Link to Readings

If you look to the right, you should find a link to a Dropbox folder containing all the readings sent as email attachments thus far, plus some bonus material for upcoming modules!

Further to Debord et al

http://comma.english.ucsb.edu/content/walter-benjamin%E2%80%99s-arcades-project-visual-companion%E2%80%94convolute-e-haussmannization-barricade-fi

Hot Links! Click Now!

Some links courtesy 'patacritical researcher Alan Tofhigi:

Segway for zermatism mythos http://new.labroots.com/trending/id/793/was-a-6ft-6in-19th-century-russian-woman-serf-actually-the-fabled-yeti
Szukalski is laughing wherever he is above the scum line

Info on Jim Shaw's Hidden World book with a glossary covering everything from Ayahuasca to Zermatism
http://www.artbook.com/9783863355845.html

Seldom Talked about Outsider musician the Long lost 26 FKA Doc Corbin Dart of the Crucifucks, by Sam McPheeters of Mens Recovery Project Fame
http://www.vice.com/read/the-troublemakers-515-v16n1

Fake advertisement for bohemian grove with directions
http://youtu.be/yWsNGSJSLvQ

Part in a series of Outsider architectural/edifice musicians
The Bitches Brew Door
Door Does Impression of Miles Davis

Fugitive Thoughts: Timothy Leary's Reading of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

"... It was in solitary confinement in Sandstone, Minnesota that Leary asked a trustee for something to read. "No books for special cases," was the answer. Soon after, he "heard the clank of the padlock and the rasp of the metal slot being opened. He passively accepted a book which was pushed through the slot." It was the recently released novel Gravity's Rainbow. Leary, in solitary confinement, read it for 12 hours straight until the lights went off, then woke at sunrise and read it for 15 hours. When he finished the first reading, he began again at page one and annotated, "decoded, outlined and charted the narrative." (I wonder whatever happened to that copy?)

Why? Why was Leary so enchanted by this book? Because, somehow, this Pynchon guy, in postmodern prose (kaleidoscopic narrative, shifting perspectives of time, unworldly erudition, hundreds of characters, lowbrow humor, passages of phantasmagorical proportions) had described the very worlds Leary had been enmeshed in during and after his academic career. I will elaborate on this below, but first: solitary confinement.

I have some hyper-educated friends but not one I've talked to lately had thought much about solitary, except that it seems inhumane, even for a bona fide murderer. I agree, but if you don't: read up on solitary. To me, it's so medieval I want it stopped Yesterday. And we are making some progress. I will include links to a few articles I read on it in the notes. Solitary literally damages the brains of inmates, and many of them are there because of damaged brains in the first place. If anything, prisoners should be in environments that stimulate their brains. Off my soapbox, for now...

So: picture Leary, with people like Manson all around him, reading a book filled with robotic scientists bent on total control of humans and machines, in an all-out rush toward megadeath...and it's a "rational" world! How did Leary's brain cope with this?

Robert Anton Wilson visited Leary many times in prison, and one time Wilson asked Leary how did he manage to cope in such a situation? Leary said he was spending time with the most intelligent person he knew: himself. This sounds flippant and/or typical Leary, but it could be that Leary's prior reading and extensive cosmopolitan experience gave him such a cognitive surplus that he could deal with it all. Also: he didn't spend years on end in solitary, as many prisoners in California have. Remember: he was really a political prisoner. He was facing 50 years at age 50 for two roaches. (Friends of Leary say he was imprisoned, basically, for "Poor usage of the First Amendment.") Nixon had called Leary "the most dangerous man in America." Imagine this shit: it really happened.

Leary was a PhD in Psychology, a fierce individualist-libertarian and had written a dense book called Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality that his peers awarded him Best Psychology Book of the Year. And then there was the scientific mindset that had carried over to his experiences on psychedelics. (Still: I often wonder to what extent - if any - solitary confinement had damaged him; this seems an underrated discussion when writers probe Leary's life after 1976.)

