Link for this Post: The Doors Movie on [Blu-ray]
Oliver Stone's movie about my generation made a a full generation ago (1991) is on HBO in HD. As I turn it on, Morison played by Val Kilmer is in front of my old Hollywood Hangout, the Whiskey A Go Go or a reasonable facsimile.
He leaps on top of one of the cars that cruised up and down Sunset Blvd as Hippies played guitars and shook tambourines.
Morison has eaten some acid and as he looks down at the hippies on the street, he asks them "Is there anyone here who really knows how to feel."
He is transported to the desert where words straight from the words of Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzer from their classic LSD albums, invoking the Tibetan Gods and Bardos.
Since many of you are tweeing what you are up to tonight, I thought I'd share my encounter with the fictional verion of the raw soul of who young Irish Jim Morrison was.
Link for this Post: Intro to Paul Laffoley and Future Organic Technology
A couple of days ago, I found a site called Miquel.Com "Your Favorite Source of Random Information." Actually the information is not a "random" as advertised but along the lines of stuff you might see on this blog.
Among the interesting eclectic information found on the site is a virtual visionary art expo by an artist named Paul Laffoley. One of his images adorns the top of this post. Here is how the artist describes his exhibit:
Immensely detailed mandalas of geometrical systems, thought symmetries, machines of the future, bioengineered living structures, methods of creating time-machines and dimensional wormholes are just the beginning!
There are many images up there and it would be worth your while to go there and take a look around.
Link for this Post: New Book Undergrowth # 8: The Journeybook: Travels on the frontiers of consciousness
Back in February of 2006, after returning from the LSD Conference in Basel Switzerland, I posted REBIRTH - The Psychedelic Movement Comes of Age Rak Razam in Undergrowth describing and excerpting from Austalian Journalist Razam's account of the Basel event.
I just heard via email for Rak in which he told me about a new book he has published which uses the "Rebirth" blog article as a cornerstone for an anthology I have not had the opportunity to read the book as it is from a small publication down-under but.here is his description of the new publication:
Undergrowth #8: The Journeybook is an essential map of hyperspace for the contemporary psychonaut and the uninitiated alike. Travel through time and space and partake of mushrooms at Harvard, hemp in Nimbin, DMT in the Amazon and anti-depressents in the suburbs of the West, to name but a few of the experiences which await you. Dance at Dionysian festivals, meet alchemists in the laboratories of
Links for this Post and embedded YouTube Video
Storm NLP Plus Brain Wave Entrainment, How To Information on the Healing MindN Power Circle Blog
Mind Stereo Mind Media Player for Windows Version 1.0
I resonate with the YouTube video by Healing MindN (no pun intended) because of my personal background in psychology. I spent a year taking advanced classes in Ericksonian Hypnosis which Neurolinguist Programming (NLP) attempts to emulate. I also spent some time working with Timothy Leary at several workshops he presented in conjunction with NLP expert Robert Dilts.
Continue reading "Video: Storm NLP with Brainwave Entrainment on YouTube (Plus How To)" »
Link for this Post: Bruce Eisner's Poetry on the Web
Today is my birthday so I thought I'd share a poem. I wrote it on my text software while working on the web.
Put Out the Word
put the word out
put out the word
its the strongest biggest greatest verb
you ever heard
Its a noun for the highest of renowned
so go and put out the word
The word from pen is mightier
than the sword
in the beginning there was a word
(or was that a burning bush)
the word echoes in the emptiness
an impossible sound
recorded here as symbols
symbols that make up the word
the word is a word of letters
esteemed for its ability to
represent our deepest meanings
the most intense of our feelings
sticks and stones can break my bones
but yes words can hurt me
still words can also heal
put the word out
put out the word
one if by land
two if by sea
send out the signal
all over this land
the entire universe can be contained in a word
universe
words are huge enormous
say the word and you'll be free
they say the word is love
put the word out
put out the word
and you will see
the word is a river flowing from my pen
the word is thoughts inside your brain
seeking to have a sound
Bruce Eisner,
Las Vegas NV February 2009
My long-time friend Dennis Berry along with an assemblage of Timothy Leary's friends including Joi Ito, Ken Gofmann (RU Sirius), Joey Cavella and Chris Graves (the later two featured in the video below) has launched a new Timothy Leary site which promises to replace the void left when Leary.Com went off-line a in the late Nineties.
Denis Berry is a woman who Timothy Leary entrusted to be the excectuor of his estate. She set up the Futuiqe Foundation to overlook Leary's heritage. The new website is their first public gesture but they have been networking privately for a while now.
