similar patterns of discovery, multiple cross-usage, dissemination, and
criminalization.^6
An overlap between Techno and New Age ritual symbolism frames digital dance
events as neo-shamanic experiences. Particularly raves and trance parties, these are
multimedia dance events in hidden urban or rural areas, secretly announced within
informal networks of young “initiates.” A tribal layout places the dance floor at the
center of the venue, and technological devices are strategically positioned for altering
subjects’ minds: mega-speakers powered by multi-deck amplifiers; smoke machines;
laser beams, ultra-violet and stroboscopic lights; and video projections of
extraordinary images: kaleidoscopic fractals, dazzling angels, digital babies; ethereal
gardens, crystalline waves, super-nova stars; zooming spaceships, industrial plants,
sex manga cartoons; or air bombardments, atomic mushrooms, and slavery;
wastelands, destruction, cyber monsters, etc. As a postmodernist art genre, these
videos are set on iterable mode: images unfold for a few seconds and are
instantaneously repeated; the next sequence, though, extends shortly, and is looped
again, and so on: repetition with difference. At a deeper level, iterability dramatizes
modern routine and neurosis in a clash of boredom and excitement, hugely
intensified by psychoactive substances. Likewise, rave décor draws on tribal, military,
psychedelic, and utopian elements: colorful drapes, tents and banners, psychedelic
paintings, aromatic candles, incense, religious symbols (Om, Shiva’s Trident) and
statues (Buddha, Nataraj, Ganesh). Enveloped in kaleidoscopic mystery, a rave or
trance party is felt as a pulsating organism that engenders extraordinary experiences.
By combining art, technology, and religion, the DJ is the new digital shaman,
responsible for creating and maintaining an atmosphere of excitement and
communion in the crowd. As a witchdoctor healing the sick, divining the hidden,
and controlling events (Mauss and Hubert 1902), the DJ plays music with techniques
of continuous beat matching, planning, and improvisation of “tracks” (records) in
direct, albeit intuitive, interaction with the dancing and non-dancing crowds. The
music is extremely loud and its multi-rhythmic layers unfold through iterable and
restless refrains: repetitive beats and loops of sound with minor alterations of tones
and insertion/removal of layers and staccatos. This endless pattern of repetition-cum-
difference pumps untiringly for many hours, often days, as DJs alternate without
interruption. Rather than circular, digital music is spiral, if not fractal. As intensity
sets in, iterable sounds transform music into a meta-music of derailing sounds,
altering people’s sense of mind, body, feeling, time, and reality The dance floor
gradually becomes a powerful zone of psychic fields.
While “raving,” “when the dancer becomes the dance” (Osho 1988:55), sounds
and lights acquire tangible textures and are felt to merge with the dancer’s soul. It is
Neo mastering The Matrix. Induced naturally or chemically, states of perception are
altered, and the self disintegrates; the ordinary sense of a bounded atom melts into
waves of flows: flows of pleasures and imaginations, synchronizing with other
bouncing bodies, merging with the crowd into an ocean of light, sound, warmth,
and dance. The Judeo-Christian individual is replaced by a Confucian experiencing
of a cosmic self. Or, in the Zen acceptance of paradox, raving sensations are as
ANTHONY D’ANDREA 245