User:Emily/Thematic Project/Trimester 03/03

Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville

in the early 1960,The Living Brain by Grey Walter --> 1930's -->electroencephalogram became accessible --> correct localization of the alpha rhythm to the occipital cortex -->"In a telephone system the meaning of a mesage received depends on the sender; in a sensory system the meaning depends on the receiver. When nerve impulses travel from a sense organ, it is their destination on the cortex which determines" --> how it is the receiving point that gives substance to the message, not the initial 'statement'

a phonograph-driven stroboscope described as "the first art object to be seen with eyes closed", and intended to affect the viewer's brain alpha wave. The dreamachine generates vivid images and brightly coloured patterns.

Gysin refine its design--> replete with calligraphic art

Patent(P.V.868 281)in 1961 --> commercial exploitation in psychic centres but not successful

exhibiting it in an exhibition entitled 'L'Object' at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

Helena Rubenstein,a lavish patron of the arts.displayed the loaned dreamachine

William Burroughs, mysticism ?? It is through the malleability of dreams

physiological??(do they lack meaning) vs psychic reality??(do they encompass meaning)

'The permutations discovered me - because permutaions have of vourse been around for a long time; in the whole magic world permutaions are part of the cabalistic secret.' Gysin to Terry Wilson

The Process: 'I'll tell you one thing you really should keep to yourself: the World is contained in that Word. If you have understood, there is no other mystery. The Way Out is to permutate...'"Rube out the Word"

the dreamachine has the immense advantage of allowing us to respond to ourselves.

interior vision which had never been tapped before

Catherine de Medici (in French history)

alpha bads of excitation of brain --> within the alpha band between eight and thirteen flickers a second. -->dreamachine produces this continuously

the secrets of the unconscious

Kathy Acker, Terry Wilson, David Bowie

Gysin focused on the far less commercial literrary form of permutaion. in The Third Mind:The Divine tautology came up at me off a page one day. I AM THAT I AM, and I saw that it was lopsided. I switched the last two words to fet better architectural balance around the big THAT. There was a little click as I read from right to left and then permutated the other end. AM I THAT AM I? "It" asked a question. My ear ran away down the first one hundred and twenty simple permutations and I hear, I think, what Newton said he heard: a sort of pealing inside my head, like an ether experience, and I fell down.'

Abraham Abulafia, a 13th century cabalist, we permutate a word or phrase he proposed a method that leads to a transcendence of normal consciousness.

Meaning is lost and the mind becomes focused inward on the structure of the letter or numbers of the words, and thier possible reverberation in different forms.

Working with an extended permutation is best likened to listening to a complex rhythm that transmutes by the slightest of degree of each bar. The whole piece becomes a perfect mirror of itself.

a scale of senven notes = 5040 different melogies --> Gysin restricted his poems to no more than 4 or 5 words

The dreamachine was a device, creating pattern after pattern within the brain itself, turing image upon imges, light upon light until the infinite became possible

Sources:
http://www.permuted.org.uk/dream1.htm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJFgNMVePaQ