Richard Metzger

How far do you have to go to go too far for television? Disinformation found out with its own television show on the UK's Channel 4 TV Network. DisinfoTV on DVD, hosted by Disinformation co-founder Richard Metzger, is a show that acts like a television newsmagazine on speed, filled with enough counter culture propaganda, that according to Wired magazine, "makes Jackass look tame." The show challenged Channel 4's censors when it originally aired and resulted in the network refusing to broadcast certain segments. What did make it into people's homes became an instant classic of the weird and unusual, and the series was a hit. Eventually bought by the Sci-Fi Channel for the United States, it was considered too controversial and never aired in America. In this DVD, you'll see everything as it was intended; including the banned segments.

Disinfo.Con contains an amazing 4 hours of footage from The Disinformation Company's massive counterculture event in New York City's Hammerstein Ballroom. New York hadn't seen anything like this since the Nova Convention in 1978 which saw Frank Zappa, Patti Smith and others anoint William Burroughs as king of the counterculture. A quarter century later Disinformation's keynote speakers Richard Metzger and Douglas Rushkoff ushered in a dizzying, day-long array of performances ranging from sword-swallowing to sanskrit chanting, interspersed with lectures and conversations with counterculture luminaries like Mondo 2000 founder R.U. Sirius, industrial music progenitor Genesis P-Orridge, Grant Morrison, Robert Anton Wilson, theorists, performance artists and others from the extremes of popular culture. Nothing beats actually experiencing an event like this in the flesh, but this DVD comes pretty close to capturing the spirit of the counterculture as we lurch into the 21st century.

In 1960, Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine, a hypnotic light device with the power to induce hallucinations, drugless highs, and revolutionize human consciousness. It looks simple enough; a 100-watt light bulb, a motor, and a rotating cylinder with cutouts. Just sit in front of it, close your eyes, and wait for the visions to come. The Dream Machine enthralled mystics and freethinkers everywhere; Kurt Cobain had a dream machine, and William S. Burroughs thought it could be used to “storm the citadels of enlightenment.” With a custom-made Dream Machine in tow, director Nik Sheehan takes us on a journey into the life of Brion Gysin; his art, his complex ideas, and his friendships with some of the most eccentric counter-cultural icons. Taking the Dream Machine as the basis of its explorations, FLicKeR asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness, and imagines a humanity liberated to explore its creativity in complete freedom.