Cyberia-Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace
Signal Compression and Mind Expansion
The multimedia quality of cyber comic books spills over into cyberian
video production, which has begun to reinterpret its own dynamic in relation
to the fantasy games, novels, and comics. While these media borrow from
video's quick-cut electronic immediacy, videographers now borrow back from
the cyberpunk style and ethics to create a new graphic environment--one
that interacts much more intimately with the viewer's body and
consciousness than does the printed page.
At any Toon Town house event, television monitors throughout the
club flash the computer-generated imagery of Rose X, a company created by
Britt Welin and Ken Adams, a young married couple who moved Petaluma,
California, to be close to their mentor, Terence McKenna. Global Village
enthusiasts, they hope their videos will help to awaken a network of likeminded
people in remote regions throughout the nation. Their vision,
inspired in part by McKenna, is of a psychedelic Cyberia, where techniques of
consciousness, computers, and television co-evolve.
Like McKenna, Ken and Britt believe that psychedelics and human
beings share a morphic, co-evolutionary relationship, but they are quick to
include technology in the organic dance. As they smoke a joint and splice
wires in their garage-studio (where else?), Ken explains the videopsychedelic
"Psychedelic experiences are almost like voices from your dream state.
They call you and they seduce you. People are also constantly seduced by
psychedelic techniques on TV that have to do with fluid editing and
accelerated vision processing. People love that stuff because it strikes them
in a very ancient place, something that spirals back down into the past for
everybody whether or not they're using psychedelics. It's there already.''
Like MTV videos that substitute texture for story and quick cuts for
plot points, Rose X videos work on an almost subliminal level. Meaning is
gleaned from the succession of images more than their linear relationship.
Viewers process information moment to moment, thus the amount
processed increases with the number of cuts, even if the data is less
structured. Rose X takes these techniques a step further by intentionally
appealing to the viewer's ability to experience a kind of morphic resonance
with the patterns and data flashing on the screen. Even their subject matter-
-their most popular videos are talks by Terence McKenna and Ralph
Abraham--is intended to awaken dormant zones of human consciousness.
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