David Cronenberg – “Videodrome” & Projective Hallucination

“Bear with me. You might find this interesting.” He flashed Max an expression of camaraderie. “We were doing some very, very sophisticated zero light weapons scopes for military application. Developed something called an image accumulator. It used a system of vidicon tubes, a closed circuit where we amplified indistinct signals from tube to tube, to create images where the physics books said there wasn’t enough light for an image to exist. We made a kind of helmet with conical fibre optics – didn’t want to get into lasers – and you know? The damnedest thing happened to some of the boys who were testing her in the field… Under simulated combat conditions, the boys who used her began to hallucinate. Images began to appear that weren’t really there – and the images lasted for hours after they’d stopped wearing her. Took us quite a while to figure out that the boys were starting to project their own images through the optical accumulator, images that came from their brains and ended-up exciting the vidicon mosaic like an electron gun. Video hallucinations, Max, that we have recorded on tape.”

David Cronenberg & Jack Martin, “Videodrome”, New English Library 1983

See “Rorschach Audio” book page 124