Abstract

It is a truism that we live in hyperstimulated times. From the ubiquity of digital networks, screens and their associated information overloads, to the always accelerating flows of neoliberal capital to the dense and mobile populations of cities constantly on the move, to exist in the 21^st century is to inhabit a structure of feeling characterised by sensory overload of always on 24/7 late capitalism (see Crary, 2014). One of the paradigms to emerge for thinking the digital transformation of cinema and related technologies is that of post-cinema (see Denson and Leyda, 2016). One aspect of this transformation concerns digital cinema technologies and techniques, and another side embraces an expanded field of related technological forms such as music video, gaming, VR, from which cinema is no longer separable. This article will argue that counter to this dominant tendency towards neoliberal accelerated post-cinematic aesthetics, there is another neuro-aesthetic tendency in audiovisual and other media, operating through drones, strobes and glitch that in some instances have been used for very different purposes than neoliberal information acceleration. This is not to claim that these technologies are radical in themselves as there are clear overlaps between these two audiovisual tendencies, and plenty of instances of these technologies being commodified, or even used in contexts of military domination. And even in their most creative or political functions, there is no claim being made here as to their political efficacy as part of any anti-capitalist project. Rather they are creative DIY misuses of technology that are definitely inventive, and potentially constitute therapeutic practices of the self and community that counter the pathogenic effects of dominant audiovisual media. This will be explored via a number of case studies from Dreamachines and Flicker films to the video work of E. Gabriel Edvy.

Keywords

hyperstimulation, post-cinema, strobes, drones, neuro-aesthetics, Tony Conrad, E. Gabriel Edvy

MICHAEL N GODDARD
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Introduction

It is a truism that we live in hyperstimulated times. From the ubiquity of digital networks, screens and their associated information overloads, to the always accelerating flows of neoliberal capital to the dense and mobile populations of cities constantly on the move, to exist in the 21^st century is to inhabit a structure of feeling characterised by sensory overload of always on 24/7 late capitalism (see Crary, 2014). Several authors such as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Mark Fisher have related this situation to mental health through such terms as ‘Schizo-Economy’, ‘Networked Panic’, the ‘politics of depression’ or ‘depression as desertion’. For Berardi there is a disconnect between the accelerated infinite temporalities of digital networks and the finite time of sensual experience which cannot function beyond certain limits:

We have more information, less meaning; more information, less pleasure. Sensibility is within time. Sensuality is within slowness and the space of information is too vast and fast to elaborate on it intensively, deeply. At the point of intersections between electronic cyberspace and organic cybertime is found the fundamental crux of the present mutation (Berardi, 2009: 70).

For Berardi what happens in this gap between overstimulating networks and finite organic beings are a series of psychopathologies, centring around the experience of panic: ‘Society risks being propelled into a condition of panic, of diffuse psychopathology, of desensitization, and disaffection’ (Berardi, 2009: 71). And following the accelerated speedy experience of panic comes an inevitable crash into depression. Berardi tracks a number of phenomena here, from the attenuation of relations with the other allowing psychopathic behaviours to emerge including those of mass murderers, to economic markets characterised by algorithmic high frequency trading being inseparable from brokers maintaining attention to work through amphetamines and cocaine. What is key here is that there is no distinction between market forces on the one hand and psycho-pathological conditions on the other. Instead, both are part of a single accelerated economy which always tends to be unsustainable. As such, psychic conditions such as panic and depression are always collective and social, and when similar terms are applied to the market these are not metaphors but refer to the same (Schizo) economy.

This article will argue that counter to this dominant tendency towards neoliberal accelerated aesthetics, there is another tendency in audiovisual and other media, operating through drones, strobes and glitch that in some instances have been used for very different purposes than neoliberal information acceleration. This is not to claim that these technologies are radical in themselves as there are clear overlaps between these two audiovisual tendencies, and plenty of instances of these technologies being commodified, or even used in contexts of military domination. And even in their most creative or political functions, there is no claim being made here as to their political efficacy as part of any anti-capitalist project. Rather they are creative DIY misuses of technology that are definitely inventive, and potentially constitute therapeutic practices of the self and community that counter the pathogenic effects of dominant audiovisual media. As such they may in certain contexts have political implications, in the sense of decoding dominant modes of information circulation and experimenting with alternatives. Both these tendencies can be linked as forms of neuro aesthetics, operating directly on the brain via sensory stimulation rather than through conventional notions of representation.

