Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Android Jones
Android Jones delivering his 2017 Palenque Norte Lecture
Date this lecture was recorded: August 2017
Today’s podcast features the Palenque Norte Lecture given by visionary artist Android Jones at the 2017 Burning Man Festival. Rather than give a structured lecture, Jones answers questions from the audience about the process he uses, including the use of entheogens, to create the fantastical images that we have seen on album covers, festival posters, live performances, and online at YouTube and Vimeo. If you have ever wondered how a work of art, such as his intriguing video titled Samskara came about, this evening conversation on the playa with Android Jones will fascinate you.
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Android Jones
[When facing a blank canvas] “you’ve got all these possibilities, and every time you make a decision the infinite possibilities are collapsing. By making a piece of art we are actually collapsing infinity. Every yes is a no to every other thing that you do.”
“I don’t take psychedelics to try to understand some sort of like forth dimensional entities’ agenda on Earth. I take psychedelics so I can understand the majesty of nature. I take psychedelics and I study the ways that trees grow. I take psychedelics and I look at the way that bees will start moving around the hives and the shapes they make. Psychedelics are not inspiring, but they help me gain a whole new level of insight into what is the most inspiring thing, which is just raw, beautiful nature that’s around us all the time.”
“I like making art more than sex. I like it more than any other thing that there is… . I’m a junkie for that deep creative flow space.”
Android Jones’ Website
Android Jones on Vimeo
Samskara - An experience by Android Jones
Left to right:Phong, Chris Aimone, Bruce Damer, Andrew (Android) Jones, Samantha Sweetwater
Previous Episode
Next Episode
033 - The Psychedelic Archives of Keeper Trout
Similar Episodes
- 647 - Why Burning Man - score: 0.82410
- 052 - The Future of Visionary Art Part 2 - score: 0.77364
- 422 - Visualizing the Psychedelic Experience - score: 0.76179
- 518 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 4 - score: 0.73769
- 329 - Vision Mapping for the Golden Age - score: 0.72877
- 354 - Pre-End of the World Special - score: 0.72863
- 447 - Manifesting New Communities - score: 0.72810
- 032 - Ben Stewart’s Wild Ride - score: 0.72196
- 047 - Philadelphia and Baltimore Storytelling - score: 0.71828
- 008 - Art, Love, Family, and Psychedelics (Part 2) - score: 0.71724
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I would like to begin today by thanking Joseph T. and Andrew G.,
00:00:29 ►
both of whom made donations to the Salon this past week.
00:00:33 ►
And Andrew also asked me to give a shout-out for a conference that’s titled
00:00:37 ►
Entheogenesis Australis, that will be held near Melbourne, Australia
00:00:43 ►
on the 8th through the 10th of December this year.
00:00:46 ►
Andrew also says that his only affiliation is as a ticket holder who wants to find the others.
00:00:53 ►
And that conference, by the way, has a truly stellar lineup of speakers,
00:00:57 ►
including Rick Doblin, Cat Harrison, Eric Davis, Tom Roberts, and Nashae Devenrow, among others.
00:01:04 ►
Eric Davis, Tom Roberts, and Ne’Shea Devenrow, among others.
00:01:07 ►
So, if you’re able to get to Melbourne in December,
00:01:12 ►
well, this would be an excellent conference where you can find a few more of the others.
00:01:19 ►
Now let’s get back to the Planque Norte lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival this past August.
00:01:25 ►
And the talk that I’m going to play for us today is by the visionary artist, Android Jones.
00:01:32 ►
I’m not exactly sure when I first learned about the amazing art that Android creates,
00:01:39 ►
but it was several years ago when I first began receiving emails from fellow salonners who sent me links to his work.
00:01:46 ►
And I’ll provide some of those links in today’s program notes, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.
00:01:51 ►
I don’t actually have the right words to properly describe Android’s work,
00:02:01 ►
but my guess is that you most likely have already seen much of it at festivals, on album covers, and online at YouTube and other sites.
00:02:05 ►
In the past, Android has worked with George Lucas at Industrial Light and Magic, and he worked at Nintendo as well before striking out on his own. In the program
00:02:12 ►
notes, I’ll put a link to his Vimeo channel, as well as to his YouTube channel, where he appears
00:02:17 ►
both as Android Jones and as Andrew Jones, and I’ll be sure to link to one of my favorites of his that’s titled Samskara. Now that my body is wearing out a little bit, I’ve had to give up using
00:02:30 ►
strong psychedelic medicines for the most part, but late at night before going
00:02:36 ►
to bed, sometimes I like to get really stoned and watch one of Android’s videos.
00:02:41 ►
When it comes to having a psychedelic experience, I find that his videos are actually the next best thing
00:02:47 ►
to being in that space,
00:02:49 ►
particularly when boosted by a little cannabis.
00:02:53 ►
So, now let’s join Android Jones
00:02:55 ►
in the Palenque Norte tent at Camp Soft Landing
00:02:59 ►
on a hot August evening in 2017
00:03:02 ►
and learn a little more about this important psychedelic artist.
00:03:08 ►
Hi everyone. I lost my voice a few days ago, so you guys are going to have to get my like
00:03:16 ►
Illuminati godfather voice for this whole lecture. Thanks for having me. Man, I remember there’s
00:03:25 ►
so many pieces of art that
00:03:27 ►
I made super
00:03:30 ►
late at night while listening
00:03:32 ►
to Lorenzo and the Palenque Norte.
00:03:34 ►
So it’s awesome to be
00:03:35 ►
part of this and be added to the library.
00:03:39 ►
And
00:03:39 ►
I don’t have any kind of spiel
00:03:42 ►
or agenda or anything.
00:03:43 ►
This is a Q&A, so your questions will definitely lead the next hour.
00:03:48 ►
I don’t really have too many out-of-bounds topics,
00:03:52 ►
so we’re at Burning Man.
00:03:54 ►
You guys can ask whatever, and I’ll try to answer as honestly,
00:03:58 ►
as helpfully as possible.
00:04:00 ►
That’s a great question.
00:04:02 ►
Yeah, kind of alone time and solitude is is really important to me
00:04:07 ►
um i’m definitely by naturally much more of like an introvert than extrovert i’m the most
00:04:12 ►
comfortable when i’m just kind of there in the moment of creation uh i find that as i get uh
00:04:19 ►
older um to really kind of get into the kind of that,
00:04:28 ►
to be able to like open myself up enough to receive some type of, you know,
00:04:29 ►
to connect with the muse
00:04:30 ►
or kind of reach a deeper level of insight or narrative
00:04:34 ►
into the works that I do that I like to have,
00:04:37 ►
like a good,
00:04:38 ►
it’s not something I can just jump into and out of anymore.
00:04:41 ►
So the way I structure my days is on an ideal day
00:04:45 ►
when I’m not doing a lot of traveling,
00:04:47 ►
I start the day by waking up at midnight,
00:04:50 ►
and then I’ve got like a good eight-hour stretch
00:04:54 ►
from midnight to eight in the morning
00:04:56 ►
to just totally be by myself,
00:04:59 ►
like no email, no other distractions,
00:05:01 ►
and that’s kind of like the precious work time that i have then it i wake up at eight and uh by that time my martha and my daughter are waking up
00:05:11 ►
so i hang out with them in bed sleep for four hours wake up again at around one take care of
00:05:19 ►
like just like the mandatory communication and business and things like that, have dinner, watch the sunset,
00:05:25 ►
uh, with my family, go to bed for another four hours and wake up at midnight and do the eight
00:05:30 ►
hour stretch. So I do that. And then sometimes I’ll do kind of, I’ve, I find it. I’ve been like
00:05:37 ►
over the years, I’ve been getting, getting more into like, just like binge creativity where I
00:05:42 ►
might take kind of getting like take a whole weekend or take two days
00:05:45 ►
or kind of save up and sleep a little bit but um yeah if I like distractions is the biggest enemy
00:05:53 ►
towards me being able to make anything that I don’t hate so having that time is uh yeah I wouldn’t
00:05:59 ►
I wouldn’t I’m I’m not I’m not in I’m not very much of like a co-working space kind of person. It’s very hermetic.
00:06:06 ►
Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with entheogens
00:06:10 ►
and the creative process
00:06:12 ►
and whether it’s something that,
00:06:15 ►
how you integrate that kind of experience
00:06:18 ►
or mystical experience in your art,
00:06:20 ►
both in terms of conception and actually execution?
00:06:24 ►
Sure.
00:06:27 ►
I’ve been an artist all my life since i was like five i just knew that what i was going to do so um i uh like a lot of
00:06:35 ►
the art training and the art classes i had i didn’t really discover entheogens probably marijuana when
00:06:40 ►
i was 15 and um i just remember like i was, I mean, I was a pothead from
00:06:47 ►
like my first toke, like in the back of the parking lot. And what I found is that it’s just,
00:06:52 ►
I had always spent a lot of time by myself drawing. Um, you know, drawing is kind of how I
00:06:58 ►
got to know myself and explore my own consciousness. And I started smoking marijuana. It just,
00:07:05 ►
you know,
00:07:06 ►
making a piece of art.
00:07:07 ►
Um,
00:07:08 ►
one way of looking at it,
00:07:09 ►
it’s,
00:07:10 ►
it’s,
00:07:10 ►
it’s really like an advanced problem solving.