If we look at the 20th century, many of us, when forced to use one word, might choose "bloodbath." Go back to the late 1890s and read the scads of scientist's proclamations that the 20th century will be a utopia. Why wasn't it? Leary says Pynchon nailed it: it was nationalistic forces using their brightest scientific minds to compete using neuro-technological know-how. "The national competitions of 1914 compelled the antagonist countries to master the tank, the airplane, radio and the rapid transportation of masses of people. The political lineups of World War II seem equally absurd until we understand that the genetic purpose of the conflict was to stimulate the development of radar, rocketry, synthetic chemistry, atomic fission, long-range naval maneuvers and accelerated aeronautics, and, most important, computers and digital linguistics." The teleological riff is Leary's; we don't know - of course! - if Pynchon agrees. Although, this?

After all of Leary's run-ins with Authority and Control, who can fault his reading of Pynchon in this way: "Every character in Gravity's Rainbow is either an operative working for a Psycho-political hive-bureaucracy, or and Independent Intelligence Agent (Out-Caste) working counter to the hive-bureaucracy." In other places Leary calls these competing genetic "castes": Control vs. Expansion, with Pynchon elucidating a monumental treatise on human intelligence control - which Leary thought made people stupider - against intelligence expansion. Some readers may be thinking Leary's just talking about the freedom to explore one's own mind using consciousness-expanding drugs, but it's far, far, far deeper than that. And this is where it gets Really Weird.

Early on in your first reading of Gravity's Rainbow you'll notice the repeated allusions and hints and outright citations of academic-military types and their psychological test apparatuses. The Americans were steeped in their Skinner, the Europeans in Pavlov. Conditioned responses. Control. Not much thought for the dignity of the individual. All must be rational, quantified. There will be no limit to the delving into how much control can be exerted on agents (people). As Leary writes about this aspect in Pynchon:

"The Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Branch operates a mind control unit called Pisces (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender)...From a base in England, Pisces' agents probe the mysteries of consciousness, behavior and brain-function, using Pavlovian conditioning, ESP, brain surgery, hypnosis, clairvoyance, drugs, objective questionnaires, projective tests, personality assessments, behavior modifications."

Henry A. Murray, colleague of Leary's at Harvard,

sadist, one-worlder, "liberal," speed freak, Melville

fanatic, CIA spook for MKULTRA ops. A real

innarestin' character.

Back at Harvard, before he got thrown out for allowing undergraduates to take part in his experiments using psychedelics, Leary had turned on fellow Harvard Psychology professor Henry A. Murray. Murray had worked with the OSS during the war, and continued working for the OSS's successor, the CIA. Murray was a methamphetamine freak and sadomasochist (see Alston Chase's woefully under-appreciated Harvard and the Unabomber, esp. pp.240-326). Murray's great achievement had been the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), something both Leary and Pynchon knew a lot about. Biological organisms and machines were subject to entropy, a topic fascinating to two of Unistat's greatest scientific thinkers after the war, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. The CIA was interested to find out how humans broke down. They hired undergraduates, told them very little about what was going on, and basically drugged the students with quite large doses of LSD. One student remembered seeing an ad: he'd get $15 an hour to be a "psychopath for a day," saying to a friend, "Imagine getting paid for what we do anyway!" Theodore Kaczynski needed the money. He was subjected to LSD without knowing what it meant, then a battery of abusive psychological testings.

Theodore Kaczynski as Math prof at Berkeley. He'd soon drop out - 1971 - and move to a cabin in Montana. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In a letter Kaczynski wrote from prison to attorney Michael Mello: "We were told that we were to engage in a debate about our personal philosophies, and then found that our adversary in the debate subjected us to various insults that, presumably, the psychologists helped him to concoct. It was a highly unpleasant experience."

While Leary and his Harvard psychology colleagues were using LSD to gain insight into religious experience and seeing if it helped prisoners to see their own part in the "game" of criminal go-round that led to recidivism (it seems to have been very promising), Murray and his CIA-linked Harvard men were purposefully making their subjects "as confused and disquieted" "as much as possible" and that "All subjects became, to a varying degree, both anxiously and angrily involved in this stressful situation." Apparently, Murray thought Leary's importance of "set and setting" was something to sneeze at indeed.

