Program Notes
Guest speaker: Niles Heckman
[NOTE: All quotations are by Niles Heckman.]
“The visual component of the psychedelic experience is for the most part the final frontier for what computer graphics still have yet to replicate faithfully.”
“Art isn’t really important unless it helps you grow in creating it, or it helps others grow through its consumption.”
“Computer graphics are, and will continue to be, the tool used to visualize what is essentially unlanguageable.”
“It’s really fascinating that indigenous people have essentially been uploading themselves to much more advanced organic realms for potentially thousands of years, if not more, seeing imagery that’s much more complex than what you can see in a Hollywood summer blockbuster today.”
“Psychedelic experiences, whether real or future replicated, if done responsibly, aren’t negative escapism but could be a true awakening process for more people, because we are not human beings that can have spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings having human experiences.”
“Ambitions are competitive, aspirations are not. Aspirations take nothing from anyone else and injure no one else and allow you as a sovereign individual to grow, because that’s why we’re all here.”
Niles Heckman’s contact information:
Twitter
Production Company
Podcast
Post-Burning Man companion interview with Rak Razam and Niles Heckmen for his podcast “In A Perfect World.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:26 ►
Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And today we’re going to be treated to another of the 2014 Palenque Norte lectures, the ones that were held at this year’s
00:00:32 ►
Burning Man extravaganza. And our guest speaker is Niles Heckman. And while his name may not be
00:00:38 ►
one that you recognize, my guess is that you’ve seen some of his work. Niles also has his own podcast, and after we listen to his talk, I’ll pass along more information about how to contact him.
00:00:50 ►
But for now, sit back, relax, and join me as we learn how the psychedelic experience is seen through the eyes of a professional computer graphic artist.
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Welcome back to Palenque Norte. Thank you all for coming out. So I’m happy to introduce
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Niles Heckman. Niles is an artist and filmmaker. After years of working on large professional
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teams, he’s now focusing on putting his skill set to more of his own personal projects,
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allowing him more creative freedom. So here’s Niles to discuss conscious art and visualizing the psychedelic experience using computer graphics.
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Hello, beautiful people.
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If you had said to me five years ago I would be coming to, let alone speaking at, Burning
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Man, I would have thought you were out of your mind. So transitioning times we live
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in. It’s delightful to be here.
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My name is Niles Heckman. I’m an artist and filmmaker. I’d like to thank Bruce Dahmer
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and Chris Pezza for having me here today. My background as an artist is a career in
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the Hollywood visual effects industry, which is basically a fusion of art and technology.
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And I’ve had a wide-ranging career doing a variety of different roles in a variety of
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different locations. Some were very glorified kind of assembly line at your desk all day work. Others were going on
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to film sets as a supervisor and with some of the major studios, telling them essentially how to
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shoot the photography properly for visual effects. And I worked on three Academy Award winning films,
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two for visual effects and one for animated feature. And a few of the films that I worked
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on were the Matrix sequels and Avatar, as well as as tron legacy and it wouldn’t be till after i’d worked on them the more kind of
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deeper themes i would eventually come to see in them like the deep gnostic themes of the matrix
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and the shamanic themes in avatar and tron which has of course a heightened outlandish reality
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existing alongside the standard reality, which,
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of course, that’s quite an untechnical concept when you really know about it. I created imagery
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for high-end commercials and game cinematics, in which I received an award for virtual cinematography,
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which is cinematography on a motion capture stage when you’re working on a fully computer-generated
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project. And the commercial industry is, of course,
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constantly upping the use of bright, saturated colors with increasingly complex imagery year after year.
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And since then, I’ve kind of gotten more
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into just my own independent filmmaking.
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And I’ll share a little bit of my story here today,
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which I think is basically becoming all of our stories,
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which essentially entails following a conscious path of growth to create
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art and storytelling. And in my case, much of that has been through technology and computer
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science, both on a professional and personal level. So human beings are profoundly influenced
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by images. And a psychedelic experience is one of the most profound visual experiences
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we can have which
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pushes the boundaries of our perception and visual effects professionals work to replicate what can’t
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be shot practically or would not be feasible to do so and the visual component of the psychedelic
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experience is pretty much for the most part basically the final frontier for what computer
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graphics still have yet to replicate faithfully or can only do currently in extremely small doses.
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And most attempts to do so to date have been quite crudely done,
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and aren’t anything nearly to the same extent of what I’ve happened to see in my own personal experiences.
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So why would one want to do such a thing?
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I’d say it’s the same reason that you go to a museum or an art gallery, right?
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I mean, viewing any sort of work of art is an altering of our reality,
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no matter how slight.
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And even though each plant medicine journey is different and experiential,
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duplicating these experiences authentically in a digital medium
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could allow for more dissemination.
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Thus, more people would gain insight into them
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and potentially then have them for themselves. When done rarely and safely and responsibly in proper set and setting.
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So it’s not just for entertainment purposes, but for educational purposes as well.
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And what do most people living in the industrialized first world, which is essentially
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Rome and the crown, what do they do? They go to school.
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They maybe go to more school.
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They go to even more school if they’re lucky.
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And that basically is just kind of training them
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to slot into very specialized roles
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in the current capitalist system,
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which thinks it can just have endless growth
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on a planet of finite resources.
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They get a job.
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They watch their shows.
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They have barbecues. Maybe two weeks out of the
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year, they travel. So it’s kind of work, eat, sleep, repeat. And that’s kind of what the society offers.
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That’s kind of it. And most people in this society, unfortunately, aren’t growing much.
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And growth is a manifestation of life. So if you’re not growing fully, you’re not fully alive.
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life. So if you’re not growing fully, you’re not fully alive. And the average person gets kind of educated air quotes into the present system, which kind of just allows us to continue propelling our
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mistakes and then feels they’re done and they’ve kind of learned everything they need to know.
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And then from that on, from that point on, it’s kind of like the aspects of what our culture
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hands to you, sports, news, celebrity, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, family members maybe down during the holidays
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educating you on kind of the little things.
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The everyday kind of surface-level pedestrian conversations.
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It’s what a friend of mine calls the price of fish.
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Everybody’s just kind of talking about the price of fish all day.
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And you’re lucky if you can get people to even discuss
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what to do with our broken political systems
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in kind of a proactive, constructive way.
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So if you are truly growing, you may one day come to realize that everything in this society is kind of the opposite of what it should be.
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Everything is essentially backwards and upside down.
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So the example of that is this kind of stereotypical starving artist is maybe struggling financially greatly while creating potentially brilliant artwork while somebody moving numbers around let’s say an
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abstract artificiality on soulless wall street is extremely financially rewarded in this current
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paradigm so we’re not living our authentic lives and every kid is kind of born artistic in some way, and we’re kind of trained to become unartistic.
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So we really kind of have to unlearn to then really learn.
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And as one searches for truth,
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which is basically a natural process,
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one may come to learn that efforts are at work
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that actively prevent one from growing.
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And I would go so far as to say
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that this is by design with our current system,
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and it’s been going on for a very long time, 2,000 plus years,
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and it’s essentially an effect of living in empire.
00:07:33 ►
So without sounding too conspiratorial, most people,
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not necessarily most people that would be at Burning Man,
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but most people that may not ever want to come to Burning Man,
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would be absolutely flabbergasted to learn the real extent
00:07:44 ►
as to which we’re intentionally kept in a state of non-growth. And we’re asleep and
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essentially kept in a childlike state of neoteny, which I would say kind of stems from people not
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learning from themselves, but basically having other people tell them what to think. So there’s
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a reason it’s called television programming, for example. And another example might be somebody that goes into a building on a Sunday,
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and somebody standing in front of that building tells them what to think, and they don’t actually,
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they just take that at face value rather than going off and having their own experiences.
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It is possible to awaken to life and to truth and begin a real education,
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but we’re just as a species kind of starting to come out of the
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sandbox and stepping out of that sandbox can tend to really marginalize you because you start getting
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at the heart of what our society is kind of built on which is money in the bottom line but you may
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come to realize you’re not crazy but unfortunately far too many other people are which doesn’t mean
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that you’re better than them but is is a recognition of our collective psychosis.
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So there’s that great quote, entheogens aren’t illegal because they drive you insane.
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They’re illegal because they drive you sane.
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So with growing, which is a compulsion to explore life’s mystery, if things have a foundation in integrity they are worth looking at
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if they cater to sensationalism in ourselves
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or superficial statistics they’re not really worth looking at
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so I kind of would classify this as a difference between
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maybe the esoteric versus the exoteric
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and the exoteric offers us things like empire
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culture, ignorance and unconsciousness
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corporatized and militarized government,
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war, debt-based monetary systems,
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false choice with political candidates,
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the Hegelian dialectic, mundane artlessness,
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conditioning, infotainment, monarchy, plutocracy,
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the Protestant work ethic,
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miseducation, fashion and celebrity,
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dogmatic, reactionary religions,
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synthetic consumerism, a dismantling
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of the middle class, an erosion of our rights, a reduction in our vocabulary, dirty energies,
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environmental destruction and climate change, GMOs, acidic monocultured foods, alcohol,
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shadowy technologies, ecclesiastic legal systems, and the war on some drugs, as I like to call it,
00:10:03 ►
since all the expansion
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drugs are illegal and all the contraction drugs are legal.
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Surprise, surprise.
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NSA spying and jobs we kind of don’t really like, but we’re mostly conditioned to feel
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like we have to do.
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And the esoteric offers us to explore art, philosophy, expanded consciousness, enlightenment, growth, spirituality, multidimensionality,
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an expansion of our language, alkaline foods, meditation,
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our chakras, our pineal glands, astrology, psychism,
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the tarot, astrotheology, entheogens, hermeticism,
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gnosticism, mysticism, alchemy, shamanism, Telepathy, Sensory Deprivation, Sacred Geometry, Box Technologies, Metaphysics, Sovereignty, Natural Law, etc.
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All sorts of things most people don’t even know about, but really help fuel the growth process.
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And over time, people who have really known things through time have been initiated into esoteric teachings.
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So we live in transitioning times where we’re just kind of coming out of the dark ages,
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and empire is alive and well, and the dark is super dark.
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But it’s important to look at the dark because that’s how we learn is from the dark.
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But the opposite side of that is that the light is super bright and super beautiful and incredibly empowering.
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So protesting in this current system can be very useful,
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and especially if it can be kind of sustained and not crushed by Orwellian police states.
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You look at things like the Arab Spring or the Occupy Movement,
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which scare the machine greatly and aren’t perfect,
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but are as much about changing language as anything because language is very important. And however much is better described beyond language in pictures. And thus, the
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existence of image-creating systems increases our means of expression and of imagination.
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So what’s even more important in this current system is peaceful non-compliance and creating
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content rather than consuming it so essentially i would say that’s because the current unsustainable
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paradigms won’t work if people stop buying excessive stuff so you talk about you talk
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about the commoditization of artwork and you know’s, of course, a balance with that. We all have to make a living in this current society.
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But today’s authentic artist is a seeker challenging the status quo operating on the sidelines of that kind of phony rat race.
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And whether you’re doing it with a brush or a pen or a guitar or a camera or art pieces in the desert or tattoos tattoos on people’s bodies, or via a computer,
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the more authentic you kind of are, the less likely you probably will be to be recognized by the mainstream.
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So challenging empire and its associated control systems really alarms the current power structures
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because it’s about fueling conscious growth, which does not come from dogma or indoctrination.
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So I think banksy is a
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good example of this right like his work really makes you think and conscious art has to do the
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inner work before it can do the outer work and that’s especially to be said with the artists
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themselves art isn’t really important unless it helps you grow in creating it or helps others grow through
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its consumption and i would ask then kind of what is your contribution to life you know what is your
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creative output you know because in human creativity there is cosmic meaning and people
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can easily fall into not being creative because control systems discourage creativity and replace it with purely consumption of junk food that doesn’t allow people to grow in any way.
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It’s just top-down schlocky art used to convey unconscious tales of distraction and programming, saturating us with images of the negative aspects of our culture.
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Top 40 reality TV, CGg disaster porn which i in a
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former life helped create so um you know but we’re not asked to be to participate in it we’re just
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asked to consume it so differentiating and discerning between good and bad is extremely
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important and that requires balance balance of mild amounts of good consumption, which allow us to propel our creations forward, which the universe is essentially always inviting us to do.
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And that helps us become our authentic selves.
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And the archetypal figure of the artist brings healing because artists are dreamers and are a function of our divine imagination.
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And that’s especially true if we’re all seeing this as kind of a dream of our collective realities.
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So the abstract artist especially is kind of a deconstructor,
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and you can get much more sense out of what the artist was saying
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when they do it through abstraction.
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So even if you don’t know what’s really going on
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behind the scenes of the piece of art,
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you can really feel it in the work
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because we all have the same hardware.
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So breaking through language with art is very important and
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leads to experiences you simply cannot
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have in any other way.
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So getting rid of ego and overthinking, that’s when
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creativity comes and penetrates the unconscious and allows exploration of other realms.
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And it connects one’s transcendent being with one’s higher self
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and allows for much deeper realizations
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of what it is to truly be a human being.
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So the conscious artist basically frees themselves
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from kind of the political relevances of the day.
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And of course the mainstream view of an artist
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is typically that we’re kind of a funny bunch and we’re not really to be taken seriously but for people like you and i who
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probably are a bit further along on our journeys than most and you know we’re here at a place like
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burning man that’s all about radical self-expression we know that could not be further from the truth
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the truth resides in the innermost parts of the lives of people and the great journey of
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the individual is from ignorance to truth so what is leading edge art that’s conscious authentic
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esoteric and awake psychedelic art the psychedelic experience is extremely authentic and can be
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profound and integral to expanding consciousness and realizing
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who we really are so if if you take something and you leave your body what does that tell you
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it tells you that we’re not exclusively our bodies and empire doesn’t really want us to know that so
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if we can have these experiences we’re really meant to use these experiences.
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And you talk about our higher faculties.
00:16:53 ►
There have been times in the past, likely due to the processional cycle, which I’m not sure if anybody’s familiar with,
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but it basically states that we have a cycle in a day where we’re awake and asleep,
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and then a cycle in a month where we have our, you know, a cycle in a year, excuse me,
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where we have seasons where we have periods of growth and non-growth which is kind of awake and asleep and then we have a great year as well where over thousands of years we go in and out of periods of being awake and asleep
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so you look at the ancient Egyptians who likely had much higher faculties than we did
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faculties that allowed them to kind of transcend space and time and these are faculties that have
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been lost to us but will likely be regaining so to talk about artistic previews into what it’s
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like to have these higher capabilities um what makes something visually psychedelic it’s portraying
00:17:40 ►
multi-dimensionality or simultaneously occurring worlds, vivid saturated colors,
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endless readjusting of shapes and novel content,
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time tunnels, interconnectedness, non-locality,
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hyper-realism, un-Englishable visuals.
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So artists like maybe Degas or Cezanne or Renoir,
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the Impressionists kind of did dabble in this a bit,
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but Surrealist art is where it really kind of starts to come to the forefront.
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And I think of artists like Magritte and Dali,
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or maybe even somebody like Casper David Frederick,
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and more contemporary artists like Robert Vinoza, Pablo Amaringo,
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Alex Gray, Ernst Fuchs, even H.R. Giger,
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or maybe people like the comic book artist Mobius come to mind,
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or other artists that you might see here at Burning Man
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are featured in publications such as Juxtaposed
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or communities such as Reality Sandwich.
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They really explore this.
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And I’m not saying that they’re getting everything from plant allies, but they’re
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portraying an esoteric window which the exoteric masses can then peek through. So it’s kind of like
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the designers are on drugs while the consumers are not. But however photoreal their work is,
00:19:01 ►
it’s not moving, right? So computer graphics is nearly indispensable when one is confronted
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with the dynamic processes which cannot be illustrated by individual still images but
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purely through animated sequences so computer graphics are and will continue to be the tool
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used to visualize what is essentially un-languageable.
00:19:27 ►
So high-end computer graphics, or CG,
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sequences are very time-consuming and extremely expensive to create.
