Noise Machine

hi everyone. There’s a new FAQ page for people if your interested in more information about what I do, as there has been quite a bit of attention resulting from the Derren Brown thing. Also, I’ve just released some software. Check it out.

Someone told me about this article in the Observer

In addition, I was pointed to these little gems.

I really like this one!

This one’s great too. Ive got to quote it.

Appalling. Brown should be banned from British public broadcasting henceforth. When will they ever learn? Case after case of long-term damage from stage and TV hypnosis. Whilst the performer gets rich quick, and arsehole viewers applaud.

This one is nice, cos it has a picture of me.

This one states that although the trick was possibly cruel, it was still good!

Derren Brown Forum on the Channel 4 Website. Interesting.

This one is hillarious. A blogger who’s also an amateur magician is seriously upset about the stunt. I really loved this. Especially when he says ‘people don’t fall asleep standing up’. I suppose I should be careful, I don’t want to upset the guy. It’s great stuff, though. Comments are interesting too.

some more here

and here

Also, some nice comments from the gaming community

and I found this, which is very interesting.

let me know if any of you find anything else related to the stunt.

mick’s video art can often have a strange effect.

The show was broadcast last night (fridaymay 6th), and so far the response has been very favorable - apart from the odd friend phoning me up and calling me a sick man. It was nice to see the final cut, and plenty of people have been in touch to say how much they enjoyed it, which is great. There have been some interesting reviews, including this one from the times,

The second part of this programme is unmissable. Brown devises a pub computer game called Waking Dead. Like something out of a horror movie, the person who plays it goes into a deep trance. He is taken to a nearby room and woken up inside a “real” version of the game that he was just playing, with a gun in his hand and zombies coming towards him. The effect on the person — and the implication about the effect of computer games — is profoundly disturbing. In a perfect world, there would be a separate programme afterwards, in which Derren Brown discusses the programme with psychologists — if only to put my mind at rest.

There are some more interesting opinions here, here, and here. The radio times were also a bit worried.

Lots of people have been asking me if the stunt was ‘real’ or not. I can understand why people might ask this question. However, it’s fair to say that it took months to prepare, and if we’d have wanted to fake it it would have been SO much easier. In the end it was presented pretty much exactly how it happened. Importantly, the actual details of the game’s design can’t be shown on television (this is for a number of reasons both legal and technical), and I certainly can’t explain it to anyone in simple terms. Suffice to say that we were all very relieved when it actually worked.

One thing I will say, though, is that you should
never underestimate the power of SOUND.

Me and Derren waiting for a punter

set the controls for the heart of his brain