[Above I linked to Pynchon's essay, "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" We now know the FBI suspected some very prominent writers as possibly being, or knowing who the Unabomber was: Tom Robbinswas surveilled and visited by the FBI and questioned. The Feds gave William T. Vollmann quite a look as a suspect. Of course John Zerzan had been a suspect. Zerzan openly admires Kaczynski. Due to Pynchon's essay on Luddism and common interpretations of his writings about technology, many of us wonder to what degree the FBI took seriously the idea that Pynchon may have been suspect. Perhaps we'll hear from Pynchon on this one day. Maybe not.]

Back to Leary, writing on psychological warfare in Pynchon: (In addition to massive psychological testing and screening by military co-opted academics) "Diagnosis and treatment of psychological casualties - an entirely new concept of human nature - also developed. Machines break down; personalities could not break down until personality types were defined by our new mechanical-civilization. All our external technology serves as a model to understand internal (i.e, somatic-neurological) technology. Machines help us to understand our own bodily mechanics. Electronic computers lead us to understand and control our own brains."

Leary also spilled about who got to implement CIA "dirty tricks" and other espionage games. They too were dosed with LSD and tested. "Easy-going, trustful souls, given to cocktail fun, were transferred out to the Office of War Information. Distrustful, cagey, paranoid types were immediately screened-in as part of the Intelligence (sic) elite." Then Leary quotes Pynchon from page 434 ofGravity's Rainbow:

"...the New Chaps, with their little green antennas out for the usable emanations of power, versed in American politics, (knowing the difference between the New Dealers of OWI and the Eastern and moneyed Republicans behind OSS), keeping brain-dossiers on latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits, erogenous zones of all, all who someday might be useful."...

Read the whole essay at The Overweening Generalist

and the companion blog article at A Building Roam - PQ also has a thoughtful piece on Room 237 - it's all coming together, people! I encourage you to browse the older posts for new insights.

Image by Bobby Campbell at Disinfo

Am I dreaming 9pm? Preliminary Findings

From 'patacritical researcher AMIA:

9pm - Spider sits on the bedroom ceiling. The light flutters a little like it's reflecting off water. "Water FX". But there is no water in my bedroom.

9pm - Driving passenger in jacks car. We leave my place drive down York and head south. I look down at my phone to find a place to route to and then look up again and we're back on York going the same direction but behind where we just were. I totally forget about the dream assignment, then remember it around midnight so I explain the whole thing to jack and ask what we were doing at 9pm. He suggest I write about how we looped back around on York when I wasn't looking and I was confused. That's kind of dreamlike, right?

9pm -Spent all day working on a collage. Felt like I was getting somewhere. Making progress. Look at all that glue on my fingers. Look at what I've accomplished. It's hardly anything at all. Where did all my good work go? Why so much glue for so little? In dreams, time always feels like its moving the wrong way up the escalator.

9pm. On the ground right by my car I find the miniature replica of Kevin's drift wood penis figurine. I sand the balls down a little bit on the bumper block. I've chanced upon too many wooden penises in one night for real life....am I dreaming or is this just what "lucky" looks like in Malibu?

9pm. - Old people fox trotting while the Frank Gary band play some tunes. The waiter brings me a giant plate of peas in pea pods. All the women around me have equally elaborate 60s up-dos with neon subsections. A woman takes a pink cake selfie - probably because the frosting makes her feel decadent. The cherubs swarming around us remind us that heaven is a place on earth.

9pm - I take a nap and I am actually dreaming.

9pm - driving on the freeway. Nothing dreamlike. Just stupid fucking la traffic.

9pm - standing on a weird street corner downtown(?) at the new experimental half hour space. Across from the 24hr doctor/dentist/Botox/tattoo/all-stop-body-shop. Talking to Sarah with the pink smudgy eyes (at nighttime she goes by Serene). I hear someone yell my name in the distance. I look back thinking Yasmina decided to show up, but then it gets much louder and "aaammmmiiiiaaaaa" turns into the scream of the train that passes behind us on the tracks. I turn back to Sarah, "sorry I thought the train was calling my name". I don't know if she believed me.

