The Master Musicians of Joujouka were Brion Gysin’s favorite musical fraternity. Gysin spent 23 years in Morocco in order to be close to the Sufi Masters.

On June 6th The Master Musicians of Joujouka headline at the Villa Aperta IV Festival at Villa Medici in Rome. Villa Medici is a 16th palace which has been the home of the French Academy in Rome since 1803.

The Master Musicians will play two sets one led by Master violinist Sheich Ahmed Talha, who starred as Boujeloud in the recent movie by the  Brothers Hurtado, Marc and Eric ” Jajouka, quelque chose de bon vient vers toi”.

The Master Musicians will finish the night with a full performance of Boujeloud. This suite of music is accopmapanyed by a dance performence of Boujeloud a half man half goat figure who has been likened to the god Pan.

Also on the bill are Mali’s desert rock band Terakaft

and the  French group  Concrete Knives.

Tickets are available http://www.greenticket.it/eventi_cerca.html?t=0&c=&r=villa+medici

More info at http://www.villamedici.it/en/cultural-events/events-programme/2013/06/villa-aperta-2013-iv-edition/

Afetr the festival The Master Musicians will return to their village where they host their annual festival from 14-16 June. Some tickets are still available on http://www.joujouka.org/

Profoundly Sick Society from LanaVanzetta on Vimeo.

‘IT IS NO MEASURE OF HEALTH TO BE WELL ADJUSTED TO A PROFOUNDLY SICK SOCIETY’ Jiduu Krishnamurti

4 April 2013

Private view: Thursday 4 April 7 – 9 pm
Exhibition hours Friday – Sunday April 5 – 7 11 am – 6pm

HOXTON ARCHES, Arch 402 Cremer St, London E2 8HDwww.hoxtonarches.com

Arch 402 Hoxton Arches is pleased to hold the first solo exhibition of recent MA graduate Lana Vanzetta

Vanzetta is a new and exciting video artist showcasing self-portraits that show her succumbing to the pressures of contemporary culture. She is a woman obsessed with status, substance abuse, charity, love and the loss of self. Vanzetta questions the world, its fixations and the pursuit of personal happiness.

This artist has nowhere to hide, and her autobiographical works tell the story of a divided life style that swings relentlessly and exhaustingly between the good and the bad.

Vanzetta’s portraits are emotional, seductive and darkly humorous. They sit somewhere between reality and fantasy.

The viewer is both compelled and repulsed as they venture into a world of The Fake, The True and The Wannabe. Vanzetta is and has been many things: The Junky, The Super Hero, The Crazy, The CEO, The Philanthropist and The Down and Out. But like most of us, in the end she sits comfortably between The Saint and The Sinner.

This journey is not for the faint hearted, climb aboard and hold on tight!

www.lanavanzetta.com

5 Screen Moving Image Installation & artworks

RSVP for private view Email: contact@lanavanzetta.com

Artist Statement

Photographs and film are my sketchbooks. I document the world around me blurring the boundaries between witness, commentator and participant.

I agree with the Turkish curator Fulya Erdemci who said ‘The raison d‘etre of any art project in a public space is to create a contrast, unfold a conflict, and even add more conflict to make it visible’.

Taking into account, the political, financial and social imperatives operating in my work – I am seeking to actively integrate their influence whilst maintaining a critical perspective.

In this body of work I use the cut up technique originated in the 1920’s by Gysin and later championed by William Burroughs to alter reality and bring disparate elements into collision through the use of interspersed clips and seemingly unrelated statements provoking connections and also contradictions.

Bio

Born in Glasgow 1962

Lana Vanzetta studied photography at the Alberta College of Art & Design Canada 1996 – and participated in the mobility exchange programme at the Glasgow School of Art.

Moving to London Vanzetta began her career photographing for such publications as The Face and Wonderland Magazine.

In 2012 Vanzetta returned to full time education completing her MA in Documentary Film at the London College of Communication London England.

Preview on viemo http://vimeo.com/59052646

“Aristotle’s ladder of nature is not just being flattened; it is being
transformed into a bush with many branches. This is no insult to human
superiority. It is long-overdue recognition that intelligent life is not
something for us to seek in the outer reaches of space but is abundant right
here on earth, under our noses.”

Read ‘The Brains of the Animal Kingdom’ at the Wall Street Journal

‘William S. Burroughs the artist’ probably places second to ‘William S. Burroughs the writer’ in the sphere of popular culture. Yet in the sphere of influence, Burroughs’s art has had immeasurable success, inspiring icons from David Bowie to Patty Smith to Kurt Cobain.

An exhibition on now at the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljublijana, Slovenia, focuses on the artistic side of Burroughs’ oeuvre, specifically his cut-up works, precursors to postmodern collage and even digital sampling in music. ‘Cut-ups, Cut-ins, Cut-outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs’ uses the Beat artist’s patchwork painting, photography, film and audio work to tell the story of his development in this other field.

Curators Colin Fallows, a professor at Liverpool John Moores University, and Synne Genzmer of Vienna’s Kunsthalle museum have rounded up dozens of rare works from Burroughs’s experimental phase. They begin in the late 1950s, shortly after Burroughs met the painter Brion Gysin, the godfather of cut-up art, at the Beat Hotel in Paris, and continue through the 1960s.

Gysin collaborated with Burroughs on his early cut-ups, splicing together fragments of text and sound to uncover a sort of freedom from conventional thinking. The original material came from Burroughs’s own writings, classical authors like T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare and Kafka, popular imagery, scientific motifs and TV; when juxtaposed they conspire to create new, disconnected realities.

Tracing the progression of works from text to painting to sound offers a glimpse into the artist’s complex mind and the beginnings of a revolution in art and music that continues to shape us even today.

Through March 29
Venue: Roth
Venue Address: 160A E. 70th St., New York
Venue Phone: 212-717-9067
External URL:andrewroth.com

Originally posted on The New Yorker

“The idealism at the heart of digital free culture exists in a kind of isolation. It is not reflected and supported by other types of idealism around property — intellectual or otherwise — and the distribution of wealth. The federal prosecutors in the Swartz case represent the sort of hard-ass, legalistic, economic concerns that surrounds digital idealism like a school of sharks that senses the potential for an oncoming feeding crisis.”

