TY - JOUR
AU - Lovell, Jonathan
AB - Abstract This article explores Cerebrum, a hybrid of a nightclub and a gallery, which for a brief moment in the late 1960s, used the combined force of media, performance and architecture to transform a Manhattan storefront into a series of virtual realities. Described as a ‘Psychedelic Playpen’, Cerebrum became—as its name suggests—an environmental model on the contemporary discourse on altered states of consciousness. It provided an eloquent expression of Timothy Leary’s advice on how to conduct a psychedelic trip, and Marshall McLuhan’s prediction that electronic media technologies would return humanity to the playful sensuality of preliterate societies. After being attended by Gene Youngblood and Alvin Toffler, Cerebrum was cited within their respective texts—Expanded Cinema and Future Shock—as evidence within their debate upon whether the pleasure generated by such environments would be used to challenge or consolidate structures of power. The purpose of this article is to elaborate on what constituted a typical night at Cerebrum and evaluate how it contributed to the post-war debate about the psycho-social implications of immersive multimedia environments. Introduction In the quiet of a late autumn night in 1968, a taxi releases a band of young freaks into the deserted streets of Lower Manhattan.1 Worried that they were dumped in the wrong neighbourhood, they search the canyon of empty warehouses for clues of the city’s latest intermedia happening. Pulses of white light from an unsheathed police siren emanate through the glass inserts in a sidewalk, drawing the freaks to a blacked-out storefront, 429 Broome Street, whose door holds a small illuminated buzzer.2 They press it. Without an apparent author to the action, the door opens and closes, swallowing the group into a black anteroom. Confined in shadows, a disembodied voice calls out, ‘Welcome to Cerebrum. Your name, please?’3 Once the reservation is confirmed, these ‘guests’ are collected by a ‘guide’ wearing a white, diaphanous gown, who ushers them into Cerebrum’s interior, a grand hall of white walls, dyed with swirling layers of psychedelic light and sound [1]. Taken down a central runway to one of fourteen platforms, the guides wordlessly instruct their guests to change into the white robes. The clothes blur the boundaries between environment and body, opaque enough to catch the images projected upon them and transparent enough to reveal the naked silhouettes underneath. Finally, the guides offer toys to their guests and encourage them to play along with the scenarios depicted in the multimedia projections.4 Fig 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Guests playing in the psychedelic colour of the multimedia projections. Life, 4 April 1969. Courtesy of © Charles L Moore via Getty Images. Fig 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Guests playing in the psychedelic colour of the multimedia projections. Life, 4 April 1969. Courtesy of © Charles L Moore via Getty Images. Cerebrum eluded easy definition but attracted some colourful attempts, such as ‘Hippie Hippodrome’, ‘kinesthetic [sic] kindergarten’ and ‘psychedelic playpen’.5 Each of these descriptions succinctly capture the two main intentions of the project. The first objective was to environmentally recreate the multisensory experience of a psychedelic trip. According to its creators—Ruffin Cooper Jr., Bobjack Callejo, John Brown and Richard Currie—this meant more than merely providing audio-visual stimulation. It required that everyone participate in tactile activities, whilst the guides filled the hall with aromas and placed edibles into the guest’s mouths. The aim was to create a sensorium—the site in the mind where all sensory stimuli coalesce into a single, synaesthetic impression of the world—thereby creating an environmental model of human perception. This prompted the experimental film theorist Gene Youngblood to conclude that, ‘Cerebrum (the place) exists in cerebrum (the mind)’.6 The idea of a psychedelic trip was enforced by having the multimodal stimuli consolidate into a chain of virtual realities that transported its passengers from one setting to another. To this end, Sylvana Foa, a guide and student journalist, advised that, ‘Taking a Trip? Fly Cerebrum’.7 The second objective was to create a site for play. Throughout the performance, the guides brought out new toys and initiated activities that encouraged the guests to participate in the changing scenarios presented within Cerebrum. Ruffin, the 24 year old who owned the club, wanted Cerebrum to be a place for ‘freedom—to do anything you want or play at being anyone you want’.8 Beyond being mere entertainment, games of role-playing and sensory manipulation are proxies for ritual phenomena, in that they can deconstruct and reconstruct the social and sensual patterns of profane experience, allowing the self to create and connect with some sacred other. Writing for The New York Times, Dan Sullivan said that, ‘Clearly the place speaks to the ancient human desire to shed the burden of consciousness, to plug into some warm large Other, to regain the indiscriminate bliss of babyhood’.9 Here, the reconstructed self was the rediscovered child, and the innocence by which they connect with people and places as potential sources of play. Like much of the counterculture, Cerebrum’s veneration of childhood and play served as a powerful reaction against the alienation that adult systems imposed on the lives of its subjects.10 Through psychedelia and play, Cerebrum sought to make its patrons whole. In doing so, it provided an environmental model of the contemporary understanding of how phenomenological processes could engender alternative modes of psychology and sociology. Specifically, Cerebrum reflects Timothy Leary’s belief that psychedelic drugs could uncover the creative core of our being, and Marshall McLuhan’s theories on how electronic media technologies would recalibrate our modes of perception, physiology and psychology to that of synaesthetic playfulness.11 Extrapolating upon this discourse, Youngblood called for an Expanded Cinema that used media, performance and architecture to evoke an expanded consciousness.12 Conversely, the futurist Alvin Toffler warned that so-called psychological corporations would use these simulated environments as forms of mind control.13 Similarly, members of the established and underground press concurred in their description that Cerebrum served as a prototype of an imminent future, flush with ‘pleasure-domes’.14 Although the specific rhetoric is different to the language we use today, their visions of mediated spaces of play resonate with current expectations for virtual and augmented reality. The purpose of this article is to re-evaluate Cerebrum’s position within these predictions. Recent scholarship has begun to respond to this task by including brief accounts on Cerebrum’s contribution to the post-war efforts to create immersive multimedia environments. In his book, Spaced Out, Alastair Gordon positions Cerebrum within the intersection of two traditions.15 The first came from the countercultural ambition to use immersive theatres filled with multiple streams of imagery as pedagogic and psychedelic devices for restructuring mental processes, such as Kenneth Isaacs’ Knowledge Box, where twenty-four slide projectors were methodically aimed at the six interior faces of a 12-foot