, were increasingly being taken seriously as tools of architecture, product design, and, to some extent, contemporary art.

Reportedly the first work of art created on a computer was a plotted outline of a pin-up girl, created in the late 1950s to test the signal between two computers in the US Air Force’s SAGE network. More formally, in the January 1963 issue of Computer and Automation, Edmund C. Berkeley coined the term ‘computer art’ after using an image by MIT student Ebram Arazi on the journal’s cover. Arazi had used a computer to combine individual camera readings, forming an abstract image where, according to Berkeley, “the brush is an electron beam; the canvas, an oscilloscope; the painter, an electronic computer.” There were many subsequent instances of computer art through the 1960s but the most high profile was the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968. Curated by Jasia Reichardt to explore the relationship between technology and creativity, in the accompanying catalogue Reichardt explained it as divided into three sections: “1. Computer-generated graphics, computer-animated films, computer-composed and -played music, and computer poems and texts. 2. Cybernetic devices as works of art, cybernetic environments, remote-control robots and painting machines. 3. Machines demonstrating the uses of computers and an environment dealing with the history of cybernetics.” The exhibition took its name from Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, first published in 1948.

Norbert Weiner was an MIT mathematics professor who during the second World War had theorised a device for predicting the positions of enemy aircraft, in order to shoot them down more effectively. The idea treated the gun operator, the enemy pilot, the capabilities of both weapon and aircraft, plus the properties of time, movement, speed etc as contiguous elements of one system, where each element was continually affecting another. So to shoot accurately, whoever controlled the gun would need to respond to changing circumstances like distance and velocity, but also the results of their own actions, such as the pilot taking steps to evade them and altering their position and speed.

After the war, he expanded this idea to apply it to human behaviour more broadly, and then to any kind of self-regulating system, the ultimate goal being to create a machine capable of thinking, learning and self-reproducing. Wiener suggested that automating manual labour and developing a harmonic relationship between people and machines would free human beings to follow more fulfilling and creative pursuits. Bringing in collaborators from many different fields, such as psychology, anthropology, physics, engineering, biology and more, this idea then became the field of Cybernetics, essentially the study of systems, processes and dynamics. Where everything could be understood in terms of systems of communication and exchange, feedback and homeostasis, proprioception and balance, action and reaction. Systems that could be emulated, reproduced, modified or controlled by computers. Wiener renounced military support in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, publicly cautioning scientists to consider the implications of their research, but with his ideas being taken up by people like JCR Licklidder, information technology would continue to be directed by military investment.

A contributor to the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition had been Gordon Pask, a professor of Cybernetics at the University of London. In 1969 he published a paper titled ‘the Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,’ where he posited architecture as an environment of complex systems rather than one of static and inhuman material objects. Pask would influence and collaborate with American architect Nicholas Negroponte, who had a similar vision for the potential of architectural systems, and Pask would be a frequent visitor to the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, which Negroponte had founded in 1967. Arch Mac had been set up with the help of US Department of Defense funding from ARPA and the Office of Naval Research, to explore the possibilities of symbiosis between humans and machines, as similarly espoused by Wiener and Licklidder, as well as the field which would become known as Virtual Reality. The group also collaborated with MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, who similarly benefitted from MIT’s close relationship with ARPA.

In 1970 Negroponte published The Architecture Machine, where he set out an idea of how such a symbiosis might take shape, exploring the “intimate associations” where human architects and intelligent machines processing complex information would learn to interface and collaborate with each other. Arch Mac would go on to build a computer they also called the Architecture Machine, and develop ways of interacting with it and through it, researching audio-visual and display media, graphics, speech, gesture, robotics, and more. Negroponte’s vision evolved into one of a multi-purpose intelligent environment that anyone could inhabit, which would adapt and respond to their needs.

