Nomad Codes

culture. Though detailed figures are impossible to come by, it seems that a moderately sized but passionate chunk of Burners amplify their playa escapades with compounds such as LSD, DOB, N2O, DXM4-hydroxy-DMT, or 2C-B. But the psychedelic intensity of the Man does not depend on the morphology or even presence of the “alphabetamines” saturating the cranial fluid of its more sophisticated drug users. It lies instead in the qualities of playa experience itself, especially at night, when lights and spaces take on the character of portals that shuttle your nervous system into a spin cycle of possible worlds. Even those hewing the straight edge launch into their evenings like trippers, packing supplies and opening their psychic gates to a diverse but strangely coherent stream of synchronicities, fractured archetypes, visual phantasmagoria, and unsettling transhistorical implications—the bulk of which will not be recalled the next morning. Wandering the playa in any state, one is simply no longer lord of one’s house.
    In contrast to the self-consciously “spiritual” frameworks that surround, say, the contemporary use of ayahuasca , Burning Man’s psychedelia is raw, lusty, and chaotic. Its cult of intoxicants does not isolate “good” visionary compounds from party drugs. This resistance to explicitly sacred meta-narratives could well be criticized as a dangerous refusal to inculcate the higher, more integral potential of the entheogens. But I suspect that, as with the cult of experience, this refusal simply reflects Burning Man’s spirit of cognitive diversity, one that takes psychedelics not so much seriously as aesthetically. As such, its psychotropic landscape disenchants as much as it enchants, and offers playful tricks and weird science as antidotes to the cosmic revelations that inevitably come. Even here we are reminded that, as Aristotle suggested, there is nothing to learn from the mysteries. For though Burning Man celebrates visionary capacity, it does not deny the peculiar and even garish emptiness of drugs. This void may offer the deepest teaching of all: you can’t really see the patterns until you embrace the nothingness that they etch.

THE CULT OF FLICKER

    In his 1970 media-freak classic, Expanded Cinema , the Los Angeles writer Gene Youngblood defined his era as the “Paleocybernetic Age.” Pumped up on Marshall McLuhan and the cult of experience, Youngblood sensed a new phase of humanity emerging, one that unleashed the liberating power of archaic consciousness into a technological society whose growing understanding of systems—cognitive, technological, anthropological—was laying the groundwork for radical change. Youngblood saw his Paleocybernetic Age reflected in the media experiments he describes in his book, a catalog of underground cinema breakthroughs leading up to and including light shows, installations, and performances. For Youngblood, expanded cinema meant nothing more or less than expanded consciousness, the drive—spiritual as well as technological—to manifest the spectral machinery of mind in the world before our eyes. This is the cult of flicker.
    However you dub the vibe—paleocybernetic, future primitive, or technopagan—West Coast artists have long deployed new visual technologies in the service of trance states far outside (and antecedent to) the official boundaries of modern consciousness. Well before the Prankster Acid Tests and Avalon Ballroom light shows of the ’60s, San Francisco was home to a nuanced and esoteric tradition of expanded cinema that included Harry Smith’s Bop City jazz projections and the profoundly immersive Vortex Concerts staged by Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson at the San Francisco Morrison Planetarium in the late 1950s. During these concerts, Belson, who went on to make sublimely cosmic experimental films like Samadhi and Re-entry , projected largely abstract images through hundreds of projectors, some of which rotated or flickered or zoomed, against the sixty-foot dome of the planetarium. Belson described his Vortex work as “a pure theater appealing directly to the senses.” [9]
    Less visible (but nonetheless present) during the punk era, this Paleocybernetic vibe again rose to prominence in the early 1990s, when the incoming futurism of global rave culture fused with and rekindled California’s penchant for psychedelia. Expanded cinema found its way into the photon jams of local club VJs, especially in the subculture