cube, or Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome, where audio-visual stimuli raced along the interior of a 31-foot high dome. The second came when commercial interests sought to transform these experiments into discotheques, such as The World and The Electric Circus. Following on from this concern with nightclubs, Night Fever—edited by Mateo Kries, Jochen Eisenbrand and Catharine Rossi—includes a small profile of Cerebrum and an interview with its architect, John Storyk.16 Here, Cerebrum and its contemporaries are used to substantiate the larger argument that describes nightclubs as a form of Gesamtkunstwerk, whose totality relies on the triple technologies of architectural design, electronic multimedia and psychoactive drugs.17 These technologies implicate the environment and body within the same field of affects, and thereby create sites where our notions of reality and identity are open to being reconstructed. This article elaborates upon the specific ways that Cerebrum contributed to this discourse by providing a detailed historical and theoretical account on its motivations, design and position within the broader debates of the post-war period. A new form of environmental entertainment In 1970, the seminal works of Youngblood and Toffler—Expanded Cinema and Future Shock—reported on their author’s encounter with Cerebrum. Extrapolating on their experiences, they shared a vision of a future where media environments were explicitly designed to manipulate the psychological states of their patrons, although they disagreed on what would be the motivating agendas behind such places. Youngblood emphasized the transcendental potential of such environments, in that they promised, ‘another path in man’s [sic] ancient search for himself’, whereas Toffler anticipated their commercial applications, writing that Cerebrum was ‘performing research and development for the psych-corps [psychological corporations] of tomorrow’.18 Whilst both interpretations have merit, they must be checked against the creator’s intentions for their project. Cerebrum was conceived as merely the middle phase within a larger creative project to develop new forms of environmental entertainment. Three years earlier, in a Manhattan apartment thick with marijuana smoke, four young men from the theatre—Ruffin Cooper Jr. (talent agent), Bobjack Callejo (stage designer), John Brown (sound designer) and Richard Currie (lighting designer)—discovered the formula for Cerebrum: psychedelia and play. Under the influence, they improvised their own intermedia happenings, by experimenting with light and sound projections, dressing up and playing with found objects.19 Soon, they expanded these experiences by hosting loft parties, and by April 1968, they created their most ambitious project to date. Joined by David Randolph, the founding four became Ruffin’s New World Sound Machine (NWSM), and performed at a Teen Fun Fair in Omaha, Nebraska.20 Despite calling themselves a ‘band’, nobody could play an instrument or sing, but they created a ‘psychedelic sound’ by distorting the playback on their vinyl records and overlaying it with the noises from an album of sound effects. A cacophony of bongos, tambourines, whistles and toy crickets completed the aural atmosphere. Complementing the soundscape, newscasts and commercials competed with the chaos created by strobe lights and bubble machines. Every night the NWSM used the reverse setting of a vacuum cleaner to inflate a military surplus weather balloon, which they released into the audience, so that they could aim their projectors at the spherical screen above the crowd. Later, this activity would become a defining feature of Cerebrum. At this event, the greater vision for a new form of environmental entertainment became apparent, with Ruffin stating: We are trying to open up the people…to create an environment by which they (the audience) can open up and be free…We think it’s very dull and boring for people to stand and watch a show…The new kind of entertainment is to involve the audience.21 Upon returning to New York, the group dropped the pretence of being a band and reformatted their performance into an immersive environment that would dissolve the distinctions between the stage and auditorium; spectacle and audience. With an $8,000 loan from Ruffin’s banker father, they rented the ground floor of a narrow building on Broome Street.22 The NWSM rebranded themselves as ‘Ruffin Associates Absolutely Unlimited, Ltd.’, a name that juxtaposed corporate formality with countercultural frivolity.23 By August, they had placed an advertisement in the Village Voice, calling for ‘supergirls’ and ‘turned on guys’ to volunteer their skills to build and run a new nightclub.24 John Storyk, a recent architecture graduate from Princeton, was one of those that responded to the advertisement, where he secured a meeting with Ruffin and Callejo, who explained their ambitions with a model in a shoebox.25 Storyk fleshed out the design and helped with its construction. The club opened on 10 November 1968. In a press release, Ruffin described Cerebrum as: An electronic studio of participation equipped with audio, visual and tactile elements designed to involve and be controlled by its participants. A place to play and explore, where conventional entertainment structures (sit there…look that way…dance over there) have been rejected for an atmosphere that permits sensual and creative freedom on the part of the participants. Male and female Guides provide for the comfort and security of the participants in this unique environment and offer any necessary instruction in the operation of the equipment. It is hoped that new methods of using the equipment will continually be explored by the participants.26 Throughout these early months, the founding four consistently engaged with the reciprocal relationship between psychedelia and play. Psychotropic drugs altered the creator’s phenomenological relation to their environment, encouraging them to reimagine ordinary objects as aesthetic experiences, and thereby repackage play in terms of an ‘electronic studio of participation’. In turn, the swirl of multisensory activity reinforced their drug-induced synaesthesia, creating a positive feedback loop that spiralled towards a transcendental union between environmental and embodied experience. Commenting on how drugs drove their intentions for Cerebrum, Currie stated, ‘It was meant to feel druggy. We had created this whilst we were smoking pot and that is where a lot of the ideas come from’.27 At this point, it must be noted that neither the drive towards psychedelia or play was made in reference to external discourse. Although their statements on ‘electronic’ and ‘participation’ mirrored McLuhan’s theories on the involving sociology of new media, and the reviews that categorized Cerebrum as ‘McLuhansville’, there is no documented evidence to suggest that the media theorist was a major source of inspiration to the creators.28 Here, Cerebrum stood against some of the more prominent members of the Expanded Cinema movement, especially USCO—an artist collective led by Gerd Stern, Michael Callahan and Steve Durkee—whose artworks often accompanied the lectures given by McLuhan and Leary.29 Even Andy Warhol, who rarely revealed his intentions, is rumoured to have called McLuhan an ‘honorary muse’.30 If true, this reference was reciprocated by McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage, which contains a double-page photo