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Ian Sommerville (June 3, 1940 – February 5, 1976) [2] was an electronics technician and computer programmer. He is primarily known through his association with William S. Burroughs's circle of Beat Generation figures, and lived at Paris's so-called " Beat Hotel" by 1960, when they were regulars there, becoming Burroughs's lover and " systems adviser".
Sommerville was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Around 1960, he programmed a random-sequence generator that Brion Gysin used in his cut-up technique. He and Gysin also collaborated in 1961 in developing the Dreamachine, a phonograph-driven stroboscope described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed", [3] and intended to affect the viewer's brain alpha wave activity.
Sommerville and Burroughs made the 5-minute tape "Silver Smoke of Dreams" in the early 1960s, and later provided the basis for the quarter-hour audio "cut-up" and "K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens" around 1965. The following year Sommerville also installed two Revox reel-to-reel machines for Paul McCartney in Ringo Starr's apartment at 34 Montagu Square, Marylebone, London, and recorded Burroughs on the machine. [4]
Sommerville along with Gysin and Burroughs collaborated on Let The Mice In, published in 1973. [5] Burroughs' book My Education: A Book of Dreams, indeed largely composed of accounts of his dreams, includes dreams of talking with Sommerville.
He died in a car accident on William Burroughs's birthday, 5 February 1976. Burroughs's biographer Barry Miles reports that Ian had sent Burroughs a telegram that day saying, "Happy birthday. Lots of love. No realisation. Ian". "No realisation" referred to Ian's unsuccessful search for a job as a computer programmer in America. [6]
References
- ^ Chandarlapaty, R. (2019). "Woodard and Renewed Intellectual Possibilities", in Seeing the Beat Generation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. pp. 142–146.
- ^ John Geiger, Chapel of Extreme Experience, page 90.
- ^ Quoted on cover flap of Tuning in to the Multimedia Age.
- ^ Miles, Barry (1997). "6: Avant-Garde London". Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. New York: Henry Holt and Company. pp. 238–243. ISBN 0805052488.
- ^ Ed. Jan Herman. Vermont: Something Else Press, 1973.
- ^ Miles, Barry (2014). William S. Burroughs: A Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp. 520–521. ISBN 9780297867258.
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