Coincidentally, my pal Dustin "UPSO" Hostetler also posted about Dream Machines last night on his blog. (My post this morning: "History of the Dream Machine") In Dustin's post, he turns us on to "Citadels," a Dream Machine-inspired multimedia performance piece by Matthijs Munnik "about brainwave interference." The audience wears opaque visors and is bombarded with flickering light and audio controlled by Munnik. The video above gives you a sense of the piece, but it's clearly one of those "you had to be there" moments. From the project description:
“We must storm the citadels of enlightenment. The means are at hand,” William S. Burroughs wrote to his best friend Brion Gysin. The means, he was referring to, was the invention of the dream machine.
A rotating cyllinder lamp-like device, which produced a stroboscopic light. You would see beautiful patterns, shapes and colours, while looking at this device with your eyes closed. Even full hallucinations have been reported…
(William Grey) Walter, a neurophysiologist, was a pioneer in research of brainwave activity. In this book he describes his experiments with stroboscopic light. He found that flicker-induced hallucinatory experiences of his test subjects seemed to be as broad and dynamic as anything experienced in the medical case histories. As suggested by himself, this effect is caused not by properties of the light itself, or by the eye, but are a product of the brain.
One theory is that the flickering is interfering with the brain’s visual cortex, attempting to deal with intermittent signal. It’s hard not to wonder if the patterns you see perhaps offer a glimpse of our own brain activity, something beyond our own senses.In my performance I also make use of the flicker effect, but I have more control over it. In my performance, the audience wears white plastic masks, this way they look into a ganzfeld, a totally white field during the performance. In my set up, I use beamers, projecting light on the audience’s masks, completely immersing them in the light and colors of the projection.
