One second, I’m bathed in brilliant orange light, like I’ve just been plunged inside the sun. Then, geometric spirals of tunnelling technicolour pull me towards a some all-consuming point in the unreachable distance, before the whole thing folds in on itself, and I’m being flung back towards some other realm. It’s intense, and what’s most incredible is that it’s all happening behind my closed eyelids. It takes real power of thought to remind myself that, no, I’m not traversing the astral plane — I’m actually sitting inside an old market in Woolwich.
You’d struggle to believe this kind of mind-melting is exactly what Theresa May had envisaged when the former prime minister announced plans back in 2018 for the Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — dubbed by some a Festival of Brexit — but here we are. That cumbersome name has been dropped, first in favour of the faintly W1A-ish Festival 2022, before settling on something rather more ambiguous: Unboxed.
It’s the UK’s “biggest and most ambitious public creative programme to date”, according to the festival’s chief creative officer Martin Green, and there are certainly some intriguingly out-there concepts among the 10, tenuously linked projects taking place from March until October. Green Space Dark Skies will see some 20,000 people gathering to create large-scale artworks; Our Place in Space is a 10km scale model of the solar system; See Monster is an art installation built onto a decommissioned North Sea offshore platform.
Most interesting of them all is Dreamachine, an audiovisual installation that aims to trigger psychedelic experiences, simply by using flickering light — and all we have to do is sit back and close our eyes. It’s a modern interpretation of something first developed by Brion Gysin, the UK-born artist-inventor who, in 1959, created a cylindrical device with slits, housing a lightbulb. As it rotated, it emitted flickering light which, if produced at the right frequency, synchronised with brain activity and created kaleidoscopic visions in the mind of its viewer.
Gysin had lofty ambitions for the invention — he hoped maybe one day it would replace the television, instead allowing our brains to create their own entertainment — and you get the impression he’d be delighted with this revival of the Dreamachine concept. There are some smart minds behind this iteration, from director Jennifer Crook, who counts Danny Boyle and Olafur Eliasson among her past collaborators, to Assemble, the Turner Prize-winning collective. What they’ve created is thrilling and, crucially, accessible, with tickets available completely free of charge (as is all of Unboxed).
The Dreamachine itself, a 20ft-tall, windowless structure, placed within Woolwich Public Market, can hold up to 32 people at once, but at this preview session, there are only a handful of us. We’re all instructed to take off our shoes, and place mobile phones in lockers (a good thing — the marimba ringtone would be maddeningly off-putting at the height of the experience) before being reassured that we’re free to leave the experience at any time, and that nothing inside the Dreamachine, either the bright lights or the loud music, is harmful. It’s simultaneously comforting and unnerving — what exactly awaits us?
Well, to describe it too much would be to ruin things. But the general concept is pretty simple. You sit, eyes closed, as gentle ambient music begins to play (the renowned producer Jon Hopkins, whose last album was titled Music for Psychedelic Therapy, is the composer, and feels like an astute choice). The music begins to swell, the lights slowly rise, and then they begin to strobe.
What followed was 20 minutes (or so… time did seem to melt away) of genuinely mind-blowing visuals. “Immersive” is thrown at basically any event these days, but this felt so in the most transporting sense of the word. Great, multi-layered, cosmic bursts of texture and colour rush into vision, replaced by something altogether different from one moment to the next. It’s incredibly hard to describe, and to do so is almost a waste of time, seeing as every single person who takes part will see something different.
It is hugely intense, almost overwhelmingly at times, but once you get used to the all-out nature of the thing and — as wisely instructed by one of the technicians before we entered — “just let yourself go”, it’s something quite amazing.
Once it’s all over, outside of the Dreamachine, we’re invited to reflect on what just happened, either through drawing, talking with fellow attendees, or with the help of prompts delivered by tablet devices. Really, I just wanted to go back through it all over again. Without the help of any law-breaking substances, this is one of the wildest trips you can take.