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And top-of-the-line photo-real work,
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like you see in the movies,
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generally costs many millions of dollars
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per chunk of screen time,
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has been done by large teams of incredibly talented people
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working sometimes multiple years.
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And a CG pipeline, just without getting overly technical,
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but just to say the basic steps so people are kind of familiar,
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you basically build an asset in the computer,
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whatever that may be, whether it’s a plant or a desk lamp
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or a battleship or a giant monster.
00:20:01 ►
And that essentially entails modeling it, texturing it, shading it, rigging it,
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animating it, lighting it, rendering it, and compositing it.
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And generally a single person does each one of those steps.
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So it’s a very complicated process.
00:20:17 ►
And rendering is essentially turning what’s in the software into the actual image
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to then be displayed on screen.
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And generally this is an extremely mind-numbingly slow process
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requiring extremely heavy technical resources.
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So to create a fully computer-animated film
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requires giant rooms of hundreds of racks
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of thousands of computers with rendering nodes
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requiring huge amounts of energy to run and cool.
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And that kind of makes me think of like this
00:20:45 ►
new NSA data center in Utah that they’re using to spy on us, I guess uses like a million gallons
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of water a day. So along with our advanced technologies, we’re paying for them with
00:20:55 ►
extreme strain on planetary resources. And as the years have gone on, the processing power is
00:21:02 ►
improving and the cost is lowering, but the bar is always being set higher
00:21:05 ►
and higher for what can be achieved.
00:21:08 ►
So as the imagery of high-end CG
00:21:09 ►
only improves with the rise of
00:21:12 ►
photorealism, we’re getting to the
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point where it’s incredibly hard to differentiate
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fiction from
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reality.
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And there
00:21:21 ►
are still things that
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are very difficult to do in computer graphics,
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like moving images are harder than stills, for example.
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Organic things, especially faces.
00:21:32 ►
Large, complex worlds.
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Uninterrupted camera moves.
00:21:35 ►
Heavy amounts of variety.
00:21:37 ►
Everything the psychedelic experience can be, visually.
00:21:40 ►
When you build an asset in the computer,
00:21:43 ►
it can basically be propagated to a bunch of shots
00:21:46 ►
and then reused but if you’re having an experience where you’re constantly moving through thousands
00:21:52 ►
of different locations where no two areas are really the same and everything is rapidly changing
00:21:57 ►
you and you’re seeing essentially more art than has ever been put to any canvas or to any screen. All that needs to be built in the computer. So my first psychedelic experience happened not that long ago under rather unusual
00:22:12 ►
circumstances. And it was rather profound and life-changing and something I did not expect to
00:22:16 ►
be at all. And I’ll share a bit of it here. I mean, short of making this like an Arrowood-style
00:22:21 ►
trip report, I’ll tie it in by comparing its visuals to the visuals I’ve seen in dailies.
00:22:27 ►
Dailies is basically where you go to review shots in progress.
00:22:30 ►
It’s some of the top-of-the-line visual effects facilities in the world
00:22:33 ►
that create some of the most top-of-the-line imagery possible.
00:22:36 ►
And that basically being absolutely nothing
00:22:38 ►
compared to what this experience showed me.
00:22:41 ►
So shamanism is as old as the hills and through a series of events with potentially
00:22:48 ►
synchronicity abound i befriended a few shamans that were living back and forth between peru and
00:22:54 ►
los angeles and they’re very legit and very professional and one of which is hamilton
00:22:58 ►
suther who’s previously spoken here at palenque norte and hamilton is doing several very interesting
00:23:04 ►
things one of which is exploring bringing the icaros that they sing during shamanic ceremonies at Palenque Norte. And Hamilton is doing several very interesting things,
00:23:05 ►
one of which is exploring bringing the Icaros
00:23:08 ►
that they sing during shamanic ceremonies
00:23:09 ►
into electronic dance music
00:23:12 ►
with the ultimate goal being confusion of the elements of EDM
00:23:17 ►
with the elements of a shamanic ceremony,
00:23:19 ►
which I’m sure is easier said than done.
00:23:22 ►
So I had been working to help create content for them
00:23:24 ►
to visualize some of their music videos and whatnot.
00:23:27 ►
And it got to the point where it was like,
00:23:29 ►
if I’m going to be generating some of this imagery,
00:23:31 ►
I should have some of these experiences directly.
00:23:34 ►
So we did kind of a pay and trade thing, right?
00:23:36 ►
Like you might have done 1,200 years ago in a village
00:23:39 ►
or indigenous tribes still do today.
00:23:41 ►
Like, you give me that spear and I’ll give you that yak.
00:23:44 ►
It’s like, I will create high-end CG for you if you give me ceremonies.
00:23:49 ►
So this was the maiden voyage of them attempting to shamanize medical-grade cannabis.
00:23:56 ►
And I didn’t even know that was possible.
00:23:59 ►
I’m not sure if they did either because this was the first time they had tried it.
00:24:03 ►
And I’m not sure if this has been done anywhere or if this is a complete
00:24:06 ►
old hat. But we
00:24:08 ►
were sitting around in a circle
00:24:09 ►
on furniture in a normal apartment living
00:24:12 ►
room high rise building in Los
00:24:14 ►
Angeles overlooking the UCLA
00:24:16 ►
campus. And this is a
00:24:18 ►
very rare experience because it’s essentially just me
00:24:20 ►
and one other person in a ceremony with three
00:24:22 ►
shamans, one of whom is a maestro.
00:24:24 ►
And I get there
00:24:26 ►
and I’m asked Hamilton, I’m like, well, what are we doing? And he’s like, oh, we’re going to try
00:24:28 ►
the green goddess. So he holds up just basically your standard cannabis pipe with cannabis in it.
00:24:34 ►
And we smoke it and they start doing their thing. You know, we’re preparing for ceremony,
00:24:38 ►
darkening the lights. It was evening time and start shaking their chacruna leaves and start
00:24:43 ►
singing their Icaros. And I don’t feel
00:24:45 ►
anything from the cannabis. It’s literally like the third time I’ve ever smoked it. I’m a Virgo,
00:24:49 ►
so I feel nothing. I’m like C3PO, caffeine, nothing, sugar, nothing. So I close my eyes
00:24:56 ►
and I start to see the usual thing you see with your eyes closed, which is of course darkness
00:25:00 ►
and perhaps a bit of latent image but behind closed eyelids i slowly start seeing
00:25:07 ►
dim dark black and white patterns creeping in around the perimeter of my field of vision
00:25:13 ►
and they’re kind of kaleidoscopic they’re moving to the song as he’s singing at the pacing and
00:25:18 ►
timing that he’s going and they’re not really like a flat 2d screen but more like a dome in
00:25:24 ►
maybe a planetarium.
00:25:25 ►
And as the first song finishes, they slowly fade out.
00:25:28 ►
And I already think this is miraculous, because I had previously worked on some personal projects with sound reactive visuals,
00:25:34 ►
where you essentially plug an audio track into a particle system that then moves to the audio.
00:25:40 ►
It’s kind of like the glossolalia.
00:25:42 ►
So this is already tying in with my body of work.
00:25:46 ►
And he starts singing the next song and they slowly fade back on again and the screen comes back.
00:25:51 ►
But this time I start seeing depth to them, right? There’s depth in the patterns. And there’s 3D
00:25:57 ►
software and then there’s 3D stereo technology, which involves rendering two images or shooting
00:26:02 ►
things with two cameras so that when you go to the movies
00:26:06 ►
and you put your 3D glasses on,
00:26:07 ►
the image then has depth to it
00:26:09 ►
when it’s a 3D image that’s being rendered
00:26:11 ►
that’s then being presented in 3D.
00:26:13 ►
So it kind of reminded me of that.
00:26:15 ►
It also kind of reminded me of those,
00:26:16 ►
remember those audio stereogram patterns
00:26:19 ►
where you stare into them,
00:26:20 ►
and the longer you stare in them,
00:26:21 ►
the more you might see something in depth?
00:26:24 ►
So basically now there’s this kind of XYZ component.
