A short video created to provide overview of my research into the relationship between audiovisual media, installation, and altered states of consciousness. Binaural soundscape and narration developed to emulate the hypnotic state. Musical collaboration with Simpl_machine.
BRIEF:
Create 5 minute film summarising your research, with specific reference to your research paper, and how this research is impacting on your practice.
YEAR:
2020
TRANSCRIPT
We think what we perceive is reality.
But in actuality all perception is gamble.
Our culture hypnotiSes us from birth.
Through conditioning our experience becomes controlled, constricted, directed, censored and simplified.
The state of consciousness we ordinarily walk around in is but one special type of consciousness - an arbitrary, biased, and slanted construction.
But apply the right sensory stimulus, and you’ll find states of consciousness entirely different. Each with their own fields of application and adaptation.
From hedonistic indulgence to spiritual awakening. From creative expression to mental well-being - Altered states have been used for millennia.
Each altered state offers a unique vantage point to explore different potentials of experience–form, colour, time, the body, emotion, identity, and cognition.
So as an artist I play and experiment with new means of arranging experience and look to grasp the implications of my actions.
All media are extensions of some human faculty,
Mental or physical.
Electric technology extends the central nervous system.
The extension of any one sense displaces the other senses and alters the way we think, the way we feel, the way we see the world, and ourselves.
Digital mediums trick the brain into creating more than the retina and eardrum have received.
Their construction openly relies on illusion and reveals the short-comings of our perception - prone to paradox, hallucinations and delusions.
Inducing an Altered State is not without challenge or conflict. And so I proffer seductive works which simulate altered states. Perhaps you will fall, at least momentarily, for an illusion.
My key materials are ink, water, and light - dispersing, diffusing, diffracting, and embracing the unexpected. By acting in the moment I discover the aesthetic rather than create it.
Documenting my actions through photography and video allows me to solidify these visual meditations, so I may elongate, interpret, and share the experience.
Much like a strange loop in go round in circles shifting from one level of abstraction to another.
Layering, looping, reflecting, refracting, stretching, scaling, scanning, projecting, photographing and printing.
Each process builds up complexity, bringing new depths and emergent phenomenon.
We are all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.
Which means I cannot rely on my subjective experience.
So take my hand and join me on this Cyberdelic journey–from gallery to gala, from exhibition to exposition, from festival to front room.
Immerse yourself in this augmented reality and contemplate the illusionary nature of your experience.
What did you think? What did you feel? What did you perceive? Tell me. Everything.