Daily Psychedelic Video (blog)

Fantastičan blog koji ne samo da dnevno nudi izbor dobrih psihodeličnih videa, nego ima i liste najboljih takvih videa svih vremena itd.

 dailypsychedelicvideo.com

The Greatest 50 Psychedelic Videos

2 years ago, when the idea was born to set up a website dedicated to curating one psychedelic video every day, we were still skeptical about how long one could continue, and afraid that after a month or two we’d run out of psychedelic videos to post.

Today, in the second year anniversary of daily psychedelic video posts, with more than 700 psychedelic videos on the site, it seems clear that there are many more psychedelic videos out there than any of us would have dared to imagine. Psychedelic videos are not a thing of the past. In fact it is clear that more psychedelic videos are being produced these days than ever before by professional workers and independent artists alike, aided by ever improving computer technology and by the increased ability to share these videos on the web. While we have a number of classic 1960s videos on the list, most of the psychedelic videos that appear on it are from the past 10 years.
Now, with the advent of 3D screen technology and augmented reality glasses, one can only imagine what these might mean for the future of psychedelic video and media. From our first impressions of psychedelic media art created for these new types of media it seems that psychedelic media is one of the artistic genres which will benefit the most from the incorporation of a 3rd dimension into media as well as from the immersive media environments which will be created by augmented reality glasses.
After 700 videos we felt that we now have a preliminary basis to create a pioneering list of the greatest psychedelic videos of all time. To our knowledge, this is the first list of its kind. While there have been some lists of greatest psychedelic films, we haven’t been able to find any list for the greatest psychedelic short videos (If you know of one, please tell us). This makes sense because before the arrival of the web and sites like YouTube and Vimeo there was no infrastructure that enabled people to share and access short clips effectively.
So this one is probably the first, and we took the selection process very seriously (indeed, some people thought almost psychotically serious). Each of the editors chose 20 videos from the total 700 videos on the site, which gave us to a list of some 130+ videos pretty cool videos. These 130+ videos were all ranked by each editor from top to bottom. The different lists were then calculated by our data expert in Barcelona (Thanks, Amit!), and this finally gave us to the current list. Enjoy.

50. Rules of Acid Song – Jeffrey Lewis (2007)

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Jeffrey Lewis’s acid song is probably the funniest song about an acid experience. It is also a pedagogical piece which teaches the 8 immortal rules of tripping. The video is very simply done, with no fancy after effects, but really makes you feel the experience.
49. Gluko & Lennon (2010) – Federico Radeno

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Gluko & Lennon is a psychedelic animated series from Buenos Aires based studio Punga and production company L’Orange Gutan. The official description says it is a series about “the psychedelic adventures of two best friends.”
48. Street Musique –Ryan Larkin (1972)
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The Canadian animator Ryan Larkin (1943-2007) was one of the pioneers of psychedelic film. His films “Walking” (1969) and street music (1972) are considered classics of the early psychedelic film, and combine instrumental country and bluegrass music together with psychedelic images.
47. Catalog – John Whitney (1961)
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John Whitney is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of computer animation. Throughout the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s Whitney has pioneered many computer animation techniques, first with mechanical analogue computers, and then moving to digital computers. In 1961 psychedelics were still research chemicals, and the psychedelic influence on culture has been yet to emerge, yet
Whitney’s 1961 “Catalog” which was created using an “analog compuer/film camera magic machine” that he built from a second world war anti-aircraft gun sight, already foresaw the arrival of psychedelic computer animations. But “Catalog” is more than just an historical piece. It takes the viewer to a pioneering journey through computer landscapes which divulged unforeseeable transcendent realms in the machine.

46. Beat Connection in the Water – Panaframe (2011)

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“In the water”, from the excellent Panframe vimeo page, is an iridescent tropical daydream for a track by Beat Connection. This video just takes you into the flow of luminescent figures and images which continuously emerge and disperse in an endless continuum of bliss.

45. WTF – OK GO (2009)

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OK GO’s “WTF” video has the most ingenuous use of the trail effect we ever saw. Directed by Nick Nackashi and OK GO, this video is full of imaginative playfulness which transforms everyday objects from the 99 cents store into psychedelic spectacles using a simple trail effect. The making of video for the clip is also worth a watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeItlrTdvY&feature=relmfu

44. Fractalic Castle  - Hömpörgő (2010)

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The Fractalic Castle is slightly disturbing fractalic video which zooms into the sinister realms of some fractalic structure that seems to go on and on. Turn the volume up.

43. Goiin – Birdy Nam Nam (2011)

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Never has a more magnificent video been made for such a sad excuse of a song. I can only imagine where this video would be, if it hadn’t been for the lousy soundtrack. And still, it’s a really great video.

42. The Golden Age – The Asteroids Galaxy (2009)

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The Golden Age is just one of those uncomplicated psychedelic videos that are really fun to watch.

41. Fehlerlofia  – Marcel Jankovics (1981)

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Fehérlófia (1981) aka Son of the White Mare is a full length psychedelic film from Hungary by Marcell Jankovics. Based on Hunnic and Avaric legends, and done as a tribute to the old steppe people, Feherlofia tells the mythic story of a superhuman boy with a cosmic mission.
40. Lylac – Papercutz (2010)

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Lylac is just an impeccable cinematic dream of infinite delicacy.

39. Lebensader – Angela Steffen (2009)

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A little girl finds the whole world inside a leaf in this animation by Angela Steffen

38. The Golden Path – United Force & Digital Dinamite (2009)

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“The Golden Path” by United Force and Digital Dynamite is a demo video, one of those computer generated clips rendered by a ridiculously concise code and devised by obsessively devout bands of freak-geeks that worship efficient code. It feels like a joyride through glowing colorful virtual worlds.
37. Drifting away with fractals – subBlue (2011)

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We have all seen fractal videos, but they are all missing something. Yes the psychedelic experience includes a lot of fractals, but in these videos for some reason the fractals don’t evolve the way they do in the real experience. Fractals change and twist with thought, they have the rhythm of thought and are affected by them. When you stare into the fractalic world you stare into your soul, obviously most of the fractal videos miss that. This video on the other hand is the most beautiful fractalic video we’ve seen. The way the landscape changes on it is the closest we’ve seen to what is experienced during the psychedelic experience.
36. Destino – Walt Disney (2003)
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Destino is a unique film project that was initiated in 1945 by two very different artists, the Spanish painter Salvador Dali and the American animator Walt Disney. The film was completed only 58 years later, in 2003 and introduces a unique world in which Dali’s visual style is combined with Disney’s animation style
35. Carolina Melis – Hands (2010)

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Carolina Melis is an international illustrator and art designer. Her short movie “Hands” is an enchanting clip for a campaign against child abuse, which shows again how psychedelic aesthetics has trickled into the mainstream.

34. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist (2005)

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The Avalanches’ “Frontier Psychiatrist” is an ingenious demonstration on how to make videos that offers a radical visual accompaniment to the even wildest DJ tracks.

33. A Box with a Secret – Valery Ugarov (1976)
    

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Although Russia didn’t seem to have much of a psychedelic revolution in the 1960s, some soviet animators were evidently taken away with the psychedelic aesthetics of the Beatles’ Yellow submarine. During the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s a number of soviet films appeared which made use of Yellow Submarine’s psychedelic style. One of these, Valery Ugarov’s 1976’s  “A Box with a Secret” is a musical imagination on the theme of the fairy tale of V.Odoevsky “Small town in a snuffbox”. Be sure to watch the part that starts in 4:55, it’s really great.

32. I met the walrus – Josh Raskin (2008)

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“I am the walrus” is a 2008 academy award nominee which was done using a recording of a short and unusual interview with John Lennon. The interview was done in 1969 by a 14 years old Beatles-obsessed reporter who snuck into Lennon’s hotel room and started asking him question. 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. Besides being a  2008 Academy Award nominee for best Animated Short, the film also won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).
31. Time to Pretend – MGMT  (2008)
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MGMT’s “Time to pretend” is a fully fledged shamanic trip. It begins with a group of tribal hunter-gatherers dancing around a fire, shooting giraffes, beating on tribal drums and riding shamanic power animals in the psychedelic realm. Andrew VanWyngarden shooting down his inner monsters with glowing fire arrows. Things get even more psychedelic when MGMT group members kneel down to and open their mouths to receive what appears like a highly psychoactive sacrament. Then comes a homage to a scene from Alexander Jodrowski’s avant-garde esoteric film The Holy Mountain (which appears as no. 16 on this list) where the heroes throw stacks of money into an enflamed hole in the center of a round table. Post-modern computer generated psychedelic aesthetics with primitivist, esoteric, and mythical themes.
30. Chiral – Robert Seidel (2010)

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A chiral phenomenon or structure is some weird-ass thing that is not identical to its mirror image. You have to admit the concept sounds cool, even though you wouldn’t immediately understand it. Inspired by this scientific idea, German Robert Seidel went and created a very unique motion graphics piece using among other things projection onto a paper sculpture.
29. One – Michal Levi (2007)
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“I see music. As I hear it, it appears. Music for me is a gateway to 3D space full of shape shifting colors and textures” writes Michal Levi in her website. “One” is Michal Levi’s second synesthetic video after “Giant Steps”. Levi mixes a track by Jason Lindner with beating urban landscapes and shifting forms in a way which makes you feel that you can really see the music.
28. Artificial – A Short Trip through Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall – Lasse Gjertsen
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This is what life with augmented reality might look like one day. Lasse Gjertsen made a video of the Bomuldsfabriken museum in Arendal Germany but animated the tour, making the works of art as well as the surroundings come alive. The result mixes reality and fantasy in a scandalously psychedelic way

27. The Parachute Ending – Birdy Nam Nam (2009)

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The DJ crew Birdy Nam Nam has produced some of the most captivating psychedelic music videos in the past couple of years. Their “Parachute Ending” video, directed by Steve Scott, tells the strange tale of the blue alien who saved the planet from the attack of the white cubes, or something like that.  Birdy Nam Nam managed to land two videos in the top 50. (Another one in no. 43).

26. Fantasy – Vince Collins (1976)

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Vince Collins is a gifted animator who was responsible for a series of violently colorful videos from the 1970s and 1980s , among which is a very psychedelic 4^th of Juli video for the 200^th anniversary of American independence. His “Fantasy” video hosts a disturbing world of flashing colors hallucinations and intimidating transformations.

25. Sing Sang Sung – Air (2009)
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Follow the black ball through the forest of lillypad mushrooms and seas full of diamonds. Air’s soothing sound is conjoined with psychedelically pleasant visuals in “Sing Sang Sung” and together they create a dreamy, comforting world where there is nothing to worry about. Directed by Petra Mrkyz and Francois Moriceau
24. Chris Casady – Pencil draw (1988)
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Drawn on 12″ paper with black ink pens and markers, Chris Casady’s “Pencil Dance” was assembled from “pencil tests” which Casady drew during an 8 year period in his day job as an effects animator. Casady has been responsible for the special effects for many Hollywood films during the 1980s and the 1990s, the most notable of which is 1982’s Tron. Casady’s “Pencil Dance” is full with imagination and energy It was awarded Prize for first film at Annecy ’89.
23. Corner of the Sky – Cut Copy (Unofficial Music Video) (2011)

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Corner of the sky shows the myriad forms of human life on planet earth, which is indeed very psychedelic.
22. Contact the Star People – Larry Carlson (2008)

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Larry Carlson is one of the most original visionary artists of our days. His Vimeo page includes a wide selection of highly psychedelic videos featuring extremely bizzare content. “Contact the star people” is an eerie collection of images and sounds, which orchestrate an uncanny, disturbing, yet curiously appealing, hallucination.
21.Birdfractals in Utrecht (2011)
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At some point while watching this video the bird swarms started looking like a computer animated screen saver. It took me a while to remember that it is not nature imitating computer algorithms, but algorithms that are imitating nature – or rather algorithms which are nature.
20. Pure – Blackbird blackbird (2010)

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Blackbird Blackbird’s Pure video evokes altered-state imagery that will be familiar to many viewers. The black grid lines, jewel-like colors, and hints of embarkation, observation, and approach are especially redolent. The patterns integrate into the subject matter to create a formscape reminiscent of hyperspatial modalities. The visual rhythm is cohesive and masterfully executed to compliment the Blackbird Blackbird song Pure.
19.Let Forever Be – Chemical Brothers (2003)
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Michel Gondry’s clip for the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be”, mixes disorienting special effects together with choreography to create a schizophrenic maze of worlds that collapse one upon each other.
18.The Devil’s Tuning Fork – DePaul Game Elites (2009)