Read R.U. Sirius’s full essay on The Verge

Lanier has another problem with the techno-utopians, though. It’s not just that they’ve crashed the economy, but that they’ve made a joke out of spirituality by creating, and worshiping, “the Singularity”—the “Nerd Rapture,” as it’s been called. The belief that increasing computer speed and processing power will shortly result in machines acquiring “artificial intelligence,” consciousness, and that we will be able to upload digital versions of ourselves into the machines and achieve immortality.

“I think we changed the world, but this notion that we shouldn’t be self-critical and that we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves is irresponsible.”

Read the full interview on Smithsonian.com

DREAMACHINE
Saturday 24th November 2012

“We must storm the citadels of enlightenment the means are at hand” William S. Burroughs

“The Dreamachine is an aid to visionary experience” Aldous Huxley

> > Line Up < <

> > Line Up < <

Can’t wait until 24th November ? Dreamachines are available now from :
http://brianjonesjoujoukafestival.blogspot.fr/2012/08/buy-brion-gysins-dreamachine-direct.html
Profits help support The Master Musicians of Joujouka

This rare collection of recordings features the controversial American writer William S Burroughs (author of The Naked Lunch) and the British-born artist Brion Gysin – the man Burroughs credited with the invention of the ‘cut-up’ literary technique.

The centre-piece of the collection is a complete, previously unissued recording of Burroughs reading live in Liverpool in 1982 (tracks 2-10). The disc also includes performances by Gysin of a selection of his ‘permutated poems’, and previously unheard home recordings made by the pair in Paris in 1970, all taken from tapes in the British Library collection.

This CD is part of the British Library’s highly acclaimed ‘Spoken Word’ series of historic recordings.

Purchase it, and listen to sample tracks, here.

Working in a style that combines collage and the associative logic of cut-ups à la William Burroughs or Brion Gysin, Sears produces images in an uncanny, flickering style with oddly floating figures and juxtaposed textures that belie a staggering amount of labor. “Frame-by-frame filmmaking is a labor of love; some days I can work all day on three seconds of footage. But it’s [in] that meditative space that the stories really start to percolate,” she says. “I look for an entryway to engage with the story that already exists in the frame. The images always come first. I’ll collect a bunch of material, and as I’m experimenting with animating and layering the images, a story slowly emerges.”

Read the full story in The Austin Chronicle

Ginsberg, in a tightly knotted relationship of friend, lover and agent, had been chief sounding-board for the letters and routines that became Naked Lunch. But as the 1960s dawns, you see the set changing as the artist Brion Gysin becomes Burroughs’s main agent of correspondence. “Dear Allen,” the book’s first letter begins, “Thanks a million for the mescaline. Split it with Brion for a short trip home”. The two worked at the centre of a web of occult and artistic actions – painting, scrying, mediumship, telepathy, and the Cut-Up’s operations of chance – from 9 Rue Git de Coeur in Paris. Here, at the Beat Hotel, Burroughs turns from Beat writer to counter-cultural figurehead, achieving a fame that influenced the Beatles, the Stones, Bowie, the punks and the sampling culture of the Nineties and beyond.

Read the full review at The Independent

Keith Haring. "Untitled," 1981. Courtesy Keith Haring Foundation.

Keith Haring, who died in 1990, was a quintessential New York street artist and is one of the most recognizable figures in 20th century art, known for his dense colorful murals, his AIDS activism, and his Pop Shop. How many revelations about his career can yet another exhibition of his work possibly bring to light? Very many, according to Raphaela Platow, curator of a survey of his early work that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on March 16.

“Keith Haring: 1978-1982” presents work from the first four, very raw years of Haring’s career—before he traveled the world, designed a jacket for a Madonna video, went on MTV, and painted Grace Jones’s body; before the Absolut and Swatch ads. It’s the first large-scale exhibition to focus exclusively on the period that began when he came to New York from Pittsburgh to study at the School of Visual Arts, and ended when he created the images that would make him famous, and commercial.

A look at Haring’s journals reveals that there is much to work with in this period. There are examples of his experimentation with words, and the results of cut-up exercises he did à la William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who were both major influences at the time, as well as examples of gouache cut-outs he did when exploring Matisse’s practice. He documented his artistic breakthroughs. An entry from Nov. 7, 1978, reads, “I have just completed another landmark (for me, that is) painting. It is the first time I ever tried to utilize both arms to control two brushes.” Interspersed with the writing are small drawings of penises, pyramids, dogs and scenes of New York City.

Read the full article at GalleristNY

As with all engaging and from-theory literature Perilous Passage – The Nervous System and the Universe in Other Words (2012) employs both its content and its form in order to draw the reader into a novel and interesting relationship with the text: “The “Reader” – under the impression that he is “reading” – receiving these signals from some dissonant strata of our nervous systems” (Wilson 176). The method Wilson utilises stems from his friendship with Brion Gysin (1916-1986) and William Burroughs (1914-1997) who developed the cut-up technique. Before saying something about how the method has been used here, it is necessary to first say something of Gysin and Burroughs in order to put some background into the text.

Brion Gysin was a painter, writer and performance artist, a fringe member of the Beats and good friend of the writer William S. Burroughs. It was Gysin who ‘re-discovered’ the cut-up technique in the 1950s. It involved cutting up a text and rearranging it into novel narratives, and which was part of a wider project of trying to implement artistic methods within literature (in this case collage.) Burroughs put the technique to work in his infamous book Naked Lunch (1959). The two men later collaborated on The Third Mind – a book first published in France in 1977 and in English a year later. It included short fiction pieces, poetry by Gysin and an interview with Burroughs. Taken as a whole, the book showcases the cut-up technique and further develops the theory as the ‘Third Mind’ – which is the product of what is described as the ‘Process’. In Perilous Passage, Wilson uses the Process to recount his own relationship with Gysin, generally centred around the times before and after the artist’s death.

The flickering room, breathing mosaics with Bedaya and the Old Man – the Old Man’s finger – “Remember THAT?” – The psychic phantasmagoria, a cosmic Disneyland of mock horror . . . awe-inspiring but somewhat tiresome – total impossibility – the mirrors – Suspension in space the whole city spread out below – A Vertiginous landing-strip, coming toward us . . . (Wilson 135)

Pseudonyms are utilized throughout the majority of Perilous Passage and it has the effect of dramatising the historical threads of the book; lifting the ‘reality’ of the content into the Third Mind. Subtle pointers, as to the factual underpinnings, become necessary groundings that give the work its stability as creative non-fiction, yet which does not stifle the creative process of the narrative. Passages are, more often than not, short and intense and they elude to glitches of consciousness; moments when the author-reader-character form new conscious strata. These bubbles of thought and conversation manifest across time and space; one moment in Paris, 1976,  through Tangiers, then in London, 1965 and so forth. The attraction of this non-linear method, for the reader, is that they are transported along thought processes not normally found in more standard narratives, resulting in an understanding outside the normal flow of space-time.

