The Wellcome Collection is currently holding an exhibition on mind altering drugs in history and culture. The exhibition has been showing since November and will be on until the 27th of February. If we were in London, we would definitely check it out!
(Link: Moris. Thanks!)
A few recent works revisiting psychedelic tropes by visual artist Jimmy Joe Roche.
All of these beautiful animations are works of digital media artist Takeshi Murata. I think they express a remarkably pure psychedelic vision and joy in the realm of the digital. Especially the way they develop a sense of space and time and make us look at movement links the digital with the psychedelic.
The psychedelic experience allow one to relate differently to the world around us: it removes the differentiation between object and subject, and alters the perception of cause and effect. This is why I think an interface should be a major consideration in a psychedelic work of art; and the reson I picked the video above from Thor Johnson’s highly recommended Vimeo page.
These elastic tentacles reminded me of the game pod from David Cronenberg’s “Existenz”. A cyber-psychedelic masterpiece that will get a post of its own… soon!
Friends With You is a collaboration between two artists, Sam Borkson and Arturo Sandoval. They do everything from playgrounds to gallery shows, from a giant balloons parade to a hard cover book. all is meant to bring magic, luck and friendship!
Two things we won’t see exhausted soon: the couplings of psychedelic visuals and electronic music and the beauty emerging from the kaleidoscopic effect. Enjoy!
All those colors! Johannes Itten (1888-1967) was a german Bauhaus artist who was also a mystic interested in esoteric doctrines. He spent his life meditating on colors, trying to decode the spiritual meaning and order of colors using color wheels and diagrams. His book The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color explores the philosophical and even religious meaning of colors.
In this video you can see the Itten’s color wheel developing from the primary colors to the secondary colors of first order, to the secondary colors of secondary order.
Colors are frequencies seen by the eye. When we see them, we actually see a code embedded in the world. In the psychedelic experience we often experience colors more vividly than usually, experiencing them as entities engulfing us in this world. This brings us closer’s to Itten’s ideas of penetrating the world of colors and appreciating visual perception for what it is – an act of mystic concentration.
For this reason I find Itten’s work to be very psychedelic. Enjoy!