00:26:28 ►
In the Cartesian coordinate, the 3D space of the 3D scene,
00:26:32 ►
it’s called Cartesian coordinates.
00:26:33 ►
There’s an X and a Y, but now there’s a Z component to these patterns.
00:26:38 ►
And at this point it starts dawning on me
00:26:40 ►
that these things look a heck of a lot like Alex Gray’s artwork,
00:26:44 ►
like the iconic room of hallways of Alex Gray with those heads. So they’re not brightly saturated colored.
00:26:51 ►
They’re not vibrant. They’re kind of dim and dark, and maybe that’s just my novice experience
00:26:55 ►
level. So to use a digital artist metaphor, it’s like somebody in Photoshop turned the
00:26:59 ►
saturation way down and the blurriness way up. And at this point, I know I’m really in
00:27:04 ►
good hands. I’m welcoming it with open arms. I’m getting very excited because I’m seeing something.
00:27:09 ►
And you know when you’re getting those kind of rapid eye darts under closed eyelids that you’re
00:27:14 ►
getting somewhere. And the singing is amazing. It sounds tribal and ancient. It’s probably
00:27:18 ►
thousands of years old and passed on from shamanic generation to generation.
00:27:23 ►
So the next thing I know, I’m moving forward in depth,
00:27:28 ►
and I’m starting to move through the columns,
00:27:30 ►
and the pace is moving faster
00:27:32 ►
because now his songs are going faster.
00:27:34 ►
And I don’t know if we’re in another dimension
00:27:36 ►
or another world,
00:27:37 ►
but through the shaman’s guidance,
00:27:38 ►
we’re flying through what feels essentially
00:27:41 ►
like an endless archive of moving spirits.
00:27:44 ►
And the amount of them and the size of the world is absolutely indescribable.
00:27:48 ►
So if this was actual 3D geometry in a computer-generated scene,
00:27:52 ►
it wouldn’t even be possible in traditional ways that it’s done now in the movies.
00:27:56 ►
So it’s like the feeling like your body is gone and all that’s…
00:27:59 ►
It’s dissolved away and all that’s left is like your pineal gland with a fisheye lens on it.
00:28:04 ►
It’s like running a mental marathon.
00:28:06 ►
And through the complex 3D patterns, windows start tearing open in kind of sacred geometric patterns.
00:28:13 ►
And through the windows, I see jungle canopy I’m flying over.
00:28:16 ►
I see ancient Mayan-like temples.
00:28:18 ►
I see a series of hexagon-shaped waterfalls, which look kind of like Iguazu Falls in Brazil,
00:28:25 ►
which is one of the world’s most beautiful waterfalls.
00:28:28 ►
But it’s like the M.C. Escher abstract version of that,
00:28:32 ►
where there’s kind of like one fall going up in every direction, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:36 ►
And after that, it’s basically going on to things that are very cosmic,
00:28:39 ►
you know, the typical psychedelic thing where you’re suddenly changing locations
00:28:42 ►
and we’re flying over the rings of Saturn.
00:28:44 ►
And the thing about that cosmic element is I’m starting to see
00:28:48 ►
things that are, they look like basically space art. So I’m starting to see work that I’ve already
00:28:56 ►
created in my portfolio, and I’m getting inspiration for things that I will create
00:29:01 ►
in future projects. You know, It went on to things that basically,
00:29:05 ►
I’ll wrap it up there,
00:29:07 ►
but it essentially went on to things
00:29:08 ►
that are indescribable, of course,
00:29:09 ►
that look like they’re out of the Voynich manuscript
00:29:12 ►
or the Codex Seraphinianus,
00:29:14 ►
those books that seem like they’re channeled
00:29:16 ►
from alien dimensions and are completely fascinating.
00:29:20 ►
So the type of visual effects artist
00:29:21 ►
which assembles the final shot in layers is called a compositor.
00:29:26 ►
So it’s like compositors speak from back to front.
00:29:29 ►
So in this experience, it’s like you have layers where you have these celestial space elements,
00:29:34 ►
and then you layer that in the foreground with many layers of these kind of curtains of kaleidoscopic patterns.
00:29:40 ►
And then in front of that, you have these tearaway windows of specific content.
00:29:44 ►
And then in front of that, you have these tearaway windows of specific content. And then in front of that, you have these layers of Alex Gray hallways.
00:29:47 ►
So with my background, all I can think about at this point is, oh, my gosh, this would be so impossible to replicate in computer graphics.
00:29:53 ►
There’s no way I could do this without some sort of massive team.
00:29:57 ►
And even with a massive team, I don’t even know if this is possible with our current technology.
00:30:01 ►
So it’s like having a fully immersive 3D screensaver that’s really a wormhole.
00:30:06 ►
And the whole time I’m having
00:30:08 ►
this experience, I’m thinking it blows
00:30:09 ►
mass multiplayer gaming
00:30:11 ►
out of the water. Because rendering
00:30:13 ►
technology and game engine technology
00:30:16 ►
is just getting to the point where
00:30:18 ►
it can perhaps start to push this amount
00:30:20 ►
of data. And game engine technology,
00:30:22 ►
for those that aren’t familiar, is basically like
00:30:23 ►
you take all the kitchen sink of everything that’s being developed in the computer and you put it into the game engine technology, for those that aren’t familiar, is basically like you take all the kitchen sink of everything
00:30:25 ►
that’s being developed in the computer, and you
00:30:27 ►
put it into the game engine so that it can then
00:30:29 ►
render in real time, because when you play
00:30:31 ►
the game, the game has to move in real
00:30:33 ►
time. And there’s now
00:30:35 ►
stereo 3D motion tracking headsets,
00:30:38 ►
which are becoming more and more
00:30:40 ►
popularized these days. And they allow
00:30:41 ►
for much more immersive experiences
00:30:44 ►
into virtual worlds through game days. And they allow for much more immersive experiences into virtual worlds
00:30:45 ►
through game engines. And I tried one on last week for the first time. And it was the most
00:30:51 ►
profound video game experience I’ve ever had. And I’ve been playing video games for 30 years.
00:30:56 ►
But it was absolutely nothing compared to what the organic virtual worlds can show us
00:31:01 ►
that are orders of magnitude more realistic. So as the future goes on, that is where we are headed.
00:31:07 ►
We’re headed into increasing realism in virtual spaces with less restricting the viewer to just passive consumer and more stimulation of creativity,
00:31:17 ►
which essentially just allows us to get back to where the plants have always been able to take us, right? So it’s really fascinating that indigenous people
00:31:25 ►
have essentially been uploading themselves
00:31:27 ►
to much more advanced organic realms
00:31:30 ►
for potentially thousands of years, if not more,
00:31:33 ►
seeing imagery that’s much more complex
00:31:35 ►
than what you can see in a Hollywood summer blockbuster today.
00:31:38 ►
So I’m sitting here thinking this is the most advanced visuals
00:31:41 ►
I’ve ever seen with my background coming from a plant
00:31:45 ►
and a really mild mannered plant at that right so with technology today it’s not uncommon for
00:31:54 ►
let’s say a game engine to slow down or get laggy if the hardware isn’t top-notch none of that here
00:32:00 ►
this is perfect frame rate regardless of volume of data. When frames can render in real time with max height and photorealism,
00:32:08 ►
it just shows how extraordinary of supercomputers our brains really are
00:32:13 ►
and how powerful our minds are.
00:32:17 ►
And with Moore’s law of computing power doubling like twice every 26 months,
00:32:21 ►
it’s still nothing compared to the untapped parts of the human mind and imagination,
00:32:26 ►
not to mention the areas of our brains
00:32:28 ►
we don’t even fully understand or know about.
00:32:31 ►
So with each new kind of staggering and leveling up
00:32:34 ►
that arose during this experience,
00:32:35 ►
which I saw completely off medical-grade cannabis,
00:32:39 ►
I have an unbelievable newfound respect for the plant.
00:32:42 ►
And, of course, you know, this,
00:32:46 ►
me kind of briefly retelling this experience
00:32:48 ►
does not do anything to do it justice.
