Dreamachine

The Dreamachine is a mind-bending light and sound extravaganza designed to be experienced with your eyes closed. Currently installed in Woolwich, London, the high-sensory experience invites members of the public into the Dreamachine, where kaleidoscopic visual hallucinations are generated by flashing lights and an immersive 360-degree soundscape.

Dreamachine is inspired by an extraordinary but little-known 1959 invention by artist–inventor Brion Gysin. His experimental homemade device used flickering light to create vivid illusions, kaleidoscopic patterns and explosions of colour in the mind of the viewer. Designed to be the ‘first artwork to be experienced with your eyes closed’, Gysin had a pioneering vision for his invention to replace the television in every home in America. Instead of passive consumers of mass-produced media, viewers of his Dreamachine would create their own cinematic experiences. Gysin died before his vision could be realised, but his idea to use technology to reconnect us with our inner lives remains just as radical, and relevant, today. Over sixty years after its original invention, Dreamachine has been radically reimagined as a powerful new kind of collective experience, taking place in every nation of the UK for free. Dreamachine is presented by Collective Act, a producer of powerful large-scale participatory commissions. We are a flexible and independent team that collaborates with a network of artists, freelancers, partners, and festivals to create memorable public projects across the globe. We champion a collective and multi-disciplinary approach to producing new work, creating space for taking risks and the unexpected to bring ambitious ideas to life. As a team, we are driven by the ethos of creating meaningful shared experiences that build connections and help change the way we look at the world. 

Dr. David Schwartzman is a Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Consciousness Science. He is a cognitive neuroscientist, whose research investigates the neural basis of altered states of consciousness. David is working on the scientific and research elements of the programme, which will include a ground-breaking large-scale study of perceptual diversity. 

Professor Anil Seth is a world-leading neuroscientist and public science communicator. He is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and the author of the recently published Being You – A New Science of Consciousness (Faber/Dutton) – an instant Sunday Times Bestseller and Guardian Book of the Week. Anil is working on the scientific and research elements of the programme, which will include a ground-breaking large-scale study of perceptual diversity. “We all have different experiences of the shared world and the Dreamachine brings those differences to light in a beautiful and creative way,” says Seth. “Understanding these differences can be a catalyst, I think, for better communication between people.”

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-gocx50CKmo



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dark Matter Transducer

Image
Scientists are on a quest to solve one of physics’ biggest mysteries: What exactly is dark matter – the invisible substance that accounts for 85 percent of all the matter in the universe but can’t be seen even with our most advanced scientific instruments? Most scientists believe it’s made of ghostly particles that rarely bump into their surroundings; that’s why billions of dark matter particles might zip right through our bodies every second without us even noticing. Leading candidates for dark matter particles are WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) National Accelerator Laboratory is helping to build and test the LUX-ZEPLIN or LZ detector, one of the biggest and most sensitive detectors ever designed to catch hypothetical dark matter particles known as WIMPs. Identifying the building blocks of dark matter is one of the highest priorities of modern physics. Most scientists believe it’s made of ghostly particles that rarely bump int
Read more

Chasing The Dream

Image
Similar to many other fields in Psychiatry, understanding sleep and dreams as biological events remain unconsolidated and a work in progress. In 'The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams', psychologist Patrick McNamara describes the neuroscience of sleep and dreams while emphasizing on the evolutionary and social significance of the two. Organized into two sections, Part I Sleep and Part II Dreams, McNamara walks through definitions, characteristics, variations and theories of sleep and dreams. He draws examples from human case studies to describe the two phenomena in relation to human anatomy, as well as citing animal studies to explain possible mechanisms. McNamara approaches sleep and dreams as physiological and social functions that can be explained within the paradigm of Darwinian evolutionary biology. In other words, sleeping and dreaming involve fitness 'trade-offs' in our social context, such that one’s 'sleep expression' centers around his or her interactio
Read more

The Science Of Lucid Dreaming

Image
Lucid dreaming refers to realizing within a dream that you are dreaming. It is an ancient spiritual technique (used in Buddhist dream yoga, Taoism, Sufism, and numerous native wisdom traditions). However, the scientific evidence for lucid dreaming emerged in 1980, which makes lucid dreaming a fascinating subject, since this ancient spiritual technique has achieved scientific acceptance and investigation. In the video link below, Robert Waggoner examines the experiments which provided evidence for lucid dreaming, along with the more ancient view of lucid dreaming as a pathway to accelerated spiritual growth. He also examines the use of lucid dreaming by modern day psychotherapists to resolve recurring nightmares in people with PTSD, along with lucid dreaming's potential use in areas such as accessing inner creativity, exploring the unconscious, and spiritual practice. In 1975, Robert Waggoner taught himself a simple technique to lucid dream or become consciously aware of dreaming, w
Read more