The new site has the outlines of a living Timothy Leary site with sections on media, video archives, people and events with a blog as the front end. The latest feature on the blog is an interview with Joe Cavella and Chris Graves, Leary's creative team. I posted the Youtube video of the first portion of the interview below.
Barack H. Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States
Links for this Post:
I have not posted in several weeks. I've been having problems with the computer network in my home and decided to get to the root of the disorganization that is behind it. I figure I'll be doing a lot of writing now that our country has had its second "somewhat" peaceful revolution in the past first decade of the Third Millennium.
The far right had seined the moment of opportunity created by the attack by religious fanatics on New York that occurred shortly after ascension then to high office by someone who served as counterpoint to this point in our history. We are all happy that we do not have to put up with him anymore.
A few months before Ronald Reagan office, the now late comedian Richard Prior said that everyone would get a high and have as much sex as possible because when Republicans take office, sex and drugs usually become more scarce.
But Reagan was a wild-eyed liberal compared what we experienced under George THe last eight years have made it seem like the in the millennium, the spirit of playfulness had disappeared from the repertoire of human behavior.
So as the artist formerly known as Prince sings, "Let's Party Like Its 1999!"
Link for this PostL THADDEUS GOLAS -- The Official Thaddeus Golas Café In Cyberspace:
I've posted about Thaddeus Golas previously in two posts. One post was called The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment is a link to a book which most of you reading this post will not remember but which was read by a lot of us older members of the psychedelic movement cognoscenti.. The other was Perspectives on LSD by Thaddeus Golas, a contribution to a publication called Blotter which I was honored to be the editor of some twenty years ago.
Thaddeus Golas passed away 11 years ago but I am glad that someone decided to take the time to tell his story and tell it well. This site has more than enough to get you up to speed on Golas and the enlightenment shortcuts he was famous for.
More than just a tribute, the folks who put together the site are keeping Golas's ideas alive with a publication called the Cosmic Aerodrome, a newsletter.
Fourth International Aldous Huxley Symposium in Los Angeles 2008: Aldous Huxley in America
Huxley in Hollywood by David King Dunaway on Amazon
Sorry for the delay in giving you the rest of the story of my visit to LA and the International Aldous Huxley Symposium.
Continue reading "Notes from Aldous Huxley in America Symposium Part 2" »
Link for this Post: A Psychedelic ‘Problem Child’ Comes Full Circle By Benedict Carey in the New York Times
My mother read this article about Albert Hofmann and his legacy, LSD. Here is a snip from the piece:
Dr. Hofmann’s child was no hustler from a shotgun lab in Tijuana, after all, but a bourgeois revolutionary, born into establishment medicine and able to travel the world and enter societies from the top down, through their most hallowed institutions.
The English novelist Aldous Huxley, who struck up a friendship with Dr. Hofmann, was one of the first prominent proponents of LSD use for personal transformation. Timothy Leary, LSD’s pied piper, was a Harvard professor whose public raptures over the drug were a strong cocktail of mystical and scientific jargon. Ken Kesey, founder of the protoraves known as acid tests, was at age 30 already an acclaimed novelist, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He likened taking acid to “putting a tuning fork on your whole body.”
Not that acid was a hard sell to young people in the early 1960s, at least to those who longed not only to shake free of mainstream suburban-corporate culture but also to transform it, and themselves. They weren’t looking for an angry fix but something far grander.
Read the rest of the article in the Times at the link above.
Note:Image above is by Robert Venosa. Original signed prints are available form MAPS and proceeds go toward funding MAPS work promoting psychedelic research..
Link for this Post: Trip of a lifetime: How LSD rocked the world - - The Independent.
According to this article in The Independent from the UK:
It's the psychedelic drug that inspired Hendrix and The Beatles - and shaped the music, art and literature of a generation. As the world bids farewell to the bicycling Swiss chemist who created LSD, John Walsh explores his mind-altering legacy
The article gives a UK perspective on LSD's influence on the arts, film and music in the 1960's.
The article comes to me via my friend George Douvris who is on the road.
Note: Image from article
Link for this Post: The Dream Machine Online Note; Be sure to close your eyes when you view the dream machine.
Three years ago, I wrote Remembering Brion Gysin Among Gysin's works was the concept of the Dream Machine.
The main link at the top of this post is to a website the attempts to render the Dream Machine concept as an online web application.
A Dream Machine according to Wikipedia:
The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and scientist 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, situated between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing.
A dreamachine is "viewed" with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optical nerve and alters the brain's electrical oscillations. The "viewer" experiences increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the "viewer" feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that viewing a dreamachine allows one to enter a hypnagogic state. This experience may sometimes be quite intense, but to escape from it, one needs only to open one's eyes.
