Review waiting, please be patient. This may take 3 months or more, since drafts are reviewed in no specific order. There are 4,509 pending submissions waiting for review. If the submission is accepted, then this page will be moved into the article space. If the submission is declined, then the reason will be posted here. In the meantime, you can continue to improve this submission by editing normally. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. How to improve a draft Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a basic overview on how to edit Wikipedia. Help:Wikitext – how to use the markup Help:Referencing for beginners – how to include references Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article Wikipedia:Verifiability – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Add tags to your draft Editor resources Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs Reviewer tools Instructions · What links here · Pulsa (talk: + · bio) · (log) · Copyvios report · reFill · Citation Bot · (Search: Google, Wikipedia) · Submitted 7 days ago by Dwthomas86 (talk: D · +) · Last edited 3 days ago by Hoary

• Comment: Please see Draft talk:Pulsa#Formatting references.
  Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide says: The practice of editing or creating articles about [...] your organization [...] is strongly discouraged. Also, that Ethically, you need to disclose your conflict of interest. You have one if you are editing about yourself, or anyone you know personally. You can do so on your user page, or on the talk page of the article you have a conflict of interest with. Hoary (talk) 04:54, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

---

Pulsa was a collaborative group based in Connecticut that made multi-sensory public environmental art from 1967-1973. Pulsa originated as an artists' collaboration in the cultural awakening of the late 1960's. With seven core members whose background spanned the sciences as well as the arts, the Pulsa Group created abstract multi-sensory installation works intended to empower viewers through enhanced interaction with technologies that the group saw as increasingly conditioning life in the 20th century. The group aspired to transform man-made environments by making art that revealed, optimized and beautified the generally hidden operation of technological systems through which man-made environments function, especially in the operation of cities, as well as transportation, communication, and media. Pulsa's goal was make people's interface with technology as nurturing and evolutionary as humankind's primordial experience of nature.

Initially, the Pulsa Group created shimmering fields of abstract light/sound phenomena in both indoor and outdoor spaces. Like events in nature, Pulsa's minimalist abstract light-sound fields addressed two or more senses at once to activate centers where the senses meet in consciousness. As their work developed, Pulsa's installations increasingly incorporated interactive features that mirrored the complexity of nature by utilizing control systems which responded to viewers non-linearly in real time.

The group's later works featured live video projections that simultaneously displayed past & present while simulating the future. Other works provided real-time audio-visual connection between remote locations. Viewer-interactive installations enabled participants to create and share sensory phenomena. Pulsa also made sculptures that responded to natural phenomena and engaged in ecological, agricultural, architectural experiments, as well as nomadic adventures and communal living as art.

To program its installations, Pulsa designed and built a state-of-the-art voltage-controlled analog/digital signal synthesizer (VCADC) and related innovative devices that were formative to the development of synthesizers, music, multimedia and digital control systems.

Though the Pulsa Group realized major works enabled by technological breakthroughs it created during the six years of its collaboration, its more ambitious proposals and utopian visions remained unrealized. None the less, Pulsa's project significantly posited enhancements to humanity's interface with technology. Their work anticipated great cultural changes that are foundational to 21st century life including network culture, virtual reality, media arts, biofeedback, responsive environments, robotics, artificial intelligence, and the monitoring & control of vast complex systems including cities, transportation, communication & climate.

Pulsa was a collaborative American art and design group, primarily based out of Connecticut, that from 1967-1973 produced technologically sophisticated environmental art. These cybernetically responsive public installations were supported by state-of-art hardware designed and assembled by Pulsa themselves. Pulsa's designs represented major breakthroughs in early computer-based art, cybernetic art, and environmental art. Historically, they are often associated with the discourse around dematerialized art.^[1]

Michael Peter Cain-Painter, light sculptor, composer, writer Patrick Clancy-Painter, writer, composter David Rumsey-Filmmaker, logistics, fixer. William (Bill) Duesing-architect and artist Peter Kindlmann- Electrical Engineer and Director of Yale's Electronics Lab. Paul Fuge- Psychologist (Double check) William (Bill) Crosby- Photographer, architect, light sculptor.