As the decade progressed, Arch Mac became increasingly focused on graphics and media, at this time many research institutions were developing drawing and painting software, mostly with animation in mind, and Arch Mac Research Associate Paul Pangaro had written a raster graphics editing programme called Electronic PAINT in 1977. The programme had a menu of options like brush shapes and sizes which could be used to draw with a mouse, to create a picture or pattern, or to select an area within an existing image, which could then be modified, rotated, moved, erased. A selected area could be filled with a colour, or an area could be specifically selected by colour so only that colour would be adjusted. In the mid 1980s similar programmes would be developed for personal computers, like MacPaint, PC paint and Microsoft paint. Adobe Photoshop wouldn’t arrive until 1990, but in the late 1970s many of its functions were already available in at least a rudimentary form within the Arch Mac lab.

The lab’s direction was still shaped by its funding though, much of which came from what was now known as DARPA, to emphasise the ‘Defense’ element of their mission. One project was to create a method of virtual communication that would feel as close as possible to an in-person conversation. When security protocol meant that the people in the top five positions of government leadership were not allowed to be in the same location, this technology would allow them to be ‘telepresent.’ At each location any physically absent person would be represented by a contoured screen in the shape of a human head, broadcasting a real time video of their face and matched to the nuances of their expressions and gestures, apparently the result was uncannily realistic. The name of this project was Talking Heads. The limitations of available computer capacity at MIT meant that machines had to be signed up for, on a board indicating the project involved. In 1980 Negroponte was encouraged to see from the board that this project was apparently very popular, but it would turn out that some students were actually working on a different project under the same name.

Also in 1980, one of those students, Walter Bender, was getting ready to submit his master’s thesis looking at computer graphics, animation and the optical video discs which were the precursors to both CDs and DVDs. Funding for his research had come from DARPA’s Cybernetics Technology Office and the animation was the result of another DARPA funded project, the Aspen Movie Map, led by Andrew Lippman, where a team from Arch Mac had mounted cameras on top of a vehicle and driven it round the streets of Aspen, Colorado, and used the footage to create an interactive virtual tour of the city which functioned much like Google Street View today. For Arch Mac this was about developing interactive animation and storage technology, for the Department of Defense, it was intended as a tool to help familiarise soldiers with a territory before entering it, or for simulating a hostile environment as an aid to tactical development.

In 1978, planning had commenced in designing a new building at MIT for Arch Mac, the architect for which was IM Pei. One of Pei’s assistants, Yann Weymouth, himself an MIT graduate, was impressed by the work the group were doing and enthused about it to his sister, so in 1980 she and her husband went there to see it for themselves.

Yann’s father, Ralph Weymouth, had joined the US Navy aged 17 in 1934. He became a Navy aircraft pilot in 1941 and served in the second World War as well as the Korean War and the Vietnam War. During his service he studied aeronautical engineering at MIT and rose to the rank of vice admiral, in 1940 he married Laure Bouchage and they went on to have eight children. After retiring from the Navy in 1973 he became an anti-nuclear campaigner, his perspective shaped by a visit to Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum during the Korean War. The US had entered the war in July 1950, that November Ralph and Laure welcomed their third child, Martina Michèle Weymouth.

Chris Frantz met Tina Weymouth in 1971 when they were both students in the same painting class at the Rhode Island School of Design. They found they had a lot in common, they had similar tastes in music and Frantz also had a military father, a general. The two became an item, and shared a painting studio, Weymouth’s parents had recently moved nearby and renovated the carriage house next to the family home for her to live in, and she allowed Frantz, who had been playing in a soul band, to practice his drumming there. Knowing that Frantz played the drums, a fellow student, Mark Kehoe, asked him to help record a soundtrack for a film he was making, along with a friend of his who played the guitar, David Byrne. When they’d finished recording Franz asked Byrne if he’d be interested in starting a band, Byrne agreed and they formed the Artistics, playing mostly covers to RISD students.