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“What if you saw the world with your ears?” Devil’s Tuning Fork is a synesthetic psychedelic first-person exploration/puzzle game “in which the player must navigate an unknown world using visual sound waves. Inspired by M.C. Escher’s classic optical illusion and the echolocation of dolphin.”
17.Big Bang Big Boom – BLU (2011)

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Wall-painted animations are psychedelic in the way in which they make the environment come alive. Like psychedelics, they transform everyday landscapes into surrealistic environments teeming with bizarre and unexpected forms of life.
Big Bang Big Boom is “an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life … and how it could probably end”, and it’s one of the most amazing wall-painted freeze-frame animations we know.
16. The Holy Mountain – Alejandro Jodrowski (1973)
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The Chilean director Alejandro Jodrowski, is one of cinema’s foremost occult figures. Besides producing some of the most amazing surreal works ever caught on film, Jodrowski has a worldwide reputation as a tarot reader and shamanic healer. Jodrowski’s 1973’s Holy Mountain, his most exquisite cinematic work, remains an unsurpassed masterpiece of avant-garde surreal cinema to this day. The Holy Mountain’s original trailer features an array of exceedingly potent, bizarre and surreal images to dazzle the mind
15. Superflat First Love – Takashi Murakami (2009)
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Superflat First Love is the second of Takshi Murakami’s duo of Superflat commercials for Louis Vitton. (The first one landed at no. 9 on this list).
The Superflat creatures function as a kind of variation on the self-transforming machine elves which McKenna saw when he smoked DMT, inhabiting the portal of another magical reality. Murakami has a distinct ability to create gleeful colorful and highly psychedelic universes, merging them with consumerism and Japanese anime, Shinto magic and kawaii culture. It is a world in which cell phones can transport you into other enchanted universes, and if you follow the magical Superflat creatures you might just land in a different place at a completely different time.
14. Katamari Damacy – Namco Bandai Games -  (2009)
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The Japanese video game Katamari Damacy is one of the most psychedelic games of all time. The game, which follows a diminutive prince on a mission to rebuild the stars, the moon and the constellations, which were accidentally destroyed by his father, the King of All Cosmos, has inspired many highly psychedelic videos like this one.
13. Lion in a Coma – Ori Toor (2010)

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“Lion in Coma” begins like a “normal” psychedelic video, with the familiar psychedelic principle of constantly transforming forms. Then, at around the middle, something amazing starts to happen. The balance between the abstractness of forms and their combinations into recognizable figures which keep metamorphosing back into abstract forms is kept so fine that the viewer can choose to view the figures on the screen as just abstract forms, or as figurative objects. This makes for one hell of a viewing experience when you are high. And this all culminates magnificently in the last 20 seconds of the clip.
“Lion in a Coma” was the final project for the Shenkar school by the Israeli designer and animator Ori Toor whose work seems to be very psychedelic generally.
http://oritoor.com/
12. Levels – Bilal (2011)

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Bilal’s “Levels”, directed by Flying Lotus, is a majestically beautiful music clip, taking the viewer into a delightfully mysterious world of dreams.
11. The Taking Woodstock Trip Scene – Ang Lee (2009)

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The Taking Woodstock trip scene (begins at around minute 3 of this video) is considered by many (including this author) as the most nuanced rendition of the psychedelic experience on film to this day.
Viewing this sequence, I can almost feel what the protagonist is feeling as he slowly enters his psychedelic journey. The sequence pays great attention to the gradual movement into a different order of perception: the sublime glowing of the colors, the orgasmic shivers of the skin and palpitations of the heart.  It enfolds in a way which is typical for many psychedelic experiences: from the womb-like feeling of the caravan, into the magical world outside and onward into a spectacular peak experience where Jake watches the Woodstock crowd turn into one vibrating tissue and his eyes are filled with tears of awe and joy.
10. Cyriak – Hooray for Earth (2011)
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With more than 65 million views and 200,000 subscribers to his channel, Cyriak is probably the most successful psychedelic after-effects artist of our time. To the world of YouTube after effects animations today, Cyriak is what Eric Clapton was to rock guitar in 1966 London. His short and extremely popular videos, known for the way in which they eerily combine simple objects like fingers or cows, and transforming them into disturbing new forms, have revolutionized the instrument of after effects and turned it into a popular form of art.
Cyriak’s “Hooray to Earth” video (Made for a song by the band “True Loves”) is special in that there is nothing hideous about it. Somebody called this clip “Cyriak meets Minecraft meets powers of 10.”  The video actually features a sort of fractalic zoom through minecraft-like boxes of reality. The zoom in begins in a cosmic perspective, continues by zooming into planet earth, then zooming in to human proportions, and then into the eye of the human and further into microcosmical proportions where one encounters the same cosmic constellations within the atom again. Does Cyriak mean to tell us that all is one, or that the universe is one? I don’t know, but he certainly succeeds…

9. Takashi Murakami – Superflat Monogram (2003)

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A Japanese Alice in wonderland falls down the rabbit hole in search of her cellphone and lands in a bizarre world of magical brands. This amazing Superflat commercial for Louis Vitton by Takashi Murakami is the first of Murakami’s Superflat videos  (The second is featured as no. number 15 on this list).
Murakami, one of the greatest artists of our time, brings psychedelia, consumerism, magic and kawaai culture closer than ever. A true gem.
8.The Music Scene – Anthony Francisco Schepperd (2010)

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Anthony Francisco Schepperd is one of the most gifted psychedelic animators of our time, and the video clip he created to the Blockheads’ “The Music Scene” is certainly his masterpiece so far. Schepperd deconstructs reality into colorful vibrating splashes of color which reconstruct again into vibrating pieces of psychedelic flesh.
7. An Excrept from Fractal Philosophy – Prophet of the Subliminal Phoenix (2010)

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DPV editors have seen a lot of spectacular computer visualizations in their time, but this excerpt from fractal philosophy was the only one to land in the top 50, and for a good reason. The video, by Prophet of Subliminal Phoenix is part of his experiments with fractal imagery and sacred geometric visualizations, which “infuses thematic imagery of flight and transcendence with moving mandalas” design in after effects. The result is a captivating video of harmoniously vibrating dynamic mandalas.
6.Bluberry – Jan Kounen (2004)
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Bluberry is a 2004 French psychedelic spaghetti western, and one of those rare films which are psychedelic from start to finish, yet it is the famous ayahusca visions scene that became one of the most circulated psychedelic videos on the web. Director Jan Kounen participated in over a hundred Ayahuasca ceremonies with Shipibo language speakers in Peru before directing the ayahusca sequence which attempts to portray shamanic experiences authentically, even using an authentic Shipibo shaman who chants authentic icaros.
5. It’s all too much – The Beatles (1968)
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The saturation of colors on the screen reaches such heights in Yellow Submarine’s “It’s all too much”, that it seems to echo the lyrics of the song.
“It’s all too much” seems to me to be a song about a state of serotonin flood in the brain, a glorious surge of joy and ecstasy. “When I look into your eyes, your love is there for me” sings Harrison “And the more I go inside, the more there is to see. It’s all too much for me to take. The love that’s shining all around you”. Love and happiness can certainly become too much when one reaches the heights of psychedelic ecstasy.
The images and sounds at the end of the clip, which close the story of Yellow Submarine, are for me the most spiritual and religious that the Beatles ever got to be.
4. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds – The Beatles (1968)
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John Lennon reportedly dropped around 1000 acid hits during the late 1960s, which wouldn’t have left him much time to be sober. Although Lennon initially denied that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” stands for LSD, Paul McCartney confirmed this rumor in a 2004 interview. But really one doesn’t need McCartney testimony to know who is “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes”, if one only takes a look at this video clip, taken out of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film. It starts in a psychedelically colored sea of brains which flicker consciousness maps like “patriotism” (the American stars), “Freud” “DE SADE” or “Yes-No” and continues with psychedelically flickering art-noveau styled dancers, which echo the art-noveau revival of the psychedelic sixties. Yellow Submarine lands 2 videos into the top 10 list.
3. Superflow – Viusic Piece 11 – Happyday – Ian Clemmer (2010)

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I had the privilege of meeting Ian Clemmer two summers ago in Berlin and to watch this video in stereoscopic 3D. While watching it in full 3D I felt a sudden and unexpected surge of joy and pure energy sweep through my body. But even when watching it on a 2D screen, Clemmer’s animation based on the cosmic principle of “Superflow”, which he discovered, is none less than spectacular.
Clemmer can spend days talking about the Superflow principle, and its discovery, which was partly inspired by the John Whitney’s search for harmony (A video by Whitney appears in no. 47. on this list). Basically “it is a simple algorithm that works with creating hierarchy and changing the pivot point (center point of objects), and this simple algorithm makes many things possible, all within 360 degrees of rotation. At certain degrees linear harmonics are created where the initial shape is replicated or mirrored.”
Happyday is part of Clemmer’s Bachelor Thesis, which was dedicated to the Superflow principle. It is a part of a 12 video series, and you can watch the rest of those here.
2.Jeu – Georges Schwizgebel (2006)
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Multiperspectivism and multi-dimensionality are fundamental motives of psychedelic aesthetics and philosophy.  Radically psychedelic, Geroges Schiwzgebel’s “Jeu”, takes the viewer into a dizzying yet joyful world of ever-changing perspectives. It is in the second half of the clip that things become increasingly dynamic and chaotic, as our perception of the world keeps re-orienting itself to the changing relations of the objects on the screen.

1. 2001: a space odyssey – Stanley Kubrick (1968)

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“I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness” said Stanley Kubrick about the closing 30 minutes psychedelic scene of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Back in the sixties people used to drop acid and go to the cinema just to watch the last half hour of this film. A true classic of psychedelic cinema, the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey leads us through inner hallucinatory terrains all the way to the cosmic embryo of humanity.
Special effects are all photographic. No CGI in this one.

2012 in Psychedelic Video – The Best Psychedelic Videos of 2012

2012 was a very good year for psychedelic video, which is not surprising. The revolution in the means of video production and dissemination which occurred in recent years through the introduction of evermore powerful computers and the appearance of  YouTube have led us to a point where more and more psychedelic videos are produced and disseminated each year. When you combine this with the ongoing assimilation of psychedelic aesthetics into mainstream media you get a year which was full of delicious psychedelic treats. Below are some of the videos we liked best in 2012 followed by personal selections made by the contributors of the DPV.
Psychedelic Music Clips

In 2012 psychedelic aesthetics kept penetrating into mainstream music videos and more specifically into hip hop. The most prominent example was of course Psy’s  gargantuan hit  “Gangnam Style” which featured highly psychedelic glowing colors and style (and hardly needs being presented to anybody on the planet after becoming the first video on YouTube to pass the 1 billion views count).
The psychedelic style was even more explicit in Azyla Banks’s music video for the track Atlantis in which the singer explores a trippy underwater world, riding dolphins and hugging seahorses.

Baltimore rapper Rye Rye released a hyper-psychedelic version to the Vengaboys’ “Boom, Boom, Boom” with electronic mushrooms and flying carpets.

Another spectacularly psychedelic hip hop video was created by Ori Toor, an animation artist whose work was featured earlier this year on the DPV’s list of best psychedelic videos of all time.
In this video, created for the Seattle experimental hip hop group Kingdom Crumbs, Toor further explores the unique animation style he presented in his earlier video “Lion in a Coma”.

Hip hop wasn’t the only place where things were happening, psychedelically speaking.
Bjork who seems always willing to incorporate psychedelic elements into her enchanting clips released a music clip to the track “Mutual Core”, Directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, an extremely talented psychedelic video artist which we will encounter again on the “Psychedelic Video Art” segment of this list.

Another psychedelic music video we liked a lot was this dreamy and hallucinated clip to the song “Even Though” by Giraffage. Created by Brendan Canty, the video takes the viewer on a trip through the Italian countryside. This is probably how Toscana looks after taking 500 micrograms…

Psychedelic Television
2012 also produced some cool psychedelic television. Perhaps the most spectacular psychedelic TV show of the year was Noel Fieldings’ hilariously psychedelic comedy show which ran on the British E4 channel. Described on the Channel 4 website as “a psychedelic character based comedy show”, the series produced some of the most amusing psychedelic comedy that we’ve seen. Below you can watch the second episode of the first season. The rest of them are also available on YouTube.

