The Dreamachine (a contraction of Dream Machine), invented in 1959 by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, is a stroboscopic flickering light art device that produces eidetic visual stimuli.
The Dreamachine (a contraction of Dream Machine), invented in 1959 by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, is a stroboscopic flickering light art device that produces eidetic visual stimuli.
In its original form, a Dreamachine is a work of light art made from a cylinder with regularly spaced shapes cut out of its sides. The cylinder is then placed on a record turntable and rotated, depending on the scale, at either 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder with the rotation speed making light emanate from the holes at a consistently pulsating frequency range of 8–13 flickers per second. It is meant to be looked at through closed eyelids, upon which moving yantra-like mandala visual patterns emerge, and an alpha wave mental state is induced. The frequency of the pulsations corresponds to the electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing. In 1996, the Los Angeles Times deemed David Woodard's iteration of the Dreamachine "the most interesting object" in Burroughs' major visual retrospective Ports of Entry at LACMA. [2] [3] In a 2019 critical study, Raj Chandarlapaty, a scholar of the Beat movement, revisits and examines Woodard's "idea-shattering" approach to the Dreamachine. [1]
The Dreamachine is the subject of the National Film Board of Canada 2008 feature documentary film FLicKeR , by Nik Sheehan. [4]
The same flickering light effect is used in modern electronic devices known as mind machines.
A Dreamachine is "viewed" with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optic nerve and thus alters the brain's electrical oscillations. As users adjust to the experience, they see increasingly complex animated yantra-like patterns of color behind their closed eyelids (similar effects may be seen when travelling as a passenger in a car or bus; close your eyes as the vehicle passes through the flickering shadows cast by regularly spaced roadside trees, streetlights or tunnel striplights—these were the hypnagogic effects Brion Gysin said he sought to recreate with the device). It is claimed that by using a Dreamachine meditatively, users enter an alphawave, or hypnagogic state. [5] This experience may sometimes be quite intense, but to escape from it, one needs only to open one's eyes. [6] The Dreamachine may be dangerous for persons with photosensitive epilepsy or other nervous disorders.
It is thought that one out of 10,000 adults will experience a seizure while viewing the device; about twice as many children will have a similar ill effect. [7]
The 2022 Unboxed: Creativity in the UK touring festival included a Dreamachine project involving a series of microcontroller-controlled lights rather than a rotating cylinder, and a surround-sound soundtrack by Jon Hopkins. The experience was scaled up to use an octagonal facility two storeys high with a capacity of about 20 people at once in a circular seating arrangement. [8] It was praised by a reviewer in The Guardian as "as close to state-funded psychedelic drugs as you can get". [9]
Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
Persistence of vision is the optical illusion that occurs when the visual perception of an object does not cease for some time after the rays of light proceeding from it have ceased to enter the eye. The illusion has also been described as "retinal persistence", "persistence of impressions", simply "persistence" and other variations. A very commonly given example of the phenomenon is the apparent fiery trail of a glowing coal or burning stick while it is whirled around in the dark.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art".
A strobe light or stroboscopic lamp, commonly called a strobe, is a device used to produce regular flashes of light. It is one of a number of devices that can be used as a stroboscope. The word originated from the Ancient Greek στρόβος (stróbos), meaning "act of whirling".
William Grey Walter was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician.
The flicker fusion threshold, also known as critical flicker frequency or flicker fusion rate, is the frequency at which a flickering light appears steady to the average human observer. It is concept studied in vision science, more specifically in the psychophysics of visual perception. A traditional term for "flicker fusion" is "persistence of vision", but this has also been used to describe positive afterimages or motion blur. Although flicker can be detected for many waveforms representing time-variant fluctuations of intensity, it is conventionally, and most easily, studied in terms of sinusoidal modulation of intensity.
Hypnagogia is the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, also defined as the waning state of consciousness during the onset of sleep. Its opposite state is described as hypnopompia – the transitional state from sleep into wakefulness. Mental phenomena that may occur during this "threshold consciousness" phase include hypnagogic hallucinations, lucid dreaming, and sleep paralysis.
A stroboscope, also known as a strobe, is an instrument used to make a cyclically moving object appear to be slow-moving, or stationary. It consists of either a rotating disk with slots or holes or a lamp such as a flashtube which produces brief repetitive flashes of light. Usually, the rate of the stroboscope is adjustable to different frequencies. When a rotating or vibrating object is observed with the stroboscope at its vibration frequency, it appears stationary. Thus stroboscopes are also used to measure frequency.
The stroboscopic effect is a visual phenomenon caused by aliasing that occurs when continuous rotational or other cyclic motion is represented by a series of short or instantaneous samples at a sampling rate close to the period of the motion. It accounts for the "wagon-wheel effect", so-called because in video, spoked wheels sometimes appear to be turning backwards.
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century.
A mind machine uses pulsing rhythmic sound, flashing light, or a combination of these. Mind machines can induce deep states of relaxation or concentration.
Calea ternifolia is a species of flowering plant in the aster family, Asteraceae. It is native to Mexico and Central America. Its English language common names include bitter-grass, Mexican calea, and dream herb.
Flicker vertigo, sometimes called the Bucha effect, is "an imbalance in brain-cell activity caused by exposure to low-frequency flickering of a relatively bright light." It is a disorientation-, vertigo-, and nausea-inducing effect of a strobe light flashing at 1 Hz to 20 Hz, approximately the frequency of human brainwaves. The effects are similar to seizures caused by epilepsy, but are not restricted to people with histories of epilepsy.
Cerith Wyn Evans is a Welsh conceptual artist, sculptor and film-maker. In 2018 he won the £30,000 Hepworth Prize for Sculpture.
Ian Sommerville was an electronics technician and computer programmer. He is primarily known through his association with William S. Burroughs's circle of Beat Generation figures, and lived at Paris's so-called "Beat Hotel" by 1960, when they were regulars there, becoming Burroughs's lover and "systems adviser".
Electrically operated display devices have developed from electromechanical systems for display of text, up to all-electronic devices capable of full-motion 3D color graphic displays. Electromagnetic devices, using a solenoid coil to control a visible flag or flap, were the earliest type, and were used for text displays such as stock market prices and arrival/departure display times. The cathode ray tube was the workhorse of text and video display technology for several decades until being displaced by plasma, liquid crystal (LCD), and solid-state devices such as thin-film transistors (TFTs), LEDs and OLEDs. With the advent of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), integrated circuit (IC) chips, microprocessors, and microelectronic devices, many more individual picture elements ("pixels") could be incorporated into one display device, allowing graphic displays and video.
FLicKeR is a Canadian documentary film written and directed by Nik Sheehan, produced by Maureen Judge and Silva Basmajian (NFB). The film is based on the book Chapel of Extreme Experience by John G. Geiger about the work of artist Brion Gysin and his Dreamachine.
Dreamachines is an album by John Zorn recorded in New York City in April 2013 and released on the Tzadik label in July 2013. The album is inspired by the works of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
David James Woodard is an American conductor and writer.
Temporal light artefacts (TLAs) are undesired effects in the visual perception of a human observer induced by temporal light modulations. Two well-known examples of such unwanted effects are flicker and stroboscopic effect. Flicker is a directly visible light modulation at relatively low frequencies and small intensity modulation levels. Stroboscopic effect may become visible for a person when a moving object is illuminated by modulated light at somewhat higher frequencies (>80 Hz) and larger intensity variations.
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