David Byrne had recently returned to Providence, he had started at RISD at the same time as Franz but had dropped out after a year and travelled around. He had continued his interest in becoming an artist, and through engaging with conceptual art had discovered Cybernetics, reading Norbert Weiner as well as Stafford Beer, who had theorised business management and organisational structures, and anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who applied Cybernetics to social behaviour, ecology and epistemology. Bateson suggested that art and creativity could help reduce instances of conflict by making the connectedness of social and environmental systems more visible or comprehensible, and Byrne considered making his everyday life a work of art by becoming a systems analyst.

After graduating in 1974, Weymouth and Frantz moved to New York, as many of their peers were doing. Tina’s brother, Yann, lived there, Tina had stayed with him for a while before enrolling at RISD, and she and Frantz did so again while Frantz looked for a more permanent place. Byrne had already made the move himself and Franz met up with him to suggest they start another band, Byrne agreed and, when Frantz found a loft space that would accommodate both painting and band rehearsals, the three moved in together. When they couldn’t find a bass player, Weymouth was persuaded to take on the role, and before long Frantz had secured the band a gig at CBGBs supporting the Ramones. They soon decided they also needed a keyboard player, but Jerry Harrison was reluctant to join Talking Heads at first, he’d been disillusioned by his experience while playing with Jonathan Richman in the Modern Lovers, and was now keen to complete the master’s degree he’d begun at Harvard. After satisfying himself that the band were serious, Harrison’s love of making music prevailed over the security of a career in architecture, and together they recorded their debut album in 1977.

In 1964 composer Steve Reich went to Union Square in San Francisco to record a Pentecostal preacher he been told about, named Brother Walter. The sermon Walter gave, on the story of Noah and the flood, struck a nerve with Reich, in the shadow of the recent Cuban missile crisis and the resulting sense of apocalyptic dread in the air. Listening to the tape of the recording later, Reich was drawn to the rhythm of Walter’s speech, and after creating a loop of a single phrase, he developed a long piece in two parts, titled It’s Gonna Rain, the musicality of the spoken word emphasized by the accidental phasing effect that resulted when he combined two identical loops which were very slightly out of sync. Reich would refine that phasing effect in later works and, having begun as a student of the drums, this would culminate in a piece simply titled Drumming. Reich had become interested in the drumming tradition in Ghana and in 1970 went there to study with the Ewe people and Gideon Alorwoyie, chief master drummer of the Ghana National Dance Ensemble within the University of Ghana, and later a professor at the University of North Texas. The complex rhythmic counterpoint Reich learned from them would be a major inspiration for Drumming, which was composed immediately after his return.

Another American who went to Ghana to study drumming with the Ewe people and Alorwoyie, as well as Ibrahim Abdulai and the Dagomba people, was John Miller Chernoff. Like Reich, Chernoff had been inspired by Arthur Morris Jones’s 1959 Studies in African Music, analysing the music of the Ewe people, and like Reich and Jones, Chernoff would often refer to Ghana or specific areas of West Africa as simply ‘Africa.’

Chernoff was also, like Jones, an ethnomusicologist, and in 1979 he published his own academic report of his experience, African Rhythm and African Sensibility. In it he emphasised the participatory and social nature of the musical culture he encountered, as well as the importance of the context the music is performed within. A vital element of the music is supplied by the audience, who might recognise or make sense of a piece of music by knowing the dance that goes with it, as the central focus is always the rhythm rather than the performance.

The rhythm of the music can only be understood by maintaining a complimentary rhythm in the listener’s head or body: the primary beat of the time signature, since the music itself is played ‘around’ the beat or on the off-beat, an awareness known in ethnomusicology as ‘metronome sense,’ which Chernoff suggests is not necessary when listening to ‘European’ music. The musicians themselves keep time by forming ‘rhythmic relationships’ with each other, the music develops as a form of conversation, and the arrangement takes shape via ‘call-and-response,’ where a repeated phrase will be answered with another repeated phrase. Through this, drummers learn their craft by developing a ‘vocabulary,’ with experience, which can be applied to further musical conversations. The music arises from its social context, and the community expect it to reflect moral and ethical values and address specific social concerns, which the music plays a vital role in communicating.

