A Meditative Journey with Dan Ghenacia’s Alpha Wave Experience

Dan Ghenacia’s Multi-Sensory Artwork

This winter Dan Ghenacia’s solo show “Have a Good Trip” is on view at Sobering Galerie in Paris through January 13, 2024. The exhibition offers an immersive experience for visitors, one that exists between meditation and contemplation, daydreaming, and deep reflection.

Ghenacia is known around the world as a DJ and producer who has performed internationally, including with groups like Apollonia. His interest in dynamic visuals and pulsating lights for the music stage led him nearly ten years ago to search out beatnik Brion Gysin’s work Dreamachine, made in the 1950s, which created stroboscopic flickering light using simple materials like a turntable, lightbulb, and cardboard. Ghenacia’s fascination with Dreamachine and his own prototype lay dormant until the pandemic, when his travel and DJ schedule suddenly came to a hault.

The Alphawave Experience is Inspired by the Dreamachine

Ghenacia funneled his focus into what would become the Alphawave Experience, which reimagines Gysin’s Dreamachine as a multisensory artwork—incorporating light, sound, and environment. The artwork experience puts participants in a near immediate meditative space, whether solo, as with the piece The Clock, or in community, as with the piece The Oracle (recently on view at Silencio in Ibiza this past summer and fall).

In Paris this winter, Ghenacia will show new works like The Clouds, which re-creates flights of fancy when gazing out the window of a plane. Whitewall spoke with Ghenacia about his journey into experiential art, aiding our own journey within.

WHITEWALL: What about Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine called out to you back in 2014?

DAN GHENACIA: I’m a producer and a DJ. I was absolutely fascinated by the idea because it’s probably the first stroboscope, which is an element extremely important in clubbing. I was very attracted by the machine and the message. The Dreamachine arrived at the same time as the TV, when some were thinking that TV would be dangerous in terms of manipulation, mass marketing, et cetera. They thought people would buy a dream machine to meditate instead of watching TV. This didn’t happen, but still I was very attracted by the idea behind it.

WW: An idea that has parallels today, where rather than TV, it’s social media.

DG: Exactly. And the beauty of the project for me is that this is something that you cannot show on social media. And it’s one of the rare things you cannot show today. We are in a moment where we can show everything, everybody is with their phone trying to film and look, but this experience is an internal journey.

Dan Ghenacia Describes the Experience of Alpha Wave

WW: So even though we have to experience Alpha Wave in person, how would you describe it for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure?

DG: The original machine has no music. So I’ve been working with Tolga Fidan, another producer working with me at Boa Lab Gallery in Lisbon. We started to study meditative music and how we could translate the brain frequency in music, working on ambient and meditative music. And Anine Kirsten helped me to design the piece itself.

We did an exhibition to have viewis and test our machine, and the first time we invited 20 people—some party animals from the club scene, and they all said it was like hallucinating, it was very strong. Most of people see colors, geometrical patterns, and some—maybe 10 percent —have daydreams. They see people, faces, and landscapes.

WW: What’s the length of time that’s effective?

DG: What I do in general for an exhibit is around 10 minutes.

Alpha Wave Provides Meditation in Minutes

WW: Getting people to a meditative state so quickly has obvious health benefits. When did that connect for you?

DG: I’m not a scientist, of course, so I knew I needed the support of neuroscience. We met Francisco Teixeira, who is a neuroscientist in Lisbon who specializes in frequencies and light therapy.  

We started to collaborate. He was working on a project collecting data from this neurofeedback headset, a brain trainer for meditation. And for that research, he needed to have people meditate. That can take long and doesn’t work all the time. I said, “Let’s try with the machine.” And what we figured out was that it works instantly. Basically, your brain frequency is activated in a second. It’s a shortcut to meditation. If you don’t know how to meditate, you have no option, you will meditate. Because the light is so powerful that you don’t have time to think. You fight a little bit with the light and there is a moment you let it go.

WW: Can you tell us about the Mind Art project that’s generated from the Alpha Wave Experience?

DG: The idea came from Francisco Teixeira. The idea of Mind Art is that every frequency is an emotion. We collect the data of the experience, and we translate it into emotions that we feed into an AI and you create a piece of digital art with your brain. And, of course, we use a blockchain to make this piece unique and to have the certificate of authenticity of that piece so it becomes a piece of art. If you go on Open Sea you can see where people were concerned, stressed, moved—you have the detail of your experience visualized with this art piece.

Dan Ghenacia Travels with The Oracle

WW: So what’s next for the Alpha Wave Experience?

DG: I hope that The Oracle will travel the world. I will try to make it travel, as I have traveled as a DJ. I want the experience for a large audience, and with Francisco Teixeira, we are developing some therapeutic programs.

I’m starting to work on other projects, other pieces of art, as well. Because everything came from the internal journey that I was on because I couldn’t travel. When I started to travel again, I figured out that what I was missing most was the clouds. That moment of meditation when you don’t have Internet, you can just look at the clouds and stop to think. So I’m working around that at the moment.