From the origins of man to the trip leading us to a new world, Stanley Kramer’s Kubrick's 2001 was both a counter-cultural and a mass cultural event. Based on a story by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark, 2001 features HAL, a computer that goes crazy through being rigorously rational. The film’s final sequence utilizes abstract color imagery – reminiscent of Fantasia, but also of acid trips – ending in an enigmatic image of a cosmic infant. Many of the counter-cultural young were prepared to see that sequence as the Ultimate Trip. It was as though that Final Trip were the only antidote to a computer-induced madness that brings one human epoch to a close and places us at the brink of another one. 2001 was an attempt to create a new mythology of humankind, one thoroughly grounded in the science and technology of the late twentieth century.
On the moon with the Monollith.
Psychedelic drugs broke free of the laboratory and the elite clinic and became available on the street. Many young people experimented freely with these drugs and not a few adopted a lifestyle featuring drug use. Eastern religion, rock and roll, colorful clothes, and back-to-nature utopianism were all part of the formula. However superficial much of this turned out to be, it was quite sufficient to shock and scare people into wondering what was happening in the world. One concrete effect was that psychedelic use and experimentation was made illegal. By that time, however, the cultural cat was out of the middle-class bag. If anything, the prohibition increased the attractiveness of psychedelics as agents of adolescent and generational rebellion and both popular and elite culture in all spheres felt the influence of psychedelia.
HAL speaks and blinks.
This same generation was the first in which many individuals got their hands on computers at a relatively young age. Courses in computer programming entered the college curriculum and departments of computer science were formed. Computers were still large and expensive, but the invention of time-sharing – an outgrowth of the AI movement – made terminals available to many.
HAL sees and observes.
Computer culture began to spawn imaginative forms of its own. MIT gave birth to the first video game, Space War, in the 1960s. It ran on a mainframe computer of the time and was the progenitor of those point-and-shoot games that would soon replace pinball machines and invade television sets. In the mid-1970s Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab gave birth to Adventure, a computer game in which players entered Colossal Cave and went from room to room in search of treasure. This game was played by typing and reading text. There were no graphics; one had to imagine the cave in one’s mind. Adventure became the prototype of the role-playing games which blossomed into elaborate fictional worlds with meticulously constructed visual settings and multiple characters the players could assume. As personal computers became more powerful and graphics techniques advanced, both types of games – and hybrids of the two – became ubiquitous and, when the web emerged, they went online and became communal.
The light fantastic.
Computer programming became a recognized profession and, as such, needed a mythology of its own, explicating its place in the world of natural and human affairs. These young engineers turned to the same imaginative sources as their drug-taking hippie brethren, science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction in particular gave birth to an experimental drug-influenced New Wave and began to move from the low rent precincts of genre fiction into the hallowed realm of The Literary. These new professionals often sported hippie-style hair and informal dress, thus making a dramatic contrast with the blue suit and white shirt that had been the uniform at IBM and other corporations, which were forced to compromise on these basic issues of personal appearance.
The inner eye?
Thus the rhythms of Fantasia began moving out of the world of entertainment and into the broader fabric of life. People modified institutions and cultural practices so that they could live those rhythms rather than simply appreciate them in the guise of childhood innocence. The emerging computer culture becomes a vehicle for domesticating and routinizing some of the freedoms revealed through psychedelia.
Cosmic child, child of the cosmos?
Selected Milestones:
- 1966: LSD and other psychedelics are outlawed, making it illegal for people to take trips.
- 1966: Original Star Trek series debuts on television, starting an entertainment franchise that would produce offspring for the rest of the century and into the next.
- 1967: The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a triumph of high-tech electronics and the psychedelic imagination.
- 1968: President Nixon declares war on drugs.
- 1969: Herbert Simon publishes The Sciences of the Artificial, a collection of essays that makes fundamental insights of the artificial intelligentsia accessible to a larger audience.
- 1969: Man lands on the moon, the first time we have traveled to another world from ours – in physical reality.
- 1969: The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) establishes a nationwide network linking computer researchers to one another. This is the original seed of the internet, and arena for trips of new kinds.
The series so far:
Mind Hacks R Us: The Psychedelic Computer
Mind Hacks 2: Adventures in Fantasia
Mind Hacks 3: 1956 – The Forbidden Planet Within
Kubrick. Not Kramer.
ReplyDeleteYou're right! Thanks for the correction.
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