Bernard Szajner

Bernard Szajner ("ZANY-ner") is a unique, Paris-based visual effects artist and musician who has created groundbreaking works in multiple disciplines while consistently striving to create and explore new relationships between light and sound. A self-described "dilettante in the true sense of the term," Szajner was born in Grenoble, France, late in the second World War, and hidden in a cave by his anxious Polish parents. Always creative, he took up painting at the age of 11, then became fascinated by stories of Leonardo da Vinci and his grand spectacles combining music, actors, and mechanized effects. Szajner abandoned paint and brush to eagerly study the details of Etienne Gaspard Robertson and his "Magic Lantern" phantasmagorias, Vaucanson and his mysterious automatons, Oskar Schlemmer of the Bauhaus school, and other great visual effects artists and his career path was born. He began working on light shows in the late '60s, and became fascinated by the potential of lasers. Steady work as a stage designer and technician with such groups as Gong, Magma, Bachdenkel, and many others led him to become acknowledged as one of the top light technicians in France by the end of the '70s, at which point he joined up with inventor Patrice Warrener and electronic music innovator Tim Blake (who had just left Daevid Allen's Gong), to work on an idea for a new kind of light show. Since 1972 Blake had been championing a concept called the Crystal Machine, which called for controlling lasers with synthesized music. As the Crystal Machine they staged some small laser shows at the Kinopanorama in Paris, and played two week-long engagements at a large Paris nightclub in 1976 and 1977. Despite poor publicity the shows consistently sold out and created quite a buzz, but the enormous...