Image: Final scene from Denis Villeneuve's Enemy (2013)

Recommended Viewing

The Hammer presents Matthew Barney’s epic masterwork The Cremaster Cycle, screened in its entirety over the course of several days. With near cult status in the art world, The Cremaster Cycle is an evocation of the creative process by Barney, a sculptor and performance artist and arguably one of the most important artists of his generation. Visually arresting and often disturbing, The Cremaster Cycle is a grand mixture of history, mythology, and autobiography exploring the creation of form. Each of the five films is projected on 35mm film, and presented in the order of its making.

APR 217:30 PM CREMASTER CYCLE, HAMMER SCREENINGS
Cremaster 4 & Cremaster 1

APR 22 7:30 PMCREMASTER CYCLE, HAMMER SCREENINGS
Cremaster 5 & Cremaster 2

APR 23 7:30 PMCREMASTER CYCLE, HAMMER SCREENINGS
Cremaster 3

http://hammer.ucla.edu/cremaster-cycle/

Unraveling the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery

Back in 1996, users of the proto-Web community Usenet got spammed with messages that reached an almost transcendent level of bizarre—a weirdness so precise it implied the influence of a very human intelligence. “Markovian Parallax Denigrate,” read the title of each post, followed by a mountain of seemingly meaningless word spew:

jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen
air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower
Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most
chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant
firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac
brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion
refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark

According to later accounts, hundreds of these messages flooded Usenet discussion groups on Aug. 5, 1996, launching the type of intense, rigorous inquiries you’d expect from the geeky academics who frequented the newsgroups back then—none of which turned up any answers. And the event was soon mostly forgotten, washed away in the deluge of information and culture ushered in by the burgeoning popularity of the World Wide Web.

Then, around 2006, the event’s Wikipedia page became a favorite bullet point for any number of “creepy Wikipedia” lists that made their way across blogs and obscure Web forums. Soon bloggers had dug up something even more curious.

At Google’s public Usenet archives, only one message remains with a subject line that reads “Markovian Parallax Denigrate.” And the name on the sender’s email address was curiously familiar to anyone who happened to be a national security wonk: Susan Lindauer, a former journalist who was arrested in 2004 after allegedly serving as an agent of Saddam Hussein’s government. She’s has since become a purveyor of sundry conspiracy theories, from a Lockerbie bombing cover-up to 9/11 trutherism. Shortly after Lindauer’s connection to all this was dug up, the Wikipedia page disappeared. You needn’t have been a conspiracy nut to connect the dots, to think something fishy was going on.

Was the Markovian Parallax Denigrate a message—a cipher hiding a deep government secret?

This is a story of two Susan Lindauers and how they accidentally gave a second life to one of the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mysteries.

Read the rest of 'patacritical researcher Kevin Morris' investigation here.

Further to dérives

Mobile Maze
aka: Living Labyrinth

"What we all dread most is a maze with no centre."
                                       — G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown

The characters are wandering through a maze, except that they just turned around, and the door they just came in is now a wall....

Perhaps this place is a Living Structure Monster, is possessed by a demon or inhabited by a spirit, making it a Genius Loci, or it was built with tracks, pistons and engines to move according to the beat of an arcane clockwork heart (or high-tech AI), but usually, there is no way to stop or even detect the mechanism. You must let it herd you or puzzle it out the trick it wants. Alien Geometries (especially Oh Look, More Rooms!) may complicate it still further, along with any door being possibly a Cool Gate. As can the possibility of being eaten.

Sometimes it is, in fact, a mind game: the character's sense of direction is confused, or he can no longer recognize which parts he has been through.

The Maze is the parent trope. If paired with an Psychological Torment Zone, it becomes a deadly Closed Circle.

from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MobileMaze?from=Main.LivingLabyrinth

Paranoid Subjectivity and the Challenges of Cognitive Mapping...

