In Buenos Aires, New Zealand sound artist Phil Dadson suggested I look into Len Lye’s concept of the Old Brain.
Now I find an Article by Aurthur Cantrill, about a presentation he saw Lye give at the 1968 Cambridge Animation Festival:
The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid
‘My film talk is called The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid’,’ said Lye. This acid was not LSD but the nucleic acid of DNA and his ‘absolute truth’ was in ‘the gene-pattern which contains the one and only natural truth of our being.’ To support the case he quoted the British art critic, Clive Bell: ‘art lies in the genes’. Added Lye: ‘All the evolutionary experience of the species is stored in the nucleic acid of one cell.’ When art draws on this information it resonates with our sense of essential selfness, and we experience the aesthetic value as happiness. For Lye, this ‘selfness’ was anchored to the body and to bodily weight and motion, which explained his preoccupation with the kineticism of film and moving sculpture. Although he didn’t mention it, Lye’s ideas were reminiscent of the surrealist project of creating art that drew on material submerged in the subconscious, except that Lye referred to the site for this information as ‘the old brain’ (the right hemisphere). He practised a form of automatism, in which he attempted to suppress his more recently evolved ‘new brain’ to free his ‘old brain’ to produce his ‘doodlings’ and his writing. He exhibited with the surrealists in London in the 1930s, but generally found them too literary, and far from his ideal of ‘the kinetic of the body’s rhythms’…
…Lye …researched the culture of the Ocean Islands, the African Bushmen and Australian Aborigines. Baldwin Spencer’s The Native Tribes of Central Australia and Ezra Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska were important inspirations. He even struggled with Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
Arthur Cantrill, 2002
Senses of Cinema website