A dreamachine may be dangerous for people with photosensitive epilepsy or other nervous disorders. It is thought that one out of 10,000 adults will experience a seizure while viewing the device; about twice as many children will have a similar ill effect.
Who is Brion Gyson?
Brion Gysin (1916-1986) was a multimedia artist and mystic most famous in his lifetime for inventing a system called The Cut Ups, often credited to his best friend and soul mate the Beat writer William S. Burroughs. Traversing many nationalities, Gysin was a Sufi initiate, Secret knowledge. Dream Machine 1960 at the Beat Hotel after experiencing flicker near Marseilles tried everything to market and sell his ticket.
This description of him comes the makers of a 2008 feature documentary 'FLicKeR' by Nik Sheehan. about Brion Gysin and the dream machine . This is the Flicker website and here is some more info about the film (and an image I used).
Below and completely unrelated is The Dream Machine film on YouTube which says that it is, "based on Dave Arnold's design copy of artist and alchemist Brion Gysin's DREAMACHINE developed in the 1950s from an original design of the 'Flicker Machine' invented by the mathematician Ian Sommerville, a close friend of William Burroughs."
Note: Image at top from painting by Paul O'Donovan on the Interzone Site, Western Lands. Title: "The rebirth of Ra-Atum-Khepri, occurring during an Interzone Coffee-break T.V. commercial, causing a partial eclipse over the Westernlands"
Links for this Post
I stumbled upon a young fellow from England a couple of years ago, who is working on a semantically sensitive software program that adds into Microsoft Live Messenger called Instopix.
The program creates a stream of pictures and idea associations based on the words it detects in your chats that float on your screen as you chat. Luke calls the technology behind Instopix the Thoughtrail Semantic File System.
Luke also likes to play with words and images in his art and poetry. The poem at the top is an example of a poem with image and there are some more examples there as
Links for this Post:
Links for this Post:
Space Squid: Earth's Worst Sci-Fi And Humor 'Zine
Squids have become a popular archetype of the web recently, with Squidoo and now with Space Squid. I suppose I'm a sucker for a fun cover but there is more than just the cover in this case.
This zine has had three issues and also regular podcasts. --- Space Squid's Squidcast
Check out both via the links at the top of this post.
I found the site when someone from the zine commented on one of my posts. Enjoy!
Link for ths Post: Consciousness Cafe.
Here is an excerpt from this post:
Academy Award- and Golden Globe-nominated American actress Mariel Hemingway will host a fund-raising dinner November 9th for Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) in N
Alex's art is multi dimensional and my interest in opening to different dimensions especially the fourth/ the heart is my passion.
The Chapel and Alex have created space and work where the world as we see it, is open to a world that we can feel and experience differently, perhaps a world we are not familiar with. We are on an integrated path and the combination of the music art dance and fine art is the window into dimensions that are Bigger than us. Alex has opened this door.
- Mariel Hemingway
Tichets are $250 for the evening. Please visit the post through the link at the top to find out more.
Links for this Post:
Peter Max on lines and colors art blog.
lines and colors a blog about drawing, painting, illustration, comics, webcomics, cartoons, concept art and other visual arts
Until today, when you think of the name Charlie Parker, you probably think of the great jazz musician Charlie Parker.
Intruding Charlie Parker, the webcomics artist, cartoonist, illustrator, web site designer Flash animator and art blogger.
I found his blog through this post about Peter Max, the noted Psychedelic Sixties artist who the Beatles may have had stuck in their mind when they made Yellow Submarine. Here is an excerpt from the post about Peter Max:
Peter Max rose to fame at a pop artist and poster artist associated with the mass media image of the 1960’s psychedelic art movement.
Max took his influences from the underground psychedelic concert posters and album art of the time, and the graphically simplified echoes of that art pioneered by Heinz Edelmann and Milton Glaser, and refined them into a cheerful, less threatening version that became wildly popular.
Charlie Parker's blog features rich posts on a variety of topics. Here is what he says about the blog:
lines and colors is a blog about drawing, sketching, painting, comics, cartoons, webcomics, illustration, digital art, concept art, gallery art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it's fair game.
He also has a great portrait of himself on the blog which also seems to have a psychedelic influence.
You can explore more about Peter Max or Charlie Parker via the links at the top of this post.
Notes: Middle illustration is from the Peter Max website; Bottom illustration is from the "About" page of the lines and color blog
Link for this Post: Alterati.net: Torrent Details for: Andy Warhols TV.