00:07:12 ►
You kind of create these problems.
00:07:13 ►
Like I want to draw a thundercat or I want to draw,
00:07:17 ►
you know,
00:07:18 ►
like this sort of like a sunset or whatever it is that you’re,
00:07:21 ►
the problem is you have this idea and it,
00:07:23 ►
it,
00:07:23 ►
that hasn’t come into existence yet and you you bring it into existence, and you can start.
00:07:29 ►
There’s infinite ways of starting.
00:07:32 ►
Marijuana was great because I was looking at the same problems, but I felt like I was always looking at the problems from one angle.
00:07:45 ►
from one angle and all of a sudden I could just take whatever that problem was and I could you know essentially just like rotate it and see it from a completely new perspective and I think that
00:07:52 ►
is a lot that that sort of change being able to change like the lens of my understanding and how
00:08:01 ►
I’m solving problems what really attracted me towards making art in different types of
00:08:06 ►
altered spaces
00:08:07 ►
part of what has
00:08:09 ►
I think helped out a lot
00:08:11 ►
is I have a
00:08:14 ►
long history of like an
00:08:16 ►
academic education
00:08:18 ►
in art a lot of blind
00:08:19 ►
contour and figure drawing and anatomy
00:08:21 ►
and form and structure so I spent
00:08:23 ►
like a good decade just with a lot of discipline,
00:08:26 ►
like learning the ins and outs of what it takes to fundamentally create an image.
00:08:32 ►
And because I had what I found that was once I kind of got into college,
00:08:36 ►
I definitely started to experiment more with psychedelics and MDMA and nitrous and LSD.
00:08:44 ►
And I think that’s kind of where I hit like a stride
00:08:48 ►
and I realized that I could kind of surrender
00:08:52 ►
maybe like my more like active consciousness
00:08:55 ►
and I could alter my frame of perspective.
00:09:01 ►
But all of the skills that I had,
00:09:03 ►
like the anatomy, form color theory though no matter
00:09:08 ►
how altered i got that baseline of skill was just right there and like totally available which was
00:09:16 ►
really great and so there are times where um under the different influences i could feel
00:09:22 ►
um almost like a different like a presence coming in.
00:09:27 ►
Like there’s times during like a deep, deep kind of ceremonial practice.
00:09:32 ►
And to preface this, like I would, you know, try to be as respectful as possible.
00:09:37 ►
Like, you know, lock the doors, turn off the cell phone, turn off, like unplug the Internet and just kind of buckle up for like a 24 hour.
00:09:50 ►
Whatever is going to happen it’s gonna happen um and uh yeah there are definitely times where i could like look down at my hands and my hands are creating something and i don’t i don’t know
00:09:55 ►
whose hands these are you know like they’re making marks in there and things are happening
00:10:00 ►
and it’s kind of it’s kind of like waking up when you have like a lucid dream. You have that moment of like you know you’re lucid, you know you’re dreaming,
00:10:07 ►
and you’re kind of just riding the edge of that.
00:10:10 ►
That would happen sometimes.
00:10:12 ►
And it is exciting, but it’s also a little scary
00:10:14 ►
because I wasn’t really always sure what kind of deals I was making
00:10:18 ►
or if it’s not me in control, like who is in control.
00:10:23 ►
One benefit that I found through psychedelics uh
00:10:27 ►
particularly lsd is um you know i think obviously every artist is going to have their own uh we’ve
00:10:36 ►
all got our own chemistry and our own background and our own uh personal relationships with how
00:10:41 ►
these alter us and how a lot of it is how our imagination works.
00:10:45 ►
Um, I have never had a really active visual imagination. Like I don’t, I’m not a visionary.
00:10:51 ►
I don’t close my eyes and see visions. I don’t, I don’t, the images I make aren’t something I’ve
00:10:56 ►
conjured in my imagination, you know, in the mind. And I just try to recreate that. Like they’re
00:11:02 ►
very, they’re very impulsive. like the piece is revealed to me as I
00:11:07 ►
create the piece um and a lot of that process a lot of my process kind of starting from usually
00:11:14 ►
I’ll start with music I might have an idea or an intention but I’ll I’ll do a lot of prep work like
00:11:20 ►
I’ll build a palette you know I’ll kind of have some sort of kind of like base
00:11:25 ►
concept of what i want to kind of explore and then i’ll listen to music and then the first few hours
00:11:30 ►
are really just kind of just chaos and noise just throwing down like different colors and shapes and
00:11:35 ►
patterns and now i’ll put down different pieces of like geometry or gradients and i kind of work
00:11:41 ►
with that um and create a whole base of seemingly random information
00:11:47 ►
and with or without psychedelics
00:11:50 ►
then I’ll kind of look at this
00:11:51 ►
and something intuitive
00:11:53 ►
like some type of like this
00:11:54 ►
this pareidolia
00:11:55 ►
like our minds
00:11:56 ►
the psychological condition
00:11:58 ►
where our minds make sense
00:12:00 ►
out of chaos
00:12:00 ►
takes over
00:12:01 ►
and these random shapes
00:12:03 ►
start becoming things
00:12:04 ►
under the
00:12:06 ►
influence of like an LSD, I find that LSD is like a steroid for the pareidolia, you know, whatever,
00:12:13 ►
whatever part of my mind is uncomfortable with chaos and wants to make something mean something
00:12:18 ►
when I’m on, you know, 500 mics of LSD, like I can pretty much see it crystallized in front of me.