00:32:51 ►
And perhaps I had such a rare visual experience off of this
00:32:53 ►
because I’m such a visual person,
00:32:55 ►
and also perhaps because I had three shamans
00:32:58 ►
almost exclusively dedicated to me.
00:33:00 ►
But Hamilton is now doing this process
00:33:04 ►
over live stream ceremonies through the Blue Morpho
00:33:08 ►
Foundation online, so anybody can have access to this. And with the recent legality changes,
00:33:14 ►
little do the politicians know what a wonderful mind-expanding tool cannabis can be.
00:33:19 ►
Nothing about this experience didn’t feel untimeless or inauthentic or uncomfortable,
00:33:24 ►
and again, it’s a rather mild-mannered experience
00:33:27 ►
compared to what other plants are capable of showing us.
00:33:30 ►
So it’s not so much our technology,
00:33:33 ►
but more the society hasn’t been there to duplicate these experiences
00:33:36 ►
because in order to do so would inherently require maximum resources
00:33:42 ►
and high budgets, yet the current financial paradigm entails that needing
00:33:48 ►
to appeal to the largest possible audience yet it’s kind of an esoteric thing in this current
00:33:52 ►
culture so it’s kind of the perfect storm of what’s hardest to create combined with the largest
00:33:56 ►
cultural limitations even though it’s the most profound experience most people don’t even know
00:34:02 ►
is possible or if they do know it’s possible they’re kind of
00:34:05 ►
oftentimes opinions are quite misguided and based on misinformation which stems from them thinking
00:34:12 ►
they know about it even though again they haven’t had the direct experience of it so back to neoteny
00:34:16 ►
that is one of the main reasons why we haven’t seen more of these experiences replicated but we
00:34:22 ►
will as time goes on. And Empire doesn’t really
00:34:25 ►
want Hollywood creating any content that give people funny ideas, right? So when you talk about
00:34:30 ►
the reality tunnels that Hollywood creates for people, I mean, studio execs aren’t necessarily
00:34:34 ►
jumping to make these experiences. And, you know, even though when told essentially in allegory,
00:34:41 ►
they can be extremely commercially successful. I mean, just look at Avatar’s box office.
00:34:46 ►
The masses want these
00:34:48 ►
themes because I think subconsciously
00:34:50 ►
we all know how authentic they
00:34:52 ►
really are, but there
00:34:54 ►
have been attempts in cinema to replicate
00:34:56 ►
psychedelic experiences, of course.
00:34:57 ►
They’ve been a bit few and far between.
00:34:59 ►
I think of Enter the Void, the Gaspar Noe
00:35:02 ►
film had some sequences in it, which I believe were
00:35:04 ►
trying to replicate DMT sequences. And then Ren Void, the Gaspar Noe film, had some sequences in it, which I believe were trying to replicate DMT sequences.
00:35:06 ►
And then Renegade, the Jan Cohen film,
00:35:08 ►
had an ayahuasca sequence in it,
00:35:09 ►
which was quite well done, actually.
00:35:12 ►
The Jan Cohen, that Renegade sequence,
00:35:14 ►
I think was the highest budget sequence.
00:35:16 ►
It took two years to do and cost a few million dollars to create.
00:35:19 ►
In terms of other attempts of this kind of mixture
00:35:21 ►
of specific asset content,
00:35:24 ►
and again, a specific asset being
00:35:26 ►
something you build in the computer
00:35:27 ►
along with procedural software,
00:35:30 ►
which is essentially a rapid creation
00:35:31 ►
of visualization of structures in computer
00:35:33 ►
graphics. So an example of that would
00:35:36 ►
be like fractals, right? Like a lot of
00:35:37 ►
stuff you might see online is fractal
00:35:40 ►
software, which is basically
00:35:41 ►
kind of open mathematics,
00:35:44 ►
real-time systems like DJ, VJ, concert visuals, all of basically kind of open mathematics, real-time systems like DJ, VJ,
00:35:47 ►
concert visuals, all of which kind of look quite flat and stale compared to what I’ve seen in my
00:35:52 ►
own experiences, again, comparing them just purely on the visual component. So as the future goes on,
00:35:57 ►
having more real-time image capture applications to tap into the visual center of the brain and essentially record that
00:36:06 ►
data which were we are in the early phases of now that would likely be the west best way to capture
00:36:12 ►
any sort of visual component of the experience authentically because it essentially would be a
00:36:16 ►
real trip right so there’s no doubt that the psychedelic evolution of the 1960s has had a
00:36:23 ►
profound influence on the history of computers and computer graphics.
00:36:27 ►
But CG pioneers,
00:36:28 ►
or Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisors,
00:36:31 ►
which is kind of the highest level
00:36:33 ►
of the hierarchy of computer graphics
00:36:34 ►
in terms of role,
00:36:37 ►
in recent decades haven’t been outspoken
00:36:39 ►
about much usage.
00:36:40 ►
So nothing to the extent of Steve Jobs,
00:36:43 ►
Apple brought to you by LSD.
00:36:45 ►
So it’s kind of a renegade team thing.
00:36:47 ►
And even if you’re duplicating these experiences only in extreme moderation, you’re not somehow trying to duplicate a six-hour long trip.
00:36:56 ►
It’s still almost logistically unbudgetable to do or at least requires a complete rethink of kind of how a facility’s pipeline would work, or at very most, kind of essentially a writing and redesigning of specialized software purely from the bottom up.
00:37:12 ►
It’s not like you can do this type of thing with off-the-shelf tools.
00:37:15 ►
Or if you can do it off-the-shelf tools, it’s just in very tiny little doses.
00:37:20 ►
So let alone the challenge of a director, let’s say a Hollywood director,
00:37:24 ►
having to communicate to a team of artists that would then be assigned to replicate this experience, what is essentially, again, unlanguageable.
00:37:32 ►
So nature is really perfect, man.
00:37:34 ►
A surfer farm, again, of thousands of computers can’t replicate the human brain.
00:37:40 ►
And we are inherently designed to be connected and have these virtual reality experiences.
00:37:46 ►
And it’s why we’re so drawn to technology, you know, our cell phones, our computers, our tablets.
00:37:52 ►
So psychedelic experiences, whether real or future replicated, if done responsibly, aren’t negative escapism but could be a true awakening process for more people.
00:38:02 ►
Because we are not human beings that can have spiritual experiences.
00:38:07 ►
We are spiritual beings having human experiences.
00:38:10 ►
So as the old system, the current system,
00:38:14 ►
which basically just lets us kind of continue to fulfill our ignorances,
00:38:20 ►
as it kind of continues its ever so slow meltdown,
00:38:24 ►
and we’re transitioning out of it,
00:38:26 ►
let’s work to create better systems.
00:38:28 ►
The gatekeepers are basically going away.
00:38:31 ►
So if the job doesn’t exist that you want to do,
00:38:34 ►
create your own new type of job.
00:38:36 ►
And of course that’s easier said than done
00:38:38 ►
and not everybody can do it
00:38:39 ►
and there’s growing pains associated with it.
00:38:41 ►
But all ends have silver linings
00:38:44 ►
and ambitions are competitive. Aspirations are not. There’s growing pains associated with it. But all ends have silver linings.
00:38:46 ►
And ambitions are competitive.
00:38:48 ►
Aspirations are not.
00:38:53 ►
Aspirations take nothing from anyone else and injure no one else and allow you as a sovereign individual to grow
00:38:56 ►
because that’s why we’re all here.
00:38:59 ►
I’ve come to love books and podcasts as learning tools,
00:39:03 ►
and the Psychedelicic salon has been a wonderful
00:39:06 ►
mind expander for me and after gaining more interest in the podcast medium you know i started
00:39:10 ►
my own little podcast it’s called novelty generators and it’s basically a series of
00:39:15 ►
little chats i do with friends or conscious and creative people who i really admire and it’s kind
00:39:20 ►
of a tertiary thing on the i do on the side i don’t really do anything to promote it there’s
00:39:24 ►
no schedule to it but there’s a secret to it which i’ll basically say here which is that it’s kind of a tertiary thing I do on the side. I don’t really do anything to promote it. There’s no schedule to it.