Snippets of consciousness transform grand, sweeping, narrative ideas. For example, there is a regular intervention of espionage-conspiracy-paranoia in the text: “We are moving to another hotel – (we do this a lot. For security reasons)” (Wilson 123). Rather than this socio-political paranoia creating an arching narrative form – which would demand conclusion – it enters the text as micro-episodes that rely on a moment of convolution – the mash-up of set and setting. Paranoia becomes other than a reliance on the externality of subsequent situations and becomes internalised moments of thought within the text, reliant on the novel constructions but not one another.

I shift my gaze back to twisted vertiginous snakes vines chromosomes entwined labyrinths as ever flashing zigzagging comic helix punctuating language spelling out the same message again like a tickertape symbol control system processed by a hebephrenic computer high on aguardiente – Ends (Wilson 185)

The above quote is taken from the final chapter that details Wilson’s experiences in South America doing a course of ayahuasca sessions – following in the footsteps of Burroughs himself who chronicled his own ayahuasca journey in The Yage Letters (1963). Aside from the cultural element of visiting the shamans of Peru, being fleeced for money for one, Wilson’s approach to the experiences is quite literary, so far as he employs Henri Michaux – specifically his book Miserable Miracle (France, 1956) – as a former for them. Michaux, while recognising a multiplicity of elements within his own mescaline experiments, felt the task to be, more often than not, arduous. This sense crops up in Wilson’s descriptions as well but, allied with the Process, his words become other than the experiences and ayahuasca becomes a filter through which the Third Mind is further developed. The lack of grammar in the above quote, for example, explodes any sense of cohesion: “Well, I suppose we’ve all been derailed once or twice in our time, somewhere along the line . . .” (Wilson 188).

Perilous Passage, beyond the character relationships, is about the normal two-dimensional limits of reason-rhyme-narrative-thought, or rather it is about taking those linear limits and twisting them until they snap and shatter; before reconnecting in novel appreciation – appreciation of Gysin, Burroughs and Wilson’s friendships therein. If, as a reader, you wish to be challenged, not in the sense of War and Peace but in the sense of a psychedelic experience perhaps, then Perilous Passage is indeed an excellent read. It shifts the priorities of how your thoughts are constructed in reading and becomes a novel break in consciousness itself. Overall, a fascinating and engaging read.

From Psychedelic Press UK

Photo by Brion Gysin

The great dark surrealist writer William S. Burroughs, who blended science fiction, pulp, and transgressive writing into a chaotic style, is having selected letters published in hard cover as “Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959-1974,” out February 7th by Ecco.

Read the New York Times review here.

‘I have met my first Master in Brion..’

Below are a few of the selected letters provided by Paris Review, one addressed to “Mom and Dad” and the other to Allen Ginsberg.

WSB [Paris] to Laura Lee and Mortimer Burroughs [Palm Beach, Florida]
[ca. November 17, 1959]

Dear Mother and Dad,
I am sorry.. Can only say time accelerated and skidded—No time to eat as you see in the photo—(Taken by my friend Brion [Gysin] the painter, certainly the greatest painter living and I do not make mistakes in the art world. Time will bear me out.. Brion used to run The 1001 Nights, restaurant night club in Tanger but at that time we barely spoke disliking each other intensely for reasons that seemed adequate to both parties.. Situation and per­ sonnel changed.. The 1001 Nights closed for dislocations and foreclosures and Brion woke up in Paris.. And I, stricken by la foie coloniale—the colonial liver, left the area on advice of my phy­ sician.. “You want to get some cold weather on that liver, Bur­ roughs. A freezing winter would make a new man of you,” he said.
So when I ran into Brion in Paris it was Tanger gossip at first then the discovery that we had many other interests in common..
Like all good painters he is also a brilliant photographer as you see.. A curious old time look about the photo like I’m fading into grandfather or some other relative many years back in time..)
Rather a long parenthesis.. It strikes me as regrettable that one should reserve a special and often lifeless style for letter to parents.. So I shift to my usual epistolary style.. When my correspondents reproach me for tardiness, I can only say that I give as much atten­ tion to a letter as I do to anything I write, and I work at least six and sometimes sixteen hours a day..
I am considering a shift of headquarters from The Continent— or possibly England—All we expatriates hear now is: “Johnny Go Home”and may be a good idea at that..Terrible scandal in Morocco.. Cooking oil cut with second run motor oil has paralyzed 9544 per­ sons.. The used motor oil was purchased at the American Air Base and was not labeled unfit for human consumption .. The Moroccan press holds U.S. responsible not to mention 9,544 Moroccans and a compound interest of relatives.. “Johnny stay out of Morocco.”
I want to leave here in one month more or less a few days and make Palm Beach for Christmas if convenient.
I was sorry to hear that Mote has been ill.. Take care of your­ self—Dad—and get well. I will see you all very soon —
Love
Bill
PS. If my writing seems at times ungrammatical it is not due to carelessness or accident. The English language—the only really adjustable language—is in state of transition.. Transition and the old grammar forms no longer useful..
Best.
Bill

WSB [Paris] to Allen Ginsberg [New York]
Dec 2, 1959
9 Rue Git Le Coeur
Paris 6, France

Dear Allen,
I enclose material for Big Table.. Hope is not to too late.. So much work I never catch up and all absolutely urgent.. Brion’s [Gysin] work which I enclose illustrates new cut up method which he taught me.. I have met my first Master in Brion..
“Back Seat of Dreaming” is part of my current novel.. I have writ­ ten most of it remaining only the task of correlating material.. It is based on recent newspaper account of four? young explorers? who died of thirst in Egypt desert.. Just who died is uncertain since one member of the party has not been found yet dead or alive and the identity of the missing person is dubious owing to advanced state of decomposed when found the bodies and the methods of identi­ fication used lacked all precise techniques based entirely on docu­ ments on person but it seems the party was given to exchange of identifications just for jolly to wearing each others under and outer garments and even to writing in each others diaries an unheard of intimacy in any modern expedition.. So if my fictionalized??? account is difficult to follow so was the action, pops..
I am sending this material to you instead of direct to [Paul] Carroll so you can dig it.. I know you are busy but I think worth while pick up on this action now and I will explain method in detail when I see you also we have other project fore.. Temporary hitch.. My Old Lady [Burroughs’ mother] read the Life article and has thrown off her shop keeper weeds and revealed her hideous rank in Matriarch Inc.: “I Queen Bee Laura of Worth Avenue.. Stay out of my territory, punk..” She has, in fact, forbidden me to set foot in Palm Beach on pain of Orpheus.. And won’t send me money to come home.. I will buzz my Greek Uncle Gid [Maurice Girodias] and make it soon as possible..
Love
Bill
Will send more $ when I receive Mother Money. Please send mescaline if possible. Need transport out of the area.

