Unboxed 2022 is already sending people out of their box - as well as building a “creative commons” out of these inventive commissions
The Unboxed 2022 festival in the UK is something we’re particularly invested in: our co-initiator Pat Kane helped design and develop. the early R&D process of the event.
We are also excited to see how many of these transformative public artworks are so strongly “cosmo-local” in their impact - that is, encompassing a global (indeed sometimes a solar-system) perspective, yet embedded strongly in non-metropolitan local areas.
Some of the reviews of Unboxed’s events are coming in - and this rave review in the Guardian about Dreamachine, the free psychedelic experience with light and sound playing on closed eyes, is gratifying to read:
This is a free trip inside your own head. It’s a 21st-century version – fully credited – of a psychedelic technique patented in the 60s by Brion Gysin, friend and collaborator of Naked Lunch author William Burroughs.
The insight Gysin came up with, while smoking kif in Morocco and popping pills in Paris, is that being exposed to a simple flashing white light while you have your eyes closed can induce intense visual hallucinations. Light flickering at between eight and 13 flashes a second synchronises with the brain’s alpha waves to set off this freaky phenomenon.
So at Woolwich Public Market and three more sites in Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh, in an experience created by a team including Turner winners Assemble and musician Jon Hopkins, you start by filling out a medical form then stow your possessions in a locker and remove your shoes before being led gently in a group into a large circular chamber where you lie back on a comfy recliner with speakers either side of your head. The induction lays on the danger and tension. Can it really live up to this drama?
It can. The pulsing soundtrack starts to get louder as you lie back with eyes closed and the space blackens, which you perceive through your eyelids. Then it begins and I see a great cloud of warm purple expand in front of me, a magenta mist blooming in the void. The speed or brightness of the flashing white lights changes (I assume) and I am dazzled by a sky of bright orange – a marmalade sky. But it is not so much a sky as a wall of colour, electric and dazzling. And inside me.
I say “I” because everybody will have a different experience. Maybe you will see real places, old faces, heaven and hell. In my case it was all deliriously abstract except for one moment when there seemed to be a face at the end of a tunnel of light, but I couldn’t recognise who it might be. At maximum intensity of sound and light, complex crystalline structures like bright white beehives or molecular lattices formed out of nowhere, an architecture of pure light.
It’s a psychedelic experience all right, but done with light flashes instead of chemicals. Maybe this is “an irresponsible use of public money”, as the parliamentary Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has called the Unboxed festival, but it certainly gave me a pleasant Saturday morning. Despite all the health warnings, if you can lie back, relax and open up, this is a sumptuously enjoyable ride.
I just loved it – seeing such majestic beauty and knowing it is all an illusion created by your brain. This makes you wonder what reality is, if we can so easily produce an antidote to it in our heads. If all it takes is a light pulse to make us see infinity, we’re walking William Blake poems.
More here. The other ten projects are listed here.
One insight on the process that Pat gives us is that the rich, collaborative R&D process that birthed these ten initiatives will eventually become a public resource - as Sam Hunt, one of the festival’s programme directors reveals below. The “Creative Commons” is already beginning to be built - with the BBC’s R&D department sharing their creative methods which they applied to the Unboxed process.
To be kept informed of Unboxed events, sign up to the newsletter here.