Brion Gysin — The Dreamachine

1961

Artists: Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville (technical collaborator) · Year: 1961 · Medium: Kinetic-optical sculpture — rotating cylinder with cutouts producing stroboscopic flicker at alpha-wave frequency · Substrate: Cylindrical paper or metal shade with precisely-spaced rectangular cutouts; 78-rpm phonograph turntable for rotation; central light source · Place: Paris, France · Institution: The Beat Hotel (Paris residence of Gysin, Burroughs, Sommerville) Brion Gysin and the mathematician-technologist Ian Sommerville built the Dreamachine in 1961 at the Beat Hotel in Paris. The device is a rotating cylinder with precisely-spaced rectangular cutouts, placed over an incandescent light on a 78-rpm turntable; when the cylinder rotates at speed, the light passes through the cutouts at approximately 8–13 Hz, which corresponds to the alpha-wave frequency of the human brain. A viewer sitting with closed eyes in front of the Dreamachine perceives continuous shifting color patterns — entoptic phenomena — generated not by any image but by the flicker's interaction with the visual cortex. The Dreamachine is not strictly computer art. It is not computational in any conventional sense. But it is included in this archive because its conceptual framing — an artwork whose primary content is produced by a repeated mechanical signal interacting with a human perceptual system — is continuous with the cybernetic-art discourse that would develop through the 1960s and 1970s. Pask, Walter, and Schöffer were operating in related intellectual territory; Gysin and Sommerville's contribution arrived specifically through the counter-cultural Beat-generation circles rather than through academic cybernetics. The device was manufactured in small numbers through the 1960s and 1970s and was widely associated with William S. Burroughs, Gysin's collaborator and fellow Beat Hotel resident. Gysin patented the design in 1961. Replicas are still made today. Lore Brion Gysin built the first Dreamachine prototype with the engineer Ian Sommerville in their shared rooms at the Beat Hotel in Paris in late 1960 and early 1961. Sommerville was William Burroughs's lover; Gysin was Burroughs's closest friend; the three were a small unit. The first Dreamachine was assembled from a paper cylinder mounted on a 78-rpm record turntable with an electric light bulb at the center. Sommerville designed the slot pattern to produce the alpha-wave-frequency flicker. Gysin attempted commercial production through a deal with Helena Rubinstein's nephew, but the patent applications were rejected and no consumer product reached market. Gysin died in 1986; Sommerville died in a 1976 car crash. The Beat Hotel was demolished in 1963; the original Dreamachine prototype was lost. The surviving rebuilt versions are descendants of subsequent assemblies. Sources • Gysin, Brion — Brion Gysin: Dream Machine (New Museum, 2010) • Geiger, John — Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine (Soft Skull Press, 2003) • British Library — Gysin papers