In 1967 the founding members (Cain, Clancy, and Rumsey) created Pulsa while completing their respective MFA's at Yale School of Art in New Haven Connecticut. Michael Cain and Patrick Clancy were both painters who had grown disaffected with formalism and the economy inherent in high-art gallery-based work. David Rumsey, who had known Cain and Clancy since 1966, was an experimental photographer and filmmaker whose work also explored the physical manipulation of film media to created time distortion and dilation effects. The group expanded to its full roster in 1967 with the additions of, William Duesing, Paul Fuge, Peter Kindlmann, and William Crosby. The early members were heavily influenced by the rapidly shifting culture of the late 1960s and were highly interested in the emerging fields of mass media, new media theory, cybernetics, rock n' roll, new wave cinema, utopian design, tantric iconography, psychophysiology, and consciousness expansion.

Cain and Clancy's training in experimental design processes began with music. While at Yale University, the two studied Musique Concrète under composer Bulent Arel, which utilizes direct manipulation of recording tape and machine to produce time-warping audio effects. Members were also inspired by weekly concerts of Carnatic music by vocalist K.V. Narayanaswamy, whose concerts were part of an ethnomusicology program at Wesleyan University. Carnatic music and Musique Concrète provided the inspiration and foundation for the improvisational techniques that would later inform Pulsa's art and design practice.^[2]

Although Pulsa's works varied greatly in design and effect, their body of work in general can be referred to as abstract sensory installations that used projections of raw waveforms such as light, sound, and heat, dynamically alter the spaces of their installations. These installations never produced traditional media, or what might be called music and images, instead their phenomena were intended to engage the senses as the passed through them. Inputting content-free information to rhythmically entrain and enliven the neurological/heart-brain centers that are the locus of embodied consciousness. Pulsa explored using rhythmic pulsations of light and sound to gently synchronize bio-rhythms through resonance with the body's circadian clocks and other automatic functions, but primary simply exposed viewers to rhythmic patterns of otherwise meaningless light and sound in absence of other stimuli, thereby making them aware of perception itself, or as some reported, awareness itself. The abstract, psychophysiological phenomena in Pulsa installations were said to induce altered states of consciousness that feathered self-awareness of the process of having sensory experience and of being conscious.^[3]

Historically speaking, Pulsa's works are difficult to stylistically categorize. The installations could be categorized within light art, time-based art, environmental art, ecological art, kinetic art, and psychedelic art. In 1968, Lucy Lippard includes Pulsa in her collection of Dematerialized art, noting that they work in a time-based medium. Regardless of categorization, Pulsa's works represent breakthrough designs in the nascent fields of cybernetic art, responsive environments and computer-based art.^[4] Pulsa could be considered contemporaries to groups like E.A.T, U.S.C.O., and Ant Farm, due to each group's focus on communication technologies as their desired media.

The dynamic sensory experiences created by Pulsa's installations were supported by equipment designed and implemented by the group. Much of the hardware was sourced from state and military surplus and was repurposed by Pulsa. The most notable of the Pulsa's designs is their state-of-the art hybrid analog-digital synthesizer which was used to as the primary tool for many of their early works. Other hardware includes, lights (strobe, flash, fluorescence), speakers, tape readers, computers, oscilloscopes, and necessary support hardware such as cables and stands.^[5]

Pulsa's first two public installations are, like the rest of their works were never given formal titles. Designs and installations were often referred to by their relative locations, Orange Street Loft and Yale school of Art and Architecture. The core hardware and experience of these two first installations were iterations of the same design.^[6]

The Loft Installation was named such because it was installed in the group's loft on Orange Street in New Haven, CT. The rental of the loft had begun under founding member David Rumsey and the space would act as early laboratory and installation space for Pulsa. The loft space was on the top floor of an office building and accessible by attic ladder. The room, 54' x 24', was roughly rectangular and featured no windows or exterior lighting. The lack of windows combined with the white painted walls created an internal space designed to amplify immersive designs by isolating exterior noise and enhancing interior sensory effects.^[7]