00:12:26 ►
I’ve had a lot of experience of looking at the chaos
00:12:28 ►
and seeing the finished piece there in front of me,
00:12:31 ►
and then I just have to kind of recreate the steps of bringing it out.
00:12:35 ►
But I find that usually the one positive aspect of creating art
00:12:44 ►
under those kind of conditions is the LSD.
00:12:47 ►
I find that most of the time it’s pretty predictable,
00:12:51 ►
and I think it puts me in touch with a higher element of myself.
00:12:57 ►
Like I said before, we’re talking about being alone.
00:12:59 ►
I’m much less prone to any kind of distractions than I might normally be if I’m sober because the idea of
00:13:06 ►
like checking Facebook or my email is like repulsive when you’re high and you’re tripping
00:13:11 ►
so like I don’t have to worry about that like I’m very much there and present whether it’s ever
00:13:16 ►
happening the challenge though is that it you know within the four or five hours of that experience
00:13:23 ►
there is kind of a peak and there’s kind of a, there’s a high point of, I would call it kind of like the ultimate
00:13:28 ►
pareidolia where I can, I can see where the piece is going. Um, I, when I work digitally, I can,
00:13:36 ►
oftentimes the, the monitor becomes more of like a window into another world and the layers are
00:13:42 ►
three dimensional. And so I have this temporary superpower of this insight
00:13:47 ►
of seeing the highest crystallized version
00:13:50 ►
of what this image could be.
00:13:53 ►
And it’s moving and it’s a narrative.
00:13:55 ►
It’s more than I could ever capture
00:13:57 ►
with two-dimensional shapes.
00:14:00 ►
But yeah, the kind of challenge is trying to crystallize it
00:14:03 ►
enough before the high wears off.
00:14:08 ►
Because when you’re high, everything can look pretty rad.
00:14:11 ►
You know, it can like look amazing.
00:14:13 ►
You know, when you think it’s the best piece ever when you’re stoned and you’re like, oh, my God, it’s the best piece.
00:14:17 ►
And then you get sober the next day and you look at it, you’re like, that’s not so special at all.
00:14:23 ►
So you’ve really got to seize that window and crystallize it
00:14:27 ►
before the drugs wear off and you kind of lose the vision and you’re left with just a bunch of
00:14:33 ►
noise and chaos and regretting it so it’s kind of a but those are those are there’s lots of
00:14:39 ►
different i could answer that question all night but that’s one way that i find that they’re beneficial you know like you don’t have time to do art when you’re doing something like that i mean
00:14:51 ►
yeah i think he was kind of asking more um about i guess one one way of saying is like i i would
00:14:57 ►
consider myself like i’m like a method psychedelic artist like i like being high and making art while
00:15:04 ►
i’m high well there’s a lot
00:15:05 ►
of visionary artists that have an ayahuasca experience or a DMT and they have, you know,
00:15:11 ►
they, they, they touch the unknown or the ineffable, and then they want to come back
00:15:15 ►
and bring that and recreate that. I don’t, I don’t do that because I mean, the DMT experience
00:15:20 ►
that I’ve had have been beyond what I’m able to
00:15:26 ►
communicate in two or three dimensional
00:15:27 ►
shapes so I just kind of leave that there
00:15:30 ►
but yeah it’s more about
00:15:32 ►
having this
00:15:34 ►
substance and how it affects
00:15:36 ►
like my own intuition
00:15:37 ►
and what it brings out and like the
00:15:40 ►
depth of the narrative that I create
00:15:41 ►
through making my own meaning as it
00:15:44 ►
evolves and reveals itself
00:15:45 ►
I’m sure
00:15:48 ►
you’ve gotten this question a lot before
00:15:49 ►
but I’m curious if you can speak to
00:15:52 ►
the benefits
00:15:54 ►
and or limitations of
00:15:55 ►
formal education versus self-education
00:15:58 ►
and what your journey was like
00:15:59 ►
through that
00:16:00 ►
obviously
00:16:03 ►
education has benefits, lots of benefits i am uh i graduated
00:16:09 ►
with a bachelor uh from uh i’m an art school in florida um i’m not after that experience um
00:16:17 ►
i don’t really recommend art schools to people i really recommend an academic education um you can
00:16:23 ►
get those there’s a lot of different, like, fine art,
00:16:26 ►
like smaller ateliers that are opening up,
00:16:28 ►
like in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York.