From Death and Taxes

Gatewood, whose career has spanned over 45 years as both a fine art photographer and a photojournalist, has worked on assignment for The New York Times and Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and Time magazines. The internationally respected photographer is best known for his early documentation of the “modern primitives” movement, and of underground- and sub-cultures of the 1960s to present. Gatewood’s diverse portfolio includes teaching at The Photographic Resource Center in Rockport, Maine. He has also been the author of several fine-art books, including “Burroughs 23,” featuring images of American author William S. Burroughs, and his work appears in worldwide museum collections.

During the exhibit, there will be a “Kymara Gallery Sideshow” of mixed media works by artists who are interpreting the current political climate, along with memorabilia from Maine’s “Occupy” encampment. Hudson Valley artists Joe Concra and Denise Orzo, New York City artist Matt O’Neill, artist Scott Holloway from Worcester, Mass., and Kennebunkport artist Kymara are among the exhibitors.

The show will open at River Tree Arts’s Irvine Gallery, 35 Western Avenue, Kennebunk, Maine on Friday, Feb. 10, with a celebration/happening from 5 to 7 p.m. It will continue to run through Tuesday, March 17.

Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. The event is produced and curated by Kymara and Milo, owners of The Kymara Gallery and Kymara Happenings, which creates unique, historically significant arts related events in New York City and Maine. The Blue Elephant of Saco will cater the opening reception.

For information, contact River Tree Arts, 35 Western Ave., Kennebunk.

From seacoastonline.com

In addition to the exhibitions at the Kunstsaele Berlin and the various events to be held at HAU, Forum Expanded will also be presenting 10 film programs at the Arsenal and Delphi cinemas.

The program includes a wide range of different lengths and formats, with experimental techniques to the fore.

Projects include whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir by Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation, a film edited live in real time which shows a man under surveillance in a fictional East European city.

Another expanded forum highlight promised is a work influenced by Gysin, whose cut up method is taken up by Lebanese filmmaker Geith Al-Amine.

Elswhere Luc Moullet’s uncompleted project about two thieves (mother and daughter) in pursuit of a 35mm Aaton camera is updated in the form of French filmmaker Isabelle Prim’s La Rouge et la Noire.

And Pier Paolo Pasolini’s unfinished novel entitled Petrolio is Rosalind Nashashibi’s starting point for her film Carlo’s Vision.

Eva Heldmann’s r I v e r r e d is an homage to Cocteau’sOrpheus, while The Last Days of British Honduras by Catherine Sullivan and Farhad Sharmini is an adaptation of Tavel’s play of the same name.

Forum Expanded, in the programmers own words, sets itself the task of taking cinema apart, putting it back together or even rediscovering it from anew.

From The Hollywood Reporter

“Though not many,” she adds with a laugh, “because they didn’t like the idea you couldn’t read their poems.”

Lijn moved to Paris in the late 50s and, along with Burroughs, got to know Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso. And whether they did or not, she still likes “that idea of words floating into your head and not being linear”.

Read the full interview at Culture 24

Here I place the increasing inseparability of humans and advanced communication technology; actual augmentation of the body with wetware, body modification, nanotech, etc., but also body change techniques like hatha yoga, martial arts, plastic surgery; the work of Wilhelm Reich; energy medicine, EFT/EMDR; the contributions of the Human Potential Movement and the increasingly clever and byzantine supplement industry. We can add modern and ancient brain-change techniques like NeuroLinguistic Programming, the Leary/Wilson Eight Circuit Model, Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, radionics, tantra, chaos magick and the rest of the never-ending occult and New Age corpus. All of these and more can be used to change, warp, clean out, amp up, empower, manicure and otherwise “make cooler” the thing you call “I.”

Access to these technologies is increasingly wide-spread and I believe their use and refinement will likely produce some admirable customizations of the human experience as well as increasingly grotesque ego distortions as once-normal human beings mutate themselves into what might only be described as “creatures” comprised of a multiplicity of shattered and exaggerated ego shards rather than anything resembling a healthy, grounded, integrated identity.

Read the full article, Conjurations in the Element of Flesh: Balancing the Transhuman and the Transpersonal, on ACCELER8OR

Here’s a quick rundown of all films showing:

8 Dec 2012 World premier of

THE BEAT HOTEL
Alan Govenar, 2011 / 82 min.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: A MAN WITHIN
Yony Leyser, 2010 / 87 min.

ONE FAST MOVE OR I’M GONE: KEROUAC’S BIG SUR
Curt Worden, 2008 / 98 min.

FERLINGHETTI
Christopher Felver, 2009 / 80 min.

WORDS OF ADVICE + LOWELL CELEBRATES KEROUAC
Lars Movin & Steen Møller Rasmussen, 2007 & 1998 / 74 min. + 35 min.

THE SOURCE
Chuck Workman, 1999 / 88 min.

A SELECTION OF SHORT BEAT FILMS:

PULL MY DAISY (Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, 1959 / 30 min.)
TOWERS OPEN FIRE (Antony Balch, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin & Ian Sommerville, 1963 / 10 min.)
WHOLLY COMMUNION (Peter Whitehead, 1965 / 33 min.)
THE DISCIPLINE OF D.E. (Gus Van Sant, 1982 / 13 min.)
THE JUNKY’S CHRISTMAS (Nick Donkin, 1993 / 22 min.)

The Beat Hotel, as it came to be called, was a sanctuary of creativity, but was also, as Mr Chapman remembered: “An entire community of complete oddballs, bizarre, strange people, poets, writers, artists, musicians, pimps, prostitutes, policemen and everybody you could imagine.”