The design referred to as the "Loft Project" or "Loft Demonstration" featured large banks of fluorescent tubes covering the white-painted walls. Using a series of speakers and tape recorders to create sonic elements, Pulsa created a cybernetic sensory experience that drew viewers into a highly immersive and psychedelic experience. The installation recorded rhythmic patterns from the pinging sounds made by fluorescent filament firing. Four stereo-tape recorders, each with two sound-channels, were used as the catalysts for the installation. The first channel on a recorder would capture the pinging sounds of a fluorescent tube turning on and would repurpose that sound to signal more tubs to being firing on. The second channel would be out of sync with the first and amplified into a speaker. Each conjoined light bank and tape-recorder set remained isolated in series, responding only to itself, each of the four separate systems running independently. The four light and sound programs would create a cybernetic cascading effect that would run approximately 20 minutes before starting again.^[8][9]

The experience of the installation would go as follows: Viewers would enter the loft through the staircase and the trapdoor entrance sealed behind them. The interior of the space would be cast in pitch darkness with bean bags and floor seating provided. The program would begin with a soft flickering of light and the subtle pinging sound of the filaments heating up. The pitch-black space, in a near instant, would come to life with sound and light. The sound and light would come play in out-of-sync waves, each following its own isolated cybernetic program. The architectural isolation of the loft, the painted white walls, and lack of decoration amplified the reflection of sound and light across the space. The 20-minute experience, starting off as bright white light piercing total darkness. The almost binary, light to dark transitions, dominate the space and the viewer's sensorium. Participants remarked that during the show they began to see various colors and after several minutes they remarked that their vision and retinal after-image began to blur and warp perceptions of space and time.^[10]

The Loft Demonstration was a relative success for such a small installation with many repeat participants. Among the repeat viewers were Jack Tworkov (Chairman of the Yale School of Art and Architecture) who wrote about his experience, along with Lucy Lippard, Huston Smith, and Otto Piene were among many to request private viewings. This popularity would and new institutional support would allow the Loft Demonstration to evolve in scale.^[11]

The popularity of Pulsa's Loft Demonstration along with institutional support from Tworkov and Yale inspired the group to further develop their installation, this time inside Yale's School of Art and Architecture building. The "A&A" building, designed by Paul Randolph would house a larger and more sophisticated iteration of the Loft Demonstration. Pulsa referred to this installation, similarly to its predecessor, by its location (Yale School of Art & Architecture installation, A&A Demonstration, etc). The project is in some contemporary reviews referred to it as Project Argus.^[12][13]

Pulsa expanded the scale of their installation to match the new interior space of (25' x 65' x 50') of the Yale's Paul Randolph Building. They began by adding more than a thousand new fluorescent tubes and light banks. Each tube had new custom built epoxy capping that allowed for greater conductivity and structural support. Thousands of feet of stretched reflective mylar coated the interior surfaces and walls. A student-built structure that bisected the gallery space was covered in Pulsa's mylar. In addition to the new space, lighting, and mylar Pulsa would introduce: "six conventional loudspeakers, four 10' x 4' electrostatic speakers that also functioned as enlarging and reducing mirrors mounted on symmetrical pillars in the central arena".^[14]

Joel Katz opened his article "Pulsa: Light as Truth" by describing the experience as:

Banks of fluorescent bulbs glow softly, punctured occasionally by a stabbing strobe light. Light dances uncertainly up and down the fluorescent tubes and moves across walls with apparent abandon. The physical boundaries of the exhibition space dissolve; the security of every inch of floor space is unsure and the limits of the room and ceiling are ambiguous. Beneath everything is the pulsation of electronic sound, responding to the same signals as the lights and seeming at times to have a physical presence.

^[15]

The most profound technological improvement Pulsa made in this installation was the addition of their hybrid digital-analog synthesizer. The synthesizer allowed for a greater amount control and dynamic programing. The Pulsa synthesizer was built and assembled by Pulsa members and their partners. Members Peter Kindlmann and Paul Fuge were the primary designers and engineers of the synthesizer. In the IEEE publication on Pulsa's Syntnthesizer, Kindlmann and Fuge are listed as authors and designers, a rare move for Pusla who always published collectively under the mononym "Pulsa". In an effort the avoid the commercialization and appropriation of their designs by the larger military industrial complex and to make it available to other designers and makers Pusla published their synthesizer designs in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) catalog.^[16]

Pulsa's hybrid analog-synthesizer was designed with 42 modules of ten different types. This system was incredibly flexible and allowed for the generation of a "single output with complexly structured sequence and spectrum; ... it [also] contained...up to ten channels of output of much simpler spectral composition but still had sufficiently complex sequencing to generate program cycles of up to 30 minutes in 'live' operation." .^[17]

Flexibility and interactivity were key elements of the synthesizer design. The modules could run in sequence or independently from each other, allowing feedback loops to be generated within the synthesizer, or run as independent channels. In addition to the sequencing of the modules, their specific functions allowed for an expansive array of potential variations in sound synthesis. These variations operated on the basis of voltage- control. Voltage control refers to the synthesizer's method of driving its sound synthesis. As the voltage is increased to a module, parameters such as frequency are increased linearly or logarithmically as a direct response to an increase in voltage. The addition of capacitors allows the synthesizer to almost instantly store and discharge additional voltage, increasing the range of control. This direct voltage control allows for the discrete and instantaneous control of multiple elements of sound synthesis.^[18]

As Kindlmann and Fuge wrote, "Voltage control is provided for all important parameters, such as 1) frequency, 2) amplitude, 3) attack and decay duration (independently), and 4) time interval generation by means of shift registers and other digital function modules."36^[19]

In addition to the aforementioned parameters, various modules within the synthesizer housed even more possibilities for dynamic sound synthesis. Included within certain modules were log function generators (which allowed for stable logarithmic voltage-to- current conversions for frequency control), voltage-controlled clocks, envelope generators (which generated trapezoidal wave forms that could modulate existing output signals or could generate their own output signal), multiplier circuits (which allowed for myriad functions such as, amplitude control, beat frequency generation, frequency doubling, and manipulation of control voltages), operational amplifiers, inverters, and shift registers, among other logic circuits. What this ultimately means is the synthesizer can generate an almost limitless number of permutations in sound synthesis.^[20]

In addition to the flexibility and adaptability of the machine enumerated above, the Pulsa synthesizer was notable for its ability to shape sonic space. At the core of the synthesizer's abilities were the voltage-controlled oscillators, or VCOs. The VCOs are arguably the most important feature of the synthesizer. The oscillator allowed for the waveform or shape of a sound to be changed. For example, the standard form of a waveform, the sinusoidal wave, is characterized by the smooth rolling transitions between oscillations, similar to that of waves in water. With an oscillator, this waveform can be changed from a sine wave to a sawtooth wave (a waveform marked by jagged peaks and sharp drops), or a square wave (marked by square peaks and square drops), or various other shapes. These oscillations were critical components to Pulsa's experimental environments.

Pulsa's first major public work would debut in 1968 in the swan pond of Boston Public Garden. Pulsa would be invited to participate by the architectural firm Ashley Meyer and sponsored by an Urban Redevelopment Grant and the Boston Parks department. The installation was housed within the hourglass shaped swan boat pond of the Boston Garden. The hardware for the installation (hybrid synthesizer, tape recorder, punch card reader, cables and other control devices) were stored in mostly open view in the swan boat rental shack next to the pond itself. Pulsa submerged fifty-five poly-planar speakers, spaced evenly around the perimeter of the pond, angled toward the surface of the pond so that the soundwaves would ricochet or skip across the surface of the pond without breaking the water's surface. Likewise, the xenon strobe lights, fifty-five as well, were submerged just below the surface of the water. The lights when active would flash and create halos of the light that floated just above the surface of the pond, what Pulsa referred to as "coronas" "The configuring of the 109 output devices required computer control. MIT allowed Pulsa programmers (Kindlmann, Fuge, and possibly frequent collaborator Walter Block) to visit computer labs at night and prepare punch cards for the installation programming. Tapes were used to regulate information flow through the punch-card readers interfered with the Pulsa synthesizer's logic gates and pulse gates.^[21]

The Boston Demonstration was designed to change the experience of the familiar local garden into a new responsive sensory environment. When viewers, or perhaps users, arrived they immediately became part of the installation. Using a super cardioid directional microphone, Pulsa members captured environmental sound such as: wind, traffic, pedestrian noise, animals, insects, talking, etc, and used this environmental input to trigger their installation. The audio capture could be sent directly into the system as input, modulated with the synthesizer, or recorded and used later. The systems response to sound would vary in specific pattern but was made up of the patterned flashing of the submerged strobes along with the visual and audio effect of the speakers shooting sound across the surface of the pond. Viewers would see ripples of sound as they trailed across the surface, the waves crashing into one other amid the floating coronas of light. The intersecting waves created a persistent hanging mist that amplified the presence and experience of the lights. The subtleties of the changing patterns of light and sound were likely invisible to viewers due to the rapidity and which the lights and sounds turned on and off.^[22].^[23][24]

Pulsa repurposed the equipment form their Boston Demonstration to set up a multi-night display at Yale's golf course.