This video torrent comes by way way of a post on GPod and so I am publishing great background they wrote for the video:
At the start of the 1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine and renewed his focus on painting. Works created in this decade include Maos, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Torsos and Shadows and many commissioned portraits. Warhol also published “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again).” Firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, Warhol exhibited his work extensively in museums and galleries around the world.
The artist began the 1980s with the publication of “POPism: The Warhol ‘60s” and with exhibitions of Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century and the Retrospectives and Reversal series. He also created two cable television shows, “Andy Warhol’s TV” in 1982 and “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes” for MTV in 1986. His paintings from the 1980s include The Last Suppers, Rorschachs and, in a return to his first great theme of Pop, a series called Ads. Warhol also engaged in a series of collaborations with younger artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Keith Haring.
With the torrent link at the top of ths post and a good bittorent client, you can soon be enjoying these videos.
Links for this Post Updated:
'Sgt. Pepper' at 40 Summer of Love saw release of Beatles' landmark album By Jim Harrington, InsideBayArea.Com
"A Day in the Life: Sgt. Pepper Turns 40" by Jon Wiener, Nation
"Musical Album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Marks 40th Anniversary" By Paul Burge, Voice of America:
"40 years later, Beatles revolutionary album still spins out talk".By Scott Mervis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Hearing 'Sgt. Pepper's' Then and Now"--NPR
It must be difficult for the youth of today to understand why one music album could have meant so much to my generation.
When Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out, I was 19 years old. I had been interested in LSD for a long time as I had heard about the stuff in Middle School and had developed a rapid curiosity about it. But the release of Sgt. Peppers, which was released today June 1st in 1967 that turned curiosity into action.
In those days, albums were filled with esoteric meanings. Having turned on to pot a few months earlier, I listed to the the album over and over trying to figure out secrets locked inside the words.
One song in particular, Within You and Without You written by George Harrison caught my attention:
We were talking - about the love we all could share - when we find it To try our best to hold it there - with our love. With our love - We could save the world - if they only knew... Try to realize it's all within yourself, no one else can make you change.
And the time will come when you see we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you.
For a boy who grew up in the San Fernando Valley (LA) in the fifties, these words and melodies were magnetic, exotic. I had to know what these guys were experiencing.
It did not take me that long to find out. In July of that year, I chewed up 400 Heavenly Blue Morning Glory seeds mixed up in apple sauce. These provided the chemical propulsion for my first psychedelic experience.
It was during that experience when I discovered the meaning of the words in that mysterious, sitar shrouded song. I hope that someday you will understand them too!
Link: World Gathering 25 & 26 August 2007.
Here is an excerpt from the gathering website:
WORLD GATHERING 25 & 26 AUGUST 2007
- All Night Gathering On Hilltops Worldwide
- Use Powerful Flashlights To Signal Other Hilltops
- Time For The Gathering - New Dawn Coming
- Truth For The World - Peace For The World
- Global Meetings - Global Powwows
- The Truth Is Coming
- 25 & 26 AUGUST 2007 WORLD GATHERING
- HILLTOPS WORLDWIDE - BE THERE!
Link for this Post:Death By Digitalized Celebrity: Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson" by Joe Bageant.
Note: the image to the left is from Joe's post.
I have to thank my friend Will Penna for sending me this amusing piece by Joe Bagent. Here is an expert from the beginning of his post:
In my ragged assed 40 years of writing, I've been lucky enough -- or sometimes unlucky enough -- to meet and write about many of America's "somebodies," mostly vapid asshole
Continue reading "Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson by Joe Bageant" »
Link for this Post : Invisible College PDF Magazine.
There is a new edition out of the colorful but a bit cumbersome Invisible College Magazine out. If you remember, I posted about issue Invisible College Enthusiast PDF Magazine FREE Download back in February.
This issue is free (as was the first issue) but it takes a bit of work to enjoy successfully. Here is what I would recommend.
1) Be sure you have the latest version of Adobe Reader (which is version 8) but at least Version 7. either that or a very successful method of dealing with large PDF files
.
2) Instead of just clicking on the cover and expecting Adobe to handle the download, right
Link for this Post: Remembering Kurt Vonnegut by Paul Krassner -- Arthur Magazine.
Paul Krassner who some consider the father of Underground Journalism describes author Kurt Vonnegut as " his favorite Luddite." Here is a short excerpt from his remembrances of the Vonnegut, who died last month:
Continue reading "Remembering Kurt Vonnegut by Paul Krassner -- Arthur Magazine" »
Links for this Post:
Mark Henson Sacred Light Studio 2007 Summer of Love Tour.