He lived in the attic of the hotel, and according to Ginsberg “didn’t say a word for two years” because he wanted to be “invisible” and to document the scene.

Originally published in East Kent Mercury

In June 1972 two young Americans arrived in Tangier in order to make a film about the legendary Master Musicians of Joujouka. Having made contact with Mohamed Hamri and later Brion Gysin. The next day  they set off for Joujouka with Hamri. They they  spent three weeks filming and recording in the village.
Since July 2011 the original director and  producer John Anthony and  Master Musicians of Joujuka manager Frank Rynne have been carefully cleaning and restoring  the film.
The film was shown only twice in  1973 on Danish TV and  has remained unseen since then. Music recorded for the project by Arnold Stahl was released as a 2 LP set Tribe Ahl Serif in 1975 and is regarded as the best recordings of The Master Musicians of Joujouka/Jajouka from that period.

In 2012 the film and  the music will be released together for the first time and the film will be available at film festivals.

Here is a musical sampler of what fans of the Master Musicians can expect. If you would like to help in this project or join the mailing list email joujouka@gmail.com

[Al Yunic Sharbouni Ate (Your Eyes are Like a Cup of Tea)] Master Musicians of Joujouka/Jajouka by MasterMusiciansofJoujouka

Joujouka Interzone is a collaboration between Master Musicians of Joujouka, French sound and visual artist Joachim Montessuis and Frank Rynne. Montessuis and Rynne will live mix and project a HD digital onslaught utilizing archival and specially commissioned material while The Master Musicians of Joujouka will provide an aural onslaught that maintains their completely natural sound with no additions.
The Joujouka Interzone premiere will be the  Grand Finale of the Casablanca International Digital Arts Festival/F.A.N. 29 Oct 2011 at Complexe Moulay Rachid, Casablanca, Morocco. Through 2012 there will be further performances in Morocco and Europe.

As Joujouka Interzone features live performances by the Master Musicians of Joujouka with live  mixing of visual it is  ensuring that each show will be unique.

This trailer features the Master Musicians of Joujouka recorded live in their village at the Brian Jones 40th Anniversary Festival 29th July 2008. The sound on this trailer was recorded by David Slevin, production supervisor Frank Rynne. The full recording of the festival is due for release in 2012.

Visuals from The Master Musicians Festival summer 2011 are by Joachim Montessuis.

Torontonians with an interest in experimental music are no doubt gearing up for the sixth instalment of the X AVANT New Music Festival, with already noted highlights including performances from celebrated electronic soundscapists Oval and Tim Hecker, among others. But the festival has just announced that another big player will be making his way to town: Sonic Youth member Lee Ranaldo.

That the guitarist will be performing October 21 at the SPK Polish Combatants Hall with longtime collaborator and visual artist Leah Singer. The pair will be performing a piece called Contre Jour, which “conjures the memory of Brion Gysin and his Dream Machine.” The tributary piece to the influential British artist was premiered earlier this year at the Contour Festival in Mechelen, Belgium.

Originally posted on exclaim.ca

‘With an introduction by Paul Theroux and a chronology by Daniel Halpern’

Pre-order at Amazon

Aside from a rich programme featuring Iain Sinclair, Iphigenia Baal, Bridget Penney and others, of interest to Brion Gysin afficionados may be two talks in particular:

To ignore the avant garde is akin to ignoring Darwin: Tom McCarthy
14 August, 13.30, 1hr
Red Lecture Theatre, £5/£4
Tom McCarthy was short listed for last year’s Booker Prize. His books are crammed with coincidence, with doubles and fakes, moments of deja vu, repetitions of repetitions. McCarthy draws on the history of the avant-garde and modernist experimentation to produce left-field literary fiction that is both acclaimed and contemporary. Time Out called him: “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment”. As well as the novelsMen In Space, Remainder and C, McCarthy is also the author of a book of criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature.

Storm The Reality Studios: Ed Robinson, Stewart Home, Tom McCarthy
14 August, 15.00, 1hr
Red Lecture Theatre, £5/£4
Edward S. Robinson riffs on his book Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives From William S. Burroughs to the Present. In this book Robinson offers a biography of Burroughs cut-up method. He locates its prehistory in modernist and avant-garde practices; he charts its origins with Gysin and Burroughs through to its early practitioners Claude Pélieu, John Giorno and Carl Weissner; remarks on developments made by Kathy Acker and Stewart Home; and finally identifies some contemporary manifestations. Shift Linguals contains the first critical attention – in English at least – to some of these authors, and charts the various permutations and applications of the cut-up method since Burroughs.

For more, check out Stuart Kelly’s preview, and view the full programme.

Dawood’s work for the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, shown at Art Dubai this year, recreated Brion Gysin’s “Dream Machines”, originally designed in 1960s Tangiers to induce lucid dreaming in the viewer.

His latest project, Piercing Brightness, continues exploration in this vein.

‘The premise is that aliens landed in Preston centuries ago with the mission to learn the ways of human civilisation from its inhabitants. Shifting shape to blend in, the aliens – with the passage of time, eras and, we might imagine, the advent of social networking – slowly forgot their mission over the course of several lifetimes.’

Dawood ‘sees Piercing Brightness as a meditation on the very nature of how we, as humans, believe. From organised faiths to UFO phenomena, Dawood presents us with characters in the process of having “the ground beneath them shake”. As each grapples with the sudden invasion of an interstellar reality, the movie takes us through their realisations, often a refusal to accept, and a shared horror before the uncertain road ahead.’

For more, check out The National

Lady Gaga has nothing on Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

The British performance artist and musician was a lightning rod for controversy in the 1970s, inventing industrial rock with the band Throbbing Gristle and engaging in transgressive conceptual-art display. At the time, her extreme presence was enough to lead an enraged member of parliament to condemn the Manchester native’s art collective as “wreckers of civilization.”

“People have an image of Genesis being extreme or scary,” said filmmaker Marie Losier. “She’s not.” The Brooklyn-based director spent much of the last seven years in the company of the performer, who was born Neil Andrew Megson in 1950 but no longer answers to the male pronoun and in conversation uses the collective “we” instead of the first-person singular. The reasons for that are a big part of Ms. Losier’s lyrical documentary “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye,” which screens Thursday in Brooklyn as part of BAMcinemaFest. The film, which has yet to find a distributor, is a kaleidoscopic portrait not only of a punk-era iconoclast but of the transformative powers—both literal and figurative—of love.

Read the full review of ‘The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye’ at The Wall Street Journal.

A new film about Genesis P-Orridge is screening now, see the official site for dates and details.

Nik Sheenan’s film ‘FLicKeR’ will be screened at the Cinéma du Parc tomorrow night, Sunday 29th May, at 5pm. The film tells the story of Brion Gysin, inventor of the “dream machine” and an attempt to end the internal dialogue to give access to inner silence. Its illustrious subjects include Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull and William S. Burroughs.

If you’re in Montréal, check it out.

Ira Cohen who befriended and was mentored by Brion Gysin in the 1960s in Tangeir died on 25th April in New York at the age of 76. Brion Gysin expert and contributor to this site, Frank Rynne, writes on Ira in The Guardian.

A slideshow of Ira Cohen’s work including iconic images of William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Master Musicians of Joujouka and Hamri, Allen Ginsberg  as well as underground artists and actors Julian Beck, Jack Smith and images from Nepal and India is also featured on The Guardian’s website.

Gerard Malanga and Ira Cohen coming from a party, ca. 1999. Photo credit: Asako Kitaori/Archives Malanga.

Ira learned to “sign” before he learned to read and write, so as to be able to communicate with his deaf-mute parents.  We both agreed that this may have had an impact on his development as a poet, for surely words born in such silences take on a deeper level of resonance and reflection.

We had the Bronx in common.  He grew up in the Concourse section–at the end of Gerard Avenue, as he’d like to kid me, as if he had a claim on my name.  I grew up in the Fordham section, 3 blocks from Edgar Allan Poe Cottage.  I’d rib him on how, as an over-achiever, he never scored a J.A.P. in Riverdale.  As a scrapper I gave as good as I got.

We never met when we were growing up, although we were separated by only 7 subway stops on the “D” Line and by a mere 8 years in age. Yet as close as our worlds were, we had no idea that someday we’d be fated and blessed to experience a life in all its broader dimensions by embracing art.  We were common folk, you might say, but each with a very uncommon approach to life as we evolved into poets.

We met in 1969.  Charles Henri Ford, a mutual friend who would play a major role in both our lives, brought me to Ira’s loft on Jefferson Street on the Lower East Side.  The building no longer exists; nor does the street for that matter.  Out of necessity, Ira was one of the first loft pioneers.

At the time, Ira was collaborating with Bill Vehr, a filmmaker and lighting designer.  They were building a small wooden enclosure sans ceiling; it was lined with a silver-coated industrial plastic called mylar. They christened it “the Mylar Chamber.”  The idea was to invite friends to come sit in a chair or lounge on a sofa piled with plump pillows and get comfortable while Ira and Bill photographed their reflections on the mylar backdrop.  It was like a Coney Island Fun House.  Depending on where the camera was pointing, in a fraction of a second no two reflections were the same; the results were positively psychedelic.

I could see what they were up to since Warhol and I were working in a similar mode with the Screen Tests a few years earlier. We were, each in our own way, collecting faces and archiving lives.

When Charles and I arrived at the loft, Ira was a bit wary because of my association with Warhol, as though I was some sort of corporate spy.  The encounter was brief, and we didn’t cross paths again until three years later.  We did, however, have numerous friends in common, including Angus MacLise and Piero Heliczer, two poets whose work I’m still actively promoting and preserving.

It wasn’t until 1972, in Upper Dharamsala, India, that we reconnected in a very spontaneous and yet synchronous way that caused our friendship to grow and deepen.

I was taking a course in Tibetan Law and Philosophy with Geshey Nagawang Dargay, one of the Dalai Lama’s teachers, at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.  I had already signed up for a visit with His Holiness when Ira arrived on the scene.  My name on the Dalai Lama’s visitor list quickly caught his eye.

As I rushed into my favorite luncheonette from a torrential downpour like a scene out of Rain late one morning, there was Ira seated by the door waiting for me.  Here we were half a world away from New York, under the most anonymous of circumstances.  The only thing that came to mind was, “What the fuck are you doing here?!”

We hung out for about a week taking in the sights and swapping stories about our current world travels and projects.  Ira was on his way to Kathmandu.  I was making plans to head south after my studies to Pondicherry, hoping to link up with Angus and his wife, Hetty.  After Ira split, I finally did visit with His Holiness: Ten minutes that turned into an hour.

It would be another seven years before we finally solidified our peripatetic  friendship in of all places, Amsterdam, where Ira was living with his girlfriend, Carolina Gosselin.  I’d been invited to read at the 1979 One World Poetry Festival.  So there was Ira when I arrived to personally greet me!  We were like Mutt and Jeff the entire week and never without our cameras.  We covered each other’s backs in the snake-pit of poetry politics.  That’s the sort of situation that’s created when you bring 50 poets together from all over the world, especially when the majority of them turn out to be New York Schoolers.  We had a big laugh over that and causing much mischief!

After we parted, Ira stayed in touch by post card, his favorite means of communication.  This correspondence ultimately formed the basis for a facsimile book we had planned, called Post Cards to the G, which remains unpublished.

A year later found Ira and Carolina in San Francisco where he basically covered the waterfront with his camera while I was doing the same in New York.  I would occasionally tease him: ‘Ira, you gotta make roots in New York to succeed in your work!’  I never heard the end of it once he landed.

They moved in with Faye, his mom, in a spacious one-bedroom flat in a pre-war on Broadway and 106th Street.  Ira liked to remind me that the street was also named Duke Ellington Boulevard, in honor of the musician I had once photographed.

In 1980, after the untimely demise of Angus Maclise, I began cataloguing our dear friend’s work. Ira encouraged and supported me in this endeavor, making contacts for me that proved invaluable for my research.  The Checklist I compiled and authored is still the primary source for Angus’s work; it also brought Ira and me even closer.

In 1982, Allen Ginsberg commissioned me to photograph Jack Kerouac’s vellum roll manuscript of On the Road.  It had spent several years in a file cabinet at the office of Kerouac’s literary agent, Sterling Lord.  I was the first photographer to document this extremely fragile piece of literary history.

I invited Ira along because I knew he’d get a kick out of the experience; I also figured he’d bring his camera along for a few shots.  This was typical of the give-and-take of how our friendship grew through the years, with our cameras always at the ready.

While I was photographing the scroll, using a tripod, Ira photographed me from behind, thus documenting an important moment for both of us.  In a last-minute gesture that was so typically Ira, he asked me to photograph him with his hand placed squarely on the scroll; it was something I’d never thought of doing myself.  It was as if by placing his hand on the scroll he was absorbing its magic whole, while giving some of his own in return.

Well, I could go on and on about our travels and adventures—the stories we told; the intimacies we shared; the travails, the enthusiasms and differences, which through the years made for a richer friendship and camaraderie.  The archetypes are endless.  Perhaps William Shakespeare captured it best:

All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…

Ira has truly played many parts as one man in his time and in this ongoing saga called life.

[Note:  After completing the 2nd draft of these reflections I later realized upon retiring for the night that I had forgot to mention that what prompted me to write this piece in the first place was that Ira had died a few days earlier, April 25th 2011, at the age of 76.  It dawned on me that I was treating this piece as if Ira were still alive!  Such is the power he had on those around him.  GM]

Copyright Gerard Malanga.

Special thanks to Frank Rynne for arranging this  exclusive for www.briongysin.com

The musicians will remain at Glastonbury for the duration of the festival playing at their own area in The Park area. These performances will be un-amplified ritual trance and will allow for the musicians to showcase their music in a natural way and allow attendees at the festival to gain a unique and intimate experience with the Master Musicians playing just as they do in their native village in the North of Morocco.

This will mark a return to Glastonbury for some of the Master Musicians after 31 years, as they were hosted on the Eavis farm in 1980 during a year when there was no festival. This marked the beginning of their  first ever tour in 1980.

For press inquiries email Frank joujouka@gmail.com.
For the full festival lineup see The Guardian and visit the Glastonbury festival website for news and updates.

The Master Musicians of Joujouka are proud to announce their collaboration with music legends Jane’s Addiction on their forthcoming album “The Great Escape Artist” due August 2011 from Capitol Records. A free download is from Jane’s Addiction website.

According to Perry Farrell lead singer of Jane’s Addiction ““We wanted to add a sense of ancient ritual and some depth beyond normal instrumentation, getting off the typical path that rock bands use, etc …And we wanted the music to cast a spell on the ‘lies.’”

Producer Rich Costey (Muse, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol), stated “It was all recorded in the Master Musicians Madrassa (school house) which is out in the village of Joujouka in Morocco where they live. The drums were recorded in the kitchen and the rhiatas in the main room of the house.”

Perry Farrell adds: “Lots of sounds were recorded with them so you may hear more of them on the record. You’ll have to wait and see.”

Master Musicians of Joujouka manager and sometimes producer Frank Rynne says “I met Jane’s Addiction in 1991 backstage at the Marquee in London. They are sublime rock’n‘rollers, musicians and artists. I am proud of the Master Musicians performance for this record and the musicians worked hard and really listened hard before they did what they always do and blasted hard trance rhiatas and funky tribal beats. This was a collaboration waiting to happen but I am astounded by the results. Great song, great performances all round and a brilliant production by Rich Costey. I can’t wait for the album as this first track has brought back my faith in rock music, 100 listens and I am still hearing different stuff.”

You can download the first track from this collaboration End to the Lies by signing up to Jane’s Addiction’s mailing list here Jane’s Addiction Official mailing list

Jane’s Addiction website

Info on the Master Musicians of Joujouka recording with Jane’s Addiction

Master Musicians of Joujouka recorded in Joujouka, Morocco by Frank Rynne.
Arranged by Frank Rynne and Ahmed Attar

6 musicians playing the Tibel:

Ahmed El Attar
Mustapha El Attar
El Khalil Radi
Jamal El Bakar
Abdeslam Boukhzar
Ahmed Talha

8 musicians played Rhiata:

Abdeslam RRtoubi
Abdellah Ziyat
El Mahi Elmojahed
Abdelkhalak Talhi
Ali Ezouglali
El Touhami Talha
Mohamed El Attar
Mohamed Mokhchan
Mohamed El Hatmi who danced Boujeloud

The Master Musicians of Joujouka Festival in their village 10-12 June , 2011, is still booking on this site and Master musicians of Joujouka Brian Jones Festival blog

Mardi-Samedi
12h-19h
at

Galerie de France
54 rue de la Verrerie
75004 Paris
Tel.: + 33 (0) 1 42 74 38 00 Note ring bell on large door to gain entry.

The exhibition begins with a series of classical French etchings representing fireworks, as well as a group of photographs which introduce a major selection of experimental films and contemporary works by Brion Gysin, Ange Leccia, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, among others.

Presented in open plan and conceived both as a parcours and as entertainment, like a classical exhibition, the show follows the principle of fireworks, alternating installations with projections. The moving images are presented on screens in different sizes and formats hanging at varying heights in the space. The principle of horizontal vision is thus altered and we experience the exhibition as if we were at a fireworks show: looking at the sky.

Curators: Philippe-Alain Michaud, Laurent Le Bon, Benjamin Weil Artists: Constantin Brancusi, Brassaï, John Cale, Claude Closky, Eugene Deslaw, Audouin Dollfus, Helga Fanderl, Fischli/Weiss, Cai Guo-Qiang, Brion Gysin, Andor Kertész, Ange Leccia, Jean le Pautre, Claude Lévêque, Rose Lowder, Anthony McCall, Dora Maar, Ana Mendieta, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Yoko Ono, Anri Sala, Roman Signer, José Antonio Sistiaga, Israël Sylvestre, Rui Toscano, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Cerith Wyn Evans

Exhibition conceived by Centre national d’art et de Culture Georges Pompidou and coproduced by LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.

18th March/ 12th September
Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón
LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación

Brion Gysin gave the world his Dream Machine—a perforated shade rotating in front of a light—so that the mind could experience a blissful “alpha state” by stimulating the brain with light. John Marriott’s is a more modest version made of a perforated Budweiser beer can, which, while functioning in the same neuro-mystical fashion as Gysin’s, suggests that there are other quicker means of becoming mentally altered.

John Marriott’s “Dream A Little Dream”, the beer can sculpture based on Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine will be on view in an exhibition at Central Connecticut State University from March 30th to April 21. The show is a survey of multiples and editioned work from the Brooklyn based Fuse Works program. More information at Fuse-Works.com.

LANGUAGE CODE an exhibition about digital narratives
Artists participating: Konrad Becker, Jorn Ebner, Anaisa Franco, Rupert Goldsworhty, Brion Gysin, Karl Holmqvist, Fran Ilich, Carlos Katastrofsky, Ambient Information Systems, Joseph Moore, Laure Provoust.
Opening Thursday 17th March 2011 at 20.00H. Conservas, C/Sant Pau 58, bajos, Barcelona 08001 SPAIN

In collaboration with LAAGENCIA
Sponsored by BEEP

‘Alarm’, a new Brion Gysin exhibition in Paris at Galerie de France opened on 19th February and runs until 02 April 2011. La Galerie de France was one of the private galleries that supported and exhibited Brion Gysin’s work during his life time. This exhibition features works from private collections.

Galerie de France
54 rue de la Verrerie
75004 Paris
Tel.: + 33 (0) 1 42 74 38 00

Mardi-Samedi (Tues-Sat)
12h-19h

At the Cinematheque de Tanger, a single concert performance will resume the recording of 1968 from the legendary Brian Jones (Rolling Stones) and ‘Master Musicians of Jajouka’ (which played regularly at the “1001 Nights”, the famous Coffee Shop Brion Gysin in Tangiers). This is the new generation of “Master Musicians” and the famous British guitarist Duke Garwood will try to recreate that moment of legend around the giant dream machine that will be installed for the occasion. Shezad Dawood is also completing a documentary film in 16 mm around this event.

This Project is developped in Morocco by Shezad Dawood, in Collaboration with The Apartment 22 & the Cinematheque Tangier.

Partners: Apartment 22, The Cinematheque Tangier, Abraaj Capital Art Prize, R22 radio

Art, electronics make for energized exhibit

Many of the animation pieces will be on continuous view, and four installations will invite viewers to participate.

Picture a table covered with black sand. That’s what the installation called “Oasis” by South Korean artists Yunsil Heo and Hyunwoo Bang looks like at first. When the sand is moved, virtual fish appear and seem to swim around on the table.

“And when we cover up the sand, they go away,” said gallery curator Dorothy Cowden. “People have to move the sand to see them again.”

“Empire of Sleep: The Beach,” an installation by University of Michigan professor Alan Price, is a stereoscopic three-dimensional video projected on a large screen.

“Participants interact by using a camera that moves them to different points of interest,” explained Cowden.

This lost-looking figure is part of an animation called “French Roast” by Frendh artist Fabrice O Joubert. It is part of the “Electronics Alive VI” exhibit opening Friday at Scarfone/Hartley Gallery on the University of Tampa campus. SCARFONE/HARTLEY GALLERY

Another interactive installation is “The Travels of Mariko Horo and Tamiko Thiel,” from Germany.

“Theirs is like a tour through the Orient in a virtual environment and participants use a joy stick to move through that,” Cowden clarified.

The fourth installation, “Dreamachine” by the late Brion Gysin, features a stroboscopic pillar of light which moves by means of a flicker device.

The exhibit opens with a free reception from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at the gallery, located in the R. K. Bailey Arts Studios, at 310 North Boulevard. The exhibit continues through Feb. 24.

Throughout the month-long show, some of the more prominent artists will give lectures and presentations. The first of this series is at 2 p.m. Thursday in which Alan Price will discuss his installation “Empire of Sleep.”

For information and a list of the other lectures, visithttp://ealive.utarts.com. Call Cowden at (813) 253 6217 for other details.

Exhibit draws variety of Florida artists

West Tampa Center for the Arts [WTCA] presents its first building-wide art event of 2011, a multimedia exhibit called “Sacrosanct.” In the call that went out, artists were challenged to interpret what was meaningful or valuable in their lives, something that was “above criticism or change.”

“We left it wide open and invited artists to interpret something that wouldn’t change, so it became very personal,” said center director and exhibit co-curator Maida Millan. “We received about 40 entries and we expect to select about 25 from that.”

There’s a wide variety of media represented, from local artists as well as from artists throughout Florida. The art will be displayed throughout the second and third floors of the center.

In the second floor Gallery 209, two artists will be showcased: well-known local artist Alex Torres, and the acclaimed artist Mark Schwartz, who recently moved to Tampa from New York.

Schwartz was a protégé of the late pop artist Andy Warhol, Millan said.

“Andy Warhol spent many, many months toward the end of his life painting with Mark, helping him hone in on his own style, and it’s just stunning work,” she said.

He’s known for placing a shoe somewhere in all of his works; sometimes it’s obvious, other times more discreet.

“He takes this shoe and it becomes personified in some sort of interaction with a human form,” Millan said. “It’s like it has a life force of its own.”

According to Millan, he designed Oprah Winfrey’s shoes for her 60{+t}{+h} birthday bash.

Millan was put in touch with Schwartz through the Hillsborough County Arts Council.

“I looked at his work and listened to his stories,” she said. “He’s a very humble man.”

Meet the artists, visit the open studios of the resident artists and professionals, sample treats, and enjoy music spun by disc jockey Fuego at an opening reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Friday in the old Santaella Cigar Factory at 1906 North Armenia Ave. The event is free, but donations are appreciated.

Visit www.wtca-art.org or call Millan at (813) 453-4381 for information.

In my performance I also make use of the flicker effect, but I have more control over it. In my performance, the audience wears white plastic masks, this way they look into a ganzfeld, a totally white field during the performance. In my set up, I use beamers, projecting light on the audience’s masks, completely immersing them in the light and colors of the projection.

I play an 8 minute live composition, based on the varying effects of different frequencies of flicker, colour, binaural beats and sound. During the performance every spectator will see something different, varying patterns and colours, created within their own brains.

For the full Dutch-language webzine see: Passage 14

Beginning with the idea that the alteration of consciousness is a universal human impulse, the exhibition looks at the use of drugs across the world, whether for the recreational, experimental, religious or medical purposes. Many of the drugs featured are well known to us all. Others are from ancient cultures and distant places where they form an essential part of long-established rituals and belief systems.

Mind-altering drugs have often been the subject of scientific experiment, and also the source of artistic inspiration. For some, they offer an escape from daily life; for others, a fuller understanding of what it means to be human. But their widespread and uncontrolled use also poses complex questions and problems to which medicine, psychiatry, social science, education and the law are all struggling to respond.

High Society is on display at the Wellcome Collection, London 11 November – 27 February.

Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/