of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable—a happening that occupied 19–25 St. Marks Place before The Electric Circus—as an example of how multimedia would bombard our perceptual, physiological and psychological systems.31 Conversely, Cerebrum’s involvement with these theories stemmed from an innocent exploration with the embodied experiences of drugs, games, media and performance art, all of which were consistently framed as creating a new form of entertainment. Still, it is through this assemblage of interests that Cerebrum became embroiled within the debates between Youngblood and Toffler. As such, any examination on Cerebrum’s relation to theory must shift from a tracing a lineage of direct influences, to mapping out zones where it—autonomous from scholarly reference—provided near-perfect representations of schemas that treated psychedelia, play and electronic participation as synonymous subject matter. The environments of the mind Cerebrum’s allusions to alternate worlds began before people entered the main hall. The act of being anonymously beckoned through hidden doors reminded some reviewers of speakeasies.32 After the patrons responded to the disembodied calls for a reservation in the anteroom, a door on the left wall slid open, offering passage to the ‘Orientation Room’.33 The small space was lit by a colour television inserted face-down into the ceiling, tuned to ‘coloured snow’.34 In this strange static, a receptionist asked for an envelope containing the exact fee of admission; the only time money was exchanged throughout the night. Each evening hosted two, three-hour sessions, commencing at 8 and 11.30 pm. The cost of admission changed every night, starting at $3 for Sunday sessions, with an additional $3 being charged each subsequent night, peaking at $21 on Saturdays.35 In contrast, the price of a movie ticket in the late sixties was approximately $1.50. Such discrepancies encouraged different types of people to attend each night. The freaks arrived early in the week, and were gradually displaced by wealthier New Yorkers on the Fridays and Saturdays.36 After this exchange, a guide dressed in a diaphanous gown collected the participants, and brought them up a ramp into a large hall, approximately 67 × 22 feet, and rising 13 feet in height [2].37 Called ‘The Screen’, this hall was completely white in anticipation for the cinematic projections to be cast upon it. The floor consisted of a carpeted deck elevated 2 feet above the original floor level, etched with black trenches that carved out fourteen 7 × 7 foot platforms shooting either side of a central 3 foot runway. Each platform hosted four guests, allowing a maximum patronage of fifty-six patrons per session. Fig 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Floor Plan for Cerebrum designed by John Storyk 1968, Courtesy of John Storyk’s personal collection. Fig 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Floor Plan for Cerebrum designed by John Storyk 1968, Courtesy of John Storyk’s personal collection. On the short walls, two booths housed 16- and 35-mm film projectors, carousel slide projectors, overhead projectors for liquid light shows, and airport ultraviolet floodlights. Additional stages lighting and bubble machines were rigged on a pipe running along the centre of the ceiling.38 The booths also contained three turntables, two reel-to-reel tape players and a microphone, which could be broadcast to the hall or channelled into the headphone jacks that dotted each platform. Upon arriving at their platforms, the guides presented white gowns to the guests, before miming the actions of putting them on and removing some of their street clothes. The robes were a large poncho-style sheet of a translucent material called Stevetex, sewn between the arm and leg to create a more secure fit.39 Those who worked at Cerebrum listed three ways that these simple robes contributed to the performance. The first purpose of the gowns was to continue the white environment onto the guest’s bodies, so that they became a screen for cinematic light, with the former staff explaining that, ‘everything was white’ and ‘everything was a projection surface’.40 Many projects within the Expanded Cinema movement sought to expand the scope of cinematic projections beyond a singular screen and cover an architectural interior. To create a perfect diagram of the immersive ideal, these efforts often expanded their projections to cover a dome or spherical theatre, such as those employed by Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson’s Vortex Concerts, Milton Cohen’s Space Theatre and VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome.41 Cerebrum’s unique contribution to the immersive ideal was not achieved by spherically surrounding its audience in mediated phenomena, but in how it suffused them by projecting it on their skin. This makes Cerebrum one of the most eloquent examples of how visual stimuli can be made to adopt the immersive properties of acoustic phenomena, which, by virtue of vibrating through air and flesh, evokes a more immediate and intimate relationship between environmental and embodied experiences. The sound technician, Rod Grady, described the degree to which the participants were conceived as an extension of a media environment, stating, ‘We were trying to make them the stage’.42 Second, the light material and loose cuts of this ‘silken envelope’ sought to enhance the sensual experience of its wearer by exaggerating their movements and having gusts of air brush against their bare skin.43 Although Cerebrum prohibited full nudity, the translucent robe seemed to disappear when backlit, revealing the silhouettes of the bodies underneath. Such effects cast an ambiguous cloud over the creator’s intentions of emphasizing innocent sensuality over posturing sexuality. Youngblood described Cerebrum as a place where people were simultaneously a voyeur and exhibitionist, while an anonymous profile in the Village Voice said that, ‘Being able to see all of each other’s bodies creates a nice kind of erotic tension’.44 Such themes were brought to the fore in ‘Sex, Shock and Sensuality’, an article written by Joan Barthel for Life magazine, which featured a full-page image of a nude silhouette of a dancing female, taken by renowned civil rights photographer, Charles Lee Moore [3].45 Fig 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Translucent Gown showing Female Silhouette, Life, 4 April 1969. Courtesy of © Charles L Moore via Getty Images. Fig 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Translucent Gown showing Female Silhouette, Life, 4 April 1969. Courtesy of © Charles L Moore via Getty Images. Finally, these gowns served as a ‘levelling device’ that encouraged everyone to shed their identities and inhibitions, preparing them for collective play.46 From this blank slate, the creators’ wanted the guests to look at each other without the biological or social identifiers that might rank one over another, allowing them to encounter their shared humanity, the way that a child might look for new friends. Here, the guests were to discover new versions of themselves through role-playing in shared virtual realities, thereby transcending their ordinary existence. For Youngblood, this device dissolved gender differences, inspiring a ‘unisex effect’ where ‘one is both male and female’.47 Ruffin described the gown as transforming the audience into participants, stating, ‘When you take your