Via 'patacritical researcher Joni Spigler:

Anthony writes "One of the great ambiguities of the present is whether and how to attribute plotting to state or capital, or to myriad agencies pullulating in the intermundia between them. Jameson's 'Totality as Conspiracy' was of course anything but a counsel to abandon the (in any case inevitable) activity of totalisation, but a manner of tracking how socio-economic compulsion was figured and displaced as para-political agency. Piglia explores a way to bring totality and conspiracy closer together, by considering Pierre Klossowski's view of the economy as 'an invisible and multiple manipulation that knots and rivets individuals, groups and ensembles to the movements of money', amounting to a 'practice of experimentation on subjects'. But the upshot of this conspiratorial imaginary is not paranoid passivity, it is a counter-conspiratorial activity, in which the artist conjures an opposition to the productivity of monetary conspiracies, another economy (here Piglia nicely brings in Bataille's admiration for Keynes's own 'plot' to counter, or perhaps save, capitalism: by burying money in coal mines). 'The conspiracy (complot) tries to modify relations of force that are adverse to it and has the secret as its foundation and flight as its condition'. Such a movement from an epistemology of totality to a practice of conspiracy can also be traced from Debord's Society of the Spectacle to the later Comments, which is prefaced by this statement: 'As long as certain pages are interpolated here and there, the overall meaning may appear just as secret clauses have very often been added to whatever treaties may openly stipulate; just as some chemical agents only reveal their hidden properties when they are combined with others.'"

from a rewarding thread at http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/paranoid-subjectivity-and-the-challenges-of-cognitive-mapping-how-is-capitalism-to-be-represented/1080

In case there isn't enough about NASA in Room 237...

An exciting 'patacritical exercise would be to take Mr. Wysmierski's detailed reading of the film as the basis for a renovelisation of the story -- not with any mention of the moon landing necessarily, but with prose descriptions of, for example, a menu with 11 lines on it as Mr. Halloran shows Wendy and Danny the kitchen. Who want's to tackle this exciting extra credit opportunity?!

[I haven't watched this one all the way through yet but] PLEASE READ BETWEEN THE LINES while watching this doc.This documentary is written as a fiction so to be presented or give a impression of a true story till the end to mock and make fun in that way of who believes in the fake moon landing, but it is their way to slowly get the message out. Make fun about something that is a hoax to reinforce the idea that it isn't.

And here's an excellent "making of" documentary:

Required Viewing #16

ARISE! The Church of SubGenius Recruitment Movie

A QABALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF Dr. Seuss' GREEN EGGS AND HAM

I'll be posting some more links pertaining to Greg Bishop's talk shortly (as well as our other guest speakers) but I came across this quintessentially 'patacritical exercise in the Excluded Middle anthology Wake Up Down There! (available through the EM website)

The book begins with the innocent sentence,"I am Sam."

This simple phrase is perhaps the most sublime. Sam can be seen as an abbreviation of the sacred Sanskrit mantra from Vedic literature, So'Ham, which means "I am that."

Thus we have the Hebrew God name Eheieh or I Am That I Am. Sam can also be seen as one of the the root words of Samadhi, which means "together with," sam, "the Lord," Adhi. Thus we have together with, I Am. Either way this is certainly Kether; the uppermost sephiroth on the tree of life--complete unity. This blissful state is secretly betrayed by the repeating of it. Here also, we have the appearance of a new character. He is the witness to the statement repeated,"I Am Sam."

Dualism has been evoked and heaven will never be the same. The negative veils of existence have been shattered. Kether has given way to Chokmah and Binah, the Yin And Yang of creation. There is nothing left but to look to where this new consciousness emanated and to speak what now appears in reverse."Sam I Am !"

Like an inverted pentagram, the truth is seen improperly due to the faulty perspective of the viewer. Immediately, we see the second character resist. He states,"That Sam-I-Am! That Sam-I-Am! I do not like that Sam-I-Am!"

Here we have it! The Ego separates from the now Higher-Self (Sam-I-Am) and begins to resent it, not realizing he is it! This resentment is the root of all human error as Nietzsche so exactly examines in Will to Power. Yes, the original sin is committed. The observer posits himself separate from the observed. But the Higher-Self is ready with a solution, an offering, a Holy Eucharist,"Do you like green eggs and ham?"...

read the full article on the EM website: http://www.excludedmiddle.com/occulted_dr._seuss.htm

Image: The Most Holy Tree of Eggs & Ham by D. McGovern

"Cockatoo Finding Out He's Going to the Vet"

up her ago sold
spotters her star
shakers arms
of hers I'm shoppers
all show sup I

Cyprus sucks
are bigger my help
charity rash anything
sands wanna tell I
some France I shot shots homes
senator trash socks group
touchstone acts
moments started sorry thanks
substandard

Spartans nice sharp
arms some stuff

Stuff on stack stacks
shack stocks stocks I
of checks huh you

['patacrirical free verse by Max generated with youtube subtitle]

Digital Excavation of Gendered Reptilian Evidence!

