Research Catalog

Title

[Color photograph (ca. 2010 print) of Brion Gysin staring into a dream machine]

Publication

[Tangier? : Early 1960s]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

1 photographic print : ill., col. port.; 36 x 28 cm

Summary

Three quarter profile portrait of Gysin with dream machine, with his calligraphy on walls in background.

Subjects

• Gysin, Brion > Portraits
• Altered states of consciousness > Pictorial works
• Hallucinations and illusions > Miscellanea > Pictorial works

Note

• Artist Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs's 'systems adviser' Ian Sommerville created the Dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain. In its original form, a Dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency of between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing. The Dreamachine is the subject of the National Film Board of Canada 2008 feature documentary film FLicKeR by Nik Sheehan. A Dreamachine is "viewed" with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optic nerve and thus alters the brain's electrical oscillations. Users experience increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the user feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that by using a Dreamachine one may enter a hypnagogic state. -- From Wikipedia.
• Brion Gysin was born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire on 19th January 1916. […] Educated in England, at Downside College (1932-34), he moved to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne. Among those he met at this time are renowned members of the Surrealist group, including Max Ernst, Salvador and Gala Dali and Picasso. Gysin's work was included in the Surrealist Drawings exhibition in Paris in 1935 (Galerie Quatre). He first visited the Algerian Sahara in 1938, a journey that was to have a deep and lasting influence on his life. Equally significant to the form of his later giant landscape paintings were the years he spent in New York working as assistant to Broadway stage designer Irene Sharaff (1940-43). In 1953, having returned to North Africa, Gysin opened the Thousand and One Nights restaurant, where the Master Musicians of Joujouka played an extended residency. This was his primary location until 1973, although he famously spent a number of years in Paris where, with William Burroughs, he both developed the cut-up technique of writing and experimented with tapes, permutations and the Dreamachine. In the summer of 1982 he and William Burroughs were the principal artists in the Final Academy show. His paintings are in museum collections in Paris and New York. --http://www.trocadero.com/stores/MuseXX/items/295590/item295590.html

Access (note)

• Restricted access ;

Call Number

Berg Coll+++ Gysin ZP8 1960

OCLC

1004394199

Title

[Color photograph (ca. 2010 print) of Brion Gysin staring into a dream machine]

Imprint

[Tangier? : Early 1960s]

Access

Restricted access ; request permission in holding division.

Connect to:

Request access to this item in the Berg Collection

Research Call Number

Berg Coll+++ Gysin ZP8 1960