clothes off you can be anything you want, there are no signs of the outside world. Then you can cross over the sit-there-and-watch barrier and begin to interact and experience’.48 Once dressed, the guides taught the guests how to operate the headphones that emerged from each platform, and distributed toys that allowed them to contribute to the multimedia mix. These toys included Anscomatic hand-held slide projectors, view-masters, mirrors, crystals and illuminated spheres, made by inserting lights within a coffee can and plastic ball [4].49 Upon witnessing these guides tending to guests, who bowed to contemplate the music stream into their ears, Alex Gross of the East Village Other imagined Cerebrum as creating new electronic rites in ‘McLuhan’s Geisha House’, a declaration that echoed in subsequent reviews of the club [5].50 Later, koto music played as the guests broke bread and drank from a collective goblet of water, ‘served rather sacramentally’, which only reinforced the reference.51 With everything in place, Cerebrum began transporting its guests across a series of twenty-minute environments. To construct these scenarios, the booths superimposed the footage from newscasts, commercials, travelogues, cartoons and educational films, with the abstract patterns emanating from theatrical lighting gels, liquid light shows and celluloid strips marbled with paint.52 Similarly, the aural atmosphere blended pop music, sound effects and spoken word, which were bifurcated to play either in the hall or through the headphones, creating multiple statements on a theme. The guides provided the tactile, olfactory and gustatory sensations required to complete the synaesthetic environment. Fig 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Guests enjoying a Light Sphere. Life, 4 April 1969. Courtesy of © Charles L Moore via Getty Images. Fig 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Guests enjoying a Light Sphere. Life, 4 April 1969. Courtesy of © Charles L Moore via Getty Images. Fig 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Guests sitting at the platforms, Courtesy of © John V Veltri, www.earthalive.com. Fig 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Guests sitting at the platforms, Courtesy of © John V Veltri, www.earthalive.com. During a particularly memorable environment, Cerebrum presented the theme of strawberries in ways that indulged all sensory faculties.53 The Mellotron flutes of Strawberry Fields Forever pulsed through the room as images of the fruit were cast on the screen. On the floor, guides walked down the runway, either spraying strawberry-scented perfume from aerosol canisters, or feeding strawberry-flavoured ice cubes directly into the guest’s mouths, adding a tactile element to the total experience. In another iteration, the screen took its guests to America’s National Parks by using slides scavenged from souvenir shops, paired with the canned aroma of soil and pine trees.54 These moves towards synaesthesia place Cerebrum in parallel with McLuhan’s thoughts on play and Youngblood’s calls for psychedelia. For McLuhan, synaesthesia was synonymous with the theories of St Aquinas and Aristotle, who argued that humans possessed a ‘common sense’, a point-of-contact, where all sensory information coalesce and construct a unified impression of the world.55 For this to occur, McLuhan and his precursors believed that all sensory modes were translated into one format—touch—writing, ‘It begins to be evident that “touch” is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and “keeping in touch” or “getting in touch” is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses…’.56 For McLuhan, touch served as the basic unit of all sensory information because it was the most immediate to our physiological and psychological experiences, approximating the electrical bursts that occur within the nervous system. According to McLuhan’s history of the senses, preliterate cultures were instinctually in-tune with this synthesis, until the invention of the printed word fractured this sensual marriage by elevating vision—and its disposition of a phenomenological and epistemological detachment—as the hegemonic force by which we relate to the world, creating our worldview. McLuhan couples this distinction between holistic and hierarchical modes of sensuality with the differences between play and work, stating, ‘At play man [sic] uses all his faculties; at work he specialises’.57 Here, McLuhan joins a chorus of social theorists—such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim—who argued that the alienation experienced within modern societies emerges from the segmented, sequential and specialized quality of the industrial division of labour, but diverges from his predecessors by stating that the historical rise of these feelings are primarily driven by apolitical forces.58 Whereas his predecessors argued that the rise of alienation is perpetuated by the political-economies brought about by industrial machines and the changing means of production, McLuhan insisted that they emerged from the phenomenological-epistemological conditions encouraged by new media technologies recalibrating our means of perception. To this point, McLuhan’s end-of-history is not achieved with the triumph of pure capitalism or communism, but with electronic multimedia returning our divided sensory systems to the common sense of a synaesthetic-tactile play, writing, ‘When all our senses are globally enveloping all our senses, you have an archetyped game or play situation which ensures for the whole of mankind [sic] the utmost possibilities of creativity…’59 Such statements were aligned with the counterculture’s admiration of the authenticity of childhood, and Cerebrum appeared to be on the vanguard of that veneration, with Gross proclaiming that this ‘McLuhanist playground’ is ‘potentially American’s finest contribution to civilisation so far’.60 Echoing McLuhan’s belief that touch served as the common sense, Youngblood often described his psychedelic brand of Expanded Cinema as ‘kinaesthetic cinema’ and ‘synaesthetic cinema’.61 Because of these qualities, Youngblood claimed that Expanded Cinema was the ‘only aesthetic language suited to the post-industrial, post-literate man-made environment’.62 Only it could speak to the ‘inarticulate conscious’, a term Youngblood borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein to describe, ‘the domain between the subconscious and the conscious that can’t be expressed in words but of which we constantly are aware’.63 Traditional cinema could not reach this non-verbal realm because it was still tied to the linearity of literary exposition, whose strings of given meaning did not challenge the audience to exercise their whole consciousness. For Youngblood, ‘synaesthesia and psychedelia mean approximately the same thing’, and as such, only a cinematic form that emulated the language of the common sense could uncover the hidden bridges to the core of our consciousness.64 Cerebrum achieved the synaesthetic and kinaesthetic ambitions of this form of Expanded Cinema. It used media, performance and architecture to generate a total environment of events, which surrounded and suffused through the entire sensory field of its audience. In turn, this encouraged the audience to intuitively contribute to the artistic happenings, thereby creating an immediate and intimate relation between phenomenological and epistemological processes. For