Introduction to Psychedelic Film Practice.
Points in time, altered perception vs. altered state, and a fight for accuracy of expressions.
This is the sixth Sunday of publishing an article. Another anchor, alongside my journals, which reminds me of the passage of time. Linking a point in the past in which I had imagined the future. The future is now becoming the present. We can imagine the points to which we want to get, but how much can we picture and feel what it will be like, or how we will get there?
Since I was a child I have been doing sort of mental experiments with regards to time. Once, I had been looking forward to a holiday scheduled in two weeks time, there was still quite a lot of waiting ahead. I would think: “the Monday after next, at the same time of the day, I will be walking out of the flat and getting in the car to go to the sea”. In that moment, that Monday at 9am two-weeks-away-from-holiday, I felt the details of my surroundings intensely, in order to be able to recall it on the anticipated date and experience the happiness that comes with a realised dream. Then, on the day of the journey, I would think: “yes, it seemed like a long wait, but now these two weeks appear to have been just a blink of an eye”. This method allowed me to alleviate the nervousness of an impatient anticipation. Being able to link the points in time by means of visual immersion made things seem real and under control.
I still have vivid memories of all those moments in which I absorbed myself in the present, in order to comprehend the reality of the future, and experience my relationship with the time passing.
I try to imagine things that are not as certain as that seaside holiday when I was six. It is strange, that we are able to mentally create events or states that we have never experienced before, and sometimes, in unexpected forms, they become the present.
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One of the most interesting things I read this week was a description of an experiment in which scientists reverse-engineered an AI neural network designed to recognise visual objects and their categories, such as dog breeds. They filmed a normal scene on a local market with a 360˚camera and created a VR environment, onto which the AI network attempted to impose its categories. The resulting image is an artificial hallucinatory experience, where dog body parts are weaved into the contours of clothes of passerby, suitcases, market stalls, buildings. Sussex University’s Sackler Center for Conscious Science, under the direction of neuroscientist Anil Seth, who wrote about this study in his recent book Being You, wanted to investigate the mechanisms involved in perception in an altered state.
I wondered just how much hallucination in a form of distorted visual experience actually contributes to an altered state. While an altered state can produce altered perception, does it actually work both ways? The experiment reported that even though the participants compared the experience to visuals seen on psilocybin, there was no changes to the experience of passing of time (perceived temporal distortion), which is usually associated with altered states of consciousness.
In my projects I have been looking at film as holding a potential for altering the state of consciousness. While I like to experiment with various distortions of the image, I never thought that this in itself is solely responsible for the altered state.
An altered state I see more as something taking place within the time-frame of the film, and requiring some degree of participation on the side of the viewer. This participation is not necessarily an effect of conscious effort, but rather something that happens by a way of letting go of conscious attempts at interpretation and evaluation of the seen content, allowing for the direct perception to take over and guide into the realm of unconscious free-flowing associations - memories, imaginations, feelings, impressions - unique to each spectator.
I am again bringing myself to the level of definitions. Altered state of consciousness is different awareness. Different awareness can result in different perception. Different perception, alongside with the overall altered state of consciousness, can result in an exceptional human experience, which is a subject of study of transpersonal psychology.
In my recent essay introducing my idea of Psychedelic Film Practice to my supervisors, I felt it necessary to make quite a few notes on what the practice is not. So many misunderstandings can form when the terms aren’t defined. Even with the awareness, of which I wrote here previously, that language can never be strictly accurate, because the word is not equal with what it represents, I need to attempt to describe things in a way that reflects what I mean. It is an endless process. Meaning evolves. Meaning demands to be explained in various ways depending on the context. It can be a scary discovery that words are political, and there is nothing that can be done about this fact. But there is many decisions to be made on what to do with meaning.