The Yale Golf Course installation was less of single design shown to the public, like the Boston Garden, but was more of a semi-public series of experiments. The lights and speakers were placed in various figurations on the course itself and the adjacent wooded area. One experiment featured two 1000ft parallel lines of highway flashers (regularly flashing battery powered yellow lights) and speakers. This arrangement was used by the group to explore phasing between two simple linear movement.

Another formulation was a grid of lights in 500' x 800' isometric matrix with thirty-six paired strobe lights and speakers. The programming included sweeps from various directions and overlays of simple patterns that created a rich impression of stochastic or random activity.

The Yale Golf Course installation is characteristic of Pulsa's design process and networking abilities. Each custom design, experiment, or installation of Pulsa's should not be considered as separate expressions of Pulsa's process but instead seen as an evolving series of experiments, or nodes in a circuit, each one a successive iteration or newly written command. Enhancing the experimental nature of the Yale Golf Course demonstration was the donation of a General Automation computer. This computer was one of the earliest portable and stand-alone models produced (the model was most likely an SPC-12, SPC-8, or GA 18/30 all of which are produced in 1968). All of the binary code was written by Pulsa and their collaborators.^[25][26]

In the spring of 1969 Pulsa presented an event for the Electric Ear at the Electric Circus on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The installation featured banks of fluorescent tubes, strobe lights, and sound generated by the Pulsa synthesizer and featuring musical improvisation by the group.^[27]

In the spring of 1969, Pulsa presented two lecture/demonstrations of similar design at Wesleyan University of Rhode Island. The installation featured six 8'x 8' banks of fluorescent tubes in a circular configuration on the backs of auditorium seating with a loudspeaker and a microphone near each bank. Once the audience and Pulsa were seated amidst the banks of fluorescents, the lights were turned off. The artists use a few microphones to inform the audience that what they were hearing and seeing was directly generated by sounds picked up by the microphones and that everyone was welcome to contribute. Whenever anyone spoke or made sounds into a microphone, the signals were amplified as sound in the space, and activated the adjoining fluorescent bank, lighting up a particular area of the room.

As the dialogue picked up, the analogue-digital synthesizer contributed additional signals and began cycling signals around the room in complex, changing patterns, so that, after appearing near the microphones from which they originated, the lights and sounds began to dance around the room. As Pulsa continued to describe their work's development and goals, the lecture/demonstration spontaneously turned into an immersive improvisation to which everyone contributed ideas, sounds and songs.^[28]

Wadsworth Atheneum Director James Elliot invited Pulsa to install a work in October-November 1969. Three independent systems were presented simultaneously, each running on its own, so that the mix of the three components was always unique. The existing temperature and humidity control system was programmed to generate twenty-minute cycle of cold-wet hot-dry conditions– a change of about 25 degrees (from 55 degrees to 80 degrees). Fourteen strobe lights were installed outside the gallery's glass walls in the courtyard and street, producing several layers of reflective patterns, fired in patterns generated by the analog-digital signal synthesizer. A sound system with inputs from a dozen directional microphones were in various spaces inside and outside the museum. These sounds were switched by photocell inputs to an automatic program that responded to the strobe lights and changing ambient light conditions, selecting, mixing and circulating carious channels to six loudspeakers located at the corners and midpoints of the room.^[29]

In late 1969, Pulsa was invited to participate in the Spaces exhibition, curated by Jennifer Licht, which ran from December 30, 1969, to March 1, 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in the Sculpture Garden. Pulsa installed a responsive sensory environment in the used a computerized control system and surveillance equipment as well as light, sound, and heat.^[30]