Post-cinematic hyperstimulation, affect and chaos

The chaotic hyperstimulation of audiovisual media has also been discussed in terms of post-cinema. Already, the replacement of written language with audiovisual information was lamented in the late twentieth century in relation to largely analog technologies, in very different ways by Neil Postman (2005) and Paul Virilio (1977). However, the implantation of digital technologies within all spheres of human existence and culture has greatly accelerated this original acceleration making it seem quaint by comparison. One of the paradigms to emerge for thinking the digital transformation of cinema and related technologies is that of post-cinema (see Denson and Leyda, 2016). One aspect of this transformation concerns digital cinema technologies and techniques, and another side embraces an expanded field of related technological forms such as music video, gaming, VR, from which cinema is no longer separable. Moreover, as opposed to earlier terms such as new media that emphasised the radical novelty of digital media, ‘post-cinema’ points to both continuities and discontinuities with the analog past. As Denson and Leyda put it in their introduction to their volume:

To employ the term post-cinema is, first of all, to describe this impact in terms of a broad historical transformation—emblematized by the shift from cinema to post-cinema. It is in this regard that we find another advantage of the term; for rather than positing a clean break with the past, the term post-cinema asks us more forcefully than the notion of “new media,” for example, to think about the relation (rather than mere distinction) between older and newer media regimes (Denson and Leyda, 2016).

For Denson and Leyda, post-cinema is less a new state of affairs than a conversation between new and inherited media forms, and the volume also presents multiple perspectives and conversations, and at times disagreements on what constitutes the post-cinematic.

One of the more precise debates within this expanded field is that of ‘intensified continuity’ (Bordwell, 2008), ‘post-continuity’ (Shaviro, 2016) or stated in its most extreme form as ‘chaos cinema’ by Matthias Stork (2011), specifically within action cinema but not limited to it. All these authors have responded to the idea that with predominant use of CGI and other special effects, as well as the affordances of non-linear digital editing technologies, the formerly dominant rules of continuity editing, with their functions of disclosing actions in a coherent space and over a coherent period of time, have been all but abandoned, replaced by jerky camera movements, impossibly fast editing, and post-production effects to entirely fragment any coherent sense of spatio-temporal relations.

Bordwell originally described ‘intensified continuity’ in a 2002 article of the same name as consisting of four observable stylistic tendencies: more rapid editing, bipolar extremes of lens lengths, closer framings, and a free ranging camera style, at times for no reason. This was not necessarily related to digital technologies as Bordwell discerned these shifts going back to the 1960s and evident in 1970s US films associated with New Hollywood for example. If anything he pointed to the influence of television production practices on film aesthetics and claimed that, while a relative shift in classical continuity style, for the most part these films remained ‘classical’ and merely pushed the boundaries of what the classical system was capable of: ‘Intensified continuity constitutes a selection and elaboration of options already on the classical filmmaking menu’ (Bordwell, 2002: 24), notwithstanding a few exceptions such as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) which was a rapid montage of all manner of heterogeneous media materials. However, as the 21^st century progressed and cinema became completely characterised by the implantation of digital technologies, such insistence on classical style became harder to maintain. By 2008, Bordwell registered this shift, especially in relation to action films, as one from expressionistic kinaesthesia to a dull impressionism, particularly associated with filmmakers like Michael Bay:

By contrast, Hollywood action scenes became “impressionistic,” rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it (Bordwell, 2008).

This shift is especially discussed in the series of video essays made by Matthias Stork that reference the same phenomena that Bordwell characterises as impressionistic intensified continuity very differently. According to Stork:

Chaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. It consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Every single frame runs on adrenaline. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes building toward. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. […] Directors who work in this mode aren’t interested in spatial clarity. It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile, audiovisual war zones (Stork, 2011).

This is referred to by Stork as Chaos cinema. As Steven Shaviro points out, what makes Stork’s argument convincing is that you can see it play out in the contrast between the different action sequences he assembles in his series of video essays, in which you can directly sense the coherent experience of spatio-temporal coordinates in action sequences up until the 1990s disintegrate in the 21^st century examples.

While Stork sees this as nothing but a degeneration of classical cinema, for Shaviro this new regime is not necessarily worse than classical cinema but certainly different. Echoing the term post-cinema, he prefers the term post-continuity to refer to the phenomenon that ‘In post-continuity films, unlike classical ones, continuity rules are used opportunistically and occasionally, rather than structurally and pervasively. Narrative is not abandoned, but it is articulated in a space and time that are no longer classical. For space and time themselves have become relativized or unhinged’ (Shaviro, 2016a). Intensified continuity, which was rather a late 20^th century precursor or premonition of the digital transformation of cinema in the 21^st century, merely set the groundwork for a much more thorough destabilisation of spatial and temporal perception that extends well beyond cinema itself and well beyond any stable sense of spatio-temporal continuity. It is more an emergent structure of feeling that Shaviro goes on to categorise as ‘post-cinematic affect’. It is perhaps no coincidence that even Bordwell in his 2008 reconsideration of intensified continuity made reference to mirror neurons, since these shifts exceed the narrow realm of cinema and film theory to constitute the emergence of new forms of hyperstimulated neuro-aesthetics and biopolitics of the digital era. These shifts are registered in a different language by Patricia Pisters in terms of what she calls the ‘Neuro-Image’. Drawing on Deleuze’s bringing together the brain and the screen in his prescient works on cinema, as well as his later works on philosophy, Pisters articulates this connection directly with digital media:

The digital turn in culture at large, and in media culture specifically, is the context in which the neuro-image must be situated. […] the neuro-image is the continuation of film as film, even if, or indeed precisely because, it can be encountered transmedially […]. Since Deleuze argues that the brain is also a screen, and the screen is also a brain, it is useful to first establish how exactly the brain and the (film) screen can operate as a meeting place for art, science and philosophy (Pisters, 2012: 8, 14).

These ideas pull together different concepts of digital culture such as network architectures, the importance of software and interfaces, media ecologies, database logics and others, in order to posit the screen less as a flat surface for representation and more as a dynamic interface between technical processes, affects, perception and thought, an approach at first envisioned by Deleuze but taken up much more in a digital culture scholarship, including discussions around post-cinema and especially post-cinematic affect.

For Shaviro, post-continuity is also symptomatic of an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ that characterises hyper-stimulated 21^st century life that he refers to as post-cinematic affect (see Shaviro, 2010). This hyperstimulated experience is not necessarily ‘bad’ but just as in cinema it may not be ideal for maintaining meaningful narratives which just become a residual framework:

Post-continuity stylistics are expressive both of technological changes (i.e. the rise of digital and Internet-based media) and of more general social, economic, and political conditions (i.e. globalized neoliberal capitalism, and the intensified financialization associated with it). Like any other stylistic norm, post-continuity involves films of the greatest diversity in terms of their interests, commitments, and aesthetic values. What unites, them, however, is not just a bunch of techniques and formal tics, but a kind of shared episteme (Michel Foucault) or structure of feeling (Raymond Williams) (Shaviro, 2016a).

Post-cinematic affect, which Shaviro developed into a book focusing on some then contemporary media examples including Gamer (2009), Boarding Gate (2007), Southland Tales (2007) and Grace Jones’s ‘Corporate Criminal’ music video (2008), is in essence a more detailed examination of this post-cinematic ‘structure of feeling’ which conjugates together four diagrams of the social field:

1. Deleuze’s concept of ‘control societies as replacing disciplinary exercises of power with a modulating network model’;
2. Delirious financial flows taking the form of derivatives, futures trading or high frequency algorithmic exchanges. This can be seen very clearly in the more recent film The Big Short (2015) on the 2008 financial meltdown. This film is also a notable example of how the same post-cinematic techniques can be used to engage critically in cultural processes such as 2008 economic crisis that operate at high levels of abstraction;
3. Media ecologies, which for Shaviro refer to the permeation of heterogeneous media forms such as the ubiquitous presence of digital technologies within the space of cinematic representations as can be seen in Southland Tales;
4. Finally, gamespace, or the gamification of previously one-directional modes of cinematic experience, as can be seen in films like Gamer or more recently Source Code (2011).

Perhaps a fifth diagram of post-cinematic affect is also apparent in the idea of the multiverse as demonstrated in more recent films that Shaviro greatly appreciates such as Detention (2011), or Everything, Everywhere All at Once (2022).

Ultimately post-cinematic affect, as distinct from the classically cinematic capture and dissemination of human emotion takes us beyond both the cinematic and the human and towards both digital and financial networks:

Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from, this affect. […] They generate subjectivity, and they play a crucial role in the valorization of capital. Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance (Shaviro, 2016b).

Once again there is no separation from a neoliberal capitalist machinery for producing affect and the affective experience that it mirrors or represents. Post-cinematic affect is both a product and a motivating cause of digital audiovisual images and their relations. In ‘real life’ this can be seen in the generation of a whole range of psycho-social effects that we have already mentioned, from Berardi’s diagnosis of panic, depression, lack of empathy and psychosis, as the direct effects of the implantation of digital technologies, to the multiplication of neurodivergent conditions ranging from ADHD to Autism, to the extent that these conditions imply a mutation of fixed modes of subjective experience, emotion or finitude.

From accelerated hyperstimulation to flickers and dreamachines

While one response to these accelerated aesthetics (Vernallis, 2013) is to go in the opposite direction through such phenomena as slow cinema (see de Luca and Barrados Jorge, 2015), with its long durations and takes and deliberate cultivation of boredom as a mode of escaping stimulation, in this article, I would like to suggest that what may be more effective is a paradoxical engagement with glitch, noise and drone as a form of counter-stimulation. This way of countering hyperstimulation is not by rejecting it but experiencing it via different technological forms, in a mode that allows for repetitions that generate psychic recalibrations that can be experienced as desirable and pleasurable. One line of this is via the so called ‘flicker film’ through the use of strobe lighting, and Dreamachines that in their rapid alternation of light and darkness are at the limit able to produce effects akin to psychedelic drugs. Similar experiences can be obtained via the use of repetitive sonic drones that have been part of sacred musics for centuries and reappear in the 20^th century in the work of minimalist composers like LaMonte Young. Ultimately, this led to the use of drones by groups like Coil especially in their Time Machines project that they claimed could subvert chronological time and facilitate a mode of time travel. In more popular arenas, the popularity of noisy musics, from industrial, post-hardcore and noise musics to black and death metal, attest to the popularity of repetitive sonic noise as a liberation from neoliberal media hyperstimulation, via a darker mode of repetitive stimulation whether from repetitive drones, chaotic breakdowns, or digital glitch that provide different modes of stimulation. As such this article will explore a more experimental, underground parallel tendency to intensified and post-continuity that short circuits spatio-temporal perception altogether, initially via deceptively simple DIY means.

An exemplary place to begin with this counter-stimulation is Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville’s Dreamachine, which used or rather misused the existing technology of the record turntable. To this was added a cardboard cylinder with slits and a light source, thereby creating an artisanal stroboscopic device. This device could then be used to provoke altered states of consciousness, not by looking at it but precisely by not looking at it with closed eyes, that are nevertheless stimulated by the fluctuations in light intensity. Two aspects of this device are key here; the first is a form of synaesthesia or sensory derangement whereby the seeing operates through the skin as a kind of neural interface. The second is the stroboscopic effect itself that also operates in industrial contexts as well as forming an essential part of the cinematic apparatus itself, which at a certain fundamental level is nothing more than projected flickering light. As such, strobe and flicker not only run through the entire history of cinema but also predate it in the kinds of 19^th century scientific experimentation with light that Friedrich Kittler identifies as Psychophysics. In fact, the cinematic apparatus can be traced back to Faraday’s invention of alternating current: ‘coupled with the afterimage effect, Faraday’s stroboscopic effect became the necessary and sufficient condition for the illusions of cinema’ (Kittler, 1999: 122). As Kittler puts it, this alternation of light and darkness that generates persistence of vision and illusion of continual movement constitutes ‘the film trick preceding all film tricks’ (ibid: 122).

It is worth noting in this respect McLuhan’s account of electric light as a medium of pure information whose only content is itself, as opposed to other media which typically incorporate earlier or simpler media forms. Light is by its very nature digital as it is either on or off, but rapid alternations of on/off settings may affect perceptual apparatuses in different ways, from the stable illusions of persistence of vision and continuous movement to psychedelic states of consciousness. Before returning to the cinematic apparatus, it is worth noting other 21^st century legacies of the Dreamachine concept in various prostheses designed for everything from lucid dreaming to overcoming depression. Just as the Dreamachine aimed at achieving the same effects as mind altering drugs, a new generation of neuro wearables also aim for similar interventions into directly optimising the brain. In an article on technopharmacology, Chia and Neves make the following argument about the distinctiveness of these devices: ‘they operate as technologies of wearable stimulation, sending light, sound, vibration, electricity, and magnetism directly into the body. […] These products aim to stimulate or condition mental and affective dispositions for specific tasks by feeding prescriptive biodata back into the body like a drug (Chia and Neves, 2023: 80). In short rather than the mere tracking devices of the quantified self these are stimulation devices aimed at self-optimisation, that bypass the mind to activate the brain. Other contemporary neuro stimulant devices, like the ‘Flow’ headset now available through Boots, claim to be able to counter the effects of depression. According to the publicity materials for this device, it takes the form of a ‘non-invasive headset’, that generates electrical signals that communicate directly with the cerebral cortex through Neurostimulation: ‘Your brain communicates through electrical signals. Flow works with this natural electrical language, delivering precisely calibrated stimulation […] This gentle current helps restore healthy brain cell activity patterns, targeting depression at its source to help relieve symptoms’ (FLOW Neuroscience Website, 2025).

All of this is arguably prefigured in the 1960s phenomenon of flicker films that focus on the stroboscopic effects of the cinematic apparatus and subtract from this effect any distracting narrative or representational content. Strobe technologies were invented in the 1930s, largely for industrial purposes of observing mechanical objects in motion but by the 1960s, their effects of making bodies seem as if they are moving in slow motion had been adopted for night clubs and live performances. A strobe light will usually flash up to hundreds of times per second, allowing rotational movement of a plane propeller, for example, to be seen and monitored in apparent slow motion. Similar effects became increasingly popular over the course of 1960s, especially in relation to the rise of psychedelics and multi-media shows like Warhol’s ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable’. Fred Turner, who in a previous work traced the development from 1960s counter-culture to Silicon Valley cyberculture (Turner, 2006), has more recently examined what he calls the ‘Democratic Surround’ developing from liberal ideas of collaboration and participation in the postwar period to the video art and multimedia events that became prominent in the late 1960s. Following on from happenings, be-ins and democratising art movements like Fluxus, multi-media events, like the one produced by Warhol, were a kind of pinnacle of this tendency: ‘Warhol and his crew had created an all-encompassing media environment. Images, sounds, and movements swirled over the stage [and] over the bodies of the audience too. […] At the ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable’, sensitizing audience members to the world around them meant turning off their internal censors, shutting down their reason, and so perhaps freeing them to recognize and make visible long-hidden desires’ (Turner, 2013: 282). In Warhol’s case, amplified by the music of The Velvet Underground, this meant towards gay, trans and sadomasochistic desires, whereas in West Coast psychedelic light shows this was more aimed towards LSD-fuelled cosmic consciousness. But in both cases, there was a perceptual politics involved that aimed at individual and collective liberation from Western rationality and its cold war nuclear death drive, in favour of an underground or other ways non-conformist sociality. In all cases along with drugs and repetitive drone-like music, repetitive and disorienting flashing stroboscopic light played a key role in this counter cultural assemblage.

Before this, similar effects were already being produced via flicker films of which this article will discuss two examples. While Tony Conrad’s film The Flicker (1965) is often thought of as the beginning of the flicker film, it was preceded by some five years by Peter Kubelka’s film Arnulf Rainer (1960), and possible this was already anticipated in the imageless films of the French Postwar avant-garde group the Lettrist International from the 1940s.

This film alternated solid black or white film frames, metrically patterned to function like musical notes: these frames were accompanied by either white noise or silence. Through the variable rhythms of these frames, audiences experience the film as speeding up and slowing down, and it also generates audiovisual illusions such as afterimages of swirling colours or a transparent offscreen halo. Similar principles were used by minimalist musician Tony Conrad to construct The Flicker, but this time these accidental psychedelic effects were deliberately sought after, from initial observations of cinematic projectors accidentally generating these kinds of results. Conrad designed the shifting rhythms of the frames in order to directly stimulate cerebral activity, in line with the operations of different kinds of drugs. Audiences reported a range of reactions to these films, from walkouts, headaches and nausea to hallucinations of movements, shapes and colours. While seen at the time as part of ‘structuralist-materialist’ film, an avant-garde movement aiming to strip back the illusions of cinema to reveal its material conditions, it is better considered an analog neural interface, experimenting not so much with a drive to experimental austerity, but with modes of perception, based on direct stimulation of the brain. This was reinforced by the only frame in the film not part of the flicker that was a warning that the ‘producer, distributor and exhibitors waive any liability for physical and mental injury’ caused by the film and acknowledging that the film may produce epileptic seizures or ‘mild symptoms’ of shock therapy and advising that staying in the movie theatre is at your own risk and that a physician should be present (Conrad, 1965). Conrad actually consulted with doctors about the risks of the film which, while minimal, could nevertheless affect a small percentage of people. However, the warning says a lot about the aims of the film to directly stimulate the brain on a pre-representational level. Flicker films are part of a much longer and broader history of the use of blank frames, whether black, white or coloured in the history of cinema, which has been thoroughly explored in Tanya Shilina-Conte’s book Black Screens, White Frames. While originally a technological effect of the medium itself, for example in the inclusion of black or white leader before or after the projection of photographic images, blank frames have been deliberately used in a range of avant-garde cinematic practices. For example, the Lettrist International group in post-war Paris advocated what they called the ‘chiselling’ of pre-existent film strip to the point of effacing the image altogether (see Shilina-Conte, 2024: 131ff) and also screened entirely blank films with only a soundtrack encouraging the audience to imagine the invisible film being projected. Ex-Lettrist Guy Debord would extend these practices into his situationist film-work, constructed mostly of found materials but now given a more explicitly political context as the negation of representation, considered in terms of the spectacle (Shilina-Conte, 2024: 132-134). Where it comes to flicker films themselves, Shilina-Conte argues, drawing on Deleuze, that these are a radical deterritorialization of cinematic representation that directly address the brain rather than the eye: ‘Flicker films have a more direct effect on the “autonomic nervous system” (Le Grice, 2001: 50) than the extended black or white screen”, constituting a flickering brain, which relinks or creates loops’ (Shilina-Conte, 2024: 144). The effect of watching a film like The Flicker has the potential to generate altered states of consciousness including ‘extended peripheral vision, hallucinatory images (where there are none), and, in some cases, hypnotic trance effects. [These effects] do not result solely from the stimulation of the optic nerve but also from engagement with the visual cortex of the brain’ (Shilina-Conte, 2024: 145).

It is no accident that the soundtracks for these films were also highly experimental, with Kubelka’s film using white noise and Conrad’s using a synthesised low frequency tone, subject to tape delays, that could be perceived either as rhythm or pitch. Conrad was working with LaMonte Young in experimental ‘dream’ music based on drones (in a group, The Theater of Eternal Music, that included John Cale and Terry Riley among others), which can be considered the sonic equivalent of the stroboscopic effect. While drones are similarly based on the repetition of frequencies, albeit at a much slower rate, they are known to have similar effects in terms of provoking altered states of consciousness and have been used as the basis for sacred and ritual musics across multiple cultures for thousands of years. Harry Sword’s book Monolithic Undertow (2021) traces this passage of drone from ancient ritual practices to doom metal groups like Sunn ((0)), via minimalism, industrial and noise musics, exploring how drone persists as an unmusical experience of sonic environments both natural and man-made:

Static, hiss, white noise, feedback – these are all drones. In essence, drone equals sustain – sustained sustain, if you will. Environmental and mechanical drones form the auditory backbone of urban and wild spaces alike. […] to be alive is to live with multiple background drones, whether we’re conscious of them or not (Sword, 2021: 7).

Experimental music groups like the post-industrial group Coil experimented with drones on their Time Machines project and made claims that they can constitute an equivalent of both mind-altering drugs and time travel. As Coil member John Balance put it about this project: ‘Time Machines was supposed to cure you of time. In the sense that time is an affliction, everything is speeding up and there’s no time and everything is compressed. Your time isn’t your time anymore’ (cited in Keenan, 2016: 376). As such drones and strobes are highly inter-related and often meet in one form or another in audiovisual work aiming to provoke alterations in consciousness.

Finally, there is the phenomenon of ‘glitch’ or ‘glitch aesthetics’, in which the technical failures or ‘noise’ generated by a given medium are deliberately cultivated and then used as a generative aesthetic element. The term glitch was first applied to errors in radio transmissions, but has subsequently been taken up in relation to a range of electronic media, especially electronic music, video and computer art and gaming. Every technology from the gramophone to digital storage and playback has its specific errors, and artists and media producers have capitalised on these glitches as generative resources in a range of fields. In recorded sound, several artists have pushed sound recording technologies including records, CDS and newer digital formats to the point of complete failure, while in electronic music groups like Oval and the Mille Plateaux ‘Clicks and Cuts’ compilation series (2000-), deliberately used and created sonic glitches, for example by damaging CDs as a compositional element. In video art, Cory Arcangel in works like ‘Super Mario Clouds’ (2002) modified the Super Mario video game to only include the sky and clouds, and Rosa Menkman has dedicated most of her work to glitch including coming up with a highly glitchy Glitch Studies Manifesto (Menkman, 2010a), as well as glitch-based artworks including The Collapse of Pal (2010b). In one of the most detailed studies of glitch aesthetics, Peter Krapp writes:

In glitch, the signal/noise dialectic in human-computer interaction emphasizes more than ever a balance between error and control; both are needed for performance. The reminder of the imperfect, noisy, lossy nature of the machine counters our contemporary digital culture’s positivistic faith in technology as providing order (Krapp, 2011: 74).

But this emphasis on the generative potentialities of noise and error is not only applicable to digital culture but to all media technologies and systems, which all produce their distinctive forms of noise, as this article has been exploring. Moreover, the glitch is not merely yet another means of revealing the media system itself and its errors, but also a short-circuiting of the senses, enabling, as with strobes, flickers and drones, a more direct communication with the cerebral cortex, bypassing the representational functioning of the senses.

Strobe, drone, glitch and the subversion of representation

A powerful example of this kind of practice that departs from the minimalism of only using alternating black and white frames is Paul Sharits’ film T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968). In this film, monochrome colour backgrounds transform into each other while undergoing a highly visible strobe effect. There is also a dynamic interplay with black, white and coloured rectangular sections of the frame of different scales up to the entire frame. All of this is alternating at such rapid speeds that it is impossible to track and bypasses conventional visual perception. But in front of all this abstraction is a much more representational picture of a man’s face and naked chest, which looks like an amateur photograph, and which is also alternating rapidly between flashing positive and negative images as well as the flashing rectangular shapes. This visual complexity is accompanied on the soundtrack by a single repeated sound recording of the word ‘destroy’, repeated so persistently that is starts to lose all meaning and becomes drone-like, and the film has also been said to provoke audiovisual hallucinations. This film is far too perceptually complex to be merely seen as a structuralist deconstruction of the cinematic apparatus. Instead, it is another case of direct neural stimulation via repetition, both sonically and visually, with an added sense that its rapidly accelerated visual alternations ‘destroy’ any stable perception of the representational image that is presented, or alternatively imprint it directly and violently on the brain.

In a more mainstream context, David Lynch has famously made use of explicit stroboscopic as well as drone effects, in order to destabilise conventional perception of both space and time across many of his works. Sometimes given narrative justification, such as the malfunctioning fluorescent light during Laura Palmer’s (Sheryl Lee) autopsy in Twin Peaks (1991-1992), at other times it indicates liminal dreamspaces such as in Agent Cooper’s (Kyle McLachlan) visions, or the Silencio Theatre in Mulholland Drive (2001). In the latter, there is a weird deconstruction of cinematic experience, not that far removed from materialist film, in which an MC/magician is presenting a number of performances, claiming that they are all recordings, such as the trumpet line that continues when the player stops playing, or Rebekah Del Rio’s song that continues after her physical collapse. Demonstrating this with stroboscopic lightning flashes, the MC points out that even though we know it is all ‘recorded’ we nevertheless respond to these sights and sounds as real perceptions producing real affects, as demonstrated by the terror and sadness of the two female protagonists in the audience. As such it at once deconstructs and reiterates the cinematic apparatus that keeps functioning, even when breaking down. The insistence on flashing lights to accompany this ‘lesson’ only insists on the role of flashing light as the essence of cinematic perception. Strobes, as well as dronelike music, also turn up in various iterations of the Twin Peaks universe such as the nightclub scene in Fire Walk With Me (1994), which, while given some narrative justification, uses strobe effects to subvert spatio-temporal relations and generate a sense of the weird and uncanny. More than this, there is an almost obsessive focus on electricity, whether in the form of power poles, lightning, wall sockets or just flashing lights, accompanied by dronelike sound effects, such as when the version of Agent Cooper trapped in the Black Lodge passes through an electrical circuit from an abstract liminal space to a regular wall socket, rematerializing out of black smoke, if not entirely all there. This seems to reiterate Kittler’s insight that behind all the other tricks of the cinematic medium lies the original trick of electrical alternating current.

Strobe and drone in audiovisual art: E. Gabriel Edvy

By now strobes and drones are widespread in contemporary culture whether in the uses for strobes and VJing in nightclubs, accompanied by repetitive dronelike music, in music video, in video for live performance or in the more art context of audiovisual artworks, again often based on the perceptual conscious-alternating potentials of rapidly flashing lights and repetitive sounds.

One example of a contemporary video maker whose work crosses many of these domains is E Gabriel Edvy. Her work is prolific and, in many instances, takes experimentation with strobe-like effects and visual noise to new heights. While her work usually involves collaborating with others who are responsible for the sonic aspects of the work, the synaesthetic nature of this work means that it is already audiovisual and deeply engaged with vibration, rhythm and noise.

An exemplary instance of this is her video for the artist <PIG> (Raymond Watts), ‘Rock N Roll Refugee’. The music track is already dripping with irony as it explores the valences of this music, dropping references to Jesus, the Devil and Caesar. The video begins with a ceiling fan light out of which the light seems to explode into a supernova and the accompanying sounds make it resemble a helicopter on fire (see Fig. 1). When the singer appears, they are doubled into two negative images, one with an overall red hue and the other a more sickly yellow, with the sun of the ceiling fan still exploding in the middle of the image. In addition, there is an abstract glitchy background behind both figures resembling curtains but made of abstract light and shadow (see Fig. 2).

As can already be seen, usually in Edvy’s work there are so many layers that it renders a full description almost impossible. Self-described as combining ‘weaponised strobes and eye-cutting visuals’ (Edvy, 2025), this becomes clear once the video enters the stage of employing strobe effects, at first in a similar non-representational way to ‘The Flicker’ but ultimately more in the complex and chaotic manner of Sharits’ work but taken even further in terms of speed and variety. No amount of still images can capture the effect of these stroboscopic alterations and variations, but despite containing recognisable representational images of Watts, there is so much visual noise that it short-circuits this representational level in favour of a direct stimulation of the optic nerve.

These aesthetics are developed in a different way in her collaborations with sound artist Fabio Kubic as Sequencial AVR (Audio-Visual Research). These are works that, rather than interpreting an already finished piece of audio, are created as synaesthetic sound/image works from the very beginning. As such they demonstrate greater levels of both visual and sonic abstraction. Often the films have been shown in relation to the emergent field of ‘drone cinema’ at festivals like Dronica and Drone Cinema Festival, but reducing them to merely being a combination of drone-like visuals and sound does not do justice to either component of these works. To give one example, ‘The Foundation’ (2018), which, in its description makes reference to the Kabbala node Yesod, is also associated with the moon. The visuals present rapidly alternating shapes in black and white, while the soundtrack involves reprocessed sound recordings that, while repetitive, also involve a lot of variation, rather than conforming to typical drone patterns. Experiencing this and other Sequencial works is to be plunged into a world of abstractions that communicates perceptually at a level that is pre-linguistic and pre-representational or perhaps other to both these expressive systems. A more fruitful comparison might be that of Dreamachines, but ones that can be experienced with the eyes open as the complex variations in light intensity and abstract patternings directly refigure cerebral functioning. And in addition to the already destabilising flicker and drone effects, there is also the intensive use of glitch which, in addition to adding further layers of visual noise, further scramble spatio-temporal codes, further intensifying the experience of pure sensation (see Fig. 3).

Conclusion: From hyperstimulation to embracing noise

In this article, we have explored the experience of hyperstimulation in 21^st century media landscapes, arguing that it should be understood as a recalibration of perception in relation to the demands of neoliberal digital capitalism. We have also seen how the effects of this hyperstimulation have been seen by theorists like Fisher and Berardi as psychopathogenic, leading to panic, collapse and depression. Whether these psychological effects are seen as deliberately produced by late capitalism (Fisher, 2014) or as escape attempts (Berardi, 2024), often it seems like these are the only alternatives. However, the rich history of media experiments in flicker, drones and glitch aesthetics outlined here, offers a third path of counter-stimulation that rather than avoiding stimulation as slow cinema attempts to do, takes it to a higher power, directly stimulating cerebral functioning, beyond or before language and representation. While sharing this to some extent with contemporary post-cinema, the break with representation allows for a completely different range of effects. Flickers, strobe and drone are still ways of engaging with stimulation and chaos but in a very different manner that severs the relationship to representation altogether, rather than serving as parts of a still representational regime of neoliberal capitalist aesthetics. I would argue that these effects are at least potentially therapeutic in a way that is more effective than attempts to withdraw, escape or exit from hyperstimulation. Some of these, such as the devices discussed by Chia and Neves (2023), may be already coopted as part of neurocapitalism, as a mode of subjective optimisation aimed and making subjects work more, longer and at a better mental capacity. However, in the line of experimentation traced here from dreamachines, via flicker films, to 21^st century experimental uses of strobe and drone effects, another potential becomes apparent via the sensorily destabilising powers of repetitive light and sound, which constitutes an aesthetics of counter-stimulation. This is of course with the caveat that there are no guarantees how these techniques may be used and there are certainly instances of their use for reactionary political rallies or even as part of ‘sonic warfare’ from Waco and Guantanamo Bay to Palestine, as authors like Steve Goodman have argued (Goodman, 2009). While it may be difficult to make direct connections between this minor history of non-representational media and political resistance to capitalism, it nevertheless constitutes different modes of a therapeutic perceptual politics that counters dominant modes of hyperstimulation. As such, it is more effective than fantasies of exit or slowness as a way of countering hyperstimulation, not with stillness or silence, but with pleasurable and desirable noise.

References

Berardi, F. (Bifo) (2009) Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation. Ed. E. Empson and S. Shukaitis. London: Minor Compositions.

Berardi, F. (Bifo) (2024) Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression. London: Repeater Books.

Bordwell, D. (2002) ‘Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film’. Film Quarterly, 55(3), pp. 16-28.

Bordwell D. (2008) ‘A glance at blows’. Observations on Film Art. [Blog Entry]. Available at: https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2008/12/28/a-glance-at-blows/

Chia, A. and Neves, J. (2023) ‘The Data Pharmacy’, Media Theory 6(2), pp. 77-110.

Conrad, T. (1965) The Flicker. USA. [Film]

Crary, J. (2014) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso.

De Luca, T. and Barradas Jorge, N.  (eds.) (2016) Slow Cinema. Traditions in World Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Denson, S. and Leyda, J. (eds.) (2016) Post Cinema: Theorizing 21^st Century Film. Falmer: REFRAME Books.

Edvy, E.G. (2025) E. Gabriel Edvy [Website]. Available at: https://www.egabrieledvy.com/

Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.

FLOW Neuroscience (2025) [Website] ‘How it Works’. Available at: https://www.flowneuroscience.com/how-it-works/

Goodman, S. (2009) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. Technologies of Lived Abstraction Series. Boston: MIT Press.

Keenan, D. (2016) England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground. 2^nd Edition. London: Strange Attractor Press.

Krapp, P. (2011) Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kittler, F.A. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. G. Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Le Grice, M. (2001) Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age. London: BFI.

Menkman, R. (2010a) The Glitch Studies Manifesto. [Self Published] Available at: https://beyondresolution.info/Glitch-Studies-Manifesto

Menkman, R. (2010b) The Collapse of PAL. Beyond Resolution [Website]. available at: https://beyondresolution.info/Collapse-of-PAL (accessed 08/06/26).

Pisters, P. (2012) The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Postman, N. (2005 [1985]) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin.

Sharits, P. (1968) T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G [Film]. USA.

Shaviro, S. (2016a) ‘Post-Continuity: An Introduction’, in Denson, S. and Leyda, J. (eds.) (2016) Post Cinema: Theorizing 21^st Century Film. Falmer: REFRAME Books, n.p.

Shaviro, S. (2016b) ‘Post-Cinematic Affect’. in Denson, S. and Leyda, J. (eds.) (2016) Post Cinema: Theorizing 21^st Century Film. Falmer: REFRAME Books, n.p.

Shilina-Conte, T. (2024) Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stork, M. (2011) Chaos Cinema part 1. Press Play: USA. [Video Essay] Available at: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-in-motion/chaos-cinema-part-1-by-matthias-stork.1

Sword, H. (2021) Monolithic Undertow: In Search for Sonic Oblivion. London: White Rabbit.

Turner, F. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Turner, F. (2013) The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Virilio, P. (1977) Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e).

Dr Michael N. Goddard is Reader in Film and Screen Media at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely on international cinema and audiovisual culture as well as cultural and media theory. He is also a media theorist, especially in the fields of media ecologies and media archaeology, as well as in digital media. In media archaeology, his most significant contribution is the monograph, Guerrilla Networks (2018), the culmination of his media archaeological research to date, which was published by Amsterdam University Press. His previous book, Impossible Cartographies (2013) was on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach and culminating in editing two books on noise, Reverberations (2012) and Resonances (2013). He is currently working on a book on the British post-industrial group Coil, and a new research project on media arts as time machines, so far resulting in an open access journal issue of MAST combining theory and practice outputs.

Email: Michael.Goddard@gold.ac.uk

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 16/06/25
Date of original decision: 08/09/25
Revised article submitted: 19/09/25
Article accepted: 19/09/25