Chernoff’s enthusiasm for this music and its making is persuasive and compelling, but his own position as an ethnomusicologist is somewhat vague and contradictory. Ultimately, he is comparing his own perception of a ‘European’ musical tradition to an ‘African’ one, where quoting Jones: “rhythm is to the African what harmony is to the Europeans” a generalisation betrayed by the relating of plural ‘Europeans’ to the singular ‘African.’ Europeans also dance sometimes, just as West African audiences might observe and evaluate individual performances, and there are, of course, traditions of music making in parts of Africa based on melodic singing, or reed, wind and string instruments. Also, while contemporary ‘Western’ culture can be individualistic and transactional, to ignore, for example, the folk and choral traditions of European cultures, detracts somewhat from the universality of many of the values embodied in the cultural expression of Ewe and Dagomba peoples, presenting them as somehow exotic or other.

In 1970, the year both Reich and Chernoff travelled to Ghana, Fela Kuti arrived back in nearby Nigeria after having spent some time in the United States. Fela (as he is usually referred to) had studied music at Trinity College in London and, returning to Nigeria after its independence, had played in a variety of musical styles before he and fellow musician Tony Allen were inspired to develop their own, after witnessing Sierra Leonean performer Geraldo Pino, which they called ‘Afrobeat.’

Their band toured the United States in 1969, and in Los Angeles Fela had met Sandra Izsadore who gave him a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X and introduced him to Pan-Africanism and the Black Panther movement, which led Fela to embrace his Yoruba heritage and to use his music to address social issues in Nigeria and the legacy of colonialism. Back in Lagos he founded a commune, from where his popularity and his outspoken politics led to Fela, his family, and anyone associated with him, to be subjected to violent persecution by government forces for the rest of his life.

The music itself combined influences from soul, funk and jazz with highlife, jùjú and various West African musical traditions. Like some of the music described by John Chernoff, it would employ call-and-response and the musicians would form rhythmic relationships, two guitarists might combine to form a melodic groove, or two bass players might interlock while conversations between other instruments orbit around them, the music stretching out over an extended period around a repeated riff or chord phrase. Its context, however, extended far beyond the immediate location of its performance and when Fela referred to ‘Africa’ it was not to generalise but to find common cause with an expanded audience.

When Brian Eno first heard It’s Gonna Rain in the early 1970s, the idea that a simple input or starting point could generate a rich and complex output had been revelatory, influencing the way Eno would continue to make music throughout his career. Relating this generative method to an interest in Cybernetics, in 1976 he wrote an essay, ‘Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts,’ where he contrasted the unambiguous instructions to performers of classical music towards a specific result, with the more open directions that might be given in experimental music, towards a variety of possible outcomes. The latter suggestive of an “organism” which can adapt to a changing environment, or a way of engaging with a world which is continually evolving.

Eno had met Talking Heads before the release of their first album in 1977, and that same year recorded a song called ‘King’s Lead Hat,’ an anagram of the band’s name. He found them receptive to his experimental and analytical approach, in a press release from 1976 they had described themselves as “a group of performing artists whose medium is rock and roll music and its pursuant “band” organization and visual presentation,” and Eno went on to produce their two subsequent albums, More Songs About Buildings and Food, and Fear of Music. Eno found a creative foil in David Byrne in particular, their mutual interest in Cybernetics led them to explore similar avenues, and in 1979 they began working on a project between the two of them.

Combining the influences of Steve Reich’s generative tape loop approach, Can’s ‘Ethnological Forgery Series,’ the pseudo-ethnography of the Residents album Eskimo, and the Fourth World music Eno had been working on with John Hassell, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts took recordings of voices from the radio, particularly preaching and sermonising, plus those of singers from existing recordings, and layered them over a collage of musicians playing looping and repeating rhythmic grooves, combined with found sounds and studio effects. In the meantime, Jerry Harrison did some producing for other artists including Nona Hendryx, while Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz spent time in the Caribbean.

