Hi everyone, my name’s Craig Clark and I’m a second year PhD student at Northumbria University. My research is focused on psychedelic aesthetics in film and television. DPV has proven to be an incredibly useful resource in my studies and a couple of my favourite psychedelic sequences (Taking Woodstock and Mad Men) are already on the site. I’d fully recommend checking them out if you haven’t already. Given the topic of my research, I thought I’d offer to contribute to the site and so here I am!
Although I’m not studying music video, the first one I wanted to share is Jhené Aiko’s short film, The Trip, which she released in conjunction with the album of the same name. Both album and film feature strong psychedelic themes and ideation throughout. In the film, Penny (played by Aiko), takes mushrooms with her companion Dante (Ben Whalen) while driving through the desert. They take the mushrooms at the 12 minute 40 second mark. A trip sequence dominated by animated visuals ensues. The whole film has a psychedelic quality to it and is worth watching to put the trip sequence into context.
Another great video coming from the parody religion “Church of the subgenius” who love to poke fun at organized religion while also offering some decent philosophical ideas underneath the troll!
Diane Slattery’s Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language and the Evolution of Consciousness, published in 2015, recounts Slattery 12-year exploration of an alien symbolic language system titled Glide, to which she gained access through psychedelically inspired altered states of consciousness (the term xenolinguistics refers to the study of such alien languages). Slattery’s original encounter with the Glide language occurred in 1998, while she was writing a novel. During a process of self-inquiry regarding an aspect of the novel’s plot she found herself ‘downloading’ a visual language composed of 27 glyphs, which were really just one glyph dynamically morphing and transforming itself into all other glyphs. Amazed at this discovery, Slattery soon learned to use the Glide language as a tool for the navigation of visionary landscapes and the rewriting of the psyche. Among other things, she developed a computer software titled LiveGlide, which she used to write three-dimensional notes during her psychedelic communication sessions, often producing video records of her conversations with the alien other. Here are two of these videos.
