Today, on the day of Albert Hofmann’s first accidental LSD trip (3 days before official bicycle day), we are thrilled and excited to announce the inauguration of the world’s first Psychedelic Video Museum, a direct upshot of ten years of activity on this website, the Daily Psychedelic Video. The spectacular inauguration ritual will take place virtually on Bicycle Day at 3PM Eastern Time/12PM Pacific Time (noon)/8PM Greenwich Time/10PM Jerusalem Time.
After ten years of posting on psychedelic video a day, and with around 4,000 videos curated over the last decade, the DPV is the biggest collection of psychedelic videos on the web, and a global hub for psychedelic video fans.
Now, the time has come to take the mission of psychedelic beauty and joy to the next level. We are proud to give you the world’s first psychedelic video museum, a pioneering online museum resonating the current renaissance in psychedelic culture.
The new online museum features 700 videos carefully selected from the DPV collections and curated by themes, periods, styles and places. It includes 45 exhibitions with titles like “Soviet Psychedelia,” “Japanese Psychedelia,” “Israeli Psychedelia,” “Sixties Psychedelia,” “Oldie Psychedelia,” “Psychedelic Art Videos,” “Psychedelic Cinema,” “Psychedelic Animation,” “Psychedelic Hip Hop,” “Tribal Psychedelia,” “Psychedelic Activism,” etc. It utilizes the unique knowledgebase created in a decade of curating psychedelic videos in the DPV in order to offer its visitors a pioneering display of psychedelic video creativity.
Appearing in a period of a widely publicized “psychedelic renaissance” and renewed interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, the new museum adds a much-needed cultural dimension to the current psychedelic revival. In recent years, psychedelic art has received growing attention and was featured in prominent exhibitions by world-class museums such as London’s V&A museum and San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Art scholars and cultural critics have pointed to the seminal role played by psychedelia in shaping contemporary art and culture. The time is therefore ripe for a first museum exploring this ubiquitous and highly influential artistic style.
At a time when publics worldwide are called upon to safely stay at home, and in which it is impossible to travel in physical space, we are proud to allow our visitors a journey into their minds, to find beauty and joy even in grim, challenging days. The Coronavirus period has been accompanied by a new interest in virtual museums and exhibition spaces. Most, however, provide only dim online versions of their physical selves. The Psychedelic Video Museum, by contrast, is the brainchild of the web, conceived as a purely digital effort and native to an era of digital art spaces.
The site will officially launch on the 19th of April 2020, on Bicycle Day (celebrating the 77th anniversary of the discovery of LSD), in a psychomagical online ceremony. Join us for the inauguration ritual of the Psychedelic Video Museum, where artists and wizards from different parts of the globe will consecrate the museum with performance, speech, dance, music and ritual.
Posting the first video ever posted on the Daily Psychedelic Video – The legendary Story from North America.
If there can be only one video I could to share with you, it would be Jean-Jacques Lebel’s 1967 30-minute “Sun Love”. A crazy voodoo-level pagan surrealistic experience. Unfortunately, I was never able to find a digital copy. I was exposed to artist-activist Lebel in Centre Pompidou’s retrospective a couple of years back. And as you might have guessed, I became somewhat obsessive about it. When I shall get my hands on the footage, I will generatively machine learn the hell out of it! PM IF YOU HAVE A COPY. In the meantime please enjoy this rare footage of Soft Machine performing naked at the 1967 Sun Love happening in Cogolin, near st. Tropez, on the French Riviera.
“The Picasso part lasted an hour, that depended on the Soft Machine, and afterwards there were happenings, concerts… An American actor told us ‘come back to my place, I’ve got a swimming pool’, so we went and we created a happening which took the piss out of the faux-mystics, and we made a pseudo ritual to the rising sun, we took the piss out those people who were taking the piss out of the hippies, it was Sun Love…” (Lebel)