Courtesy 'patacritical researcher Amia Yokoyama:  "Kind of like Shaver and his rock books. These suspicious youtube users glean footage from the internet, and use different digital "excavation processes" to "paint" out the reptilian qualities found in the culled video imagery. Often times, pointing out abnormalities in the eyes - in these instances, mostly women." 

Another surprise guest: Greg Bishop

Independent researcher, zine publisher, broadcaster, and art historian Greg Bishop will address a number of 'patacritically relevant issues, including "Alien Writing" and "1950s UFO Contactees as an Unrecognized Art Movement" You can read some of his material here:  http://www.excludedmiddle.com/

PKD's Exegesis online!

'patacritical researcher Alan S. Tofighi alerted me to this collaborative online reconstruction of Philip K. Dick's "Exegesis" - the more than 8000 pages of speculative philosophical writings that PKD produced between his visionary experience in 1974 and his death in 1982: http://zebrapedia.psu.edu/#!/page_Goal

Szukalski & Zermatism

Here's a didactic panel from the exhibit Brian Tucker curated from the work of Richard Shaver and Stanislav Szukalski, summarizing Szukalski's philosophical speculations. To learn more about this remarkable visionary artist and 'patacritical anthropologist, visit http://szukalski.com/ 

Mark Pilkington: MIRAGE MEN trailer

A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram

"Wolfram's conclusion is that the universe is digital in its nature, and runs on fundamental laws which can be described as simple programs." (wikipedia; See Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? by Nick Bostrom) Link forwarded by Michael Gilleran - haven't watched it yet, but is dovetails with our Unabomber screening. It will have to do until I can track down some of these alleged trombone compositions!

Cogitate This!

'patacritical Interrogation Techniques Tutorial #01: Repetition Repetition Repetition

"The human brain evidently operates on some variation of the famous principle enunciated in 'The Hunting of the Snark': 'What I tell you three times is true.'"

-- Norbert Weiner, from Cybernetics

Excerpt from:
"The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space"
by John C. Lilly, M.D.

pages 64-68: Tape Loops

During the transition period, while I was transferring the dolphin work to others, I pursued a peculiar effect we had noticed when working with the communication systems of the dolphin. In order to study the dolphin humanoid vocalizations we put what the dolphin said onto a repeating tape loop where we could study it. We then had a group of people guess what the dolphin had been saying. We obtained a list of, say, ten different words that they thought the dolphin was saying. To complete our study we then had to take the vocalization of the human, which had just preceded the dolphin vocalization, and put that on a tape loop. We quickly found that listening to a repeating word in clear high-fidelity English generated more alternatives than did the dolphin emission. If one listens to a tape loop of a repeated word for fifteen minutes, one may hear as many as thirty different words other than the one which is on the tape loop. We did an extensive study of the word "cogitate." We exposed something of the order of three hundred subjects to this word for periods of fifteen minutes to six hours. We asked each subject to write down the words that he heard or to report them with a microphone on another channel of the same tape recorder. 

From these three hundred subjects we got on the order of 2,300 different words. Three hundred of these words were in a dictionary; the rest were words that we do not ordinarily use, i.e., nondictionary words was we began to call them. In this work I received the very enthusiastic contributions of Margaret Naesser, a student of linguistics from the University of Wisconsin. Margaret had tremendous energy and initiative and carried out the study using the IBM 360 computer system at the University of Illinois to analyze our results. Dr. Heinz Von Foerster at the biocomputer laboratory was intrigued by our results and arranged for us to use the computer. 

The computer analyses showed that, for each sound slot in the word "cogitate," the human biocomputer on repetition turns over and selects other sounds which one then hears as if coming from the stimulus word outside. Each such sound is called a phon. We found that on the average people tended to make twelve phon slots in the original stimulus word "cogitate." The minimum number of slots was 3 and the maximum number was 26. The number of substitutions of sounds in each of the twelve slots was different. For the first slot, there were 13 substitutions. In the second, 44 different sounds could be brought in, and so on. 