In their proposal letter to curator Jennifer Licht, Pulsa describes the plans for the piece: "This piece will be characterized primarily by information taken directly from the environment, which is modified by a computer signal synthesizing system. There will be many levels of feedback loops and interaction, producing a kind of ecology amongst the several systems. ... On an immediate level, information enriched through feedback will be exemplified by the real time interaction of viewers within fields of sonic response, and the thermostatic control of the infrared heaters, which will produce zones of radiant heat energy as well as waves of atmospheric distortion."^[31]

As participants entered the Sculpture Garden from either the street or the museum itself, they were immersed in an environment of swirling lights, sound, and heat. Strobe lights flashed on and off in dynamic patterns, while speakers emitted varying soothing electronic sounds from Pulsa's synthesizer. Pulsa arranged for every move a visitor made to have the potential to change the environment's sensory outputs. Each visitor's movement became information fed back into the environment; even the homeostatic act of visitors' warming themselves on a cold winter's day became input for the machine. The installation included an array of sixty strobe lights and eighty loudspeakers. The "thermal-zone sculptures," cubic space heaters, were mounted at various heights on vertical tripod stands. The thermal-zone sculptures were responsive to viewer engagement. Using a combination of luminous heaters and red infrared tubes connected to photocells the sculptures could sense when a person was standing in a thermal zone. When visitors remained in the thermal heating zones the installation would respond by changing the light and sound output.^[32]

The control room of Pulsa's installation was highly visible at MoMA, constructed in glass walled room with a wall facing the garden. Pulsa also placed closed-circuit cameras inside the museum on third floor that fed live images of the garden to a monitor in the control room on which photocell switches were affixed. These photocells in turn became part of the installation's feedback systems. As participants moved into the range of the photocells, they would trigger a series of cascading outputs or effects that would in turn trigger other outputs nested further within the systems. For the installation, Pulsa had planned on using a General Automation computer that had been gifted to them by the Agrippa-Ord Corporation.128 Pulsa hoped the computer could run a program that would take input from the sensors in the Sculpture Garden and relay the instructions to their analog-digital synthesizer, which in turn would trigger sound, light, and heat feedback. Regrettably, the group found that the software did not exist at the time that could manage real-time feedback like the group intended to use in their installation. Pulsa then hoped to create the software needed for their project. A programmer from Synchronicity and "sometime" Pulsa member, Walter Bloch, along with Pulsa member Paul Fuge, separately worked on developing software programs for the General Automation computer. Despite a year's lead-time, neither programmer was able to create a program suitable for Pulsa's needs. Pulsa was thus forced to rely on their synthesizer and on-site hardware to control the installation. Without the General Automation computer, Pulsa members opted to improvise their light and sound events. Cain noted that they "created unique pieces for each of the [sixty] days of the show, producing a variant of light and sound effects in perhaps the most constrained setting in which we ever worked."^[33][34]

In the fall of 1970, Pulsa returned to Yale School of Art and Architecture Gallery to create a new work based entirely on video projections. The intent of this piece was to create a warp in time.

The entire volume of the 25' x 65' x 50' "A & A" art gallery was darkened with black polyethylene film and illuminated with infrared light which is largely invisible to the human-eye but which can be readily detected by appropriate video cameras. The primary installation in the room was three wall-sized white screens which were parallel to the south, west, and north sides of the building, creating a U shaped enclosure, at the center of which three large black and white video projectors delivered images to the screens, enabling the screens to function as giant mirrors of what transpired in the space, though, unlike conventional mirrors, the video "reflections" were not left-right reversed. However, while one of the video projections present when the camera saw in real time, the two adjoining projectors presented what they received from the associated camera with a delay, in one case of 5 seconds and in the other of 10 seconds. These delays were accompanied by recording the signals picked up from two of the cameras on a video-tape loop of appropriate size so that recordings played back after the desired internal and were then erased when the loop was again recorded for its next playback.

