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I’ve just finished a small project for friends at Bloody Sound Fucktory label. It’s 40 minutes, 10Hz, sound-reactive flashing visualisation to be watched with eyes closed while listening to psych-noise tour the force of Atto Terzo, by one-man drone psych noise act Lucifer Big Band.

It’s actually the third time I collaborate with them, always working on a design and packaging for a Lucifer Big Band release (this goes back to the time when I was making and releasing homemade noise CR-R with my tiny personal music https://orgonomy-records.tumblr.com/). This time I wanted to do something more, that would be somehow more related with technology.

My initial proposal was to have the packaging turning into some kind of VR-like cardboard headset (like the one by McDonald’s or by Coca Cola) to be used with a specific website. Just that the website was not featuring a VR experience, but a sound reactive version of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s Dream Machine device. There’s some nice and short story of the Dream Machine here, but basically Ian Sommerville (an early computer programmer and William Burroughs’s “systems adviser”) built this light flickering device in order to replicate some kind of psychedelic experience Gysin had while staring eyes closed at the sun shining though an avenue of trees he was riding along in a bus. So the idea was to repurpose a device of (low-resolution) simulation like the cardboard VR headset into one of (high-resolution?!?) hallucination.

At the end we discarded the idea of the packaging insert - we found it really hard to try make it without looking too much like a gimmicky (see the above references), but everybody was still excited by the web app, so here it is: attoterzo.bloodysoundfucktory.com

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I’ve stumbled on some great technologies lately, I thought they were worth to mention here, for posterity.

Lightform will release this summer a consumer product for interactive projection mapping https://www.fastcodesign.com/90107499/a-2-4-million-bet-to-turn-your-home-into-a-giant-screen
Ikea’s announced a smart home kit they developed with frog, featuring a slick gyroscope based wireless knob https://www.fastcodesign.com/90107451/ikeas-next-big-frontier
Adobe and Cornell University researcher published paper “Deep Photo Style Transfer” showing deep-learning based technology to automatically apply photo-realistic style to images https://github.com/luanfujun/deep-photo-styletransfer