00:39:26 ►
But there’s a secret to it, which I’ll basically say here,
00:39:29 ►
which is that it’s basically for my own growth.
00:39:31 ►
That’s the only real reason I did it.
00:39:34 ►
And if you want to talk to people you admire
00:39:36 ►
and you can really sponge off of and learn from,
00:39:40 ►
start a podcast.
00:39:42 ►
It’s so easy.
00:39:43 ►
And you’d be amazed who would be willing to give you an hour or two of their time for a chat
00:39:47 ►
if they get a little bit of promotion out of it.
00:39:49 ►
One of the only reasons I can be up here today saying these things
00:39:53 ►
is because of direct conversations I’ve had with people
00:39:56 ►
that I’ve gotten a lot of direct learning experience from.
00:39:59 ►
So as one becomes more awake and lucid and your vocabulary improves,
00:40:04 ►
you find new words and artistic techniques to describe things.
00:40:09 ►
Because the real knowledge isn’t in books.
00:40:12 ►
It’s in rooms with people passing on lineage.
00:40:15 ►
And I’m not Captain Expert Psychonaut,
00:40:17 ►
but I have had numerous breakthroughs, some with but mostly without plants,
00:40:22 ►
one of which is a master shaman on the podcast
00:40:25 ►
telling me the future is all about consciousness,
00:40:27 ►
which our species certainly has a way to go
00:40:31 ►
before reaching any sort of full spectrum of that, by all means.
00:40:36 ►
But it’s certainly been a life-changing realization
00:40:39 ►
and has given me the inspiration to create a series of experimental art films
00:40:43 ►
of people talking about the subject, for example.
00:40:45 ►
And then he can go off and take his newfound discovery of creating a paradigm of livestream shamanic cannabis ceremonies to the world.
00:40:54 ►
So nobody was going to give him that job.
00:40:56 ►
He had to create that job for himself.
00:40:58 ►
And nobody’s giving you the opportunities to be part of a production company.
00:41:01 ►
Start your own production company.
00:41:03 ►
I did that, and being a couple short films in now,
00:41:06 ►
both science fiction,
00:41:07 ►
I’m starting to write future films,
00:41:09 ►
which are sci-fi with a PSY instead of an SCI.
00:41:13 ►
And if you want to have a genre
00:41:14 ►
that’s absolutely intertwined
00:41:16 ►
with imaginative content design,
00:41:19 ►
science fiction is completely that.
00:41:22 ►
I mean, just take inspiration
00:41:23 ►
from science fiction authors, PSY,
00:41:26 ►
writers like William Gibson, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick,
00:41:30 ►
which Hollywood has absolutely been mining for decades.
00:41:33 ►
So rather than spending all my time getting paid well
00:41:38 ►
to slot into another kind of dial-turning technician cubicle job
00:41:41 ►
for a large corporation to work on a not-so-very-good film,
00:41:45 ►
I can put my skill set into a much more substantive low-budget film, which is a documentary with a
00:41:51 ►
modern mystic and philosopher named Neil Kramer, which is the current project. And that allows for
00:41:57 ►
much less money, of course, but allows then for much more creativity because life is very short.
00:42:02 ►
And Neil is another person, for example, that
00:42:05 ►
does consultations online as a consulting philosopher, helping people with all sorts
00:42:10 ►
of various life issues. And again, back to that, nobody was going to give him that job.
00:42:15 ►
He had to create that job for himself. So break through those cultural limitations.
00:42:21 ►
And it’s funny, I’ve befriended the shaman, I’ve befriended the shaman I’ve befriended the mystic maybe an
00:42:25 ►
alchemist is next on my journey I don’t know but I’ll stop talking about myself ego ego blocks
00:42:29 ►
wisdom the only reason I do that though is to mention how these specific experiences have
00:42:36 ►
affected my work and myself better directly we have the opportunity to leave this life
00:42:42 ►
in a better condition in which we entered it.
00:42:45 ►
And returning to our plant technologies in addition to our hardware technologies is certainly a really great way to do that.
00:42:52 ►
Because there’s a better way of life than which we currently live.
00:42:57 ►
And some aspects of Burning Man truly represent that.
00:43:12 ►
And that way of life bring opportunities and consolations and have infinitely more rewards than the lesser way of life, which can’t experience the same thing.
00:43:17 ►
Because life is an opportunity to grow and build a new foundation of character.
00:43:20 ►
Because that’s all that we can really take with us when we leave. So down with superstition, ignorance, and fear.
00:43:24 ►
And up with growth, love,
00:43:27 ►
consciousness, and art.
00:43:29 ►
Thank you very much.
00:43:38 ►
Yeah.
00:43:39 ►
Hey, man.
00:43:40 ►
Question?
00:43:40 ►
Do you want the artist
00:43:41 ►
to run the empire?
00:43:43 ►
How do you want running the empire?
00:43:44 ►
I know you don’t want an empire,
00:43:45 ►
but… No, no, no.
00:43:46 ►
Well, I think artists just do such a good job of…
00:43:49 ►
If your work is…
00:43:50 ►
Look at some of the work around us here
00:43:52 ►
or some of the work that’s at Burning Man, for example.
00:43:54 ►
I just saw a piece out on the playa today
00:43:56 ►
that is such a good representation
00:43:58 ►
of just kind of how we can improve our current systems.
00:44:03 ►
And it’s done not through…
00:44:04 ►
There are some words on it,
00:44:05 ►
but it’s just done through visuals.
00:44:07 ►
And again, regardless of however those visuals are being portrayed,
00:44:10 ►
if they’re being done with a paintbrush or on a computer
00:44:12 ►
with millions of dollars being spent,
00:44:15 ►
it can be such an effective tool for helping other people
00:44:20 ►
see how much better life can be in other ways.
00:44:24 ►
So that’s why psychedelic art, for example, is such a great tool for communicating to other people see how much better life can be in other ways. So that’s why psychedelic art, for example,
00:44:27 ►
is such a great tool for communicating to other people
00:44:29 ►
what certain people have seen in their experiences.
00:44:36 ►
We’ve got a mic coming here.
00:44:39 ►
Yeah.
00:44:40 ►
I just wanted to tell you a brief fix.
00:44:42 ►
I’ve been doing computer graphics since the Amiga.
00:44:45 ►
Oh, fabulous.
00:44:46 ►
And I have a movie showing here tomorrow night, Thursday night at midnight,
00:44:49 ►
of Terrence McKenna, the Imaginatrix.
00:44:52 ►
So please come back.
00:44:54 ►
But when the very first times I did a high dose of psychedelics with my computer,
00:44:59 ►
I felt that the silicon crystals communicated with me and said,
00:45:05 ►
we’re part of the earth, we’re like plants, we’re like other elements,
00:45:09 ►
and we see that the species is in a crisis,
00:45:12 ►
and we’re trying to get all the humans on the same page
00:45:14 ►
so that they can deal with this crisis appropriately.
00:45:17 ►
And they told me if I treated them like an ally, a shamanic ally,
00:45:22 ►
they would always give me surprises to show me to make things that
00:45:25 ►
I didn’t know how to make. I always, I start randomly and work from there. So I just wanted
00:45:31 ►
to add that into this because I thought a lot about the connection between psychedelics
00:45:35 ►
and graphics and all those aspects.
00:45:37 ►
Yeah, and virtual worlds. I mean, most people today that are so drawn to virtual worlds,
00:45:41 ►
but they don’t know what the best virtual worlds are.
00:45:45 ►
Hi, I’d like to show you a video sometime
00:45:48 ►
when you’re not busy that I’ve been working on.
00:45:50 ►
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:45:51 ►
Yeah, I’d love to see it, mate.
00:45:52 ►
Yeah, I mean, if anybody’s…
00:45:53 ►
I’m sure at Burning Man here, you know,
00:45:55 ►
there’s a lot of people that are interested in this
00:45:57 ►
and perhaps working on visualizing these things,
00:46:00 ►
and I’d love to see anybody’s stuff
00:46:03 ►
because there’s so much creativity in it and anytime I
00:46:06 ►
see a new kind of psychedelic artist
00:46:08 ►
in whatever form
00:46:10 ►
it’s just so inspiring so I’d love to
00:46:12 ►
absolutely
00:46:12 ►
it’s funny I just
00:46:16 ►
I mentioned last
00:46:18 ►
week I just tried on you know a virtual
00:46:20 ►
reality headset but
00:46:22 ►
it was interesting because
00:46:23 ►
I’m at a facility
00:46:25 ►
in San Francisco and they’re doing
00:46:28 ►
development for Oculus.