During this break there had been some uncertainty about the future of the band, but My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was put on hold as the use of existing recordings led to some copyright issues, and after returning to New York, Frantz and Weymouth invited Harrison, Eno and Byrne for an informal jam at their loft, which they then continued over the course of a week. The results were inspiring enough that in July 1980 they all assembled at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas to begin recording a new album with the working title Melody Attack.

Eno claims to have introduced Talking Heads to the music of Fela Kuti when they first met, the band say they were already fans, but however they arrived at it, Fela’s work would be a major reference point for the way the new album would take shape. Byrne and Eno also wanted to apply the collage and layering methods they had used on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and in the studio the band built up each track from a simple riff or short sequence, in one key with no chord changes so they could be reassembled and rearranged afterwards. One musician might play a single repeated phrase with a space between each where a second player would insert a second phrase in a call-and-response fashion, the two interlocking to form a rhythmic whole. From there, other instruments playing a similarly constructed groove would be layered over the top, as would accents and effects, with the rhythm and arrangement increasing in complexity as each track was refined.

Instead of relying on conventional melody and harmony, the music would be composed through these ‘rhythmic relationships,’ and rather than there being a hierarchy of leading and supporting parts, it would emerge from a simple system that became more intricate with each additional layer. For Byrne and Eno, this was an intellectual exercise inspired by reading about generative systems and different musical cultures, for Weymouth and Frantz it was a logical response to the funk and soul music that was their primary influence, from James Brown to George Clinton to, indeed, Fela Kuti, as well as the music they encountered in the Caribbean and the nascent hip hop they were hearing in New York. For Jerry Harrison it was essentially the same approach to the music he himself had always taken.

When the basic tracks were recorded Byrne needed more time to come up with lyrics, so the band returned to New York and Harrison booked the studio at Sigma Sound, where he had recorded with Nona Hendryx, for a few weeks later. When they were back in the studio though, Byrne still wasn’t ready, so Eno and Harrison continued to work on the tracks with engineer Dave Jerden, rearranging and adding layers, inviting in other musicians like Adrian Belew to add parts.

Byrne took a cassette of rough mixes to listen to and improvise over, Eno suggested he use onomatopoeia and found text, as he did in his own songwriting, Frantz played him Kurtis Blow’s ‘The Breaks,’ and he began by incorporating patterns of speech, drawing upon written and audio sources, including radio evangelists, newspaper reports and headlines, oral histories and legal testimony. However, rather than incorporating them unchanged, as on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, these became a starting point for exploring the effect that context and delivery have on the way meaning and expression are received or interpreted by the listener. In addition to ethnomusicology, Byrne was also reading about mythology and identity, as well ceremonies and rituals, and from the found sources he conjured up characters who testified to their fractured identities, mythologised the institutional, or wearily reported the extraordinary. When the vocals were eventually recorded, they too would take on elements of call-and-response, with Eno performing some of the responses and Nona Hendryx adding layers of backing vocals that built up into a chorus of voices.

David Byrne had designed the sleeves for the first two Talking Heads albums and Jerry Harrison had received a grammy nomination for his design for Fear of Music. For Melody Attack it would be Frantz and Weymouth’s turn, so while Byrne was still working on lyrics, they made a trip to Boston.

On Yann Weymouth’s recommendation they met with Walter Bender and fellow master’s student Scott Fisher, and Fisher showed them around the Architecture Machine Group lab at MIT, explaining some of the equipment they were using and projects they were working on. Like Bender, the subject of his thesis would be the visual image technology that was being developed in the wake of the Aspen Movie Map, and like Bender’s it was supported by the Department of Defense. Also present, and keen to be involved, were some other students, including two who had also contributed to the Aspen Movie Map project, master’s student (and RISD alumnus), Rebecca Allen, who would go on to create digital animation for Twyla Tharpe’s the Catherine Wheel, for which David Byrne would provide the soundtrack, and undergraduate student Paul Heckbert, who would work with Allen on her award winning video for ‘Adventures in Success’ from Lynn Goldsmith’s Will Powers project.