Another 2012 television gem that you wouldn’t want to miss is the Mad Men scene in which account man Roger Sterling goes on an acid trip. This was a first acid scene in a series which is considered by many to be the most impressive portrait of the sixties ever produced on film, and which now in its fifth season has finally reached 1966/1967, the height of the 1960s psychedelic era. Mad Men creator Matthew Wiener gives the acid experience a beautiful and nuanced cinematic interpretation.

Psychedelic Film
There were a bunch of very psychedelic films released in 2012. Among them Ang Lee’s deeply religious “The life of Pi” and the Disney’s deliciously colorful blockbuster “Wreck it Ralph” and the French “Holy Motors”. Meanwhile, on the DPV we were particularly impressed by two psychedelic trailers for two non-existing films.
One of these was an animation video done in the style Huichol art for an Huichol animation film which will be based on Huichol folk stories. The result was a unique and inspiring mixture of the new and the old.

The second trailer we really liked was “Jihad of Muddaib”, a fabricated trailer for a film which was never even in the making. Based on Frank Hebrert’s Dune mythology the video mixes an electronic psy track by Silver Strain with sci-fi imagery, desert mysticism, action scenes and even some 9/11 references.

Independent studio psychedelia
Some of the most psychedelic videos of 2012 were coming from independent studios which devoted their after-work hours to bombarding us with breathtaking visuals.
One of these was “I, pet goat II”, a dark apocalyptic short film created by the Canadian Independent Studio Heliofant, which is “focused on creating experimental and challenging content”. Featuring the Bush and Obama dancing around as marionettes, and Filled with references to the Illuminati, free masons and of course the 9/11, the film evoked myriad complex interpretations which sought to decipher its symbolism.

On the lighter side of things, the Argentinian art direction and motion graphics design group 2viente produced “Psychic Land” a spectacular and cheerful video that truly deserves to be called a psychedelic treat.

Psychedelic video art
Andrew Thomas Huang who also created the Bjork music clip featured above, produced a number of dazzling psychedelic videos of the past couple of years, among them Avi Buffalo’s spectacular “What’s it in for” video. However it was the Solipsist video which impressed us the most. The video which contains some of the most gripping psychedelic images we’ve seen in a long time, exhibits Huang’s unique psychedelic style to a full extent.

Amateur Mash-Up Psychedelia
Fitting to the age of web 2.0 and user created content, some of the best stuff out there in 2012 was created by web amateurs who created psychedelic video by mixing and mashing up pre-existing images and sounds into new and exciting combinations.
The psychedelic qualities which can be seen in Disney movies such as Dumbo the Flying Elephant,  Fantasia or Alice in Wonderland was already discussed here on the DPV, however the cheerful way in which this video connects these Disney sequences with the track “Contact High” by Architecture in Helsinki takes them to a whole new psychedelic level.
Another mash-up video which we found highly enjoyable is this one which mixes Daft Punk, X Jay and Silent Bob.

DPV Contributors selections
DPV contributors were asked to choose their two favorite 2012 videos from the ones they featured during the past year. Here are their selections:

Boaz Yaniv
Phadroid at Black Rock City & Fatty Fatty Boom Boom:

The two videos I chose from the videos I featured on the DPV in 2012 are of Phadroid (Android Jones and his wife Phaedrana Jones) and Die Antwoord (Ninja and Yolanda). The reason I chose these videos from all the mind blowing colorful videos is that for me they represent a lot of the things I look for when I search for interesting videos to feature on the site. For me it’s not only about colors, spirals and high-tech visualization (though I do love all of that) but it’s about finding new cutting edge contemporary visionary artists. The DPV creates an archive for contemporary psychedelic art and as such it serves as a platform where the psy community worldwide can find out about psy-artists that work today. Android and Phaedrana’s shows can at last be seen by people that just cannot make it to the burning-man or to their other shows. Together they form a symbiosis of dance and visual effects that take the viewer on an exciting journey.
If Phaedrana stems from the hippie-trippy side of the psy world, Die Antwoord is a grass-root hood-psy group. Ninja and Yolanda create their unique ZEF world that includes music, fashion, dance and video. Their pop style might be misleading as they have quite a subversive message that they convey about the pop world we live in (check out their interview on YouTube to understand more of what I’m talking about). Some people challenged Die Antwoord’s authenticity as a band. I say it doesn’t matter if they even exist as a band. Die Antwoord are performance artists more than anything else. They submit themselves totally and wholeheartedly towards the ZEF salvation!

7eit
Orphic Oxtra – Skeletons Having Sex on a Tin Roof
2012 is the year that brought us the epic “Skeletons Having Sex on a Tin Roof” by the Icelandic group Orphic Oxtra. When I first posted the video it was lots of silly fun, but now at the end of the year another  thing became clear: with its meme-friendly ever dancing, ever smiling plastic tiara princess (and let’s not forget its slightly curious donkey and much more curious white cat) “Skeletons Having Sex on a Tin Roof” moved a step beyond your everyday “exploding clouds of million colors”-clip and showed us what a psychedelic video in the meme-bubble bursting YouTube galaxy of 2012 had to look like.
YouTube user starwarsnerd94 suggested: “This should be a mandatory introduction video to the internet. It would let everyone know what they’re getting into.” And while you still might not be certain what you just witnessed, don’t forget to enjoy that beautiful music.
New Tokyo Ondo
Misaki Uwabo’s animation New Tokyo Ondo needs more exposure. Its style is both refined and bold, the imagery at the same time well-informed and fresh. I especially enjoyed its skillful merging of functions of cultural signs with psychedelic anti-tropes (like dissolution of boundaries or stream of consciousness non-progression) without dismissing one for the other. This non-exclusive attitude is very characteristic for the development of psychedelic aesthetics in 2012.
According to little background information I was able to gather (this side of the language barrier), New Tokyo Ondo is a  “nonsense animation conceived and made from the idiom ‘it reaches’.” The way a whole swirling world is set free from the worn off detail of
an idiom expresses a lot of what could be called “psychedelic spirit”.