00:46:30 ►
And I put the thing on
00:46:31 ►
for the first time and I’m at a desk
00:46:34 ►
in this basically office building.
00:46:36 ►
And I put the thing on and there’s not
00:46:38 ►
a huge game world in it. There’s just a
00:46:40 ►
computer graphic desk in the
00:46:41 ►
Oculus. So it’s like you’re sitting in front
00:46:44 ►
of a desk and then suddenly see the digital version of the same desk and that was a very surreal experience but i yeah
00:46:50 ►
it’s like the your original question was basically like just some of the complications or some of the
00:46:55 ►
things that are more difficult yeah i think it’s just the technology it’s really just the amount
00:47:01 ►
of processing power and how the the systems are getting very sophisticated now.
00:47:08 ►
And if you look at some of the new virtual worlds in terms of however they’re being portrayed, mostly I mentioned gaming in this talk because they’re mostly being used for games because games kind of require, I don’t want to say the most computationally intensive stuff, but that’s where a lot of money is to be made.
00:47:24 ►
So I’m seeing some stuff in the latest game engine technology that’s where the most kind of, a lot of money is to be made. So I’m seeing some stuff in
00:47:25 ►
latest game engine technology that’s looking
00:47:28 ►
pretty impressive. But again, I think
00:47:30 ►
it’s like difference of quantity versus
00:47:31 ►
the quality. Like we can get to the quality
00:47:34 ►
now where you see
00:47:35 ►
imagery that’s
00:47:38 ►
comparable to what you can see in probably
00:47:40 ►
some of the most profound mystical experiences
00:47:42 ►
you can have, but you can’t do it
00:47:44 ►
for however long a mushroom trip lasts, right? So that’s kind of the most profound mystical experiences you can have, but you can’t do it for however long a mushroom
00:47:46 ►
trip lasts.
00:47:47 ►
That’s the separator.
00:47:50 ►
I think if you’re really talented
00:47:52 ►
and you’re really committed,
00:47:53 ►
anybody that knows the tools can probably
00:47:56 ►
sit down and spend an extremely
00:47:58 ►
long amount of time and make a three-second
00:48:00 ►
visualization of a perfect
00:48:02 ►
psychedelic experience, but that might take
00:48:04 ►
you six months.
00:48:14 ►
It’s just a time yeah it’s a time resource issue um hi i work uh i work in uh cartoons for children a lot of times i’m asked to incorporate not necessarily so bluntly uh
00:48:21 ►
psychedelic imagery in the work that i do that is still for a very large corporation
00:48:25 ►
and still so that
00:48:28 ►
I can get a paycheck every day.
00:48:30 ►
If that work is done
00:48:31 ►
tastefully, is there still value
00:48:33 ►
in showing that to people even if
00:48:35 ►
they don’t know the inspiration for it?
00:48:38 ►
Yes, of course. Is that okay?
00:48:40 ►
Yes, absolutely. And what’s really
00:48:41 ►
wonderful in today’s society is
00:48:43 ►
with a high budget or a large kind of a top-down system,
00:48:47 ►
when we get really great stuff from a top-down medium that’s not just, you know, junk food.
00:48:53 ►
So that is certainly a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
00:48:56 ►
When you can work at a place that’s a place trying to do good work and is actually implementing good work
00:49:01 ►
and is then kind of a next-gen 2.0, maybe philosophy on the future
00:49:05 ►
and isn’t doing the usual mistakes
00:49:07 ►
that past kind of systems have done.
00:49:10 ►
That’s a great thing, so I hear you, man.
00:49:12 ►
I’ve had rare experiences in my career
00:49:14 ►
where out of all the projects I’ve worked on,
00:49:16 ►
a few of them were just that,
00:49:18 ►
and it was very rewarding,
00:49:20 ►
and it was like for a major movie studio.
00:49:24 ►
Hi.
00:49:24 ►
Get the mic.
00:49:25 ►
Yeah. I’m interested in the struggle to replicate a trip perfectly, say,
00:49:31 ►
whether or not that is a valid experience.
00:49:33 ►
Have you ever seen it getting to the point where it is as ego-changing
00:49:38 ►
as a person’s direct experience?
00:49:40 ►
Because then the kind of spiritual element comes into question.
00:49:44 ►
Exactly.
00:49:48 ►
And any of these experiences with any plant is so much more than just the visual component,
00:49:50 ►
and I totally recognize that.
00:49:52 ►
So this is, I think ultimately it’s really just kind of a little bit like,
00:49:56 ►
oh, here, look at this, and then this is kind of a stepping stone to something else.
00:50:00 ►
Inspiring the direct experience.
00:50:01 ►
Yeah, and I don’t ever mean to imply that this is going to somehow replace it
00:50:07 ►
or be some sort of technological equivalent to it.
00:50:11 ►
I think it can, at very best,
00:50:13 ►
get people back to where we’ve come from.
00:50:16 ►
We have a question here.
00:50:19 ►
Actually, I have one question.
00:50:20 ►
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
00:50:22 ►
You’re sitting, my art is sitting around you.
00:50:25 ►
Oh, this is you.
00:50:26 ►
Yeah.
00:50:27 ►
Oh, okay, yeah.
00:50:28 ►
And I was wondering if you’ve, I don’t know if you’ve covered this,
00:50:33 ►
but talking about using animated art as an enhancement to a trip.
00:50:40 ►
So, like, have you ever seen the show Off the Air, an adult swim?
00:50:43 ►
I have not, but I, yeah.
00:50:44 ►
It totally works.
00:50:46 ►
Like, if you’re tripping and you watch that, it’s total perfect eye candy, and it just clicks.
00:50:52 ►
So I’m not sure how you feel about that.
00:50:54 ►
That’s interesting.
00:50:55 ►
That’s really interesting.
00:50:56 ►
Yeah, it’s using some sort of digital visualization to extend preexisting organic experiences.
00:51:03 ►
I could see a huge future for that.
00:51:05 ►
I mean, maybe that’s a new paradigm
00:51:07 ►
that a group of artists or that a new,
00:51:12 ►
I don’t want to necessarily say company,
00:51:14 ►
but a new way of doing business in the future
00:51:17 ►
is that you could tackle that using our current technologies.
00:51:21 ►
Now, how about, why not use your art
00:51:23 ►
to show children who naturally have the ability and
00:51:27 ►
who can learn to tap into that and recognize it because someone’s just recognizing saying i see
00:51:32 ►
that all the time then they don’t have to worry about taking plants or drugs or anything and
00:51:36 ►
identifying those people as maybe natural artists or something have you thought about using it that
00:51:40 ►
way well that i think that’s part of psychedelic art is kind of bringing back
00:51:46 ►
that synesthesia because some people naturally have synesthesia and they hear sounds and they
00:51:52 ►
see colors and imagery but for me i don’t i don’t have that gift but with psychedelics you
00:51:59 ►
you get it right so you listen to music and you see great things. Well, and think of what a powerful resource that could be, again, back if that’s a future
00:52:08 ►
system where you can have an ability to create visuals that then extend or heighten people’s
00:52:13 ►
trips. That could be a really valuable kind of commodity for the future to be able to
00:52:20 ►
have that resource, or at least maybe in a nice system be able to give away that resource.