Summer of Love Festival Website
I found this information in the process of getting my Island Web Voyages Elsewhere directory cleaned up and online (more about that later).
While working on my listing for Mark Henson, I found out about the Summer of Love Tour (Can it really be forty years since the Summer of Love!?
Here is his announcement and schedule:
This is the year that we honor our roots. An alternative culture was spawned in San Francisco in 1967. This culture proliferated throughout the world bringing a new mixture of music, art, dance, politics and reinvigorated spirituality to a planet that sorely needed it. Celebrate with us at these events during this SUMMER of LOVE including the Special 40th Anniversery event in Golden Gate Park in September
Tour Schedule
- Seventh and maybe last Annual How Weird Festival May 6th
- Whole Earth Festival, UC Davis, Davis CA May 11-13th
- Mateel Summer Arts Festival, Benbow Lake, June 1st-3rd
- Harmony Festival, Santa Rosa, CA June 8th thru 10th
- Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, Philo CA June 23 to 24th
- Kate Wolfe Festival Black Oak Ranch, Laytonville, CA June 29, -July 1
- High Sierra Music Festival, July 6-8th
- Oregon Country Fair July 13- 15th
- Reggae On the River August 3rd-5th
- Seattle Hemp Fest August 18-20th
- Summer of Love September 2nd, Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park
- Earthdance September 14-16th
For those of you too young to remember, the original Summer of Love was in San Fransisco in 1967 (see "Summer of Love" in Wikipedia). This commemorative event looks like a lot of fun. I would suggest contacting
Note: Summer of Love Poster at top of post Copyright by Mark Henson. Second poster in post a tribute to 1967 Human Be In handbill by Stanley Mouse and Michael Bowen; incorporating the original legacy with its descendant and diverse groups of eclectic arts and culture in the now. Graphic art and layout by Anurag.
Links for this Post: "Folk-Rock Memories, Psychedelic but Clear" By Ben Sisario - New York Times. (Also accompanying video embedded below)
This combo article and video feature from the NY Times is about remembrances of music producer Joe Boyd whose career began with his discovery of major catalysts of the UK Psychedelic Music Scene. The article begins:
The 1960s had a single, precise climax, Joe Boyd says, and he was there.
In a new memoir, “White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s,” Mr. Boyd, a veteran record producer whose résumé includes Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and R.E.M., ignores the conventional high points of the decade — Woodstock, the moon landing — and instead asserts that a set by the psychedelic rock band Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London shortly before dawn on July 1, 1967, was the big moment, when drugs, political activism and far-out music had their purest convergence.
Read the rest of the article in the NY Times. Embedded video of Joe Boyd below.
Link for this post: U B U W E B.
According to the people at U B U W E B:
UbuWeb was founded in November of 1996, initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry. Over the years, UbuWeb has embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.
The site features an eclectic mix of poetry, literature and music. Artists include Alan Ginsberg, John Cage, Sun Ra and more.
Link for this Post: WALRUSGUMBOOT: The Beatles partnering with Mirage for "Revolution" in Las Vegas
Two of the Beatles may be dead but their business enterprises live on. I wrote in a previous post about the lavish Beatles tribute production: Love.
Here is a bit from this story originally on RockRadio and republished in its entirety on the WALRUSGUMBOOT blog:
The Beatles and Las Vegas Mirage Hotel are partnering once again, with a new club called The Revolution opening there next month. The Beatles' Cirque du Soleil musical LOVE is now running at The Mirage, and the new adjacent lounge will feature "cutting edge, interactive experiences to create a psychedelic sensory environment and a contemporary interpretation of the Beatles' era. Each night will be an evolutionary journey, where both the music and interior transform, resulting in an eclectic nightlife adventure."
Links for this Post:
Mark Fraeunfelder's Paintings at Retrorama Exhibit
Roq La Rue Gallery, Seattle WA
Note: Click on image on the rigth to see full size.
I've known Mark Fraunfelder since the late 1980's, when Boing Boing was a counterculture print publication which featured Mark's illustrations and cartoons as well as his writings. Mark's art is being shown as part of the Retrorama Exhibit at the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle WA opening November 10th. Here's a bit about the exhibit from their website:
Roq la Rue is pleased to present a show by 5 artists who paint using techniques culled from older generations of artists and designs, yet each giving the work their own unique twist.
Here is how Roq la Rue describes Mark's work
Mark Frauenfelder unveils a new series of playful paintings done in a storybook style mixed with a dash of children’s manga and secret arcane symbolism. Known mainly for his writing and the founding of his uber-popular blog (and former zine) Boing Boing as well as being the editor of Make magazine, Mark is also an accomplished illustrator. This is his first gallery exhibit.
