In the late 1950s he lived in Venice, California, then the centre of the Southern California Beat scene. In October 1955, he became involved with the Lettrist International and then the Situationist International. His text "Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds" was published in the Scottish journal "New Saltire" in 1962 and subsequently as "Technique du Coup du Monde" in "Internationale Situationniste", number 8. It proposed an international "spontaneous university" as a cultural force and marked the beginning of his movement towards his "sigma" project, which played a formative part in the UK Underground.