This is a video of the Dream Machine Brion Gysin and Ian Summerville invented and build after reading William Grey Walter‘s book, The Living Brain. It is a nice diy approach to making mechanical interfaces for psychedelic experiences and experiments widely available.
I hope to write a whole post on mechanical interfaces for conciousness manipulation (compared to chemical interfaces like psychoactive substances) soon.
You can find a java based online version of the dream machine here.
some people can’t fall asleep. falling asleep can be the hardest thing to do. most of us have experienced this for a period..
but is falling asleep actually something you do? something you can achieve or fail at? you can not force it – it’s not a matter of will. it’s more like a habbit. (it’s more like a rabbit).
sleep is something that has to be given to us.
when we are falling asleep – falling like Alice in that rabbit hole – we can never put our fingers on it, like: there, you see, the border to sleep. we know, we fell asleep, we know we woke from sleep, but we can never say where or when exactly. this is a fundamental discrepancy of knowledge and experience. we can never say: now!, this is it. just like we know we were born, we know we shall die, but we will never experience it. it’s the limit of ego, the limit of selfconsciousness and certainty. since “i” (ego) can never say it in the present. so this is the limit of the certainty of the ego, that seemed so complete in its cogito or dubito. we never have our death, never have our birth, never have sleep. it is given to us by the others.
sleep transcends consciousness.
sleep is beyond sovereignty.
since the metaphysical entities no longer have the power to make our lifes understandable to us, we hardly have more than consistency to tell us what is real. and sleep – like birth and death – is inconsistency to the absoluteness of consciousness.
as you fall asleep, you become one with the room around you.
how are sleep and psychedelic culture connected?
alice’s story is one of a young girl dozing off in the hot afternoon and it is a common reference point for 20th century psychedelic culture. and let’s not forget all the eating of mushrooms and.. the caterpillar.
but this is merely pointing at a surface.
(alice in wonderland is an exploration into symbolic logics. so it might have something to do with language.)
we can state the similarity of dreams and trips, but what we need is a question that leads us further.
“couriouser and couriouser”
the question is important when we want to talk about (and experiment with) expanding consciousness – or consciousness-expanding practices and substances. the question is: where do we expand our consciousness to? what does this mean or what could it possibly mean?
are we all alone in our trips, like we are in sleep and death? or is it the other way around? is birth, death and sleep, is what transcends the limits of ego “community”: that what is given to us by others only?
but what could “be there” beyond consciousness, what could be there but consciousness to expand to? when we can expand our consciousness to it, how would it be any different from the consciousness we were so eagar to transcend in its absoluteness?
not being able to sleep, not being able to let go is not so trivial a matter. when we have only consistency to go by, who or what guaranties, we will find it again, once we let go?
what we can lose is the “world”, identity.
so that “world” is what we win, when we wake again.
if inconsistency is not dared, consistency can not show, since there is no substance to it, but what is found again.
And yet another beautiful Cornelius video. Not just supplementing the sound, the visuals add a voice of their own. Enjoy the harmony of your senses!
Two things we won’t see exhausted soon: the couplings of psychedelic visuals and electronic music and the beauty emerging from the kaleidoscopic effect. Enjoy!
The final sequence from Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni is very much a visually mesmerizing meditation on destruction and beauty, imagination and revolutionary action. The movie does not agree with any of the offered positions, neither of the radical students nor the “bourgeoise establishment”. This sequence stands like a bold and richly ornamented question mark at the end of the movie.
In the 1960s U.S. underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger released a “Sacred Mushroom Edition” of his earlier film “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome”. It was meant to be screened to people while taking LSD. In his movies occult, homoerotic and surreal themes often merged to a truely psychedelic vision.
Today I’d like to make the proposal that the aesthetics of “datamoshing” are kinda very psychedelic.
“Datamoshing” is the hip term for the effects achieved by removing keyframes from a videofile. It’s actually a very basic artisic technique in the tradion of randomness and the surfacing display of artistic means. What resurfaces here from the subconscious of the means of production are compression artefacts, objects born from the everyday algorithms of heavy data compression. The focus on compression artefacts sets them apart from other glitch aesthetics.
Not unlike a Rorschach test or psychedelic visuals these alien everyday compression artefacts are capable of expression. They have an emotional quality; they are anarchic smugglers on the border between conscious and subconscious.
The video above associates the compression artefacts with a certain melancholy. It’s an interesting construction of things passed since early objects of desire from 80s tv commercials and videogames are fused with the involuntary gestures of data compression from the internets early days of videostreaming. Just like a search of lost rad time with youtube.
Don’t miss those other two videos by eddie whelan! They are beautiful and no less rad executions of controlled randomness.
Another psychedelic classic by Disney. In 1940 Fantasia introduced shimmering abstract figuration morphing to the pulse of music as a subject of public viewing. Synaethetics for the masses.
There is a very nice article on the experience of exploring the labyrinth of the map. To be found here.
..singing robots. check! duelling alien dancers. check!
what else do we need for a happening of intergalactic proportion? how about a president of the galaxy called Peace? sure! an evil plan to dance the galaxy mad? why not, bring it on! a pink haired pigtailed reporter on 20 cm pleatau space boots to guide us through all this? yeah, keep it going! all of ’em singing and dancing frantically inbetween explosions of color and light? that’s it! space channel 5.
The Daily Psychedelic Video 