You can find out more about the museum and dates for the exhibit through the links at the top of this post.
Note: Painting at the top is from the upcoming exhibits website reduced in size for this post and linked to the full-size image. The second illustration showing early Boing Boing magazines is from Mark's bio section of the Boing Boing Blog and links to the full-size image.
'Psychedelic Horizons', by Tom Roberts -- Reviewed by Bruce Sewick, LCPC on TripZine
Buy Psychedelic Horizons by Thomas Roberts on Amazon
I got to know Tomas Roberts over 30 years ago when I joined a group called the Society for the Study of Psychedelic Psychology.
During that entire time, Dr.Tom Roberts has been a Professor in the Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and foundations at Northern Illinois University.
One of the classes Roberts teaches each year is titled "Psychedelic Mindview" which focuses on the educational aspects of psychedelics. In particular he is is interested in the implications of psychedelic mental states on the development of human potential.
The link at the top is to an excellent review of Tom Roberts latest book. You can also get the book through Amazon at the second link up at the top.
Link for this Post: The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
This link (which came by way of the PatternHunter blog: is to a new (at least to me) research center with a fascinating focus: Here is a bit from the intro to their website ( bold the center paragraph which is the meat of the matter
Continue reading "The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence" »
Link for this Post: Have A Computer Write Your Essay at EssayGenerator.Com
Yes it's true! All you need to do is put your subject into the blue box on EssayGenerator.Com and it spits out an essay of better quality than the average college student can write.
You can trust my judgement on this because I was a teaching assistant for two years at UCSB and had to read sometimes up to 200 essay tests at a time.
Link for this Post: "Experts believe the future will be like Sci-Fi movies" by Ryan Paul in arstechnica
Among other predictions found in this article is the prediction By 2020 We Will Become a Society of Virtual Reality Addicts
"By the year 2020, virtual reality on the internet will come to allow more productivity from most people in technologically-savvy
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Douglas Engelbart's HyperScope 1.0 Launched.
You can read a HyperScope-version of Doug Engelbart's classic 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework."
Continue reading "Douglas Engelbart's HyperScope 1.0 Launched" »
Link for this post: Acid Trip on AnaLogik Multimedia house Website
One of a series of nine drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.
Link for this post: "The Bicycle Ride" Animation by David Normal First Shown at 2006 Basel, Switzerland LSD Conference
Updated for Bicycle Day 2006: David Normal asked me to send this message and ask that it be forwarded to friends
Happy Bicycle Ride Day!!!
On April 19th, 1943, Swiss research chemist, Dr. Albert Hofmann, conducted a self-experiment with a then unknown compound, "LSD-25", a
product of his chemical research. The extraordinary transformation
of consciousness was utterly beyond his expectation. He experienced
the first LSD "trip". Uncertain what was happening to him he left the
laboratory by bicycle . .. an epic journey of scientific
investigation and social change began. April 19th, 2006 is the 63rd
anniversary of this great discovery.
THE BICYCLE RIDE - An animated short by David Normal
"The Bicycle Ride" animated short is a fanciful depiction of
Hofmann's legendary bicycling adventure and the momentous discovery
of the psychic effects of LSD. Enjoy the animation. Celebrate
Bicycle Day and forward this message to your friends. (end of update)
By way of my friend Will Penna, this fun animated short subject. Here is what the filmmaker says:
"The Bicycle Ride" Animation by David Normal (3.47 min duration, avi file, 26 mb) This is my new animated short, "The Bicycle Ride." It is a whimsical depiction of Dr. Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD. This cartoon was debuted at the recent "LSD Symposium" held in honor of Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday in Basel, Switzerland. Click here to view stills from the Bicycle Ride.
Link for this post: Psychedelic-Art.Com
I found this site surfing tonight. It has some great black-light posters.
Hive 7, An Ajaxian Virtual World by Om Malik
Thanks to Om Malik's column, I found my way to Hive7 tonight. I even brought back a picture. Here is a bit from Om's bit on Hive 7:
Web is the ultimate platform, and I think in the end it wins. Hive 7 is just the first example of the next generation web possibilities. It was nearly two years ago when I met the Linden Labs founder Philip Rosedale and understood his vision of the virtual spaces. For nearly half its life, Linden was kept going by angels, and before it got the money from professional investors.