Youngblood, Cerebrum was a conduit to the cerebrum. In their own words, the creators described Cerebrum as, ‘A new form of communication’, exemplifying McLuhan and Youngblood’s predictions on how media environments will shift humanity away from verbal communication to a new synaesthetic-tactile reality.65 Out of all the projects cited within Expanded Cinema, Cerebrum was arguably the one that most thoroughly explored tactile experience. Beyond having toys and tastes delivered through interpersonal contact, the guides also anointed the guest’s foreheads with skin-tingling balm, like a buzzing bindi on the mind’s eye, producing what Youngblood called an ‘ethereal, gentle, transcendental effect’.66 Similarly, the guides gathered the guest’s hands together and covered them with lotion, so that fingers could slither among ‘anonymous flesh’.67 The experience was escalated by having the guests lay down and do the same with lubricated toes. Despite its comparison to a nightclub, Cerebrum did not want to numb these sensations by serving alcohol. Taking drugs was also prohibited, for purely legal reasons, with the assumption being that guests would arrive at the club already high. For another set-piece, fog billowed from beneath the platforms, filling the hall, before being dyed yellow by the stage lights. ‘It was like heaven’, Currie recalled, with angelic beings in golden robes, drifting through sun-drenched clouds.68 Soon, the glow dimmed to darkness, so that a focused beam could be shot at a mirror-ball and ricochet into ‘needles of light’ that ‘cut through the fog like electrons in a cloud chamber’.69 The fog contained other surprises. When describing how the guests occasionally transgressed from the sensual to the sexual, Currie recalled that, ‘Several people said that it always looks like it was going to become an orgy at any moment. And sometimes after the fog would clear, we’d have to stop couples from fucking. They were sitting together with their robes over each other’.70 After the fog dissipated, a military parachute was unfurled on the floor. Half the guests lay beneath the canopy, whilst the other half held its circumference, raising and lowering the parachute to generate bursts of air that rushed under their robes, against their skin, and occasionally creating flourishes of nudity. Flashes of coloured light transformed the parachute into something like a circus tent, whilst the whistling tune of calliope music filled the room. These events were used for a murder scene in the 1970 Italian crime thriller, Colpo Rovente.71 Towards the end of each session, Cerebrum reprised the weather balloon experience first used at the NWSM [6]. Inflated to 8 feet in diameter and released into the hall, the balloon served as a screen for ultraviolet light, creating a ‘luminescent sphere’ over the crowd.72 Occasionally, the fog machines were reactivated, creating a dense purple haze that concealed the balloon up until the moment it collided with an unsuspecting guest.73 On some nights, the balloon deflated slowly, and on others, guides used pins to make it explode. Fig 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Guests sitting and bouncing a large weather balloon. Courtesy of © John V Veltri, www.earthalive.com. Fig 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Guests sitting and bouncing a large weather balloon. Courtesy of © John V Veltri, www.earthalive.com. Every session concluded with the song, If We Only Have Love, from the recent musical, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.74 With lyrics such as ‘If we only have love; With our arms open wide; Then the young and the old; Will stand at our side’, this song was a rare moment in which Cerebrum channelled its visceral experiences into a verbal expression of collective love.75 In total, the purpose of this environmental and embodied communication was to imitate and intensify the phenomenological and epistemological experiences of taking psychoactive drugs, which Newsweek described as, ‘In its non-verbal ambush on the senses, Cerebrum was obviously aimed at the turned-on generation’.76 To this task, many of the design decisions made at Cerebrum adhered to the advice given by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert in their book, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.77 For instance, The Psychedelic Experience argued that the environmental conditions in which a participant took drugs affected the quality of a psychedelic trip, writing: The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting. Set denotes the preparation of the individual, including his [sic] personality structure and his mood at the time. Setting is physical—the weather, the room’s atmosphere; social—feelings of persons present towards one another; and cultural—prevailing views as to what is real.78 Although confined to just one hall, Cerebrum still provided a vehicle for a psychedelic trip, in that it used multimedia to create virtual realities that transported its guests from one setting to another. Following such metaphors of vehicular transport, Jim Fouratt, writing for Eye magazine, described Cerebrum as a ‘Post-2001 Playroom’, thereby conflating the journeys of inner and outer space.79 Furthermore, the practice of having ‘guides’ followed the travel advice of The Psychedelic Experience, which recommended that the consumption of psychoactive drugs should be monitored by an experienced tripper. Leary compared the role of the guide to that of a navigation team, writing that, ‘He [sic] is the ground control in the airport tower. Always there to receive messages and queries from high-flying aircraft. Always ready to help their course, to help them reach their destination’.80 Here, Cerebrum aimed to make gentle journeys, qualifying it as a ‘downy mattress of the mind’.81 Finally, Cerebrum followed The Psychedelic Experience’s advice against verbal communication, with the guests and guides interacting through ‘wordless gestures’.82 One guide, Franne Lee, recalls that Ruffin made this decision so that words did not interrupt or intellectualize that which should be experienced viscerally.83 Similarly, The Psychedelic Experience argued that a participant should, ‘Avoid thinking, talking, and doing’.84 Cerebrum followed the recommendations against thinking and talking, but ignored the injunctions against doing, because the creator’s personal experience with marijuana taught them that psychedelia flowed into play. Despite these similarities, there is no direct evidence that the creators of Cerebrum shaped their designs according to McLuhan or Leary’s theories. Instead, Cerebrum emerged from a psychedelic and playful interpretation of found objects into aesthetic experiences. Police sirens became beacons for a countercultural speakeasy. Military parachutes tickled their guests with wind. However, the most radical act of merging life and art came from how Cerebrum was imagined as a device for transforming people into the work-of-art, with Ruffin stating, ‘The concept was that people were not coming to watch a show or listen to a concert, but that they, themselves, were the entertainment’.85 Despite all the set-pieces, Cerebrum did not commit to a script. It was open to respond to the mood of the room. For instance, on one night, as the weather balloon floated around the hall, Currie saw that one stoned patron was still listening to the headphones and used the microphone to create a surrogate for his internal monologue, ‘Oh look at this balloon. Look at how big it is. Let’s go near the balloon. Let’s reach out. Feel how big it is getting’.86 With the microphone still hot, Currie boasted to a colleague that he was controlling someone’s thoughts and actions, convincing the guest that his inner voice had grown treacherous, causing him to rip off the headphones. It is in these unrepeatable moments, Cerebrum unveiled the deep reflexivity between environmental settings and psychological sets. Consequently, any account of Cerebrum will ultimately fall short of capturing the variations that emerged and evaporated at the point of its performance. Contested predictions on a psychological future From its inception, Cerebrum was imagined as a prototype for a larger creative venture, which would translate its virtual facsimiles into architectural realities, consolidated within a ‘$25 million “super” Environmental Entertainment Complex’.87 As far back as the NWSM, Ruffin envisaged that this complex would combine restaurants, cocktail lounges, dance halls, swimming pools, ice skating rings, fun-houses and arcades.88 Currie recalls how one iteration of this vision would see them ‘buy the Empire State Building, starting at the top and working our way down, painting each floor pink as Ruffin Associates took over…so that people would see our progress’.89 Such grand ambitions required further prototypes. In a prospectus given to potential investors, Ruffin promised the more immediate goal of producing ‘an inflatable environmental entertainment which will tour this country and abroad. It will be our second World III Entertainment’, sold on the assumption that marijuana would soon be legalized and that college campuses would demand freak-out rooms.90 None of these plans came to fruition. In the summer of 1969, the founding four took their leave on a Connecticut beach and discussed the future of Cerebrum.91 After performing the same set for nine months, they had lost the playful impulse of their early endeavours, and realized they had become a business, destined for deficit. In only selling an experience, their maximum income was limited to the price of admitting the 112 guests that they could host each night, totalling to $336 on Sundays and $2,352 on Saturdays. From that paltry income, Cerebrum had to pay the approximately twenty staff members who worked the floor and manually operated the equipment in the booths, and as such, their wages were meagre.92 Ultimately, the summer heat and their inability to afford an air-conditioner provided the definitive case for closing the club. When talking to the press, Ruffin described the conditions upon which his father had lent him the money for Cerebrum, stating, ‘The deal is, if the place folds I cut my hair and get a straight job’.93 This deal was not honoured. In the following years, Ruffin attended Woodstock, lived on the Hog Farm Commune, travelled with the Medicine Ball Caravan, before settling in San Francisco.94 When his brother died in the Vietnam War, Ruffin inherited his camera and became a photographer, known for his large prints on the small details of American monuments, such as the Statue of Liberty and Golden Gate Bridge. As for the others, their futures were formed by the connections they established at Cerebrum. At a party, Callejo and Currie joined the queer-surrealist troupe, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, after its director, Charles Ludlam, told them that he was a regular at the club.95 Storyk’s career as a renowned architectural-acoustician began when Jimi Hendrix visited Cerebrum and told his manager, Michael Jeffrey, to find the person who designed it.96 Jeffrey called Storyk, explaining that Hendrix had recently purchased the Generation Club, situated in the basement of Frederick Kiesler’s Eighth Street Playhouse, and wanted it redesigned in the vein of Cerebrum. Just as Storyk had completed some preliminary sketches, Hendrix’s recording engineer, Eddie Kramer, had convinced his client to turn the club into his personal studio, Electric Lady studios. Storyk held the commission, completing the studio in August 1970, a mere month before Hendrix passed away. By the turn of the decade, everyone involved with Cerebrum had moved on, except for the theorists, who saw it as predicting future methods of mind alteration. Youngblood argued that the psychological power of Cerebrum emerged from its combination of performance and therapy, writing, ‘People began to act out their fantasies, get into their own realities, performing anonymous little psychodramas’.97 For Youngblood, these fantasies were not mere entertainment, but served as a means by which the guests could shed the burden of ordinary existence and reveal their true selves. Predicting a future lavished with similar environments, Youngblood saw Cerebrum as ushering in a State of ‘Eupsychia’ (good-soul), a term borrowed from positive-psychologist Abraham Maslow to describe a ‘psychological Utopia in which all men [sic] are psychologically healthy’.98 Extrapolating beyond Maslow’s definition, Youngblood believed that Eupsychia called for the ‘liberation and satisfaction of inner drives as prerequisite to any effective reorganisation of the exterior social order’.99 Sensuality and sexuality were the best means to challenge bourgeois systems of control, and usher in a countercultural utopia. Other assessments on the future applications of environments like Cerebrum were more problematic. Jerry Avorn, of the Columbian Daily Spectator, compared Cerebrum to a ‘pleasure-dome’, before speculating upon the potential ubiquity of such places, writing, ‘One can perhaps foresee the day in which a total, controlled cerebral environment will be within the reach of everyone out for Experience’.100 Sullivan, repeated the metaphor when he asked, ‘who can tell what pleasure domes Cerebrum may inspire, or the political effects of such palaces (see Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’) when run by the wrong people?’101 Toffler raised similar concerns on the political uses of such pleasure palaces, stating that its creators were conducting ‘research and development’ for corporations that would manipulate our perceptual, physiological and psychological systems as a part of the experience economy.102 Inspired by Kraft-Ebing and the Marquis de Sade, Toffler predicted that these corporations would blur the boundaries between pleasure and pain in these environments, as a means of behaviourally conditioning their clients. Finally, Toffler wrote of the phenomenological and epistemological implications of these arrangements, writing, ‘If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and simulated, if whole stretched of one’s life may be commercially programmed’, then our understanding of ‘rationality and sanity’ will become subject to control. Where Youngblood saw Cerebrum as a method of self-actualization, Toffler warned of being deceived by others. In this way, Cerebrum found itself within the larger ambitions and anxieties of the post-war period. To borrow the terminology employed by the social theorist Stuart Hall, the ‘hippies’ believed that new media technologies would usher in a utopia that was personal, not political, and thereby provided a countercultural alternative to the ideological tensions of the Cold War.103 Conversely, the ‘activists’ argued that such insidious instruments were primed to benefit authoritarian actors. A microcosm of these debates is found within Felicity Scott’s