00:16:32 ►
And there’s still, if you want a good art education,
00:16:35 ►
I would find some place that really just focuses
00:16:37 ►
on the classic, like, academic and traditional skills
00:16:41 ►
of figure drawing and form and anatomy and color,
00:16:46 ►
those are the quintessential and the fundamental dynamics of building any level of trust between
00:16:53 ►
you and the audience that you’re trying to send a message to. Without a reel found,
00:17:01 ►
I see a lot of artists and I can tell instantly if someone’s done their homework and has a background.
00:17:11 ►
There’s just an amazing wealth of knowledge that’s been created and passed down for thousands of years,
00:17:17 ►
and the idea of not taking advantage of that seems really foolish if your aim is to become an artist and use images to communicate with people
00:17:26 ►
it’s just a it’s a deeper fundamental language if i if i look at a piece and i see someone’s
00:17:32 ►
drawing a face and they don’t i can tell the anatomy and their proportions are off i don’t
00:17:38 ►
trust them anymore you know it doesn’t i’m not going to give it a deeper look you know like
00:17:42 ►
so much about art is it’s this magic of maintaining this really,
00:17:49 ►
really thin illusion that there’s actually something there
00:17:53 ►
when it’s just colors and shapes.
00:17:56 ►
And I feel that the artist should really take advantage of every opportunity.
00:18:02 ►
Because when someone sees your art,
00:18:04 ►
they might see it for a few seconds
00:18:06 ►
before scrolling to something else.
00:18:08 ►
You have a very small window
00:18:10 ►
to make an impression on people,
00:18:12 ►
and why would you not want to
00:18:14 ►
take advantage of all of this,
00:18:17 ►
like the decades and decades and lifetimes
00:18:20 ►
people have sacrificed and given
00:18:22 ►
to make all of this information available, and now all of this information, you can,
00:18:27 ►
if you’re disciplined enough, there’s books, I’ve got like a reading list.
00:18:30 ►
There’s everything I need to learn now through art or whether I’m doing VR or
00:18:35 ►
modeling or any new software, I just,
00:18:38 ►
everything I can learn is on YouTube now, but you know, it’s,
00:18:43 ►
it’s really, it’s, it’s not a question if all the information is there the
00:18:46 ►
real question is um this as an individual artist are you willing to you know make the sacrifice
00:18:53 ►
and the discipline to like commit to to learning that and is it going to be important enough for
00:18:59 ►
you and what you want to communicate um you know i couldn’t imagine doing any of the things I do
00:19:06 ►
without the foundation that I had as an artist.
00:19:09 ►
I don’t recommend going to art schools
00:19:11 ►
because I think they’re just kind of a form.
00:19:13 ►
I think with the student loan programs,
00:19:16 ►
I think it’s a great way to just get into, like,
00:19:17 ►
an indentured servitude.
00:19:19 ►
And there’s a lot of filler, and it’s a lot of waste.
00:19:22 ►
Like, if you’re self-disciplined and you know what you want
00:19:24 ►
and you can open up a book and read it and not just look at the pictures,
00:19:29 ►
then I wouldn’t see a lot of reason for, you know,
00:19:32 ►
maybe there’s some networking that goes on.
00:19:34 ►
But I think those are just all sort of catchphrases
00:19:37 ►
that people use as a form of scarcity to get them into art schools.
00:19:41 ►
And then these kids go out on the market and they want to be free
00:19:43 ►
and they’ve got $100,000 of a nefarious student loan debt that like never goes away
00:19:50 ►
you know i don’t think the trade-off is proportionate to the advantage you get from it
00:19:54 ►
but um you know like if you know if you’re i guess that analogy wouldn’t be appropriate
00:20:02 ►
because i think because the information is available there’s almost like an
00:20:06 ►
obligation or a responsibility
00:20:07 ►
to take advantage of it
00:20:10 ►
to choose like you know there’s
00:20:12 ►
it’s like if you want to be a mechanic
00:20:13 ►
would you just like show up at a
00:20:16 ►
mechanics with like a wrench and just like
00:20:17 ►
freestyle it like you’ve got to learn
00:20:19 ►
how a car works like
00:20:21 ►
the fundamental aspects of how like
00:20:24 ►
light is a predictable force.
