Michaux’s drug investigations also landed him the job of making his only film, Images du monde visionnaire, in 1964 for the drug company Sandoz, the company that first synthesized LSD.

Henri Michaux, Images du monde visionnaire, 1964. Click to enlarge.

You can view a video of the 38 minute film in its entirety at UBUWEB, which found the film via the blog Ombres Blanches, which tells the story of how this amazing and forgotten film came into being:

It’s not an experimental but an educational film which was produced in 1963 by the film department of Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz (best known for synthesizing LSD in 1938) in order to demonstrate the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline and hashish. Still it shares many traits with some of the more interesting efforts in avant-garde film making of its time. Maybe the most remarkable about it is that it is the only venture in film of notable French writer and painter Henri Michaux who wrote several accounts of his experiments with drugs. In charge with the filmic translation of Michaux’ prescriptions was director Eric Duvivier (a nephew of Julien Duvivier) whose other films include an adaptation of Max Ernst’s collage novel La femme 100 têtes.

You can read more about Images du monde visionnaire at each of these sites, and see some film stills. I went through the film and assembled the above composite of 30 images that especially struck me and evoke the flavor of this film – click on it for a larger version. It’s a beautiful film.

I just think this is a great art installation, no matter if unintended as such. Who knows — these two dudes could be the Gilbert & George of China.

Click on the photo at left to see a larger version, and check out the video, below. [PSFK]

Not to be confused with the Metaverse, from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, the concept of the multiverse has been around quite a while, and the specific term “multiverse” was coined in 1895 by psychologist William James:

The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including our universe) that together comprise all of reality. The different universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes. The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it and the relationship between the various constituent universes, depend on the specific multiverse hypothesis considered.

Multiverses have been hypothesized in cosmology, physics, astronomy, philosophy, transpersonal psychology and fiction, particularly in science fiction and fantasy. The specific term “multiverse” was coined in 1895 by psychologist William James. In these contexts, parallel universes are also called “alternative universes”, “quantum universes”, “interpenetrating dimensions”, “parallel worlds”, “alternate realities”, “alternative timelines”, etc. [Wikipedia]

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s home page. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

The novel’s philosopher of kipple, J. R. Isidore (who became J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner), explains:

…the First Law of Kipple (is that) ‘Kipple drives out nonkipple’… (one) can roll the kipple-factor back… No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will take over. It’s a universal principal operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

Says the technovelgy.com entry on kipple:

Kipple seems to be a combination of entropy and capitalism. I don’t think past civilizations had the resources to produce so much packaging to hold our stuff until we buy it or consume it.

…Physicists will note the similarity to the concept of entropy, which is most usually taken to refer to the tendency of closed systems toward increasing disorder.

I like the definition taken from classical thermodynamics, that entropy is a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work. In the 21st century, we seem to be working as hard as we can to take available resources and transform them into objects that cannot be used for anything (kipple).

Kipple is the perfect word to describe the entropic clutter filling our houses, our cities, our computers and our minds. It’s very sweet, gentle and disarming, just like most kipple, but it sneaks up on you until you finally realize that it has colonized your life, again, just like the thing it describes.

Here are a couple of the comments posted to the Technovelgy page devoted to kipple:

“Is there a relationship or correlation between kipple and noise? Audible kipple? Does noise somehow accumulate the way kipple does? If so, what does it leave behind? ”
( 4/28/2004 4:41:22 PM )

“Interesting thought. Urban environments have a lot of “waste noise” (as opposed to useful noise, like the sound a garbage truck makes when it backs up!). However, noise tends to dissipate; it is absorbed by objects and is attenuated by its passage through the atmosphere. Unlike kipple, which never seems to go away.

On the other hand, Frederick Brown wrote a stunningly original story called The Waveries in 1945, in which sounds had a life of their own. (Philip K. Dick called that story one of the best he ever read.)”
(Chief Technovelgist 4/28/2004 5:45:03 PM )

Originally posted on my personal blog at http://www.jurisich.com/blog/.

“Our dependence on imported oil is killing our economy. It is the single biggest problem facing America today,” he said.

But T-Boone moved beyond whining to release “The Pickens Plan, which “calls for investing in domestic renewable resources such as wind, and switching from oil to natural gas as a transportation fuel,” and will, he claims, reduce our reliance on foreign oil by “more than one-third”.

Just listen to what this radical hippy environmental wacko Republican moneybags / Bush and Swift Boat funder has to say:

“Wind power is … clean, it’s renewable. It’s everything you want. And it’s a stable supply of energy,” Pickens told CNN in May. “It’s unbelievable that we have not done more with wind.”

Of course, T. Boone’s Mesa Power is poised to blanket Texas with wind turbines and turn all that hot air into cold hard cash. But hey, it sure beats oil, and if someone this conservative can invest in alternative energy, then it should send a strong signal to others that the time to jump is now.