It turned out that this repeating word effect made it possible to demonstrate very rapidly to live audiences their own biocomputer operations. This is the reason that I went on with this work and made the transition from the dolphin to the human through the repeating word effect. It was an extremely convenient way of demonstrating to people their own self-metaprogramming and the various concepts of the biocomputer. 

In addition to hearing alternate words when being exposed to the repeating word stimulus, I found that certain people went through various kinds of trips. In one audience of two hundred people, we found that something like 10 to 12 percent of the people tripped out and did not report anything about the alternatives that they heard. When I was able to quiz two of these people about what had happened, they described trips very much like the ones I had found in the isolation tank. In addition, we found that we could program the alternates a person would hear by various means. 

To see the programmability of the alternates that were heard, the subject would listen to the repeating word for an hour and write down all of the alternates he heard and print them on cards.

Next, the subject would turn on the repeating word and listen to it while looking at the cards one at a time. He relaxed and then, as he turned up a new card, he hear heard the alternate printed on that card. This experiment showed that visual input can program what is heard. 

We also found that peripheral vision, that is, the vision which is off the main axis from where one is looking, could also program what was heard. We printed alternates with very large letters on cards and brought them into the peripheral vision of the subject while he was listening to the repeating word. He then reported out loud what he heard. The word that was being brought in from the periphery, in spite of the fact he could not read it consciously, started programming what he heard. This was a "programming" gradient from the farthest reaches of peripheral vision at 90 degrees to the optic axis in toward the focal center on the optic axis. Just before the subject could read the word consciously, that is, where it was still far enough off the central axis so that he could not read it consciously, the word was programming 90 percent of what he heard. 

This experiment demonstrated that people are constantly being programmed below levels of their awareness by the periphery of their vision. It is probably a good thing that this is true. It allows us to drive a car and to walk and to do various other tasks including reading in a smooth fashion without having to think about everything that happens. 

The human biocomputer is constantly being programmed, continually, simply and naturally, below its levels of awareness, by the surrounding environment. 

We noticed that some subjects were quite upset with these effects, which were beyond their immediate conscious control. They would not accept the fact that their brain was reading a word and registering the meaning of that word below their levels of awareness. No matter how hard they tried to they could not read the word unless they put their visual axis directly on the word, thus spoiling the experiment. To avoid such effect, of course, we had an observer looking at their eyes and any cases in which they let their eyes move were discounted. This kind of upset was easily corrected by continuing the demonstrations. As the person got used to such results and accepted them, he no longer became upset by the unconscious operations of his biocomputer. Later, I was to use this effect to show people some of the projection mechanisms in their own biocomputer in workshops at Esalen Institute. 

From the repeating word effect, I learned something about going with the flow, relaxing and allowing instructions from some place else to run my biocomputer. If one relaxes totally while listening to the repeating word, one can quickly find all of the phenomena that I have described above. However, if one is "up tight" and refuses to really "let go" even though one would like to let go, these phenomena just do not occur as frequently.

********************************************************************************
Some related sound works:

...and finally (FINALLY!) a drag queen lop-syncing to Gertrude Stein reading from "A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson"

The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet

We were interrupted at 1:18

Here's that ABC NEWS Closeup special:

Suggested Field Trip #01

I've just got Sheridan Lowery to agree to visit the class next month to present her brand new theories involving hidden Duchampian meta-references encoded in Pierre Huyghe's show at the LA County Museum (Wilshire/La Brea).


The show ends this weekend, Feb 22nd, so if you are interested in fully understanding Sheridan's ideas, I recommend visiting it, although it costs some ridiculous $ to get in. Here's the link
http://www.lacma.org/huyghe


You might also want to visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City www.mjt.org for background. Sheridan's earlier research into the MJT/Duchamp intersection is included as Chapter 20 (pg 299) of the 'pITA3, and you should read it before her visit. But that's next month sometime...

Also, here is a link to an exhibit based on Sheridan's earlier theories: http://www.track16.com/exhibitions/161yr_exposure/