00:20:26 ►
Like it works in predictable ways
00:20:28 ►
once you understand the dynamics
00:20:30 ►
of like how light bounces,
00:20:32 ►
how color operates,
00:20:33 ►
like what the shadows,
00:20:34 ►
there’s all these formulas that you can apply.
00:20:37 ►
And I think that’s one exciting thing
00:20:38 ►
about being an artist
00:20:39 ►
is it’s given me a whole new way.
00:20:42 ►
When I look at the world,
00:20:43 ►
it’s not just about what you create,
00:20:45 ►
it’s about what you see and how you see things.
00:20:49 ►
You know, the books that I’ve read from other artists,
00:20:52 ►
you know, being able to have these glimpse into their lives
00:20:55 ►
and the insights that they’ve had,
00:20:57 ►
it’s just really amazing.
00:20:58 ►
Like, it’s helped me.
00:21:00 ►
As an artist, I think I look at the world completely differently
00:21:03 ►
just based off the words of other artists that have already died
00:21:06 ►
that I’ve read and understood the way that they look.
00:21:10 ►
Someone likes the classic American landscape painters
00:21:13 ►
looked at a tree, understanding the fundamental respect you have,
00:21:18 ►
understanding the different proportions.
00:21:21 ►
It’s a great skill that you can apply in so many different ways
00:21:25 ►
that, yeah, it’s important.
00:21:27 ►
I recommend it, for sure.
00:21:30 ►
I really appreciated the way you talked about
00:21:32 ►
how you kind of find
00:21:35 ►
harmony in things in chaos
00:21:39 ►
and that process from an artistic way
00:21:41 ►
of tying things together.
00:21:44 ►
Are you doing the same type of thing
00:21:46 ►
with the ideas behind your work um as you explore them and what is that process like do you have
00:21:52 ►
some type of thing you want to bring out or or do you find resolution and explore as you go along
00:21:59 ►
yeah that’s a good question um for me, they really work hand in hand.
00:22:07 ►
If I can afford the luxury of it,
00:22:09 ►
I really like to just start with a piece
00:22:12 ►
without a lot of ideas or intentions.
00:22:15 ►
I don’t want to come to the canvas
00:22:17 ►
with a screenplay of where it’s going to roll out
00:22:21 ►
because what I find is as I start,
00:22:24 ►
whatever, the canvas becomes
00:22:27 ►
kind of a mirror for myself and as I I have this intuitive feeling where I can if I lay down like
00:22:34 ►
a shape or a color or a different stroke there’s like an intuitive like kind of inner compass of
00:22:42 ►
like a yes or a no or like a fuck yes or like a cringe and i write
00:22:47 ►
that for a while and i just try to keep in that sort of like positive spectrum and that sort of
00:22:52 ►
frequency and get into a rhythm of like okay this field this is new like i’ve never seen this shape
00:22:58 ►
and this color in this way ever before and then after I lay down enough of that, inevitably a narrative will
00:23:07 ►
start to like reveal itself, but it reveals itself in little pieces. You know, it starts
00:23:13 ►
really small, like it might be an animal or a face or an eye or, you know, a mountain range.
00:23:19 ►
And then I’ll kind of follow that down, and I follow that more. And then something else starts to come out. And so instead of, like, I’m at point A of nothing,
00:23:28 ►
and point B is this image in my head of where I want to go.
00:23:32 ►
This, I guess, kind of think of it, I started to think,
00:23:36 ►
I started to become helpful to kind of imagine the creative process
00:23:40 ►
as the, you know, where you have this canvas,
00:23:43 ►
and at the very onset onset if you kind of imagine
00:23:46 ►
um all of the you have you have theoretically infinite possibilities of where you can go
00:23:53 ►
where you start like what brush if you kind of imagine this like i kind of see it as this like
00:23:58 ►
like this light fractal tree kind of explosion from one root and you’ve got all these possibilities and every time
00:24:07 ►
you make a decision the infinite possibilities are collapsing by making a piece of art we’re
00:24:14 ►
actually collapsing infinity with every every yes is a no to every other thing that you do and so
00:24:20 ►
with this sort of like fractal route say say if there’s every fractable, every quantum fractal possibility is laid out before, whatever you decide has a 100% probability of being that or not.
00:24:34 ►
And so every decision, you’re carving your little 100% probability path through the fractal infinite.
