Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines a collection of "cybertrance" devices, originating in the 1960s and 1970s.These devices are based on the reappropriation of instruments from the academic world in order to place users in modified states of consciousness.They draw on the heritage of American cybernetics, and its mechanical philosophy, in order to explore what is machinelike in man.Their goal is to create unprecedented forms of experience by coupling body and machine, disturbing one by the other.The analysis focuses on the trajectories of objects, the circulation between theoretical elements from cybernetics and their technological reinterpretation in countercultural circles.Four ranges of devices are examined: the immersive multimedia installations of psychedelic culture, the flicker and its physiological effects, biofeedback devices, and the digital translations, in the world of computing, of these first analogical devices.This article examines a collection of singular artifacts, originating in the 1960s and 1970s, which I call "cybertrance" devices.These devices are based on the reappropriation of instruments from the academic world in order to place users in modified states of consciousness, far from the ordinary mode of wakefulness.All of these inventions draw on the heritage of American cybernetics, and rearticulate the man-machine concept central to it: passing from neo-mechanistic theory to experimentations with coupling and prostheses, and from rational analysis to countercultural mysticism.If these cybertrance devices literally dismantle the man-machine, using technology to disorder the senses, in no way do they seek to abolish what may be machine-like in people so as to restore a hypothetical primacy of nature.These devices use a certain idea of the man-machine, originating in cybernetics, as a resource for imagining how to gain access to unexplored potentialities of bodies, andnew means of perception to be created by coupling people and technologies.If the man-machine
Source: SubStance
Authors: Mathieu Triclot, Charles La Via
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2913373594