My question to you today is: can the youtube hive mind trip? or: whose hallucination is this?
V stands for..: Bert Brecht had his V-fx (distancing effects). Originally intended to make you think all the way “across” the distance set by the “Verfremdung” (estrangement), it seems by today’s standards you have to put in lots and lots of V’s to get things at least a little bit real.
Exquisite corpse: The surrealists had automatic writing. It was a bit uncanny to realize that language was making sense while you did not intend to. Who is making sense here? And when language can make sense without your intention, who did just say that, or: what exactly is dependent on your intention? Thoughts like that can easily become psychosis inducing.
So before the internet, before the notion of the hive mind the question of superindividuals was there, too. Social technologies like language can be conceived as collective unconscious mind. So, why shouldn’t it trip?
“I believe that one day we could have an accidental singer on top of the charts” The Gregory Brothers gave us “accidental singing”. What a nice term!
Sleeping Beauty In meta-musicals like Singing in the Rain people started dancing in the middle of everyday situations. A rhythm surfaced from a silly walk and the dance – it seemed – just followed naturally. By the act of movies like Singing in the rain the world was enriched with virtual dance waiting to be released from the rhythms surrounding us. Now our world has been enriched by a song sleeping in every news flash, voice or video post, in virtually all recorded language, waiting to be kissed awake by autotune.
Maybe V-effect has been translated to virtualizing effect without anyone intending, maybe the rainbow has never been so bright, so vivid, so intense, maybe one of the most familiar things today is living in a post-psychedelic culture.