Babasamas
Hyperspace Visuals

As a Vj, I consider this excerpt as an good example of what telling a story should be during a show. Here is a great variation of psychedelic vjaying around “borderless” space!
Ayahusqueros

In their visions, ayahuasca shamans say they see the essences that animate living beings, the first property of which is to emit melodies. These essences are considered powerful beings, and ayahuasqueros learn their melodies by singing along. Singing like powerful beings, they learn to see like them, and this gives them knowledge. The melodies that shamans bring back from their visions are called “icaros”; they help navigate the space of ayahuasca consciousness, and can also serve as lifelines when overwhelmed by visions. A film by Stephan Crasneanscki.

Holographic Elf
Jack Fried – Sick Leave

Jake Fried put out two amazing animations in 2012 and I felt like I could have chosen either one of them (Waiting Room being the other). With Sick Leave he added color to his intense stream of consciousness style. This audiovisual outpouring is certainly not your everyday mental chatter, but fluctuates between mundane situations and archetypal visionary experiences. The visual content might be taken from myths and stories read from books, but I believe an artist can just as well base them on direct experience. Animation can act as shamanic language – there is no need to point out or name anything.
X by Max Hattler

Max Hattler has become a favorite here at DPV. X has him as director and animator with five other animators, including Tony Comley of Verse  fame.
I would actually suggest watching Verse along with X and comparing the execution. The aesthetic of X is minimal wireframe, computer-generated to the extreme, but if you look at the choreography; it is practically indistinguishable from human thought particles zipping inside the mind. While being completely different from the raw technique of Jake Fried, the production does not feel at all artificial or automatic.

Clearfield
Continuum Infinitum

To me, this video materializes the enfolded dimensions which are accessed with the assistance of tryptamine hallucinogens. As if falling forward through a tunnel which turns back on itself, this looping animation is a cogent representation of altered state perception. The imagery is somewhere between ancient Mayan and Tibetan iconography, with an added biological feel; almost like an organic mandala. I look forward to seeing more from this motion-graphics artist.
Daedelus “Righteous Fists of Harmony”
This video presents elements of astral travel and lucid dreaming. The imagery which starts around the 1 minute mark is beautifully psychedelic and relays a sense of cosmic union and wonder. This is the kind of bubbling life of the universe that springs up all around us when our consciousness expands. The swirling and soaring orchestral music perfectly complements the transcendent imagery.

 
 
 

On Psychedelic Aesthetics

The Roots and Future of Psychedelic Visual Media: How Psychedelic Aesthetics Took Over the World.
If one were to judge the state of the psychedelic visual style in 1980, one would probably consider it to be an obsolete fad which receded into the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although decades have passed since the psychedelic sixties, psychedelic elements are today deeply integrated into contemporary visual culture from Avatar to videos by Beyonce and Rihanna.
The story of psychedelic visuals did not begin in the 1960s. It is in fact an extremely long tale which stretches from mankind’s prehistorical mystical visions, through the psychedelic revolution of the sixties, to modern consumerist media society and beyond. In order to understand the appeal which the psychedelic visual style holds for our postmodern culture one must get back to the roots of psychedelic aesthetics in the visionary experience.
Huxley’s  analysis of psychedelic aesthetics
“Prenatural light and color are common to all visionary experiences” wrote Aldous Huxley in his Heaven and Hell “and along with light and color there comes in every case, a recognition of heightened significance. The self-luminous objects which we see in the mind’s antipodes possess a meaning, and this meaning is, in some sort, as intense as their colour.”[1]

The origin of intense coloring in the visionary experience. Aldous Huxley.

Visionary experiences has many possible characteristics, but the most common of which, according to Huxley, is the experience of light: “Everything seen by those who visit the mind’s antipodes is brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within. All colors are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and at the same time the mind’s capacity for recognizing fine distinctions of tone and hue is notably heightened.”[2]
Huxley’s lengthy discussion about the aesthetics of the visionary and psychedelic experience in Heaven & Hell remains one the most perceptive pieces about the roots of psychedelic aesthetics. His rich background as a scholar of aesthetics, a scholar of mysticism and a pioneering practitioner of psychedelic journeys, allows him to examine the issue of the visual characteristics of psychedelia from a large historical and philosophical perspective which is essential if one is to decipher the true meaning of psychedelic aesthetics.
All psychedelic visions are unique, claimed Huxley, yet they all “recognizably belong to the same species”.[3] What they have in common are the preternatural light, the preternatural color and the preternatural significance, as well as more specific architectures, landscapes and patterns which tend to reoccur across psychedelic and visionary experiences. For Huxley this intense color and light was one of the primary and most indelible characteristics of what he called the mind’s antipodes, the unknown territories to which the psychedelic voyager is transported.
Looking at the traditions of various cultures, past and present, Huxley found a common ground between their accounts of the heavens or the fairylands of folklore and  the lands of the antipodes. He noted the existence of Other Worlds, mythological landscapes of fantastic beauty in many of the world’s cultural traditions. In the Greco-Roman tradition there were the Garden of Hesperides, the Elysian Plain and the Fair Island of Leuke. The Celts had Avalon, while the Japanese had Horaisan and the Hindu Uttrarakuru. These other worldly paradises, noted Huxley, abound with intensely colored and luminescent objects which bring to mind the psychedelic visionary experience. “Every paradise abounds in gems, or at least in gemlike objects resembling as Weir Mitchell puts it, ‘transparent fruit.’”[4] Wrote Huxley. Ezikel’s version of the Garden of Eden notes the many various stones in the garden, while “The Buddhist paradises are adorned with similar ‘stones of fire’”. The New Jerusalem is constructed in glimmering buildings of shimmering stone. Plato’s world of the ideals is described as a reality where “colors are much purer and much more brilliant than they are down here”.[5]

Mystical paradises were always glowing with color and light. Avatar.