I think, Hive7 is in the same place. It will be sometime before the world catches on to its true potential. Skibinsky says that his big breakthrough was in 2004, when he realized that “instead of building a closed online game it’s possible to do the reverse.” In other words, he had an epiphany that web is the ultimate API. He put together a virtual universe which has rooms where folks can meet, meet, chat, exchange resources and items. What got me excited about Hive7 was that it allows anyone to customize the whole experience. You can take the code, and tweak it.
Looking at what Hive7 has built, I have just realized that the web has now gone 3D.
I believe that he is right!
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Pick up an atom feed of Larry Carlson's blog SKYHASEYES
I've posted about Larry Carlson's trippy flash art Medijate. He has now launched a blog to put up his most current work. According to the SKYHASEYES BLOG you get:
Your daily dose of surreal energy. This blog is a growing collection of Larry Carlson's amazing art (flash movies, video, soundtracks, web art, collage and digital artworks).
There is also links from his blog to his other sites including his main site, The Wonderful World of Larry Carlson.
Note: From this new blog comes the above work called Fanta Exposures
Links for this post: Software Program Creates Art with Artificial Intelligence
Ray Kurzweil talks about a software program Aaron in film The Age of Intelligent Machines (Video requires Realplayer)
I came upon this site (as I often do) by accident. The site unfolds the story how Harold Cohen, an artist and AI scientist developed Aaron, the program that paints. You can even download a screen-saver based on Aaron here.
Link: Inventions and Ideas from Science Fiction Books and Movies at Technovelgy.com.
The site has an FAQ that explains its name:
What does "technovelgy" mean and how do you pronounce it?
Okay, here's the deal. First of all, it's pronounced tek novel gee. My first explanation for this name is that all the good domain names were taken by 1997.
The second explanation is that "Technovelgy" is a combination of the words "technology" and "novel." For those keeping track of such things, the word "novel" can refer to a book; it can also refer to something new or unique. And aren't science fiction novels filled with fictional ideas and technologies that are new and unique? So, there you go.
What do you find on the site? Basically a lot of inteventions, gadgets and new science thingies that come from the realm of speculative fiction. They even have a timeline of when the new technologies come into existence along with their source in the literature. A fun which you can subscribe to by RSS.
Post by way of Nerdshit.
Link for this post: "That's Brilliant!" by Scott Lyle Cohen in Samsung's DigitAll Magazine,
Here is the blurb that begins this piece.
"Who’s brilliant and why? DigitAll went to five of the smartest people we know—Clifford Pickover, Esther Dyson, Jean-Paul Goude, Paul Muldoon, and Bob Stein—to get their views on the state of genius"
The author goes on to say:
If beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder, then genius resides in the deepest recesses of the mind. What is genius, who is a genius, what is the role and responsibility of a genius? No two people will answer in quite the same way. Seeking to shed some light on these and other questions, DigitAll queried five varied thinkers. The results? Genius.
I found this series of interviews by way the blog of one of the geniuses interviewed: Clifford Pickover's RealityCarnival.
Continue reading "That's Brilliant -- the state of genius on Samsung's DigitAll Magazine" »
Link for this post: Allen Ginsberg Trust: Video Library
After I posted the The Ballad Of The Skeletons by Allen Ginsberg in the previous post, one of his fans emailed me to tell me that the ballad was on video in a great Allen Ginsberg resource which currently has 22 videos available.
In addition to the videos, there are separate areas with Ginsberg manuscripts, art, ephemera, audio,text and photography. Definitely worth a visit.
Link for this post: Web Content Creation: Ten Approaches For Small Online Publishers.
I had not taken a look at Robin Good's excellent blogs for a bit. I just returned from a visit with a recommendation for one of his posts aimed toward those of you among my readers who wish to publish on the web. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of his post:
A website is more than a container for written articles, news, photos and graphics. Webmasters, authors and small online publishers must also integrate "special" and "uniquely valuable" quality themed-content into it.
A so-called "sticky" website is one that attracts individuals and encourages them to return. "Sticky websites" integrate high-value content that is related and of interest to its readers.
A sticky web site is a place people will want to visit again and again. By creating a user-experience people like to re-experience, will likely increase your ability to capture some readers loyalty and to make them your best marketing agents.
Here some popular and tested alternative content creation ideas that can help online small publishers increase their reach and visibility while providing a useful information service to all Web users out there. Read the rest here.
So folks, I hope you find Vision Think sticky .. and you'll stick with me.
Note: The cool photo at the of this post is from Robin Good's post and he gives photo credit: Alex Bramwel
Links for this post: LSD.Info
I just returned from the opening session of the International Symposium "LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug" honoring Albert Hofmann's Birthday. The opening ceremonies were attended by almost 2000 people, I met up with my friend John Beresford.who had been at the birthday ceremonies for Hofmann on his actual birthday which was January 11th. He told me that the President of Switzerland had been there for the occasion which gave me a sense how well regarded Hofmann in his native country.
