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Dreamachine
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. Description 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 Wood ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Woodard
David James Woodard (; born April6, 1964) is an American conductor and writer. Los Angeles memorial services at which Woodard has served as conductor or music director include a 2001 civic ceremony held at the Angels Flight funicular railway honoring mishap casualty Leon Praport and his injured widow Lola. He has conducted wildlife requiems, including for a California brown pelican on the berm crest of a beach where the animal had fallen. He is reputed to favor colored inks in preparing a score. Woodard's replicas of the Dreamachine have been exhibited in art museums throughout the world. His contributions to Adam Parfrey's ''Apocalypse Culture'' book series, and to literary journals such as '' Der Freund'', include writings on interspecies karma, plant consciousness, ketamine, and the Paraguayan settlement Nueva Germania. Early life David Woodard grew up in Santa Barbara, California, the youngest child of a Canadian Mennonite mother, part of the Kleine Gemeinde, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected." Biography Early years John Clifford Brian Gysin was born at the Canadian military hospital in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England. His mother, Stella Margaret Martin, was a Canadian from Deseronto, Ontario. His father, Leonard Gysin, a captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was killed in action eight months aft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian Sommerville (technician)
Ian Sommerville (3 June 1940 – 5 February 1976) John Geiger, ''Chapel of Extreme Experience'', page 90. 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". Sommerville was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Around 1960, he programmed a random-sequence generator that Brion Gysin used in his cut-up technique. He and Gysin also collaborated in 1961 in developing the Dreamachine, a phonograph-driven stroboscope described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed", and intended to affect the viewer's brain alpha wave activity. Sommerville and Burroughs made the 5-minute tape "Silver Smoke of Dreams" in the early 1960s, and later provided the basis for the quarter-hour audi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hypnagogic
Hypnagogia is the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, also defined as the waning state of consciousness during the onset of sleep. Its corresponding state is '' hypnopompia'' sleep to wakefulness. Mental phenomena that may occur during this "threshold consciousness" include hallucinations, lucid dreaming, and sleep paralysis. Etymology In 1848, Alfred Maury introduced the term "hypnagogic" from the Greek words ύπνος (“hypnos”), meaning “sleep”, and αγωγός (“agōgos”), meaning “conductor” or “leader”. Later, in 1904, Frederic Myers coined the term "hypnopompic," with its word-ending originating from the Greek word "pompos," meaning "sender." Definitions The word ''hypnagogia'' is sometimes used in a restricted sense to refer to the onset of sleep, and contrasted with '' hypnopompia'', Frederic Myers's term for waking up. However, ''hypnagogia'' is also regularly employed in a more general sense that covers both falling asleep and wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nik Sheehan
Nik Sheehan (born 17 March 1960) is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, who established an international reputation with ''No Sad Songs'' (1985), the first major documentary on AIDS. The film cited by world-renowned specialist Dr. Balfour Mount as "the best film on the planet this year". In 1995, he produced and directed ''Symposium'', inspired by Plato’s classic and featuring multiple views of gay love as performed by Canadian artists and writers including Brad Fraser, Stan Persky, Patricia Rozema, Tomson Highway, Daniel MacIvor and others. Premiering at the Montreal World Film Festival, it was broadcast extensively by the CBC, and created national headlines. ''God’s Fool'' (1997), shot in Morocco, tells the story of Scott Symons, a renegade writer of the Canadian establishment who had exiled himself to the seaside town of Essaouira. It premiered at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, where artistic director Greg Gatenby judged it "the best film biography of a w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jon Hopkins
Jonathan Julian Hopkins (born 15 August 1979) is an English musician and producer who writes and performs electronic music. He began his career playing keyboards for Imogen Heap, and has produced but also contributed to albums by Brian Eno, Coldplay, David Holmes (musician), David Holmes and others. Hopkins composed the soundtrack for the 2010 film ''Monsters (2010 film), Monsters'', which was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Score. His third studio album, ''Insides (album), Insides'', reached No. 15 on the US Dance/Electronic Albums chart in 2009. His collaborations on ''Small Craft on a Milk Sea'' with Brian Eno and Leo Abrahams and ''Diamond Mine (King Creosote and Jon Hopkins album), Diamond Mine'' with King Creosote both reached No. 82 on the UK Albums Chart. Both of his albums ''Diamond Mine'' (2011) and ''Immunity (Jon Hopkins album), Immunity'' (2013) were nominated for the Mercury Prize. His fifth studio album ''Singularity (Jon Hopkins album), Sin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Creativity In The UK
Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable ideas or works using one's imagination. Products of creativity may be intangible (e.g. an idea, scientific theory, literary work, musical composition, or joke), or a physical object (e.g. an invention, dish or meal, piece of jewelry, costume, a painting). Creativity may also describe the ability to find new solutions to problems, or new methods to accomplish a goal. Therefore, creativity enables people to solve problems in new ways. Most ancient cultures (including Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Ancient India) lacked the concept of creativity, seeing art as a form of discovery rather than a form of creation. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, creativity was seen as the sole province of God, and human creativity was considered an expression of God's work; the modern conception of creativity came about during the Renaissance, influenced by humanist ideas. Scholarly interest in creativity is found in a number of d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the ''Times'' serves as one of the country's Newspaper of record, newspapers of record. , ''The New York Times'' had 9.13 million total and 8.83 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the List of newspapers in the United States, highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 296,330 print subscribers, making the ''Times'' the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, following ''The Wall Street Journal'', also based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anxiety Disorder
Anxiety disorders are a group of mental disorders characterized by significant and uncontrollable feelings of anxiety and fear such that a person's social, occupational, and personal functions are significantly impaired. Anxiety may cause physical and cognitive symptoms, such as restlessness, irritability, easy fatigue, difficulty concentrating, increased heart rate, chest pain, abdominal pain, and a variety of other symptoms that may vary based on the individual. In casual discourse, the words ''anxiety'' and ''fear'' are often used interchangeably. In clinical usage, they have distinct meanings; anxiety is clinically defined as an unpleasant emotional state for which the cause is either not readily identified or perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable, whereas fear is clinically defined as an emotional and physiological response to a recognized external threat. The umbrella term 'anxiety disorder' refers to a number of specific disorders that include fears (phobias) and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Photosensitive Epilepsy
Photosensitive epilepsy (PSE) is a form of epilepsy in which seizures are triggered by visual stimuli that form patterns in time or space, such as flashing lights, bold, regular patterns, or regular moving patterns. PSE affects approximately one in 4,000 people (5% of those with epilepsy). Signs and symptoms People with PSE experience epileptiform seizures upon exposure to certain visual stimuli. The exact nature of the stimulus or stimuli that triggers the seizures varies from one patient to another, as does the nature and severity of the resulting seizures (ranging from brief absence seizures to full tonic–clonic seizures). Many PSE patients experience an " aura" or feel odd sensations before the seizure occurs, and this can serve as a warning to a patient to move away from the trigger stimulus. The visual trigger for a seizure is generally cyclic, forming a regular pattern in time or space. Flashing lights (such as strobe lights) or rapidly changing or alternating images ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optic Nerve
In neuroanatomy, the optic nerve, also known as the second cranial nerve, cranial nerve II, or simply CN II, is a paired cranial nerve that transmits visual system, visual information from the retina to the brain. In humans, the optic nerve is derived from optic stalks during the seventh week of development and is composed of retinal ganglion cell axons and glial cells; it extends from the optic disc to the optic chiasma and continues as the optic tract to the lateral geniculate nucleus, Pretectal area, pretectal nuclei, and superior colliculus. Structure The optic nerve has been classified as the second of twelve paired cranial nerves, but it is technically a myelinated tract of the central nervous system, rather than a classical nerve of the peripheral nervous system because it is derived from an out-pouching of the diencephalon (optic stalks) during embryonic development. As a consequence, the fibers of the optic nerve are covered with myelin produced by oligodendrocytes, r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