The effect of walking into seemingly dark space was being surrounded by three very large mirrors, one which showed what was happening in the present moment. The second mirror to the left of the first (?), showed what one had done from a different angle, but in this case, with a 5 second delay. The third mirror, again to the left of the first, showed a reflection of what had happened 10 seconds before.^[35]

Viewers received no instructions as to how to respond to this environment but soon discovered that, because the 10 second delay was twice as long as long as the 5 second delay, by performing relatively slow repetitive actions such as walking back and forth across the space, they found that not only were their past actions being displayed but also what they were about to do in the immediate future.

In November of 1970, in a work which was part of ongoing exploration of telecommunication links. Pulsa set up a video and audio link between two large residential dormitories the top floors of which contained identical lounges, one restricted to men and the other for women. The real time wall projections and sound links between the two spaces enabled the otherwise segregated spaces and sexes to communicate freely, thus opening up new forms of social exchange.

In the spring 1971, Martin Freedman commissioned Pulsa to install a curving line of 30 (???) strobe lights with speakers along the edge of the lake in Loring Park adjoining the Walker Art Center. The group programmed this installation to enliven the park space in close proximity to a laser artwork by Rodney Krebs. The light-sound activity near the water's edge was reminiscent of the effects Pulsa achieved at the Boston Public Garden.

Pulsa presented a week-long "Video Sensorium" in April of 1971 at Automation House in New York City. The piece featured direct and delayed video and audio communication between all areas of the first three floors of the large Upper East Side brownstone. On each floor, wall-sized screens showed video projections, black and white on the first two floors and color on the third. Captured in infrared form special lights, the projected images displayed viewers activities in real-time, so that the projections behaved like non-reversing mirrors, and with various delays switched time back and for repetitive actions also forward. Certain of projections, especially the one in the entrance, featured "ghost trails" or ectoplasmic auras surrounding the participants created by increasing the gain of the projector's the beam control.

One side of the third floor was filled with verdant tropical house plants between which a number of strobe lights flashed at intervals. Various channels of sound were capture by concealed and accessible microphones and routed to speakers throughout the space, including the bathrooms. Cushions and musical instruments were arrayed on the third floor near the control system. Pulsa encouraged viewers to sit with group members and contribute creatively to the overall sound/ light field. This collective improvisation was a continuation of continuously ongoing collaborations at Pulsa's residence, Harmony Ranch. Among those who jammed with Pulsa at Automation House were Max Neuhaus and Marianne Amacher.^[36]

In the Spring of 1972, Pulsa installed four kinetic sculptures on the lawn in front of Kline Biology Towers that descends to the South toward Hill House Avenue. The Solar Rotors were an array of four wind catching fans, each fabricated out of two 6" x 4' formed steel elements, ball-bearing mounted on a shaft attached with a single pipe clamp to a vertical pipe embedded in the ground. Acrylic mirrors were laminated to the front surface of the fan blades. Aimed down Hill House Avenue, the fans rotated whenever the wind blew, creating parabolic arcs of reflected sunlight, and moonlight,) visible on the ground and seen from the distance as brilliant flashes.^[37]

The hotspots moved very rapidly across the ground in parabolas with one vertex near the fan and the other beyond the distant horizon. Driven by the direction and velocity of the wind interacting with slight imbalances in each fan's design, the parabolic arcs of light zoomed as visible hotspots across campus lawns, roads, and buildings to provide a palpable readout of weather conditions. Because the fans were installed at different heights and facing in different directions, they responded differently to changing wind and light conditions, creating an endless variety of patterns on the lawn and an endless variety of flashing lights seen from the other end of Hill House Avenue. These sculptures produced a kinetic light display autonomously with no central control, programmed entirely by nature.^[38]

In the spring of 1973, the four Solar Rotors were installed for three months on the North Side exterior wall of the Wadsworth Atheneum Courtyard at roofline facing downward and south into an enclosed internal space. The entire courtyard became a light show consisting of the play of parabolic arcs of reflected sun and moon light. The courtyard was walled on four sides by three stories of windowed galleries. Nearly continuously active, the fans created luminous readouts of weather conditions in the galleries on the East, South and West sides of the courtyard with hotspots dancing across vitrines of French Baroque Ceramics and Egyptian Mummies. As Museum Director James Elliot remarked, the Solar Rotors made the weather into sensory information to which no one in the building could be oblivious.^[39]

