The Sick Machine

"B-z-z-up. Whoo. Whoo. Twitter. Z-o-o-om. MA-A-A-CHINE!" The sounds whooped and wallowed in the semidarkness, seemed to race one another, swooped head on into ear-splitting collisions. Under the domed ceiling, lights wriggled and flickered, reeled and burst in dazzling, flaky showers. A voice came booming in: "MATCHWOOD SPLITS INTO MATCHES!"

The scene: San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium. The occasion: an evening of Vortex, a "new form of theater based on electronics, optics and architecture," which in the last year and a half has put thousands of San Franciscans in a spin.

Esthetics. Vortex is the creation of two San Franciscans: Film Maker Jordan Belson, 32, in charge of visual effects; TV Producer Henry Jacobs, 34, who handles the sound. Working together, the two present "esthetically gratifying audio-visual experiences probably related to basic instincts in the fear of loud noise and the fear of falling." Belson's equipment includes standard slide projectors, rotating prisms, a series of slotted globes, a strobo-scopic flicker machine that has the effect, at 15 flashes per second, of inducing the shakes in some viewers (Belson keeps his flicker to a safe eight flashes per second). Jacobs controls the sound from a console that is hooked into twelve three-story loudspeakers located about the rim of the planetarium, plus four bass speakers around the room. By turning a crank he can produce rings of sound racing smoothly about the dome's circumference. He can also make his sound tinkle and drip from side to side or leap in front of or behind an audience. Jacobs either uses taped works by other experimental electronics composers or pastes up his own random sounds to suit his taste.

Absolutes. Last week's program featured the works of European composers. Italian Composer Luciano Berio's Homage to Joyce consisted of unintelligible recitations of the final pages of Ulysses. Also included were such numbers as the airy Suite in the Form of a Mushroom; Untitled, an explosive collection of train noises; and Dialogue for Man and Machine, which, in addition to the whoo-whoo effect and the obscure philosophizing about matchwood, contains this mysterious admonition:

Little machine, don't wake up You're sick, sick, sick.

Innovators Jacobs and Belson took Vortex to the Brussels Fair last fall, saw a portion of their bewildered audience walk out at the first break (said Belson hopefully: "They walked out on Rite of Spring, too"). But San Franciscans have taken to Vortex so enthusiastically that they were standing in line last week to get in. Vortexmen Jacobs and Belson are confident that they have stumbled on a form that will "drag people away from TV" and beat Cinerama at its own game ("Once you've seen Lowell Thomas fly round the world, you've had it"). Their wild enthusiasm is shared by San Francisco Chronicle Critic Alfred Frankenstein, who piled absolute upon absolute, and then sliced it, in his vertiginous summary of Vortex: "The result is the closest approximation to a sense of absolute infinity which I have ever experienced."

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