From Satori to Silicon Valley by Theodore Roszak

Author:Theodore Roszak
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2019-12-26T23:00:00+00:00

The Short Cut to Satori

If we delve a bit deeper into the origins of the counter culture -- back to the late fifties and early sixties -- we find what may be the most significant connection between the reversionary and technophiliac wings of the movement. In the beginning, there was the music -- always the major carrier of the movement: folk, then rock and roll, then rock in all its permutations. Early on, the music, as it was performed in concert and in the new clubs of the period, took on a special mode of presentation. Its power came from electronic amplification; it borrowed from the apparatus. As grungy as the rock audience may have been, it wanted its music explosively amplified and expertly modulated; it wanted to hear the beat through its pores. Acoustic was not enough; the music needed machines. In this form, with nothing added, rock was supposedly sufficient to produce mind blowing results. "By itself," the San Francisco psychedelic philosopher Chester Anderson proclaimed

without the aid of strobe lights, day-glo paints, and other subimaginative copouts, rock engages the entire sensorium, appealing to the intelligence with no interference from the intellect. . . . Rock is a tribal phenomenon and constitutes what may be called a twentieth century magic. . . . Rock is creating the social rituals of the future. (San Francisco Oracle, No. 6, 1967)

But soon enough, the audience wanted even more. It wanted ecstasies for the eye as well as the ear. Hence the light shows that began in San Francisco and, in the course of the middle sixties, rapidly became an adjunct of rock performances across the country.

The first light shows performed in the United States were developed as a fine art at San Francisco State College in the early fifties. In 1952, Professor Seymour Locks staged a highly ambitious three projector show with live music to inaugurate the school's new Creative Arts Building, where a national conference of art educators was being hosted. Locks, together with other members of the San Francisco State Art Department, went on to pioneer a sizeable repertory of liquid projection and colored light techniques through the later fifties. By the start of the next decade, the new art form was being reworked by many hands, but nowhere more daringly than in the San Francisco rock clubs. There the light shows, augmented by strobe lights and phosphorescent colors, were more than an aesthetic medium; they had been seized upon at once as a way of reproducing and/or occasioning psychedelic experience. They were the visual signature of dope. And from the very outset, the premier dope of the era, LSD, was itself a technology, a laboratory product, the result of advanced research at the Swiss pharmaceutical house of Sandoz and Company.

In the early postwar period, LSD and other laboratory hallucinogens belonged to a small, elite public, made up primarily of top-dollar psychiatrists and their high-society clientele. At that time, before LSD had acquired a criminal aura and had been outlawed, mainstream publications like Time and Life were prepared to publicize its many therapeutic benefits.

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