Abstract

This article examines a collection of singular artifacts, originating in the 1960s and 1970s, which I call "cybertrance" devices. These devices are based on the reappropriation of instruments from the academic world in order to place users in modified states of consciousness, far from the ordinary mode of wakefulness. All of these inventions draw on the heritage of American cybernetics, and re-articulate the man-machine concept central to it: passing from neo-mechanistic theory to experimentations with coupling and prostheses, and from rational analysis to countercultural mysticism.If these cybertrance devices literally dismantle the man-machine, using technology to disorder the senses, in no way do they seek to...