It's been a few weeks already, last few weeks have been a bit hazy. I've just about now got my sleeping schedule almost resembling normal so that's good. I've been flittering between all kinds of stuff and it's been tough to focus. I've been reading more now, have a few books I've been working on but otherwise my weekends have been borderline catatonic.

Something that jolted me out of my coma was going to the Paranormal Technology Museum yesterday. I had heard about it a while back, maybe on Facebook or something, and had made a mental note to definately maybe visit it at some point. I was thinking it would be open like a normal museum but apparently, as I heard at the beginning of this week, it was only a temporary exhibit so I head off to see it on Saturday with a friend before it vanished.

The thing was on Nilsiänkatu 10, right behind my old school in Vallila where that weird artsy aquaintance I knew years back had a studio. It was a grey and almost misty day, moisture was just lingering in the blue-colored air as we approached the building. We had to call to get the outside door open and to my utter suprise the guy curating the museum was Tomi from my old machining class! That was weird as hell, catching up quickly with him as we walked up the stairs to the exibition. I wouldn't have ever guessed he was into this stuff. Crazy.

The first thing that I noticed was that the place smelt really strongly of weed. It was probably from a neighboring studio, but man it was it heavy. Gave the place the right vibe though, to be honest. It was way smaller than I though it'd be, the exhibition room was the size of a toilet stall. It was very well decorated, deep colors and all this nice frills and interesting details. There was flickering lights, monitors, weird frequencies humming along. If the dead were gonna speak, it was going to be inside that fucking room. The skull jars were a beautifully morbid touch. Tomi went through all the things they had in the small room, giving little stories relating to each device. They even had a dream machine made from an old vinyl player. They had all this cool stuff, stuff I remembered from old ghost documentaries and the like. They even had a Raudive diode.

In a back room they had a computer running TempleOS, the operating system Terry Davis made as a the third temple. I've run the OS myself on a virutal machine but it was really cool seeing someone else know something about it.

Down the Rabbit Hole-TempleOS

We spent almost an hour there, quite a while for such a small museum. The place had a vibe, a strong one, that I just enjoyed. It was messy and small and full of all of these little things. There was artist attention paid in how the place was designed and it really paid off. This was clearly a passion project, something that is so rare to see. I felt that I had been ripped out of the normal flow of my everyday life and went somewhere beyond.

We bought a couple old parapsycology journals from the gift shop, one had a great article of testing gerbils for psychic abilities. When we left I put something up on Instagram and joked that it was such a weird paranormal experience going to that museum. Seeing an old aquaintence like that, patterns everywhere, every face you see is one that you recognize. Even on the tram back a monitor had flipped out and was showing a Mozilla error message.

I was reminded of my own experiments I did with SSVEP back a while ago and I mentioned to Tomi that one where I was able to measure the change in brainwave activity using 40hz lights. I just dug up the old Arduino sketch I made for that experiment and put it up on my GitHub. I gave up the brain stuff about a year or two ago. It just felt like I wasn't progressing in the directions I was hoping. In all honesty, it was hard to keep up my motivation when it felt like no one really cared about the stuff I was studying. I was also constantly worried about the very real concern that I was purely bullshitting myself with all of it, that I could be looking at the graphs, staring at the light, all of that, and I'd simply be completely deluding myself into beleiving whatever I wanted to believe. There were devices in the museum where you where just stared at static or a wobbling screen and eventually you'd see the spirits in the noise. That what my brain stuff felt like a lot of the time, seeing ghosts in the noise, having no way of knowing if it was just desperation making me see the forms. Despite all that, the trip to the museum really made me want to take a look at the brain stuff again. I might spend an afternoon or two dabbling in it again.

Arduino sketch for brain entrainment device

Above is a graph I made back in the day. It shows how easily flashing lights can make your brain mimic any frequency you want. As to subjective experiences of those frequencies, my own experiments only made me fall asleep very quickly. Or I was having mini-seizures mid-experiment, who knows. It was hard to care at that point and I stopped experiments after about a month. But I guess there's always going to be a part of me that is going to be interested in the wild stuff beyond reason. It's a world full of delusion and deception, yet somewhere deep in that forest some people are able to eke out some meaning to give their lives some excitment and hope.

Paranormal Technology Museum's website