Huxley introduces many more examples of ancient cultures which establish the import and centrality of glimmering gems and precious stones in various mythologies. The implication he draws from this consistency is that the “otherwise inexplicable passion for gems”[6] must have had its roots in “the psychological Other World of visionary experience”.[7] In other words, “precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.”[8]
Moreover, Huxley notes, “among people who have no knowledge of precious stones or of glass, heaven is adorned not with minerals but with flowers”. Many more examples follow for the various intensely colored, shiny and often luminescent objects in which man had sought the semblance of the Other Worlds, among them candles, works of jewelry, crowns, silks and velvets, medals, glassware, the vision inducing stained glass windows of churches and even ceramics and porcelain ware.  All these, argued Huxley, act to transport human beings into higher realities: “contemplating them, men find themselves (as the phrase goes) transported –carried away toward that Other Earth of the Platonic Dialogue, that magical place where every pebble is a precious stone.”  Shiny objects, argued Huxley, remind the unconscious of the mind’s antipodes and so allow us to experience a taste of visionary consciousness.
The human urge to be transported into the numinous realm has found its expression in mythologies and religion, but also in art. Huxley notes a number of artists who used colors in transporting ways such as Caravaggio, Geroges de Latour, and Rembrandt. Indeed, he notes:
“Plato and, during a later flowering of religious art, St. Thomas Aquinas maintained that pure bright colors were of the very essence of artistic beauty”.
Although Huxley argues that this categorical equation of beauty with bright colors leads to absurdity, he also finds this doctrine to be not altogether devoid of truth. “Bright pure colors are the essence, not of beauty in general, but only of a special kind of beauty”: the beauty of works of art which can transport the beholder’s mind in the direction of its antipodes.
Modern taste is often reserved about using intensely bright colors, and prefers the more restrained and undemonstrative palette of minimalism and modernist design. The reason, argued Huxley, is that “we have become too familiar with bright pure pigments to be greatly moved by them”.[9] In the past, pigments and colors were costly and rare. The richly colored velvet and brocades of princely wardrobes, and the painted hangings of medieval and early modern houses were a rarity reserved for a privileged minority, while the majority of the population lived a drab and colorless existence. This all changed with the modern chemical industry and its endless variety of dyes and colors. “In our modern world there is enough bright color to guarantee the production of billions of flags, and comic strips, millions of stop signs and taillights, fire engines and Coca-Cola containers”, and all those objects which in the past might have possessed a transporting numinous quality were reduced by the new industrial consumer market into ordinary banality.
The evolution of psychedelic aesthetics in modern times
The potential of psychedelics to act as powerful catalysts for creativity in general and for visual artists specifically was  noted by researchers of psychedelics already in the 1950s. Oscar Janiger who administered psychedelics to artists was immediately flooded with artists enthusiastic to explore their creativity through the use of psychedelics. “Ninety-nine precent expressed the notion that this was an extraordinary, valuable tool for learning about art”[10]. Ron Sandison noted a patient whose style changed completely after a psychedelic experience “and she began to paint in the style she wanted to, which was imaginative”.[11]
Many more anecdotal accounts of the artistic merit of psychedelics appear during these years. However, the great aesthetic shift ushered by psychedelics would only come as a result of their popularization in the mid-1960s. The psychedelic revolution has brought the visionary aesthetic which stood at the center of many works of art and religion back to the foreground of western culture, but now through the prism of the emerging pop culture of the 1960s.
San Francisco psychedelic poster artists such as Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson, Stanely Mouse & Alton Kelley redefined the boundaries of numinous aesthetics by integrating it into commercial psychedelic posters which advertised bands and  rock concert. These psychedelic artist, who experimented with colors and forms  were inspired to a great extent by the Art Noveau movement of early 20^th century and it’s emphasis on organic forms and lines, as well as in the idea of life as art. The aesthetic of these  posters would define a new artistic style that would be widely distributed and collected.  Meanwhile, psychedelic art flourished outside the poster genre. Visual artists such as Mati Klarwein, Robert Fraser and Milton Glaser designed psychedelic album covers for the likes of Miles Davis, the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

Mati Klarwein’s psychedlic cover to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew.

Other forms of psychedelic aesthetics have emerged in various cultural domains. Psychedelic fashion was popularized by rock artists and countercultural figures and even introduced into couture by designers such as Emilio Pucci, Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin. Psychedelic light shows by psychedelic light show artists and groups such as Marc Boyle, Mike Leonard and The brotherhood of light became a popular trend in music concerts. (Here one should also note an extremely popular form of  psychedelic aesthetics, which is the luminescent culture of Burning Man Festival, whose fascination with glowing colors  have turned it over the years into a distinct form of light-worship, a spiritual fest ordered around the heavenly glow Huxley referred to in his work). Psychedelic architectural and inner designs flourished in the communes and were experimented with by a variety of architects and designers as thoroughly documented in the book “Spaced Out”.
What these various genres of psychedelic aesthetics had in common was the use of intensive coloring, extensive use  of natural lines, extensive use of op-art as well as of elaborate patterns and designs that sought to transport the viewer into a different state of consciousness. Like the other forms of psychedelic culture, psychedelic aesthetic was a new artistic genre which was rooted in the psychedelic experience and at the same time a cultural artifact which attempted to recreate some of the elements of the psychedelic experiences within the domain of culture.

A distinct form of light worship. Burning Man.

Yet, by the late sixties psychedelic aesthetics have already left the realms of the counterculture, and started being absorbed by the larger culture, as their commercial potential began being tapped into by various enterprises from Pepsi and McDonalds to Campbell and General Electric so that by the mid-1970s, the psychedelic visual style had been largely absorbed into the mainstream consumer culture which the hippies sought to change.
The evolution and reemergence of psychedelic video
Psychedelic art, fashion, design and architecture were all contributed greatly to the creation of a psychedelic culture expressed in various artistic forms. Yet when it comes to reproducing the psychedelic experience, it seems that film and video had an altogether different potential. Psychedelic visions are after all not not static, buy dynamic and related to sound. An effective use of moving pictures and a soundtrack can powerfully recreate elements of the psychedelic experience. This would appear to be part of the reason, why psychedelic film and video would achieve an even greater popularity than did the more static reproductions of the psychedelic experience such as art, fashion, design and architecture.
Already Huxley noted in his Heaven and Hell  that the equivalent of the magic-lantern show of earlier times is the colored movie. “In the huge, expensive ‘spectacular’, the soul of the masque goes marching along” wrote Huxley. He was fascinated by various films with visionary properties, such as Disney’s The Living Desert and claimed that film has the power to create a “vision inducing phantasy”. Psychedelic elements have actually emerged on film already as early as the 1920s as could be seen in this short silent animation film from 1926 as well on Disney’s 1940s films Fantasia and Dumbo the Flying Elephant, which both contained elaborate psychedelic sequences, and whose chief visualist is reputed to have participated in Kurt Beringer’s mescaline experiments in 1920s Berlin.
The 1960s psychedelic genre of film distinguished itself through such films as “Psych-Out” (1968), “The Trip”, (1967), “Easy Rider” (1969) and of course the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” (1968) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey  which was frequented in cinema by numerous tripping hippies who immensely enjoyed the closing hyper-psychedelic 30 minutes sequence.
And while the attraction and novelty of the psychedelic style seemed to diminish in the beginning of the 1970s, the attempts to recreate the psychedelic visual aesthetic on film kept evolving. Experimental movie makers such as Vince Collins and Toshio Matsumoto explored psychedelic aesthetics throughout the 1970s, while new motion pictures introduced movie-goers to more elaborate and sophisticated cinematic renditions of the psychedelic experience, created about with the help of new production techniques and technologies in films such as Ken Russel’s 1980’s Altered States  and Terry Gilliam’s 1998 version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
But while these might seem as solitary examples, a far deeper cultural momentum was at work, advancing the integration of psychedelic aesthetic into popular culture. As I showed above, Huxley already noted the visionary aspect of commercial designs such as colorful printed advertisements or neon lights. As technology and media evolved side by side with late capitalism, psychedelic aesthetic and consumer society would find a common field of resonance. Electronic media, which media theorist Marshall McLuhan described as humanity’s nervous system, and which Erik Davis called a technology of the self, would become a new and most effective form of consciousness altering medium. The visual properties of psychedelics, which expressed themselves not only through color but also through a new and more dynamic approach to video editing, would become integrated into the popular culture, while better, bigger screens and higher resolutions created a distinctly psychedelic hyper-real quality in many of the new clips and videos.
And so, while it might have earlier seemed that psychedelic aesthetic became a thing of the past, a quick examination of today’s popular culture would teach us something radically different. Psychedelic visual style is to be found in the music clips of the many of today’s leading music artists, and not only alternative groups such as MGMT, Chemical Brothers or Birdy Nam Nam but also in the music clips of many of today’s leading pop artists from Beyonce to Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Kesha and Nicki Minaj. Psychedelic visionary aesthetic also became an integral part of today’s commercial world from Takashi Murakami’s impeccable Louis Vitton’s commercials to commercials by Sony, Hyundai and Yoplait. Psychedelic videos are being created today, by web users, as well as by commercial firms and popular artists at a higher rate than ever before.
This does not mean that all these videos are psychedelic in the same way. One could distinguish between more superficial use of psychedelic motives characterized mostly by psychedelic coloring, design and editing, which can be found in more mainstream oriented productions, and more distinctly and explicitly psychedelic videos which include more hardcore psychedelic motives such as multi-perspectivism, multi-dimensionality, figure transformation, mandalas and fractalic imagery. In this way one could distinguish between soft-psychedelia and hard-psychedelia.
“the self-luminous objects which we see in the mind’s antipodes possess a meaning, and this meaning is, in some sort, as intense as their color” wrote Huxley. “Significance is here identical with being”. In this, Huxley wished to point out that in contrast to surrealism, for instance, the psychedelic aesthetic is not symbolic of anything else. It is the thing itself. Its beauty needs no explanation, for it is self-evident in its color, richness and harmony. The meaning of the psychedelic visuals is “precisely in this, that they are intensely themselves”.
And this is perhaps what makes psychedelic aesthetics so appealing to today’s popular culture. The psychedelic aesthetic style, which is rooted in the visionary Other Worlds described by the mystics of humanity, is so successful precisely because it is distinguished first and foremost by its “suchness”; because it does not symbolize anything concrete, and can hence be seen as arguably indifferent to content and used for a wide variety of purposes. At the same time the powerful responses it evokes, a result of mankind’s age old fascination with the colors and light which characterized the psychedelic visions of the Other Worlds, turn it into such a powerful mind-altering tool for media.
The future of psychedelic media
One might ask whether the use visionary elements in consumer culture still holds and delievers  the deeper psychedelic values, or whether psychedelic visual style has become abused by other purposes. One thing should be clear, however: psychedelic aesthetics in media are here to stay. They are integrated into the cultural production system, and new technologies such as 3D screens and video glasses are about to make them ever more effective and powerful.
The advent of 3D screens, which are making their way into the consumer electronics market these days are one factor which is bound to make psychedelia an even more prominent force in our visual culture. The psychedelic experience has always been about perceiving new and unimagined dimensions, and the addition of a new dimension to media, has an inherently psychedelic quality to it. As a genre which is based on bending our perception and creating rich media environments to inspire awe, psychedelic visuals can benefit greatly from the new possibilities unleashed by the new dimensions. Indeed, Avatar, the most successful 3D film up to date, is distinguished by its extensive use of psychedelic aesthetics. Meanwhile Independent psychedelic video makers have already started to integrate the 3^rd dimension into their works with mesmerizing results. The first examples of 3D psychedelic videos are so much more psychedelic and transporting than 2D psychedelic videos that this suggest that psychedelic videos will profit from the integration of the 3^rd dimension into media more than any other genre of video.
Meanwhile, augmented reality projects such as the “Google Glasses” suggest that in the not so remote future one might perceive the world through high-resolution 3D screens. This in turn raises the possibility that the augmented reality glasses will be used not only to present useful data, but also to produce visual filter effects (such as changing colors or patterns) which will be screened on reality and allow us to see reality through altered senses, much in the same way that Instagram allows us to manipulate still pictures today. Rich augmented reality environments would repackage our surroundings, freeing us from the visual constraints of the real world and transporting us into other more magical realities which will present themselves from within our glasses. Thus a new market for virtual psychedelic environments and landscapes might emerge.
Psychedelics and electronic media are both powerful mind-altering tools capable at producing awe-inspiring transformational visual experiences. Psychedelic visual culture has had an appetite for using new media to enhance and recreate psychedelic experience since the invention of the strobe light and the days of Stewart Brand’s “Trips Festival”. New developments in technology and media suggest that the wedding of the psychedelic visual culture and electronic media will only become stronger in the years to come.
(26.4.2012)

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[1] Huxley, The Doors Of Perception, 48.

[2] Ibid., 45.

[3] Ibid., 49.

[4] Ibid., 51.

[5] Ibid., 52.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

 [9] Ibid. 57.

[10] Doblin, Beck, and Chapman, “Dr. Oscar Janiger’s Pioneering LSD Research: A Forty Year Follow-up” Available at: http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v09n1/09107jan.html.

[11] Abramson, The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy, 83.