GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 82

“Illusory experiences produced by flashing lights . . . nowadays are used as a
standard method of stimulation in some subcultures. I should be paid a royalty
because I was the first to describe these effects” (quoted by Geiger 2003, 83).
This is as far as I can take the story of flicker and the sixties, and the key
points to note are, first, that this cultural crossover from Walter's cybernet-
ics to the drug culture and the Beats indeed took place and, second, that the
crossover is easy to understand ontologically. 77 In different ways, the sixties
and cybernetics shared an interest in the performative brain, with technolo-
gies of the decentered self as a point of exchange. The sixties were the heroic
era of explorations of consciousness, and flicker joined a whole armory of
such sixties technologies: psychedelic drugs, as already mentioned, medita-
tion, sensory deprivation tanks, as pioneered by John Lilly (1972), and even
trepanning. 78 In the next section we can take a quick look at yet another such
technology: biofeedback. For now, three remarks are in order.
First, just as I conceive of cybernetics as ontology in action, playing out the
sort of inquiries that one might associate with a performative understanding
of the brain, one can equally see the sixties as a form of ontological theater
staging the same concerns, not in brain science but in unconventional forms
of daily life.
Second, I want to emphasize the sheer oddity of Gysin's Dream Machines,
their discordant relation to everyday objects and the traditions in which they
are embedded. In the field of art, it is probably sufficient to quote Gysin himself,
who justifiably described the Dream Machine as “the first artwork in history
made to be viewed with closed eyes” (Geiger 2003, 54). As a commercial propo-
sition, the Dream Machine was just as problematic. In December 1964, Gysin
showed a version to representatives from Columbia Records, Pocketbooks, and
Random House, and “all present were soon trying to understand what they had
and how to market it. Was it something that could be sold in topic form with
cut-outs, or was it something that could be sold with LPs? Columbia Records'
advertising director Alvin Goldstein suggested the Dream Machine would make
a great lamp. Someone said they could be used in window displays” (Geiger
2003, 69). In its unclassifiability, the Dream machine exemplifies in the realm
of material technology my thesis that ontology makes a difference.
Finally, I should return to the question of the social transmission of cy-
bernetics. Just as we saw earlier in the history of robotics, flicker's crossover
from cybernetics to the Beats took place via a popular book, The Living Brain ,
and thus outside any disciplined form of social transmission. The focus of
Walter's topic is resolutely on the human brain; it is not a topic about art or
living-room furniture. But Gysin read “half a sentence,” and “I said, 'Oh, wow,