Weymouth and Frantz wanted something innovative and visually arresting for the sleeve and this was an opportunity to incorporate cutting edge technology as it was being developed. Much of what Arch Mac were doing began with filmed footage or photographs so they had brought some images with them, which were then scanned into the computer. The first images to be scanned were individual headshots of each of the four band members, I’ve not been able to verify it, but Lynn Goldsmith is probably the photographer who took these, given the similarity of the styling to her photo from the album’s press kit. At this point the working title for the album was still Melody Attack, which, given Frantz and Weymouth’s backgrounds, immediately had military connotations so, in addition to the portraits, Tina had brought a photo of US Navy Grumman TBF Avenger bombers. Her father, Ralph Weymouth, had led a squadron of these aircraft at the Battle of the Philippine Sea during the second World War, for which he was awarded the Navy Cross.

The photos were all black and white, so once they were scanned the first thing to be added was colour, then they played around with the portraits. Blocking out an area in red was a step the lab used when processing images for their own interactive media, and when this was applied to the faces in the portraits, Weymouth and Frantz immediately loved the effect as it was, they had wanted something simple and striking and the bold red masks contrasted against the blue background was just what they had in mind.

Another version, which was eventually used for the inner sleeve, was more subtle, the masked area was reversed so instead of being filled with red it appeared as a negative of the photograph while the areas outside the mask remained positive. Some of this scanning and editing process was very slow, maximising the capacity of the large mainframe computer, for which access was shared from individual terminals, and while they were working on the portraits, another student in the lab, most likely Paul Heckbert, had replaced the bombers’ original background of a cloudy sky with an image of some mountains that they had been using to try out a three dimensional effect, and this became the initial choice for the front of the album sleeve, with the planes rendered in red in the same way as the masks.

When they returned to New York with the finished images, it transpired that Tibor Kalman had approached David Byrne and offered to design the sleeve for the new album on spec, and Byrne had agreed. However, the designs that Kalman’s agency, M&Co, had proposed were tactile like the sleeve for Fear of Music had been, and Byrne was persuaded that Weymouth and Frantz’s idea was better. So as a compromise, it was decided that M&Co would produce something using the digitally generated images, as well as following Weymouth’s instruction that they should use a simple bold sans-serif typeface. The band were also in agreement that Melody Attack no longer seemed like an appropriate title, considering the direction the music had taken, and the album would now be called Remain in Light.

Tibor Kalman had been the creative director for Barnes & Noble, still a fairly small chain of booksellers when he left, and he had only founded M&Co in 1979, Remain in Light would be their first major commission. He and Carol Bokuniewicz set to work, coming up with hundreds of layouts and arrangements until they arrived at something they were happy with, mostly focussing on the typography. Kalman had at one point created a sketch with ‘TALKING HEADS’ written with the letter ‘A’ written upside down, and pleased with the result they incorporated this idea into the design. He also spent much of his time on the lyric sheet, presenting it in a way that would flow like the music, with each ‘voice’ written in a different typeface.

Since most of what the Architecture Machine Group was doing was connected to the Department of Defense, the MIT students didn’t want to use their real names in case they got into trouble for allowing outside access to their research, so they were credited with usernames from the computing system. For M&Co, the design would significantly raise their profile and effectively launch the company, but when Frantz and Weymouth saw the finished result, they were dismayed that the songwriting credits were not as originally agreed. Byrne and Eno had admired the collective and communal nature of music making in the West African music traditions described by John Chernoff, but now the album was finished they seemed equally keen to assert their own individual authorship. “The problem,” Byrne explained to Musician magazine’s David Breskin in 1981, “is that people tend to confuse ‘non-hierarchical’ with ‘democratic.’”