The Daily Psychedelic Video

A little more than a year ago I was talking with a friend of mine who was showing me a cool psychedelic video by Gong. At the time I was keeping track of my growing collection of A class psychedelic videos links by sending them to my email account and arranging them with tags, planning to watch them all sometime when tripping heavily. The system worked. However, it seemed like a rather clumsy way to keep track of all these videos.

What if we would build an internet site dedicated to psychedelic videos, I asked my friend? “You could call this site ‘The Daily Psychedelic Video’ and feature a different psychedelic video each day, so that this would turn into an amazing bank for psychedelic videos. Every person in the world ever tripping next to an internet connection would always be able to go on the site and access a huge bank of high-quality psychedelic videos for him to trip with.”

The idea sounded cool, and what more, it didn’t seem to be too grandiose to be accomplished. It took me a while to get there, but a few weeks afterwards, on the 25^th of April, the DPV went online. Less than two months later, in June, the site turned into a collaborative effort and pretty soon there were 6 different contributors participating in the DPV, each of them contributing on a regular weekday, together fashioning a psychedelic week, composed of the 6 distinct tastes of the six psychedelic video curators.

And there was also the 7^th contributor, which were you, all the people who have been sending us links to cool psychedelic videos all over the past year, and who have been an integral part of the video selections published on the DPV during the previous year.

The DPV actually started out as an attempt to solve a very personal problem: how to organize my growing lists of psychedelic video selections for tripping? Since then, it has featured more the 320 psychedelic video posts (Despite being the DAILY psychedelic video, we sometimes lost track of the dates, so we’re not at 365 posts yet, but give us a break, after all it’s the daily PSYCHEDELIC video, and some time bending is to be expected…), and become perhaps the most extensive exploration into the realms of psychedelic aesthetics in video.

I never thought we would find so many psychedelic videos to keep us going that long, but the amazing thing is that the more we keep going, the more we find out about amazing stuff that’s being done out there by psychedelic artists and spirits worldwide.

As someone who is genuinely in love with this kind of art, it just personally makes me happy.

This year we will celebrate the DPV anniversary with a series of 3 interviews with 3 leading psychedelic video artists which will be published this Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, so be sure to check it out.

I’ve chosen to celebrate our one year anniversary with a beautiful rant from the man with the psychedelic glasses on the top of DPV page, John Lennon. This short interview with Lennon was done in 1969 by a 14 years old beatles-obsessed reporter who snuck into his hotel room. Lennon answered in his sort of witty, off handed and cosmic way, and 38 years later the 5 minute recording was turned into a highly associative and beautiful video by director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina. The short film was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet). Enjoy!

I want to thank all the people who made this all possible. Thank you to the different contributors, who have shown me new ways to think about ‘what is a psychedelic video’, thank you to all those who have sent us links to psychedelic videos, and another big thank you to all who keep coming back because they are interested in this kind of video, quite dissimilar from many of the other YouTube gags so popular these days, and yet much more satisfying, in my eyes at least.

Thank you all, and may we see many more mind-blowing psychedelic videos this year.

Ido Hartogsohn

Tags: 00's psychedelia, 2000's psychedelia, animation, anniversary, daily psychedelic video, i met the warlus, john lennon, Josh Raskin, psychedelic