00:24:47 ►
path through the fractal infinite and i find that by not knowing where i’m going to end up at the end of that fractal tree there’s different points where i can a whole new non-sequitur can come in
00:24:53 ►
and i can then verge this way and then another part of the story starts to develop itself so
00:24:59 ►
the narratives um they they evolve together they kind of build they iteratively build on top of
00:25:08 ►
each other towards the end by the wherever i am when i finish which usually means not i never like
00:25:15 ►
like i can’t even do the sound effect it’s not like this like finished it’s just like
00:25:22 ►
abandoned you know i either give up or like stop fighting but whatever
00:25:27 ►
that point is it’s never a point that i thought i was going to get to when i started and for me
00:25:33 ►
it’s actually the process is just more entertaining because because i’m not imagining this in my mind
00:25:40 ►
i’m seeing it as i’m creating it in real time and like the thrill of that. And that’s when
00:25:46 ►
sometimes with the entheogens after maybe four or five hours into that process, sometimes there’s a
00:25:52 ►
point where you kind of let go and you’re just there and you’re just working. You’re kind of
00:25:59 ►
in this flow state. I don’t, I’m starting to really cringe at the word flow state in general.
00:26:04 ►
It’s just kind of just become this sort of catchphrase that people use, but whatever that deep meditation is
00:26:09 ►
that there are all these different pieces that I work, I created in the canvas.
00:26:15 ►
And then there’s kind of a moment where I might not know they might have, they might not have had
00:26:20 ►
any relationship to each other, but it’s like I make another move
00:26:25 ►
or I zoom out and I kind of sit with it
00:26:27 ►
and then something clicks into place
00:26:29 ►
and like all these disparate aspects
00:26:33 ►
that were totally unrelated to my process,
00:26:36 ►
now they all start having a deeper narrative together.
00:26:40 ►
And when that happens,
00:26:41 ►
it’s a point where I feel that I’ve gone beyond
00:26:44 ►
working like with my own ego or my subconscious, and I feel like I’m connecting with something else that’s outside of myself. through art and through the creative process, it’s given me access to, um, you know, the most
00:27:06 ►
probably mysterious and mystical experiences that I’ve had. Cause I don’t have any,
00:27:12 ►
I don’t have a theory. I don’t have an explanation on why that happens or what it is. And
00:27:17 ►
I don’t really care why it happens. I know it happens. I know it’s really real for me.
00:27:22 ►
And that’s enough for me to be able to work with that
00:27:25 ►
and being lucky enough to be able to create something that other people can find meaning
00:27:31 ►
and benefit from one more question um you mentioned that you don’t have um psychedelic
00:27:39 ►
experiences that you later on try to kind of capture and turn into something have you found
00:27:45 ►
that those psychedelic experiences and isolation have affected your kind of aesthetic and the way
00:27:50 ►
that you do then create or you know what does make its way if anything there’s different ways
00:27:56 ►
there’s definitely like i feel like under the influence of psychedelics like i’ve i’ve like
00:28:02 ►
like like totally new like techniques have emerged of, like, how I use tools
00:28:08 ►
together that I never would have probably discovered sober. So there’s a lot of things
00:28:12 ►
that happen that kind of upgrade my non-psychedelic status. And, you know, also it is the kind of,
00:28:20 ►
everybody has, like, their own thing. There there were a few years probably between 2005
00:28:25 ►
and 2012 where i definitely had the psychedelic like pedal to the metal um but there was a point
00:28:32 ►
where i also realized it was pretty unsustainable to operate at that and it’s really more about
00:28:36 ►
developing a practice where i can almost enter into that state without the psychedelics like
00:28:42 ►
now it’s probably like i’ll try to do at least
00:28:45 ►
a monthly check-in just to
00:28:47 ►
recalibrate myself
00:28:49 ►
and kind of
00:28:50 ►
try to find any of
00:28:53 ►
the bullshit or any ways that I’m
00:28:55 ►
fooling myself. It’s a good
00:28:57 ►
sort of check for that.
00:28:59 ►
But along the
00:29:01 ►
lines of
00:29:02 ►
seeing,
00:29:10 ►
taking psychedelics to see visions, there’s a lot of art that I see from other visionary artists.
00:29:16 ►
Unfortunately, I can’t look into anyone else’s imagination or their trips, so I don’t know what they’re seeing. But from what I hear, there’s a lot of people that take these kind of substances to have some really beautiful divine vision of something like
00:29:26 ►
interdimensional or extraterrestrial and that’s that’s awesome that’s cool for them like i don’t
00:29:31 ►
do that like i um when i take psychedelics and i’m not making art it’s usually because i’m out like i
00:29:38 ►
i don’t take psychedelics to try to understand some sort of like fourth dimensional entities like agenda on the earth.
00:29:46 ►
Like I take psychedelics so I can just pray to like understand like the majesty of nature.
00:29:52 ►
I take psychedelics and I study like the way that the trees grow.
