Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin (1916 to 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet and performance artist who also worked as an inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for the cut-up technique in writing, which he developed in Paris in 1958 and shared with his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. Gysin is placed in the engineering atlas for one device: with the engineer Ian Sommerville he built the Dreamachine in 1961, a flicker device made as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed, using light pulses in the alpha-wave range of 8 to 16 Hz to produce a change of consciousness in receptive viewers. Most of his working life went into painting and drawing, with calligraphic works inspired by Japanese grass script and Arabic script, and he also wrote the novel The Process. Sommerville additionally wrote an early random sequence generator program that Gysin used to make permutation poems.