UPDATED BELOW WITH NEW VIDEO OF DREAMACHINE IN ACTION.
So say London Tsai and Andreas Killen, two participants in an interdisciplinary symposium at the CUNY Graduate Center exploring recent developments in the creative uses of artificial intelligence.
Scholars and specialists addressed ethical and political considerations surrounding AI in collaborations with human creators. Topics ranged from AI aesthetics to the early history of machine learning, from multimedia art to computational research experiments with artificial intelligence, including AI biases and applications.
Tsai made an updated version of the Gysin-Sommerville Dreamachine and brought it to the symposium, where it was used to demonstrate its effects. Helen Koh, who organized the two-day symposium, tells me that a video of Tsai and Killen’s presentation will be posted online (eventually). When it is, I’ll post the link.
soundtrack of Lenny Tristano playing “Lineup.”
POSTSCRIPT: Nov. 26 — After watching the video of the Dreamachine at the New Museum, London Tsai emailed to say that the rotation of the cylinder looked much too fast for the machine to achieve the proper stroboscopic effect to induce hallucinations. He was right. I did not experience hallucinations that day. Tsai was kind enough to send a video (below) of the Dreamachine operating at the proper speed during the symposium. As you will see the spin rate is much less than that of the Dreamachine at the New Museum.
(Click on London Tsai’s video and enlarge it to full screen for best viewing.)
Furthermore, Tsai wrote: “It is strange that museums will go through the trouble of presenting the work, even running it, but do so in a way that defeats the point. Maybe they are just not aware of Grey Walter’s work and the alpha frequency. After all, it took me, born into the world of strobing, a lifetime to realize — and only with Andreas’ help — that a mere shift of 7 Hz from my father’s Tsaibernetic strobing would open up an entire adjacent universe of hallucination. … My experience has been to start [with eyes closed and face] as close as possible to the machine so you can get the brightest flashes. Even within the alpha frequency, it usually takes people a while before they experience anything — I like to say it’s about letting go. Then once the hallucinations start you can back off and play with moving your face around.”
