In recent weeks we have been receiving a fair amount of Cyriak links. Cyriak, an after effects artist whose work has already been featured here on the DPV is garnering millions upon millions of YouTube views and quickly becoming a sort of YouTube age Dali (At least in terms of popularity).
Imaginatively and often viciously playing around with simple photos and animations, Cyriak creates dream landscapes which often turn into bizzare nightmares. The result is compelling, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for someone under the influence…
The Amiga 500 was my very first computer system. It used DD floppy disks with 880 kb storage space. On those less than 1 mb disks you had games like elite and frontier: elite II that allowed almost limitless exploration of a virtual space literally bursting with solar systems.
But with the copies of those games came something else that challenged the notion of space maybe even more. The teams that “cracked” the copy-protection of those games often attached so-called demos to the code that was run from the disks. So before the game would load you would see – just like a little intro – demonstrations of crazy coding skills in the form of often mind-blowing animation, flickering images and pulsing color.
Those demos were at a most a few kb of code generating ever-changing images in real-time. Usually what you saw was far beyond the things you thought were possible within the technical limitations of your system. Typically some more or less abstract and alien imagery was rotating in front of your eyes, bursting into millions of colorful pieces, turning itself inside out into something totally different, dancing in fluid animation or travelling into impossible depth of space.
Somehow the dense economy of the code resulted in aesthetics and images not unlike the things you see under the influence of psychedelic substances (of course psychedelic substances were not unknown among the members of the demo scene). So, what does math and geometry have to do with psychedelic aesthetics?
Time slows to a stop. Colors are alive and vibrant. Things that are unavailable to our everyday perception reveal to us in magnificent splendor. HD cameras, Like psychedelics are a visual enhancement technology.
Why is this new Intel commercial for 2nd generation Intel Core i5 processor psychedelic?
Moving between alternate realities has forever been the trademark of the psychedelic (and shamanic) world view. Although here this happens on a computer desktop (Beware, as Terence McKenna said, computers and drugs are both ways to expand consciousness, only different parts of it…), one only needs to re-imagine this clip as the flight of the shaman through alternate realms, flying between parallel window-worlds in his other-worldly mission. And indeed, it seems to me that the dynamics of this video might remind many a psychedelic voyager, of their own trips, running, flying from inner demons, and into new frontiers through a labyrinth of window-worlds. Highly psychedelic!
An Excerpt from my ongoing experiments with fractal imagery and sacred geometric visualizations. This video infuses thematic imagery of flight and transcendence with moving mandalas I designed in After Effects. Music by Ambientium.
I am not sure this is what they meant when they were talking about “flower power” in the sixties, but this clip, titled “psychedelic warfare” on YouTube has already reached more than 3 million views. So this is what happens when guns go psychedelic…
This is a video of a complete walkthrough for a little game called “feed the head“. In the game all you do is experimenting with the psychedelic logic of the possible interactions. And it is fun to do so!
If you think about playing the game, do it before you watch this video. It’s free and very calm and played right in the browser window.
There is something in common between looking at abstract art and the psychedelic experience: they both present to you a phenomena that can not be articulated. a beauty that can not be named, an image unmediated by culture. Abstract art at it’s best may depict not more nor less than what Aldous Huxley referred to as “Suchness”