book Architecture and Techno-utopia, which features a chapter on the counterculture’s use of Expanded Cinema as a means of enhancing or recreating a psychedelic trip. With reference to Jonas Mekas—who popularized the term Expanded Cinema five years before Youngblood used it in his manifesto—Scott makes a critical distinction between the immersive multimedia environments created by USCO and Warhol. The former designed meditative shrines that sought to dissolve the ego, while the latter devised nightclubs that were dominated by its posturing.104 Other reviewers agreed that Warhol did not seek to gently dissolve the ego, but only so they may accuse him of violently destroying it, such as Michaela Williams, who wrote that Exploding Plastic Inevitable was an ‘assemblage that actually vibrates with menace, cynicism and perversion. To experience it was to be brutalized, helpless’.105 The scholarship of Branden Joseph, Jane Pavitt and David Crowley argue that much of these concerns came from the films presented at the club, such as Vinyl (1965), which reimagined the brainwashing scenes within Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) as a celebration of amphetamine-fuelled sadomasochism.106 The artistic tradition of Burgess and Warhol had precedent in the torture devices employed throughout the Cold War. Here, Pavitt and Crowley recall the story of Lajos Ruff, an anti-communist activist who had written an account of the ‘brainwashing machine’ used by the Hungarian secret police in the 1950s.107 Locked in a room of blank walls and transparent furniture, prisoners were surrounded by a constant stream of absurd or erotic films, many of them recorded within the cell itself. To further erode their notions of simulation and reality, the torturers drugged their prisoners and addressed them as if they had participated in these films. Although Cerebrum was geared towards a radically different purpose—a voluntary space of gentle sensuality—it still utilized many of the same environmental and embodied strategies as these more domineering mergers of multimedia and psychology, and for Toffler, its commercial appeal was a cause for concern. Ultimately, Cerebrum’s significance to art and architectural history does not emerge from being the only project that questioned whether immersive multimedia environments would be a force for actualization or deception, but in how this humble club was able to embody so much from the contemporary discourse on altered states of consciousness. Through its appellation and attributes, it sought to blur the boundaries between environmental and mental phenomena. By transporting its guests through a chain of virtual environments, without relying on verbal communication, Cerebrum followed Leary’s advice on the role of settings and guides in facilitating a psychedelic trip. In stimulating all sensory faculties, whilst emphasizing touch, it illustrated McLuhan’s belief that electronic multimedia would return us to a playful state of having all phenomena being synthesized within a common sense. Despite the creator’s efforts to frame these moves towards psychedelia and play as mere entertainment, Cerebrum accidentally provided an eloquent expression of these theoretical works. As to the implications of these theories, Cerebrum found itself in the crossfire between Youngblood and Toffler’s argument on whether the pleasure generated by such environments would confront or consolidate existing power structures. In this debate, its white walls and psychedelic patterns served as both the tabula rasa and Rorschach test upon which contemporary critics could mentally project their feelings towards the future. Footnotes 1 The term ‘freak’ is often viewed as being synonymous with ‘hippie’; however, it better emphasizes the act of positionings one’s identity outside of the conventions of post-war American culture. Andrew Blauvelt, ‘The Barricade and the Dance Floor: Aesthetic Radicalism and Counterculture’, in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle of Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Arts Museum, 2015), 22. 2 Bart Friedman and Franne Lee, Interview with Author, Saugerties, 16 May 2016; Larry Vigus, Interview with Author, Portsmouth, 23 May 2016; Richard Currie, Interview with Author, Burlington, 14 June 2016. 3 ‘Mattress for the Mind’, Time, 13 December 1968, 113. 4 Footage of Cerebrum can be found on the YouTube account of Bart Friedman, who was a guide at Cerebrum and later became a member of the video art collective Videofreex (1969–1978). Bart Friedman, ‘Cerebrum, Soho, 1968’ Youtube video, 26 February 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjozaLBbrUs (accessed 15 August 2017). 5 ‘Nightlife’, Cue, 4 January 1969; Dorethy Kalins, ‘Here’s Looking at You: Voyeurism in New York’, New York, 3 March 1969, 40; ‘Mattress for the Mind’, Time, 113. 6 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970), 359. 7 Sylvana Foa, ‘Taking a trip? Fly Cerebrum’, Columbia Midweek, 10 January 1969. 8 Dan Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 23 November 1968, 62. 9 Ibid. 10 Peter Braunstein ‘Forever Young: Insurgent Youth and the Sixties Culture of Rejuvenation’, in Imagine Nation: The American Counter-Cultural of the 1960s and ’70s, eds. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 243–273. 11 Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: Citadel Press, 2007 [1964]); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 2001 [1964]). 12 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema. 13 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). 14 Jerry Avorn, ‘A Stately Pleasure-Dome on Broome St’, Columbia Daily Spectator vol. 1, no. 6 (1968): 3; Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 62. 15 Alastair Gordon, Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 57–59. 16 Mateo Kries, Jochen Eisenbrand and Catharine Rossi, eds., Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960–Today (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2018), 70, 85–86. 17 Kries, Eisenbrand and Rossi, eds., Night Fever, 15–17; For further elaboration on the connection between psychedelia and the Gesamtkunstwerk, read the contribution by Pol Esteve, ‘Total Space’, 131–146. 18 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 364; Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 230. 19 Currie, Interview, 2016; Bobjack Callejo, Interview with Author, New York, 17 June 2016. 20 Tom Henderson, ‘New Sound Mixes Sirens, Lights, Flowers, Crickets’, Sunday World-Herald Omaha, 14 April 1968, 9-B. 21 Henderson, ‘New Sound Mixes Sirens, Lights, Flowers, Crickets’, Sunday World-Herald Omaha, 9-B. 22 Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 62. 23 Ruffin Cooper Jr, Untitled Proposal, c.1968 (undated), Richard Currie’s Personal Collection. 24 Ruffin Associates Absolutely Unlimited, Ltd., ‘Help – Male female’, Advertisement. Village Voice, 8 August 1968, 45. 25 John Storyk, Interview with Author, Highlands, 11 May 2016. 26 Ruffin Cooper Jr, Untitled Proposal, c.1968 (undated), Richard Currie’s Personal Collection. 27 Currie, Interview, 2016. 28 ‘Nightlife’, Cue. 29 Gerd Stern, From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948–1978 (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, 2001), 90–92, 286. 