the dreamachine: sommerville & gysin's vision of flicker.

it's been about six months now since i told myself that i was going to build my own dream machine (or flicker machine) and i've finally accomplished it. it's my first but definitely won't be my last. i used the template provided by "FLicKeR" the movie's web site (flickerflicker.com) but as i read Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine by John Geiger, i'm finding that there are many ways to make the flicker-inducing machine.

on my first dreamachine i used a world map for a couple of reasons — one to represent that the effects of flicker are universal and the visions or "drug-less high's" produced by the machine have no boundaries. secondly, as i study the Cut-Up in literature resulting in poetry, i wanted to explore the splicing of informational graphics. the idea to cut-up something is to make it your own. cutting into the world map makes new names for the places that we already know and at the same time eliminates places we know, just as the effects from using flicker — creating a new world by tapping into our memory and the imagination and bring them to our consciousness, visioning unexplained instances. i will go into the effects of flicker in another blog post.

i plan on writing down my experiences when using the dreamachine in the form of directly-written poetry. This way i can create a Cut-Up Poem without cutting it up after it's written, rather going through the cut-up process in my mind first.

here are some pics of this beautiful creation: