Ira Cohen @ cynthiabroan.com

Psychedelia’s role as a cipher for 1960s counter-culture, occurring at a moment of intense upheaval, transformed an ancient form of spiritual practice into a social revolution. Yet attempts to create a communal experience of altered consciousness through projective imagery had already taken place at the end of the nineteenth century across Europe and America, during another moment of profound collective uncertainty. Colour and sound were brought together in painterly environments created by the projection of images from specially constructed machines that matched colours with notes on the musical scale, and abstract coloured forms revolved to an accompanying musical score. Hallucinatory worlds inspired by psychotropic drugs simultaneously appeared in literature, a product of the apparent decadence of late Victorian society.

Industrialisation’s challenge to the traditional order at the end of the nineteenth century was echoed, during the 1960s, in the technological utopia of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’, within which the technological revolution had both eroded a collective sense of purpose and made the possibility of shared experience more complete than it had ever been before. In both cases, the impulse to create a communal experience of altered consciousness arguably occurred as a way of working through the trauma of modernity.

In the mid 1960s, as psychedelia began to permeate every aspect of popular culture, the core of the psychedelic experience lay in the LSD trip, and in the shared environment of the light show. Whilst tripping, whether alone or with others, was an internally-felt, solitary experience, the light show was communal. Groups of people, some tripping, others not, would gather in a club, cinema, concert hall or underground hang-out, to listen to live psychedelic music accompanied by multiple projections of colored oil patterns, moving kaleidoscopic forms and gels, on walls or makeshift screens.

This proliferation of psychedelic film and projected environments grew directly out of the experiments with synaesthesis in film, painting and music that had taken place first by Futurist artists Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra in 1909, and then in San Francisco and New York between the 1930s and the 1950s by artists, scientists and engineers. Mary Hallock Greenawalt, Thomas Wilfred, Oscar Fischinger, John and James Whitney, Jordan Belson and others projected abstract images fusing colour and sound to produce a synaesthetic experience that, in most cases, was meant to evoke a spiritually transcendent state.

The key to this transcendence lay in the effect of the vibrations of light and sound on the body. Greenawalt invented coloured light projection machines in the early 1920s, observing that rays of light were more powerful than the vibrations of sound “for pushing still further inwards the messages that sounds portrayed and conveyed…Musical sounds… are rougher in their vibratory effect. Light is…finer [and] deeper in its infiltration within the body's tissues.” (Mary Hallock Greenewalt, Nourathar: The fine art of light color playing, Philadelphia: Westbrook Publishing, 1946. p. 45)

In 1933 Wilfred, following Greenawalt’s example and influenced by theosophical principles, installed The Art Institute of Light in the Grand Central Palace at 480 Lexington Avenue, New York City, in which a hall housed one of his ‘Clavilux’ units - a machine with 32 projectors and rotating painted glass discs - and a large screen onto which were projected a changing composition of slowly moving coloured planes. As in the psychedelic light shows that followed, the imagery was driven by a musical composition, transforming the room into a synaesthetic environment.

The mandalic effect of the circular coloured shapes in these early projection machines predicted one the most common elements of the psychedelic light environment – the kaleidoscope. Invented in 1816 in Scotland, by the 1870s the kaleidoscope had become a popular instrument in America, where Charles Bush developed kaleidoscopes with mirrored cylinders reflecting a series of changing circular glass slides containing brightly coloured liquids with moving air bubbles, and colour wheels.

The scale of these table-top kaleidoscopes, meant for home entertainment, was transformed, in the late 1950s, into a vast, immersive environment which the psychedelic light show was to echo a short while later. From 1957 to 1960, the filmmaker Jordan Belson, collaborating with composer Henry Jacobs, made over one hundred Vortex Concerts inside the dome of the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. Belson used seventy projectors, including the planetarium’s powerful, thirteen foot long star projector, to screen multiple abstract or ‘concrete’ (Gene Youngblood rightly observes a difference between Jordan Belson’s films, which he describes as ‘concrete’, and the earlier, more graphic abstract films of the 1940s, in ‘Expanded Cinema’, E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., New York, 1970, p. 157.) films, by himself, John and James Whitney and others. Belson and Jacobs’ concerts transformed the experience of viewing the vastness of the sky at night into a spectacular explosion of colour, abstract forms and hypnotic explosions of moving mandalic patterns.

"Suddenly the frame is shattered with a roar and a fiery light in a heaven of boiling multi-hued gases: a grim, sinister eruption that suggests, according to Belson, 'de-personalisation, the shattering of the ego-bound consciousness, perhaps through death, perhaps through evolution or rebirth.' This celestial storm of manganese blue and zinc yellow leads into a state of karmic illusions with glacial floating, aurora borealis lights of red and yellow-whites, rainbow liquid cascades of exquisite sheerness….This is followed by an intense white-light sequence with an ethereal mother-of-pearl quality representing a state of total integration with the universe.." (Ibid)

Belson's 'pouring' of projected abstract film images over the dome and surrounding walls radically redefined the experience of cinema. Film was transformed from a single rectilinear projection of a theatrical narrative within a proscenium arch to a frameless, liquid environment. The frontal relationship between audience and screen was re-configured into a synaesthetic spectacle of meditative awe, in which participants looked not straight ahead but upwards into a filmic sky. The spherical shape of the planetarium's dome, an ancient architectural form mirroring the structure of the universe, also mirrored the internal space of the human skull. The Vortex Concerts could thus be experienced as an external parallel of an inner transformative state, achieved through a hallucinatory psychedelic vision.

Belson and Jacobs' concerts were initially regarded as a kind of scientific experiment by the authorities; but Belson was part of the Beat scene centred in San Francisco’s North Beach, and the name ‘Vortex’, describing the spinning vibrations of the sounds around the space, underlined the dissolution of the conventional boundaries between performer and audience. The concerts anticipated the 1960s psychedelic environment as an enclosing, synaesthetic form.

The implied infinity of the domed interior became both a literal and metaphorical space within which the psychedelic experience could occur. In 1954 Kenneth Anger, also based in San Francisco, made ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’, a film in which Anger’s friend Anais Nin, a recent convert to LSD, and other friends participated, appearing as mythological characters in a hallucinatory, paganistic ritual. Anger’s film begins with a reading from Samuel Coleridge’s opium-induced poem ‘Kublai Khan’ (1816), in which, by an emperor’s enchanted pleasure dome, or palace, a sacred river is flung into the air then meanders down into bottomless icy caves.

Coleridge’s hallucinatory nirvana, disrupted by the terrible power of nature, becomes, in Anger’s pleasure dome, “a convocation of magicians…Astarte of the moon brings the wings of snow…Pan bestows the grapes of Bacchus…The orgy ensues – a magick masquerade at which Pan is the prize.”(Kenneth Anger, Mystic Fire video website) In 1966, surrounded by the new psychedelic environment of San Francisco, Anger released a new, ‘Sacred Mushroom’ version of the film, to be watched under the influence of psychedelic drugs.

By the mid 1960s, Ken Kesey was attempting to transform Anger’s pleasure dome into a physical reality. As Tom Wolf reported, “This was going to be a great geodesic dome on top of a cylindrical shaft…the dome would have a great foam-rubber floor they could lie down on. Sunk down into the foam rubber, below floor level, would be movie projectors, video-tape projectors, light projectors…People could take LSD…and lie back and experience what they would, enclosed and submerged in a planet of lights and sounds…” (Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, p.206.)

In 1963, the filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, who had met Buckminster Fuller whilst studying architecture at Black Mountain College, constructed his ‘Movie Drome’ at Stoney Point, New York, from the top of a silo. Viewers lay on their backs around the dome watching an array of films screened across the ceiling and interior walls, using multiple projectors. Vanderbeek’s Movie Drome was conceived from a McLuhanesqe impulse; as he observed, “we only see each other through the subconsciousness of some other system.” (Youngblood, op. cit)

The Movie Drome’s dream-like space evoked the modernist architectural language of inter-penetration, in which, as Walter Benjamin argued, the separation of interior and exterior, and between public and private space, became dissolved, resulting in “the substitution of the void for the home.”(Ibid., pp.77-78.) This void was, arguably, evidence of what Thierry de Duve has described as a ‘symbolist’ period in architecture, in which architecture becomes metaphorical, and represents the bodies of its inhabitants, even competing with them for embodiment.(Thierry de Duve).

The overarching experience in a psychedelic environment was one of synaesthesia, in which the body is perceived as becoming at one both with others, the sounds and images they experienced, and with the surrounding architectural space. The anti-rectilinear dimensions of the dome mimicked the organic contours of the body, which were, in turn, often magnified, distorted and dissolved by the use of mirrors.

In the psychedelic environment, reflection and refraction diffused the boundaries between one surface and another, turning the body and the psychedelic projection into serpentine lines and distended images. The organic, plant-derived forms of Rococo, re-stated in the flowing, rhythmic lines of Art Nouveau and Symbolism, entered the 1960s through the mirrored organic patterns of the psychedelic image. The surface of the looking glass, through which Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s proto-psychedelic children’s book, entered another world, was a permeable membrane through which the conscious and the subconscious were filtered.

“we saw [the reflections] as mandalas, as screens of energy. By suspending analysis we were able to pass through the screens. We noticed that in the centre of all these images is a black hole, the vortex of mystical works. By focusing on this swirling, sucking void we moved through its entrance to the other kingdom. The blind spot in the centre of each mandala is recognised by Tibetan monks as a device to reach transcendence. It comes to life and triggers off archetypal images. We learned to move through the mandala to Nirvana, the state of absolute bliss. " (Alan Hollingshead, The Man Who Turned on The World).

From these and many other accounts, it is clear that the visual image plays a major role in realising both natural and chemically induced altered states, in several ways: through the reflective surface of the mirror; the circular mandalic pattern; the vibrational experience of intense colour; and the flickering of light. In all cases, there is an inference of movement, whether actual, or optically implied. The hallucinatory potential of flickering light was recognized by the Canadian poet Brion Gysin and mathematician Ian Somerville in 1959, who created The Dream Machine, a device that writer William Burroughs used extensively.

The Dream Machine comprises a rotating cylinder perforated with holes shaped according to a Sufi geometrical pattern, through which light from a motorized lamp emits a constant flicker, experienced with the eyes shut. The machine emits a pulse of light at ten flickers per second, exactly corresponding to the rhythm of brain Alpha waves. The brain tunes into the pulse and shifts from its waking rhythm to a dreaming rhythm. In the subsequent waking dream state, participants report seeing brilliant colours, geometric forms, and dream-like visions.

The mirror repeatedly appears in the psychedelic experience as a portal, or doorway, into spiritual transcendence. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze described film time in terms of a 'crystal image', which "shapes time as a constant two-way mirror that splits the present into two heterogeneous directions, 'one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past. Time consists of this split, and it is…time that we see in the crystal.'" (Gille Deleuze's Time Machine, Durham and Lonon, Duke University Press, 1997, pp.79-118, quoted in Donato Totaro, Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project, OffScreen, 1999, www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze2).

The poet and filmmaker Ira Cohen articulated this Deleuzian split in a psychedelic film and accompanying photographs, in which the image is distended into a melting, liquid form using the reflective surface of mylar. Cohen created his Mylar Chamber – a large box-like space lined with bendable mirrors - in 1961, inside which he filmed and photographed people including Jimi Hendrix, Noel Redding and the filmmaker Jack Smith, sometimes using a double prism to further fragment the reflections. Elongated, flowing Rorschach images of Jack Smith and others appear in Cohen’s psychedelic film ‘The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda’ (1968), with a soundtrack composed by Velvet Underground drummer Angus McLise.

In ‘Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda’, the fluid reflections of the mylar-lined room extend the filmic space into a psychedelic infinity chamber, within which Smith and others float around like disembodied ghosts. Maclise’s hypnotic soundtrack, influenced by eastern music and a meditative tonality, takes the viewer further into the melting space, demonstrating the fusion of music and image that became the hallmark of the psychedelic environment.

“He had a triangular arrangement of three mirrors which he put in front of the lens to break the image up into multiple facets. Taking the slides out of focus he elevated shapes to forms, and then reduced these to primal blobs of chaotic colour… I felt Arnie had visually duplicated the early stages of the LSD experience… He had understood that LSD is a non-verbal, visionary experience…Arnie had changed our session room from the inside of a cigar box to the inside of a diamond.” (Ibid. chapter 4.)

Hollingshead’s description evokes the nineteenth century kaleidoscopes with their liquid slides, whose simple format became a potent trigger for transcendence in the 1960s. From this early experiment with a proto-light show technique, Hollingshead and Leary invited a drop-out artist named Gabi to create a psychedelic environment with colour and light. Gabi’s visit was closely followed by the collective USCO, which included Gerd Stern, Michael Callahan, an engineer, and Steve Durkee. USCO created psychedelic environments using strobe lights, film, slides, kinetic sculpture, performance and music. The group was influenced by the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, with whom Stern had participated in a multi-media event in 1963, and who took part in two USCO performances in the late 1960s, and observed that "we now live in...a simultaneous happening..." in which "there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the senses simultaneously.... The contained, the distinct, the separate...are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused." (Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967; ed. San Francisco: HardWired, 1996), p. 63, 125, 145.)

As part of USCO, Yalkut created a series of "flowing" film and slide projection environments, including 'Yin/Yang sine/pulse' (1967), in which film images were projected onto silver mylar walls and revolving weather balloons. The semi-reflective, semi-transparent weather balloons reflected and refracted the projected images throughout the space, creating a sense of perceptual disorientation designed to encourage an altered state of consciousness in the viewer.

The mesmeric spatial dislocations of Yalkut's kaleidoscopic images of mandalas, colored lights, dancers, and abstract patterns evoke early twentieth-century explorations of spirituality. The USCO environments similarly gave concrete form to the interrelationship of time, consciousness, perceptual disorientation, and spatial coordination. Yalkut's kinesthetic use of film is also evident in a group of early single-screen films that incorporate multiple in-frame camera superimpositions and classic 1960s music by, amongst others, the Byrds, the Loving Spoonful, the Beatles. The music is cut up, looped, and electronically synthesized, kaleidoscopic filmic techniques of layering, superimposition, and fragmentation.

The psychedelic film was a uniquely American phenomenon, largely concentrated, with the exception of Yalkut and Ira Cohen, in San Francisco. Given San Francisco's history as a centre for abstract film from the 1930s onwards, and the influence of Belson and the Whitney brothers, it is unsurprising that the mind-expanding potential of light and movement was explored by filmmakers living in San Francisco, and that many of these experiments were closely related to light shows. Artist and experimental filmmaker Harry Smith, who was close to Belson and Hy Hirsch as well as the Beat writers, was, along with Belson, one of the first filmmakers to explore spirituality, consciousness and synaesthesia through a drug-induced fusion of abstract colour, mandalic forms and sound. His films of the 1950s are, along with Belson's, widely acknowledged as a direct antecedent of the psychedelic language of the 1960s.

During the1960s Victor Grauer, Bob Cowan, John Hawkins, John Schofield and John Gruenberger all made psychedelic films. In New York, Storm de Hirsh, one of the only women filmmakers to experiment with psychedelic imagery, made one of the first psychedelic films, 'Peyote Queen', in 1965. Her film 'Third Eye Butterfly' (1968) used the double screen to suggest the infinitesimal repetition of highly coloured organic patterns. Flicker films by Tony Conrad, George Maciunas and Paul Sharits used the structural properties of the film frame to create a hallucinogenic celluloid experience. Conrad's film 'The Flicker' (1965-66), the most rigorous of all, alternated black and white frames to produce a stroboscopic effect aimed directly at the brain, inducing hallucinations of colours and forms.

Barbara Rubin (The daughter of the Museum of Modern Art curator William Rubin.), who, whilst Bob Dylan's girlfriend, introduced Dylan to Andy Warhol and was an important presence in London during the mid 1960s, produced perhaps the most precocious psychedelic film. In 1963, at the age of 18, she filmed a group of friends, including Gerard Melanga, taking part in a simulated orgy in an apartment on the Lower East Side. The resulting black and white film, its image shrunk by one third, was projected over another film showing a woman's body, painted with patterns. The projectionist moved different coloured gels in front of both projectors, transforming the composite image into an erotic precursor of the psychedelic light show.

By 1966, Warhol was projecting his films onto the walls, the band and the audience at multi-media concerts by the Velvet Underground and Nico in the Dom in the East Village of New York, under the rubric of "Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable". The same year, at Judson Church, the senior minister, Howard Moody, asked his newly appointed young curator and activist Jon Hendricks to research LSD as part of an attempt to find an alternative to hard drugs. Hendricks' research led to a collaborative multi-media installation at the Judson Gallery in March 1966. 'The Stone', by Anthony Cox, included strobed lights, mirrors, black bags by Yoko Ono, films by Jeff Perkins, and a soundtrack by Michael Mason. As Mason wrote, "perhaps the most interesting of the psychological effects produced by these sounds is the apparent lowering of the threshold of perception of form through precise electro-mechanical repetition of aural patterns." (Michael Mason, notes for 'The Stone', Judson Gallery, March 10-27 1996.)

Back in San Francisco Ben van Meter, a co-founder of the San Francisco experimental film distribution center Canyon Cinema and an early experimenter with the overhead projector, made an early experiment with psychedelic imagery in 'Color Film' (1964-65). His 'SF Trips Festival: an Opening' (1966) and 'Acid Mantra' (1966-68), which incorporate extensive footage from Kesey's Acid Tests, are probably the closest depictions on film of the hallucinatory experiences of Kesey's legendary events.

Along with van Meter, Scott Bartlett combined light show techniques with film, in the landmark collaborative film 'Offon' (1967), which marked the first combination of film with liquid projection and video. Bartlett, light show artist Glenn Mackay and filmmakers Tom DeWitt and Mike MacNamee came together in the summer of 1967, combining twenty five film loops with light show liquids, "mixed through a video effects bank and the results..filmed by MacNamee directly off the studio monitor with a rented kinescope camera" (Canyon Cinema, Scott Bartlett). Early video techniques - wipes, feedback, keying, solarising - were combined with familiar psychedelic light show effects, creating a unique fusion of the three media. The collaborative combination of film with video occurred only once again, in 1975, in the videofilm 'Cycles', by the pioneer video artist Stephen Beck and Jordan Belson. Beck and Belson's fusion of flowing electronic forms and abstract colour produced one of the last psychedelic films.

1965 was a key year in the history of psychedelia, and of the projective psychedelic environment. Hollingshead and Leary translated the intimacy of their group LSD sessions at Millbrook, which they loosely termed their Psychedelic Theatre, into a more public forum in April 1965, at the Village Vanguard Jazz Club in Greenwich Village. Film, slides, music and the spoken word were all tools with which to achieve an altered state of consciousness, through the ingestion of LSD. Various ‘Psychedelic Explorations’ followed, at the New Theatre in New York, with performances by USCO.

In California, Ken Kesey organised the first of his Acid Test parties in a private house in Santa Cruz on 27th November, closely followed by the second on 4th December in San Jose. From a small handful of people, by 8th January 1966 the third of ten Acid Tests, at the newly founded Fillmore Auditorium, attracted 2,400 tripping participants.

“Unfamiliar colours and indeterminate sounds seemed to come at us from everywhere and nowhere… I found the overhead projectors and joined the finger painters, smearing oil and coloured goop onto pieces of convex glass which threw a prismatic liquid across the room’s ceiling and floors…film loops roamed the ill-defined space like cinematic flies soaring through an ageless atmosphere.” (Hammond Guthrie, The Acid Test, in AsEverWas – Memoirs of a Beat Survivor, SAF Publications, London, 2001 – www.safpublishing.com)

Psychedelic light shows soon became a regular feature at venues such as the Fillmore East, and the Straight Theatre in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco. Arial Transi, also known as the Brotherhood of Light, used liquid dyes, colour wheels, multiple modified overhead projectors, eighteen slide projectors, and 16mm film projectors. Slides were projected into a revolving prism, intensified by the staccato rhythm of a strobe light. The Light Sound Dimension, founded by Bill Ham and generally acknowledged to be the first psychedelic light show in the United States, performed at the Red Dog Saloon as early as 1965. Don Paulson's light show was shown at the Science Centre in Seattle in 1968. Filmmaker Joshua White founded the Joshua Lightshow, working mostly at the Fillmore East, and Glenn Mackay's light shows, inspired by Kesey's Acid Tests, incorporated dyes, liquids, and thousands of hand-painted slides. The filmmaker Ben van Meter combined triple exposed film projections with liquid projections. (The concentration of liquid light shows in San Francisco at a moment where they were virtually unknown elsewhere was partly due to the work of Seymour Locks, a professor at the San Francisco State University, who invented the technique of using a classroom overhead projector to reflect liquids in a glass dish – a clock face cover had the perfect concave shape - onto screens, or walls, in 1952. Locks, teaching a course on art and light, was hosting an important educators’ conference, for which he had decided to “revive the European experiments of the twenties and thirties in projected scenery and have dancers running in and out of scrims projected with designs.” According to Perry Charles, The resulting show, accompanied by jazz music, went on to Los Angeles, and was seen by an art student, Elias Romero, who learnt the technique and, by the end of the 1950s, was projecting liquid light shows in first Los Angeles and then San Francisco. Romero's light experiments caught the attention of his landlord Bill Ham, who went on to found The Light Sound Dimension, and by the early 1960s, several enthusiasts had overhead projectors and were experimenting with liquid projection, including Van Meter and Anthony Martin, lighting director at the Tape Music Centre.) Before its very eyes, San Francisco, a centre for bohemianism since the nineteenth century, saw the Beat generation dissolve into a Californian counter-cultural phenomenon unprecedented in its scale and impact.

Kesey's Acid Test parties, the pivot around which the frenzy of psychedelia revolved, reached their height with the 'Trips Festival' in January 1966, held in the domed interior of the Longshoremen's Hall in San Francisco. Billed as an "electronic experience"(Charles Perry, A History of Haight Ashbury, Vintage Books, 1985), the three day event included dancers, "slides, movies, soundtracks, flowers…the endless explosion, the congress of wonders, liquid projections..sound-light console, overhead projection…high energy experiments conducted in the cyclotron of the dome-shaped longshoreman's hall…air dome projections…the audience is invited to wear ecstatic dress and bring their own gadgets.."(Trips Festival handbill, January 21,22,23 1966, designed by Wes Wilson.) The 'air dome projections' were made by Henry Jacobs, co-director of the original Vortex Concerts in the late 1950s, and the presence of a 'Vortex Light Box' suggested another influence from Jacobs and Belson's earlier groundbreaking projective concerts. The newly formed Canyon Cinema group projected experimental films by, amongst others, Bruce Baillie and Bruce Conner. Strobes, ultra-violet lights and an oscilloscope froze the flowing projections and dancing participants into staccato images.

The Trips Festival marked, in retrospect, the high point of the psychedelic scene and the projective light show environment. By the time the summer of the following year was declared the Summer of Love, the Haight Ashbury scene had become a tourist destination, overtaken by a crowd dismissively referred to as 'weekend hippies'.

In London, the psychedelic scene was inaugurated on 11th June 1965, by the Poets of the World event, also referred to as the ‘Wholly Communion’, at the Royal Albert Hall. Eighteen poets including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Alexander Trocchi, took part in a chaotic event in which many of the participants and audience, holding flowers, were high on LSD, still a legal drug.

In September, Alan Hollingshead arrived in London from Millbrook with 5000 LSD trips and established the World Psychedelic Centre in a flat in Pont Street, Belgravia. The nascent psychedelic scene revolved around the newly established band The Pink Floyd, who played first at the Marquee in regular a Sunday afternoon slot called The Spontaneous Underground, and then, in October 1966, at the London Free School’s Sound/Light Workshop in Powys Square, Notting Hill Gate. Two Americans from Leary’s Millbrook mansion, Joel and Toni Brown, projected slides over the band as they played. (Pink Floyd were also exposed to the light experiments of their landlord Mike Leonard, who was one of the first to experiment with kinetic light projections at Hornsea College of Art.)

Later that month the founder of the London Free School, John Hopkins, known as Hoppy, and Barry Miles, teamed up with Jim Haynes and Jack Henry Moore to launch the International Times, the first European underground newspaper, in a landmark launch party at the Roundhouse that Daevid Allen of the Soft Machine called “one of the two most revolutionary events in the history of English alternative music and thinking.” (Pink Floyd, Lost in the Woods, Julian Palacios, 1998 p. 4 of 5 www.furious.com/perfect/sydbarrett.html). Pink Floyd used the same simple light show from the Free School – moving liquid slides projected over the audience and the band. As John Platt remembers, “oil dropped on photographic slides pulsated in time with the music. Within months that light show was to seem incredibly primitive, but few people had seen one before, and the Roundhouse audience was transfixed.” (John Platt, Nightlife of Swingin’ London, 196 www.jahsonic.com/JohnPlatt.html).

Two months later, on 23 December 1966, Hoppy opened the UFO Club in the Blarney Club, an Irish dance hall in the basement of 31 Tottenham Court Road. Pink Floyd presided over all night sessions incorporating strobe lights, slides and films by, amongst others, artists Mark Boyle and John Latham. The UFO Club lasted barely a year, yet it became legendary, and, though it was quickly replaced by the Electric Garden and other underground venues, the magic, according to contemporary accounts, was never the same.

Yet the light shows continued. In 1967 the Electric Garden Lightshow used “a twenty channel dimmer board, three 16mm film projectors, twelve automatic dry slide projectors, two liquid slide projectors, two overhead projectors.”(Pooterland website, www.pooterland.com/index2/lightshows). Across England, light shows including Five Acre Lights, the Amoeba Lightshow, Krishna Lights and the Crystalleum Lightshow, amongst others, projected light shows using Rank Tutor overhead projectors, to which they attached glass clockface bowls, into which liquid oil was poured and heated until it ‘boiled’. Spinning colour wheels were placed in front of the projector lens, tinting the liquid as it roiled across the glass. The Amoeba Lightshow placed coloured inks between glass biological slides and boiled them. The Crystalleum Light Show added clips from films, including a solarised section of ‘Girl on a Motorcycle’, starring Marianne Faithfull.

At the UFO and other venues, the band Soft Machine was accompanied by psychedelic projections by Mark Boyle, who had presented his first projective performance ‘Son et Lumiere for Earth, Air, Fire and Water’ at the Bluecoat Art Centre in Liverpool, and at the Cochrane Theatre earlier that year. Using overhead projectors, Boyle created liquid chemical reactions corresponding to each of the four elements, whose spiritual connotations with the Tibetan Book of the Dead meshed with Boyle’s interest in the associative sculptural properties of liquid forms. “Earth: Crystallisation. Corrosion… Air: project movement of air through the liquids… Evaporation. Fire: Burn various types of plastic in the projector.. Water: project melting ice, convection, boiling water.” ( J.L. Locher, Mark Boyle’s Journey to the Surface of the Earth, Son et Lumiere for Earth, Air, Fire and Water. www.boylefamily.co.uk/boyle/texts/journey2).

Boyle’s projective performances, first overlaid with his own soundtracks and then performed with Soft Machine, differed from American light shows in that each image was formed by a physical destruction of liquid material within the projector. Although many light show artists ‘boiled’ liquids in the Rank Tutor overhead projectors, Boyle burnt, iced and steamed the projected matter, which included bodily fluids. The destructiveness of his technique, and the corporeality of his materials, pulled the light show away from spiritual metaphor towards a sense of physical presence.

The organic, erosive materiality of Boyle’s light show projections was paralleled in Gustav Metzger’s event ‘Notes on the Chemical Revolution in Art’, organised by Boyle at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, in 1965, in which Metzger back-projected liquid slide projections onto three screens. He went on to develop what he termed ‘liquid crystal projections’, in which “thin glass slides containing liquid crystal are heated and inserted into projectors with a polarized filter placed over the lens. The resulting image is projected onto a screen. As the crystals cool, they…gradually become awash with every colour from the spectrum – from green to yellow, purple, red, blue and pink – transforming into endless and repeatable combinations.” (Astrid Bowron, Gustav Metzger, MOMA Oxford, p.54).

Metzger’s experiments both anticipate the ‘boiling’ of liquids in psychedelic light shows and demonstrate the destructive impulse of Metzger and others that converged in the Destruction in Art symposium in 1966. In the same year, Metzger’s liquid crystal projections were shown first at Better Books and then in conjunction with a concert by the Who, Cream and the Move at the Roundhouse, where a team of people operated twelve projectors.

Metzger and Boyle’s liquid projections differed from the American projective environments in important ways. Unlike America, Britain had no tradition of abstract film, and despite the close links between Britain and India wrought through colonialism, the profound influence of Eastern thought on American culture from the Beats onwards found no parallel in the pragmatic British soul. Spiritual mysticism in Britain was internally generated, from celtic and Christian roots, and articulated through figures such as William Blake.

Whilst the Beat poets were developing a new, mystically-inflected language in San Francisco, the post-war Britain of the 1950s was preoccupied with re-building its cities and recovering from the devastation of war. Furthermore, as Antonio Melechi points out (Psychedelia Britannica: Hallucinogenic Drugs in Britain, Antonio Melechi, ed., Turnaround Press, 1997, p.1-3), the source of literary inspiration in visions and delirious reverie was already well established. The psychedelic adventures of Alice in Wonderland were a fixture of British childhood. Writers such as Coleridge, de Quincey and Lewis Carroll had all explored the unconscious through psychotropic drugs. In 1898 Havelock Ellis reported seeing “images of the kaleidoscope, symmetrical groupings of spiked objects… Then…a vast field of golden jewels, studded with red and green stones, ever-changing…They would spring up into flower shapes beneath my gaze, and then seem to turn into gorgeous butterfly forms or endless folds of glistening, irridescent fibrous wings of wonderful insects.”(Ibid., p.90.)

As Melechi observes, this “preoccupation with the parallel worlds of childhood and dreams..links [their] writings to psychoanalysis, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had begun to colonise these subterranean regions of the unconscious in the name of science.”(Ibid. p.2.). The psychedelic experience of the mid 1960s arguably articulated, in visual terms, the re-surfacing of this nascent intellectual excavation of the unconscious, which had been suspended by the horrors of two world wars, and which, in Britain in particular, was rooted in a kind of regressive childhood innocence.

By the mid 1960s, this excavation was occurring through the influence of Eastern spirituality via the presence in London of Americans such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Trocchi, the filmmaker Barbara Rubin, the debutante and patron Panna Grady, various Radha Krishna Temple devotees, and by American writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Tom Wolfe and Carlos Casteneda. Given this, it was ironic that it was an Englishman, Hollingshead, "the man who turned on the world", (Hollingshead is known as 'The Man Who Turned on the World' from the title of his autobiography.) who had gone to the United States and turned on Timothy Leary via Aldous Huxley, then introduced LSD to Britain when he returned to London in 1966.

And yet, there was still a reluctance fully to embrace the American scene. As International Times editor Tom McGrath wrote, “Some Americans write to say that the International Times has not gone far enough: they point to the psychedelic newspapers exploding in various parts of the States in a riot of Buddhas, Mandalas, LSD-scene news, and all those other groovy images psychedelic drugs have blown out of human consciousness…But this time and place of operations, London 1967, is not ready for a completely flipped-out ‘newspaper’.” (Barry Miles, In the Sixties, Pimlico, 2002, p.141).

Despite this display of British reserve the psychedelic scene continued to grow, peaking on April 29th 1967 in the ’14 Hour Technicolour Dream’ event at Alexandra Palace, the closest event in Britain to Kesey's Trips Festival. Seventy bands and performers, including David Medalla and Yoko Ono, participated.(The event included the first performance of Yoko Ono's 'Cut Piece'.) The title once again demonstrates the importance of colour, the cinema and the unconscious for the psychedelic light show. As one of the ten thousand participants remembers, “Light shows galore lit up every inch of available wall space from a massive light gantry in the centre of the hall. Underground films, notably the horrid ‘Flaming Creatures’, were screened on billowing white sheets taped with electricians’ tape to the scaffolding the Alexandra Palace organ. The centrepiece was a helter skelter, rented for the night, which people clambered to the top of and spiralled down, quite exhilarating on acid.” (Pooters website).

It was inevitable that the intense euphoria that produced the psychedelic events of 1966-1967 would subside. As the British writer and artist Jeff Nuttall wrote at the time, “the mounting figures of psychosis and breakdown… had all gone some way toward creating a public delirium in which dislocation was dislocated, destruction destroyed.”(Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 1968, Delacorte Press, New York, p.212.) Of the psychedelic experience, Hollingshead observed that “this other world is vibrant with strange energy transformations and exists… in another dimension of mind or self….[it] could be experienced as the moment when one…becomes identified…with the limitless mind.”(Michael Hollingshead, The Man who turned on the World, chapter 3, 1973?). Once the dislocation and destruction was complete, the waking dream fragmented into a more dissipated exploration of what that dislocation had unearthed, and how the discovery of the limitless mind could be moved forward. By the end of 1967, the psychedelic revolution was over; but the synaesthetic projective environment that formed its core had re-written the language of film, sound and music, and cleared the way for radically new explorations of the relationship between the eye, the brain, the body, and the conscious and unconscious mind.