Digital Oracles and Psychedelics 2.0
This is an essay that accompanied my curated digital video program within the larger exhibition, Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior curated by Phong Bui/Brooklyn Rail Curatorial at Red Bull Studios
Digital Oracles poses the relationship between the psychedelic and the digital. This lineage is not coincidental; 60’s culture is the roots of “cyberculture.” As Fred Turner details in his book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and later, Wired, functioned as a link between the two cultures: “Between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, Brand assembled a network of people and publications that together brokered a series of encounters between bohemian San Francisco and the emerging technology hub of Silicon Valley to the south.” This is how the military technology of the mid-20th Century—the Internet—got its optimistic face when it first became accessible to a wider section of the public as the World Wide Web in the late-20th Century.
Faith Holland’s RIP Geocities (2011) takes on this history directly by looking at how the web is represented in the popular imagination of Hollywood films dating from the 1990s. The utopian ethos of the early web, teeming with hand-coded homepages made by its users, is reflected in these wild, tunneling spaces meant to represent logging on, or, as William Gibson would say, “jacking in.” The video uses the form of a supercut, a native YouTube phenomenon, to depict a sustained cyberspace. These extravagant depictions, which include excerpts from special effects masterpieces like Lawnmower Man (1992), Hackers (1995), and The Matrix (1999) tapered off in the early 2000’s. Marked by the rise of web 2.0 and the new, cleaner, corporatized web, as well as by the decline and eventual closure of the emblematic free host site Geocities (shortly after it was purchased by juggernaut Yahoo!), the Internet was no longer an “electronic frontier,” but, rather, a mall.
Yoshi Sodeoka’s work Sibyl (2011) from the series of the same name, scored collaboratively with Daron Murphy, revisits psychedelic themes through the lens of digital technology. Conceived as part of a “concept album” composed of videos, Sodeoka reinterprets cultural markers that were fundamental to the aesthetics and philosophy of “Psychedelics 1.0,” from ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology (as the namesake Sibyl, a Greek oracle at Delphi, suggests) to space travel. The video pulses with concentric circles and vibrant, fragmentary images that flow out toward the viewer before pulling him/her back in and through. Is this a trip to the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, where her face is finally revealed on the other side of the tunnel, as though at an altar surrounded by candles? Or are they not candles but, rather, the nearly-obscured footage of flames from a rocket preparing to launch? Would Sibyl then simply be a modern engineer, counting us down to the beginning of our journey to some interplanetary destination? Either way, Sodeoka plies us with colors that lead us deeper into its own mythos.
Loves Puddles (2011) by Michael Mallis and Mikey McParlane re-envisions the imagery of psychedelic eroticism into an unknown universe in an unknown time. The digital compositing used in this project offers weird and distinctly non-traditional digital juxtapositions, creating textured images that ooze and glitter, that are furry and sticky all at once. The video calls to mind avant-garde predecessors like Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, and Mike and George Kuchar, along with B-movies like Barbarella (1968) or Labyrinth (1986). The sexuality of Love Puddles, however, is denser, queerer, and more alien than any of its precursors. Indeed, the piece suggests an entire landscape that has become aroused: the volcano splooges, hard rocks caress each other, and the ground shivers with pleasure as the central humanoid figure writhes in ecstasy. Everywhere, the scenery lubricates and rubs itself, finally achieving a rapturous state of erotic, environmental satisfaction.
Brenna Murphy’s ~wavy~yantra:melty~monad~ (2011) acts as a conjuring. In the video, Murphy’s magical hands and voice appear to manipulate the image and sound themselves, which warp with her movements. She acts in tandem with multiple reflections of herself, perpetually on the brink of, and giving way to, abstraction. Finally, her body transcends the figural; the video melts into a swirl of warm brown tones, rendering the artist indistinguishable from the objects surrounding her. The title of the piece is self-referential, pointing to its own process of production: Murphy deploys a monad—a programming structure that organizes sequenced operations—to form a yantra, a Sanskrit word for “machine” that is most often used to describe a mystical diagram for meditation. ~wavy~yantra:melty~monad~ uses technology to achieve a spiritual state, defying the stereotypical logic of cold, unfeeling machines. The artist thus achieves ecstatic oneness with the image, proposing a new form and goal for meditation.
That Which Pulls (2013) by Alexander Dupuis repurposes John Whitney’s technique of “differential motion”: the idea of moving objects at different, harmonically related speeds. An early pioneer of computer graphics, filmmaker, and composer, Whitney’s work forms an alternative connection between military technology and the psychedelic, literally repurposing WWII technology to create his earliest works using an analog computer in the 1950s. That Which Pulls uses the same principle, but transposes it to a digital process in order to derive complex arrangements from a single image and a single note. Emerging slowly from complete darkness, the video rearranges its component parts into pulsating patterns, becoming denser and more layered as the piece progresses, both visually and sonically, until it reaches its apex and fades to black. The kaleidoscopic images and bell-like tones rearrange themselves in innumerable configurations, evoking the infinite and a sense of the sublime. The awe generated by the visuals, combined with tones that are reminiscent of Tibetan bowls, give rise to another meditative experience. Dupuis’ video uses repetition and difference as a technical device and a means of transcendence.
Eva Papamargariti’s New Nosthetics (2014) is a demonstration of what the mind is capable of in collaboration with a computer. Papamargariti creates an impossible landscape of otherwise unrelated 3D textures and animations that are uncanny at every turn of her “camera.” The video simultaneously shapes this fantasy while revealing its means of production through a computer-generated voice that (seemingly) narrates the video’s creation. The video destabilizes its own façade through noticeable fissures, in which the image becomes noisy and the program’s right-click menu pops up. At one point, a Facebook status update appears, describing the art trope that is represented behind it: marble surfaces and unreal fruit. The video then immediately undermines this composition and the fruit explode, exposing their fake, digital innards. It does this repeatedly, creating sculptural mirages and then unmasking their falseness. With New Nosthetics, Papamargariti posits the digital as a mere hallucination, its pixels de-forming and re-forming as soon as we click ahead to the next new thing.
Not unlike the psychedelic technologies of the 1960s, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)—a government tool gone awry in the hands of the counterculture—these six videos bear the legacy of psychedelic repurposing. Whether they make reference to its musical, erotic, spiritual, or technological history, each stages a journey through digital mind-expansion, both for the artists and for their spectators.
2087
areudirty
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
