A beautiful, haunting, trance-inducing and marginally disturbing video art series. Morgan Beringer (featured here before) has uploaded 23 of 64 videos – each a strikingly unique composition – usually morphing photographs or after-effects generators with various aberrations & distortions with a hypnotic rhythm track. Watch the entire playlist and you’ll be entranced… I’ve shared some of my favourites here.
Every since the spectacular Rillo Talk, one of my favorite psychedelic videos of all times, I can’t get enough of Wild Child. These two videos don’t come close to Rillo Talk from in terms of psychedelicness/psychedelicity (Is that a word?) but I still enjoy their mild psychedelic vibe.
Nicolas Schöffer (1912-1992) was a Hungarian-born French artist. He can be considered as the father of cybernetic art. His career touched on painting, kinetic sculpture, architecture, urbanism, film, TV, and music. Indeed he collaborated on music with Pierre Henry. All of the artistic actions of Schöffer were done in the pursuit of a dynamism in art.
This interest in artistic dynamism was originally initiated by the Cubo-Futurists and then intensified and solidified by the Russian Constructivism artists, such as Naum Gabo, Anton Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. All these artists were concerned with opening up the static three-dimensional sculptural form to a fourth dimension of time and motion. And this was the intention of Schöffer as well.
Schöffer however, coming well after, benefited from cybernetic theories (theories of feedback systems (interactivity) primarily based on the ideas of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964)) in that they suggested to him artistic processes in terms of the organization of the system manifesting it (e.g., the circular causality of feedback-loops). For Schöffer, this enabled cybernetics to elucidate complex artistic relationships from within the work itself.
His CYSP 1 (1956) is considered the first cybernetic sculpture in art history in that it made use of electronic computations as developed by the Philips Company. The sculpture is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. The plates are operated by small motors located under their axis. Photo-electric cells and a microphone built into the sculpture catch all the variations in the fields of color, light intensity and sound intensity. All these changes occasion reactions on the part of the sculpture.
Consequently his kinetic sculptural compositions were able to parallel the work of Warren McCulloch and his adaptation of cybernetics in formulating a creative epistemology concerned with the self-communication within an observer’s psyche and between the psyche and the surrounding environment. This is the primary usefulness of cybernetics in studying the supposed subject/object polarity in terms of artistic experience.
Here is an excerpt of his work:
Galerie 47 – 20th century furniture and decorative arts
Sculpture: Nicolas Schöffer 1968
Music:Pierre Henry “spatiodynamisme I ” 1963
Psychedelicvideos.com is a commercial psychedelic video website by conceptual artist Stephen Thorburn which sells DVD’s with psychedelic videos for various purposes such as parties, relaxation, and yoga. Their YouTube channel has a couple of pretty nice ones of the hyper-colorful computer generated variety.
5 short & hilarious videos from Australian animator Ben Ommundson.
These colourful, whimsical videos are designed to loop, and touch on hallucination, childhood memories, empathy and the mundane.
The Daily Psychedelic Video 