The light fantastic
A WEEK AGO this past Thursday, a San Francisco bookstore unveiled a month-long window display featuring a mechanical device that has been praised both as "the first artwork to be looked at with the eyes closed" and a "drugless turn-on." It has also been condemned as the primary cause of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's suicide in April 1994.
Invented in 1959 at the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris by artist and writer Brion Gysin and mathematician Ian Sommerville, the "Dreamachine" is a motorized cylinder into which geometric shapes have been cut. In its center is a lightbulb, and when the cylinder spins it creates a stroboscopic effect on the eyelids. This flickering, claim the machine's users -- whose number, over the years, has included Gysin's novelist friends William S. Burroughs and Paul Bowles, as well as musicians Beck and Iggy Pop -- induces "organized hallucinations," or lucid dreaming. (When he patented the device, Gysin modestly claimed it was a "procedure and apparatus for the production of artistic sensations.")
In December 1994, a group of Nirvana fans claimed that a Dreamachine purchased by Cobain from David Woodard, a San Francisco-based classical musician who manufactures and sells replicas of Gysin's device through his website (DavidWoodard.com), was "the catalyst in Kurt's unbelievably tragic, untimely death." Cobain, they claimed, used his Dreamachine for up to 72 hours at a time. Woodard, who built the device on display at San Francisco's West Portal Books, and who says he is writing a study of "the effects of flickering light," doesn't necessarily disagree with them.
"Although the Dreamachine has never made me feel suicidal," Woodard told Ideas in a telephone interview, "the 1997 incident in which flashing lights in an episode of `Pokemon' caused hundreds of Japanese children to experience severe anxiety suggests there may be something to the theory." He continued: "But although it's possible that using the Dreamachine for days might have influenced Cobain to kill himself, it seems like having . . . a heroin problem contributed to his decision, too."
