He was motivated in part by the massive civil unrest that had occurred in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, and by a long-standing desire to express his own experiences with racial prejudice as a child growing up in Brooklyn. Since we knew in advance we were going to explore controversial issues of race, politics and religion, we also knew we would have to walk a tightrope to achieve the proper balance of subject and form. Given the plethora of topics to choose from racial hatred, religious intolerance, censorship, cultural elitism we decided it would be advantageous to focus on the one major disseminator of it all television. Television, after all, is itself in the center of a maelstrom of public dissension and controversy. We even speculated on the origin and nature of the debate itself, and wondered if it was merely another more insidious type of hyperbole foisted upon an unsuspecting public by a media machine run amok.
Television usually provides all the answers within the appropriate time slot.
In our case we worked for a year and a half and came up with as many new questions as the old ones we eliminated. Ghost in Machine opens with a recurring character, an anonymous man, flipping through the channels of a TV set. The orchestra, functioning as the television, changes musical channels with each click of the remote control. They are victims of the gender war which rages across the nation. In the next segment, the viewer, the anonymous man with the remote control, discovers he can't turn the TV off and decides to tune to the evening news.