Harmony Ranch is the name given to Pulsa's collective home on a farm in Connecticut, several Pulsa members and their wives The farmhouse served as the collective home and laboratory for Pulsa for from roughly. Harmony Ranch's farmhouse and grounds served as a testing space for Pulsa's installations. One of the goals with moving to a rural location was to "better monitor, understand, and emulate the benign of nature" Using the fields, farmhouse, and surrounding nature, Pulsa engaged in the experiments that ranged from improvisational performance, consciousness expansion through sensory intervention, electro-static based art, biological planning, agriculture. Pulsa conducted experiments designed to aid in consciousness expansion. Among the use of psychoactive chemicals, meditation, and collective performance, Pulsa also focused on creating consciousness expansion using sensory intervention and the exposure to electro-magnetic fields, pulsating light and sound, often enhanced by light filters and baffles, meditation, entheogens, group dynamics, and ritualized meals. These experiments were likely influenced by Pulsa's participation in the Carnatic music performances at Wesleyan University. Perhaps the most well-known of their Harmony Ranch projects were the alpha brainwave experiments. During improvisational performances participants would have EEG (electro encephalogram ) sensors would be placed around one's head and their alpha brainwaves would be monitored during sensory performances.^[40][41]

"The City as an Artwork" is an essay published in 1972 as part of Gyrogy Kepes's edited volume Arts of the Environment. The essay, Pulsa's only extant work, is one of the few pieces that carries an individual member's name, author Patrick Clancy. While the ideas and designs within the essay are the culmination of Pulsa's work and group discussion, the essay is written by Clancy himself and is credited as such. *In this discussion I may address Pulsa as the owners of the ideas where applicable but it should be noted that the essay was authored by member Patrick Clancy. *^[42][43]

"The City as an Artwork" is a culmination of Pulsa's designs and practices. The essay outlines perhaps their most radical and political ideas. The text takes the modern 20th century American city (New York City is mentioned but the city stands in for every major American city) as its object of critique. The main issue regarding contemporary cities for Pulsa was that of imbalance or more accurate an issue of hemostasis and its mechanisms. The city as it exists in 1973 is viewed by Pulsa as an antiquated technology, one so out of date and time and that Clancy refers to the city as a "closed artefact system." This "closure" refers in many ways to a closed computer or machine design where space of mechanization and control mechanisms are purposely hidden from users or citizens.^[44]

The design of the city, according to the essay, was a pursuit of pure aesthetics or what Clancy refers to as an "aesthetic of concealment". The "aesthetic of concealment" refers to the modernist industrial facades that cover the surfaces of downtown structures. For Clancy and Pulsa, these smooth, gleaming, placid surfaces belie the technological revolution happening behind them.

The technological revolution being concealed is that of the computer age and its growing influence and control over society. As computer technology grew from its postwar nascency into the global control and communication system we know today, Pulsa felt that its function, presence, and control schemes were too isolated from the very public the systems were meant to serve. This concealment or isolation meant that urban denizens were at the mercy of emerging computer systems they could not see much less exert any control over. This control or access is vital to Pulsa, and as they see it, vital to the urban citizen. These urban computer systems (speaking from 1972–1973) will grow to control, or likely are already control, "the flow of life-supporting resources". These resources, electricity, water, heat, food, etc., are already at stake for city dwellers. By 1970s New York City was already familiar with energy struggles with the 1965 North East blackout, periodic rolling brownouts of the late 60s and early 70s, and infamous city-wide blackout in 1977.

The solution to the imbalance, or lack, of systemic access among a growing population is one that Pulsa felt could be solved by technological and sensory intervention. The interventions proposed were advanced and hypothetical iterations of Pulsa's own installations. More than just installations or demonstrations, these ideas proposed in "The City as an Artwork" are more akin to urban planning. Clancy proposes that each neighborhood, village, or small locality should have their own custom designed interface. These installations, for all intents and purposes, can be imagined as something similar to Pulsa's earlier installations. Clancy never proposes specific interface designs, but one can imagine they potentially function much in same way as Pulsa's earlier demonstrations. The hypothetical interfaces would produce sensory output akin to Pulsa's existing designs but in addition to making citizens more comfortable with computer technology, it was also meant to inform them of their usage and allocation of resources, alleviating the current strain and misuse of life-supporting resources.