As part of the opening ceremonies, Hofmann was interviewed on stage by Lucius Werthmüller. The subject was the discovery of LSD, a talk I have seen Hofmann give several times, the first on the campus of UCSC back in 1977 when I brought him to Santa Cruz.
The interview format was effective and Hofmann made more extensive 
comments about the events of his discovery than I had heard previously. He also gave an account of the "first planned LSD session" which Hofmann arranged with a small group of at his home in Burg.
Tomorrow, Hofmann is going to talk some of his ideas about the future of LSD. I'll be reporting more from Basel here on the blog, so stay tuned.
Pictures courtesy of Gaia News Media: top St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution © 2006 by Alex Grey, side Albert Hofmann at on his 100th Birthday
Link for this post: Slickr by Cellar Door Software
I found this new free screensaver software that lets me show my flickr photos as a screensaver on my PC. It can display your flickr images or you can show all public photos sorted by tags and a lot more.
Its a lot of fun, play around with it if you like.
Download Slickr by clicking here
This post was found via populicio.us
Link for this post: Dr. Susan Blackmore "Consciousness in meme machines"
Dr. Susan Blackmore is an endlessly fascinating person. Everything about her from her background in parapsychology to her multicolored hair and including her series of books on topics including memes and consciousness suggests a public yet mysterious, inquisitive and always evolving woman.
I have posted about Susan Blackmore last year in relation to her work with memes. This current reference I found is complex piece about the potential for consciousness in meme machines that was originally published in Journal of Consciousness Studies. Here is a short excerpt from the the absract of at the beginning of this paper:
Setting aside the problems of recognising consciousness in a machine, this article considers what would be needed for a machine to have human-like consciousness. Human-like consciousness is an illusion; that is, it exists but is not what it appears to be. The illusion that we are a conscious self having a stream of experiences is constructed when memes compete for replication by human hosts. Some memes survive by being promoted as personal beliefs, desires, opinions, and possessions, leading to the formation of a memeplex (or selfplex). Any machine capable of imitation would acquire this type of illusion and think it was conscious. Robots that imitated humans would acquire an illusion of self and consciousness just as we do. Robots that imitated each other would develop their own separate languages, cultures and illusions of self. Distributed seflplexes in large networks of machines are also possible. Unanswered questions include what remains of consciousness without memes, and whether artificial meme machines can ever transcend the illusion of self consciousness.
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Download "Star Light" MP3 by Fiorella Terenzi and Timothy Leary by clicking this link
On several different occasions I watched my friend Timothy Leary perform with an Italian physicist turned musician Fiorella Terenzi and each time it was a bit different and I enjoyed it. On the blog 6000 by Cliff Pickover where I rediscovered her. there is a brief bio of the good doctor:
Described by Time Magazine as "a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna", astrophysicist, author and recording artist Dr. Fiorella Terenzi received her doctorate in physics from the University of Milan, has studied opera and composition at Conservatory G. Verdi, Corsi Serali, and taught mathematics and physics at Liceo Scientifico, Milan.
I
found Fiorella tonight among good company on a website "6000" which is short for "6000 intriguing people you want to meet online before you die.(Edited by Cliff Pickover). And I know this is probably may violate copywrite, I'm putting up the Leary-Terenzi song from Leary's Album, Beyond Life. The song is called Star Light as a clickable MP3.
Link for this post: Leary.ru A Website, dedicated to the scientific and public activity of Dr. Timothy Leary
We Americans have been neglect in our maintenance of Leary.Com, the last project of Dr. Timothy Leary, in my estimation the greatest of America's Twentieth Century heroes. At the old leary.com site which was so popular during Leary's last days, the "Currently Closed for Renovation" sign has been up for at least three years. Sometimes I wonder if there is anyone minding the store.
Well leave it to the Russians. They have parked at leary.ru a site which has a bit of the look of the "under construction" site from at the top but if you poke around a bit, you will discover that there is a lot of resources that their Timothy Leary Project has assembled. These include some of the photos, letters and other writings that were on the original Leary.Com site before the renovation sign went up and they stripped out the old directories.
Also there a several long videos, some audio segments, a great collection of additional Leary related photos to the originals, a fun little piece called "Timothy Leary's Endless Party" ... and much more. Thanks to the Russians, it will be a little harder for us Americans to forget Dr. Timothy!
Note: Image by Dean Chamberlain.
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