30 Lewis Lapham as cited in Richard Cavall, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), xvi. 31 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (London: Penguin, 2008 [1967]), 108–109; For more on the connections between McLuhan and Warhol, read: Branden Joseph, ‘“My Mind Split Open”: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable’, in Grey Room, no. 8 (Summer, 2002), 80–107; Sylvia Lavin, ‘Andy ArchitectTM – Or, a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Disco’, in Log, No. 15 (Winter, 2009), 99–110. 32 Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 62. 33 David Kaufman, Ridiculous!: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (New York: Applause Books, 2002), 167. 34 Currie, Interview, 2016. 35 Ruffin Cooper Jr, Untitled Proposal, c.1968 (undated), Richard Currie’s Personal Collection. 36 Friedman and Lee, Interview, 2016. 37 Drawing 1, Personal Archive of John Storyk. 38 Vigus, Interview, 2016; Rod Grady, Interview with Author, Seattle, 25 June 2016. 39 Ruffin Cooper Jr, Untitled Proposal, c.1968 (undated), Richard Currie’s Personal Collection. 40 Friedman and Lee, Interview, 2016; Vigus, Interview, 2016. 41 All of these projects are cited in Youngblood, Expanded Cinema. Although Youngblood does interview VanDerBeek, he only refers to the Movie-Drome through a caption. For a more extensive account on the Movie-Drome, read Gloria Sutton, The Experience Machine: Stan VanderBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). 42 Grady, Interview, 2016. 43 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 361. 44 ‘Scenes’, Village Voice, 7 November 1968. 45 Joan Barthel, ‘Sex, Shock and Sensuality’, Life, 4 April 1969, 28. 46 Currie, Interview, 2016. 47 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 363. 48 ‘Life and Leisure’, Newsweek, 3 March 1969, 34. 49 Ruffin Cooper Jr, Untitled Proposal, c.1968 (undated), Richard Currie’s Personal Collection; Details about the coffee can lamps comes from Storyk, Interview, 2016. 50 Alex Gross, ‘McLuhan Geisha House’, East Village Other vol. 3, no. 50 (1968): 2; Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 62; ‘Mattress for the Mind’, Time, 113. 51 Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 62. 52 Jerry Avorn, ‘A Stately Pleasure-Dome on Broome St’, Columbia Daily Spectator, 3. 53 ‘Scenes’, Village Voice, 10 October 1968. 54 Friedman and Lee, Interview, 2016; Currie, Interview, 2016. 55 McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 66. 56 McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 66. 57 McLuhan as cited in Barrington Nevitt and Maurice McLuhan, eds., Who Was Marshall McLuhan?: Exploring a Mosaic of Impressions (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co, 1995 [1994]), 34. 58 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Books I-111 (London: Penguin Books, 1999 [1776]); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Books, 2010 [1848]); Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 2014 [1893]). 59 Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Harry Skornia 7 April 1960, as cited in Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011 [1962]), xvi. 60 Gross, ‘McLuhan Geisha House’, East Village Other, 2. 61 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 97. 62 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 77. 63 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 71. 64 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 81. 65 Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 62. 66 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 362. 67 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 363. 68 Currie, Interview, 2016. 69 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 363. 70 David Kaufman, Ridiculous!, 168. 71 Colpo Rovente, directed by Piero Zuffi (Italy: Roberto Loyola, 1970), Film. 72 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 363. 73 Grady, Interview, 2016. 74 Callejo, Interview, 2016. 75 Jacque Brel, If You Only Had Love, Columbia Records, 1968, Vinyl. 76 ‘Life and Leisure’, Newsweek, 34. 77 For a greater account on the architectural explorations undertaken by members of the psychedelic counterculture, read: AnnMarie Brennan, ‘An Architecture for the Mind: OZ Magazine and the Technologies of the Counterculture’, Design and Culture vol. 9, no. 3 (2017): 317–335. 78 Leary, Metzner and Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience, 3. 79 Jim Fouratt, ‘Bam-Boo’, Eye, March 1969. 80 Leary, Metzner and Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience, 89. 81 ‘Mattress for the Mind’, Time, 113. 82 ‘Mattress for the Mind’, Time, 113. 83 Friedman and Lee, Interview, 2016. 84 Leary, Metzner and Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience, 104. 85 Charles Fracchia, ‘An Innovative Artist’, Southwest Art vol. 6, no. 2 (1976): 98. 86 Currie, Interview, 2016.  87 Ruffin Cooper Jr, Untitled Prospectus, c.1968–1969 (undated), Richard Currie’s Personal Collection.  88 Henderson, ‘New Sound Mixes Sirens, Lights, Flowers, Crickets’, Sunday World-Herald Omaha, 9-B.  89 Currie, Interview, 2016.  90 Ruffin Cooper Jr, Untitled Prospectus, c.1968–1969 (undated), Personal Archive of Richard Currie.  91 Currie, Interview, 2016.  92 Friedman and Lee, Interview, 2016.  93 Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 62.  94 Fracchia, ‘An Innovative Artist’, 98.  95 Kaufman, Ridiculous!, 168.  96 Storyk, Interview, 2016.  97 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 361.  98 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 359; Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1970 [1954]), 121.  99 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 113. 100 Avorn, ‘A Stately Pleasure-Dome on Broome St’, Columbia Daily Spectator, 3. 101 Sullivan, ‘Cerebrum: Club Seeking to Soothe the Mind’, New York Times, 62. 102 Toffler, Future Shock, 230. 103 Stuart Hall as cited in Andrew Blauvelt, ‘The Barricade and the Dance Floor’, 26. 104 Felicity Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010 [2007]), 192. 105 Michaela Williams as cited in Joseph, ‘My Mind Split Open’, 91; Jane Pavitt and David Crowley, ‘The Hi-tech Cold War’, in Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970, eds. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (London: V&A Publishing, 2008), 187. 106 Joseph, ‘My Mind Split Open’, 82; Pavitt and Crowley, ‘The Hi-tech Cold War’, 187. 107 Pavitt and Crowley, ‘The Hi-tech Cold War’, 186. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank all those who agreed to be interviewed and provided me with documentation of this club, including Bobjack Callejo, Richard Currie, Sylvana Foa, Bart Friedman, Rod Grady, Franne Lee, John Storyk and Larry Vigus. This article would not have been possible without your generosity in sharing your stories with me. Jonathan Lovell has recently completed a PhD dissertation at the University of Melbourne. His research explores how the artists and architects who created the immersive multimedia environments in the post-war period—especially those associated with the Expanded Cinema movement—used communicative and spatial media to evoke the phenomenological and epistemological conditions associated with transcendental experiences. © The Author(s) [2021]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Cerebrum: Modelling the Mind through Psychedelic and Playful Environments
JF - Journal of Design History
DO - 10.1093/jdh/epaa054
DA - 2021-02-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/cerebrum-modelling-the-mind-through-psychedelic-and-playful-VsLSOKeB0y
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -