no folks, it's nothing political.
I happened upon this the other day, when going through the archives. It is something written by Mike (the Spaceman Bassman) explaining the change of name from the Light Opera to the Illuminatus Light Show. I thought readers might find it interesting, so I've scanned it and here it is:
ILLUMINATUS
What We Think We're Doing Up There With All Those Projectors
Confusion 14 marks our 6th year of participation in fandom, a tradition begun when we hauled a few projectors to Noreascon and set up in the "Alien Environments" room. Since then we've added personnel and equipment and changed our name from Light Opera to Illuminatus, a move prompted by confusion from the operatic set as well as an appreciation of the trappings (pyramids) and pun potential of being "illuminated". We've graduated from doing shows in our hotel rooms to opening last year's Worldcon, an even from which we have yet to recover(*).
What we like doing, basically, is shining colors and images onto surfaces in front of (and sometimes, on) people in hopes of providing entertainment; edification and merriment and (if we're really hot) astonishment, consciousness expansion and awe. We do have artistic pretensions. We like to think we're contributing something positive towards a unification of art and technology. We are tinkerers, fooling around in our basement laboratory with laser and oscilloscope, hot rod slide projectors and spinning mirror discs, hot glue and super tape. We read Popular Electronics and Theatre Crafts, Laser Focus and Saturday Review, Scientific American and National Lampoon, Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction; and out of all of this we put together visual events that reflect man's innate tendency to take perfectly good tools and make of them works of art.
Ours is an aesthetic of swirling colors, clear cut by the laser's pure straight line, abstracted by the mirrored reflections of time-slices caught by lens and photo-reactive films. Ours is a practive of power tools, projector bulbs and miles of interconnecting cable. We have as heroes Thomas Wilfred and Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and Rube Goldberg, Stanley Kubrick and Science Fiction Writers of Association.
Stuart Brand once wrote (in the Whole Earth Catalogue) something to the effect of "If we are to become as gods, we might as well get good at it"; so we daydream of anti-gravity flying saucers projecting colors on clouds, of laser displays upon a new moon, of a zero-G, all-encompassing holographic experience.
In the meantime, we do what we can.
We hope you enjoy the show.
-- Mike Gould
[(*) - I'm pretty sure the Worldcon Mike wrote about was the big convention we went to in Washington D. C. ? Right Mike? Me, Mike and Wayne, and some folks from the Stilyagi Air Corps... there, we saw the world premiere of "A Boy and His Dog," with Harlan Ellison (except we couldn't hear the sound because there was a projector glitch having to do with the Hotels A/V setup.) In fact I think I may have blurred this with the Star Con, maybe this was the one with Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov having an insult contest... someone help me out here! - Hugh]