00:52:31 ►
Yeah, okay. Last question? able to have that resource or at least maybe in a nice system be able to give a ray that resource yeah okay last question so uh what is your creative process and when does it start like of you know concept or like during the visualization or like what do you do right after the visualization
00:52:38 ►
and how do you start building on on top of that concept or the idea or the image that you have like of putting it, bringing it
00:52:46 ►
down onto a graphic or
00:52:48 ►
remembering it or you know
00:52:49 ►
pointers for yourself to
00:52:51 ►
keep it going or you know to bring it back together
00:52:54 ►
yeah I kind of in the few
00:52:56 ►
experiences I did mention an experience or two
00:52:58 ►
where it’s like I got a visualization off
00:53:00 ►
of something from something that Hamilton
00:53:02 ►
for example helped me with and then
00:53:04 ►
that was something that right after it happened,
00:53:07 ►
I did the standard thing where it’s just like I wrote it down
00:53:09 ►
and then I drew some imagery from it.
00:53:11 ►
I sketched it in a sketchbook.
00:53:13 ►
And then it’s basically, I mean, that was it.
00:53:15 ►
It’s like for future systems,
00:53:17 ►
I always find that it’s just this methodical note-taking.
00:53:20 ►
But I know a lot of people do other things
00:53:21 ►
where they like to record voice after an experience but it is
00:53:26 ►
the type of thing isn’t it where you kind of lose it
00:53:28 ►
if you don’t jot it down and
00:53:30 ►
for me I definitely seem to get
00:53:32 ►
if for example with one
00:53:34 ►
of those experiences I didn’t get the idea
00:53:36 ►
until right after the experience I got it
00:53:38 ►
like the next morning so then I did the same thing
00:53:40 ►
then but it comes at odd times
00:53:42 ►
doesn’t it kind of these moments of inspiration
00:53:44 ►
can come at very like you’re in the shower,
00:53:47 ►
you’re driving to work, or you’re just waking up in the morning.
00:53:49 ►
And I know morning is a really good time when you’re kind of the least,
00:53:53 ►
you’re kind of the most clear.
00:53:54 ►
So I oftentimes get a lot of the ideas in the morning.
00:53:56 ►
And then those have certainly come the evening after some sort of experience.
00:54:02 ►
Yeah, the question was, have I ever gone in with a certain concept and gone deeper with it? Not really, not at this point, but yeah, that’s definitely a good
00:54:08 ►
future exploration with the kind of body of work that I’m doing. I’m kind of transitioning
00:54:13 ►
out of one field and starting another field, and you know, there’s much more limited resources
00:54:17 ►
in what I’m doing now, so I’m kind of early in that journey, but I definitely will for
00:54:22 ►
the future. So, yeah. Yes, yes.
00:54:27 ►
I wanted to suggest that your lecture would
00:54:30 ►
make a great illustrated YouTube on video,
00:54:35 ►
or something of that sort.
00:54:37 ►
And also to comment that I think the history of cinema
00:54:40 ►
itself, with Walt Disney and all kinds of,
00:54:44 ►
there’s a whole history of
00:54:45 ►
things that fall into the realm of psychedelia that I think have conditioned the collective
00:54:51 ►
consciousness of our culture and that our experience of psychedelic agents as Westerners
00:54:59 ►
may very well be colored by materials that have come out of cinematic animation and also cinematic
00:55:06 ►
decor.
00:55:08 ►
Yeah, and a lot of what’s come out of Hollywood
00:55:10 ►
and cinema is very kind of unconscious
00:55:12 ►
unfortunately. It’s just kind of the
00:55:14 ►
same with the game industry.
00:55:16 ►
So as the future goes on,
00:55:18 ►
I would love to see more of Hollywood
00:55:20 ►
becoming more conscious in its content
00:55:22 ►
and things have not so
00:55:24 ►
the same thing over
00:55:25 ►
and over again. It’s just kind of a rehash
00:55:28 ►
of that. But in the past,
00:55:29 ►
it’s nice when we’ve seen certain times
00:55:31 ►
when we have had that
00:55:33 ►
and it’s been a beautiful thing.
00:55:35 ►
But yeah, it’s good.
00:55:38 ►
Well, thanks so much, everybody.
00:55:40 ►
Yeah, thank you.
00:55:48 ►
You’re listening to The psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives
00:55:50 ►
one thought at a time
00:55:52 ►
I hope that you enjoyed that as much as I did
00:55:55 ►
in fact Niles even got me to thinking about
00:55:58 ►
maybe getting back involved with coding
00:56:00 ►
I actually never was a very good programmer
00:56:03 ►
but that never stopped me from
00:56:05 ►
writing code whenever I had the chance to get paid for it anyhow. Anyway, with all of the new
00:56:11 ►
tools that are available today, just learning how to use them sounds like a lot of fun to me, but
00:56:16 ►
then I’m probably a little bit more geeky than most of us. However, even if you aren’t a geek,
00:56:22 ►
and if you haven’t already done so, you really should get a hold of one of those little build-it-yourself kits
00:56:28 ►
and solder a little computer together
00:56:30 ►
then program it using assembly language
00:56:32 ►
that would be sort of similar to a modern radio engineer building a crystal set
00:56:37 ►
which of course is another thing you should do if you haven’t already done so
00:56:41 ►
even today’s super high-tech kids seem to still marvel
00:56:45 ►
when they see a working crystal radio set.
00:56:48 ►
And why am I passing these old guy tips along to you?
00:56:52 ►
Well, simply because until you’ve played with the insides of a computer
00:56:55 ►
or a television or a radio at the lowest, most basic level,
00:56:59 ►
you really can’t understand that when you’re using one of these new tablets,
00:57:04 ►
say, to watch a movie like Avatar,
00:57:06 ►
and then use that same device to video conference with a friend in another city,
00:57:10 ►
while at the same time searching for homework answers on the Internet,
00:57:14 ►
well, if you understand that those primitive experiments that I just mentioned
00:57:18 ►
were the leading edge of technology at the early period of my own lifetime,
00:57:23 ►
then you’ll see how your tablet or web phone or
00:57:25 ►
laptop, well, you’ll see it in the same way I do. It’s every bit as much an object of magic to me as,
00:57:32 ►
well, a potential philosopher’s stone. These new computer tools that are becoming more affordable
00:57:38 ►
to us common people every day, particularly when connected to the internet, give we the people much more power than
00:57:46 ►
all of the governments on earth combined. And I’m not talking about using this power for politics.
00:57:51 ►
What I’m talking about here is the same thing as what Niles was saying, what Alex Gray has been
00:57:56 ►
saying, what Terence McKenna has been saying. Art. Art is the single most transformative force we humans have.
00:58:09 ►
And something I find interesting is that the microcomputer revolution exactly coincided with the resurgence of psychedelics.
00:58:13 ►
And for an excellent account of how the personal computer revolution
00:58:17 ►
was actually shaped by the concurrent resurgence in psychedelic usage,
00:58:22 ►
I suggest you read John Markoff’s excellent book, What the Dormouse Said.
00:58:27 ►
Now, if you think back to the podcast I posted just before this one,
00:58:31 ►
we again heard Terence McKenna stating his opinion that our communications need to evolve
00:58:37 ►
from mainly using small mouth noises to a language that is beheld.
00:58:42 ►
And what better way to do that than through art,
00:58:44 ►
as created with the most powerful mind tools that we’ve yet produced. to a language that is beheld. And what better way to do that than through art,
00:58:49 ►
as created with the most powerful mind tools that we’ve yet produced.
00:58:53 ►
My own first personal computer was a Sol 20,
00:58:55 ►
and I soldered it together myself.
00:58:58 ►
It was great fun and a wonderful learning experience.
00:59:02 ►
But when I look back on my early tech experiences, I now see myself as one of those apes in that opening scene of 2001, A Space Odyssey.
00:59:08 ►
Do you remember that scene when they all awaken and see this big black slab in their myths?
00:59:13 ►
I see myself as one of those apes in my tablet computer as that big black slab.
00:59:19 ►
But fortunately I’m not an ape, or at least a full-blown ape.
00:59:23 ►
Otherwise I’d probably start worshipping the damn thing.
00:59:27 ►
Well, now I have no idea what it was that I first started talking about,
00:59:32 ►
so I guess I’d better close by thanking Niles for this informative and inspiring talk.
00:59:37 ►
And I’ll post his contact information, his Twitter account info, podcast info, website, etc.,
00:59:43 ►
in the program notes for today’s podcast,
00:59:46 ►
which you know you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:59:50 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:54 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.