Just the use of the word psychedelic is a risky endeavour in the present state of the world, with the negative connotations attached to it as a result of the war on drugs which began around 1960s, and remained a tool for long-lasting misinformation, scientific regress, and oppression. Talking about it in this way is not an ignorance towards the cases of misuse, but rather an understanding of the bigger picture, and that it is not the chemical substances that are to blame, but the political systems that nourished the environment for misinformed use, by restricting the forms of support and development of understanding of psychological processes. It is worth noting that even in a recent academic book that talks about Deleuzian philosophy, altered states and film, I happened on a use of the word “narcotic” in a context of a depiction of an LSD trip in a 1960s movie. This is an incredibly common, technically incorrect use of the word. “Narcotic” originally signifies any medically used substance with numbing or paralysing effects, and is mostly used to describe effects of substances such as morphine or heroin. Unfortunately, the word’s popular use extends to mean any legally controlled substance, causing immense risk of confusion.
I am not here to talk about substances. Because the subject of altered states of consciousness is so tightly culturally connected to a pile of stereotypes and misunderstanding, I constantly remind myself and others that my project is based in the department of art and film. I use the word psychedelic in my project, and I am quite sure that it is crucial enough to remain in the title of my thesis, but I am acutely aware of the politicised debate that emerges behind every corner. I hope I am prepared for it, my literature review in the past few years has been inclusive of a lot of material that aims to define and analyse the meaning of words that are often thrown around without crucial considerations of definitions and contexts, while I continue to keep my research up to date.
I suppose it would have been boring if my PhD was not in the least controversial. Do they even allow you to start one if it’s not? If a new contribution to knowledge did not bring about a debate on meaning and significance, what good would it be anyway. Doesn’t confidence come with learning to express arguments for and explanations of something you care about? I hope it does. I hope it just comes with doing things that I am not sure how to navigate, but I am sure I want to do.
The following is a fragment of my introduction to Psychedelic Film Practice. Finding and testing out words that dance around the meaning I feel, but am learning to translate.
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My work is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and the philosophical aspects of interpretations of the word psychedelic, here used as an adjective. As an experimental filmmaker and artist working with the moving image, sound, photography, and writing, I am interested in psychedelic in its root meaning: from Greek psyche - mind/spirit, and delic - revealing, manifesting.
I understand Psychedelic Practice as comprising of two basic aspects: a method in the artistic process, and an experience in the time-space of a film.
As a method in artistic practice, I imagine psychedelic to mean working in an altered state of consciousness, or inspired by an experience of one, in ways that allow for radical freedom of expression. The work can be captured, as well as edited/formed/shaped intuitively and experimentally, with attention and perception different to ordinary awareness. This altered state can be understood in a variety of ways, some of which will be discussed here.
Abandoning the everyday practical reasoning allows to perceive things as they are, without immediate judgement and analysis. This view is inspired by Buddhist pure awareness (Watts, 1973, 1979), where a meditative state allows to be fully present in the moment, and direct perception, described by writer Aldous Huxley in his account of a mescaline-induced psychedelic experience (2004 [1956]). The experience in an altered state is of interest in that it has the potential to extend beyond the sense of individual self (transpersonal experience, Daniels, 2005). In Jungian terms this could mean gaining access to one’s personal unconscious, allowing for a discovery of inner knowledge, as well as achieving contact with the collective unconscious, which connects all humans Jung, 1980).
According to the idea of Psychedelic Practice, the experience of film creates a time and a space in which an altered state can be entered. I suggest this can happen through the direct sensory input of the structures of filmmaking and artistic devices such as rhythm, duration, colour, shape, and movement, as well as through a disorientation and surprise to the cognitive processes which, in a surrealist vein, can be effected by the unexpected use of text, imagery, or even narrative. I am interested in the properties and mechanisms of an altered state itself in relation to the audiovisual, and in the potential for transpersonal and transformatory experience.
This essay will attempt to briefly introduce the rich soil of theoretical and artistic contexts on which the concept of Psychedelic Practice began to grow. The motivation of my research and praxis can perhaps at this stage be described as a search for ways of communication or sharing of experience through the moving image and sound, in ways that are psychedelic: connecting to the collective through the revealing of the subjective. It is important to note that Psychedelic Practice is not aimed at devising a single specific methodology or achieving specific cinematic results, but rather is a curiosity towards the existing and developing relationships of the self and the collective with the process of filmmaking and the experience of film.
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