Glenn McKay, a painter, began performing light shows after attending one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests at the Fillmore Auditorium in January of 1966, where Martin had provided the visuals. The Acid Tests featured bathtubs full of LSD, a light show by Tony Martin, and performances by the Grateful Dead. McKay did hundreds of shows with the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead, mostly at the Winterland Ballroom. In 1968, his group staged “An Evening with Glenn McKay’s Headlights” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The San Francisco Museum of Art held a retrospective of his work in 1999. Using slides, 16mm film, and overhead projectors, McKay and his cohort combined photographic and liquid media so that, according to McKay, “it was like painting with three or four hands.”

Describing the aims of his project, McKay has said, “I’m providing a new door to the consciousness of sound and color–to be so in touch with the emotion and the rhythm of the experience losing any sense of separation between the color, moving images, and the sound.” In other words, McKay hopes to elicit a synaesthetic response in his beholder in which the elements of his light play, combined with sound, result in a Huxley-like movement that invigorates or transcends quotidian perception.