00:29:57 ►
I take psychedelics and I study the way that I look at the way that like the bees will
00:30:02 ►
start moving around the hives and the shapes they make, because I find that nature is the, you know,
00:30:07 ►
psychedelics really, they’re not inspiring,
00:30:10 ►
but they help me gain a whole new level of insight into what is the most
00:30:15 ►
inspiring thing, which is just raw,
00:30:18 ►
beautiful nature that’s around us all the time.
00:30:22 ►
Andrew, I was just wondering,
00:30:25 ►
what would you identify as your primary motivation
00:30:29 ►
to make art nowadays?
00:30:32 ►
Because to me it seems like you’re at a point
00:30:34 ►
where you could probably not make art
00:30:38 ►
and just kind of sail off of the stuff
00:30:41 ►
that you’ve already done.
00:30:43 ►
You could almost go the Maynard James Keenan route
00:30:46 ►
of like, all right, I’m just going to start a vineyard now
00:30:48 ►
or something like that.
00:30:49 ►
But what keeps you inspired
00:30:53 ►
and why do you still keep creating visual art?
00:31:00 ►
That’s a great and flattering question.
00:31:04 ►
A lot of different ways.
00:31:05 ►
I’ve thought about that sometimes.
00:31:08 ►
I know I got really into evolutionary psychology and biology a couple years ago
00:31:13 ►
and realized that most of what I thought I was doing through all these, like,
00:31:18 ►
really kind of, like, naive and idealistic ideas of, like, why I was an artist
00:31:23 ►
and why I made art, I realized it was just
00:31:26 ►
a subconscious way of peacocking
00:31:28 ►
and signaling so I could find
00:31:29 ►
the most ideal mate to
00:31:32 ►
breed with.
00:31:33 ►
I found an ideal mate and we’ve bred
00:31:36 ►
once and it’s pretty awesome.
00:31:38 ►
I don’t need to
00:31:40 ►
make art to
00:31:41 ►
signal to the community to find
00:31:44 ►
a better mating partner,
00:31:45 ►
because I’ve got that, so that’s done.
00:31:47 ►
So I can take that motivation away.
00:31:49 ►
So it’s like, without that motivation,
00:31:50 ►
why am I making it?
00:31:51 ►
There is the financial aspect,
00:31:53 ►
and I have enough of a library of work,
00:31:56 ►
I could probably just hustle that for a while.
00:31:58 ►
That could be a strategy for sure.
00:32:02 ►
But I think deep down you know jake that that being in that that in when
00:32:10 ►
you’re really in the throes of a creative experience like it is it’s fundamentally the most
00:32:16 ►
uh the most valuable thing that i think i could ever be doing with my time you know it’s better
00:32:22 ►
than like i’m not really into, I’m not a foodie.
00:32:26 ►
I’m not, I like sex, but, like, I like being,
00:32:29 ►
I like making art more than sex.
00:32:30 ►
I like it more than any other thing that there is.
00:32:33 ►
I can’t imagine that there’s, when you’re high
00:32:35 ►
and you’re making a piece of art, like, there’s times when, like,
00:32:37 ►
I don’t think there’s anything else in the entire planet
00:32:40 ►
that I could be doing that’s more amazing than this is right now
00:32:44 ►
to, like, be like be like wielding
00:32:46 ►
the full power of like the most advanced art making technology like on the planet listening
00:32:53 ►
to tipper you know on really clean lsd like on my farm it’s like I’m sorry if you’ve got like
00:33:00 ►
if you have something that’s more fun than that like I’ll try that too. But this is the best thing that I’ve found that I can do with my time.
00:33:09 ►
And ultimately, regardless of what chemicals got me into that state of mind,
00:33:14 ►
and it happens often without chemicals,
00:33:17 ►
I know that ultimately I think our minds are the greatest pharmacies around.
00:33:24 ►
Like the kind of chemicals that we can create,
00:33:26 ►
like adrenaline and serotonin.
00:33:28 ►
These things are unbelievable.
00:33:31 ►
Whatever chemical is secreted in my mind
00:33:36 ►
during a moment of complete flow, creative abandon in that moment,
00:33:44 ►
I’m hopelessly addicted to that you know
00:33:49 ►
i’m a junkie for that deep creative flow space and you know regardless i don’t think that i would
00:33:57 ►
ever i don’t see myself ever recovering from that particular addiction you know and i can’t i mean
00:34:04 ►
maybe i’ll find scuba diving or something.
00:34:08 ►
Scuba diving is fun too,
00:34:09 ►
but until I find a better way of getting that fix,
00:34:13 ►
I think I’m pretty locked in to this art thing
00:34:16 ►
for the foreseeable future.
00:34:19 ►
If you don’t mind sharing, you don’t have to.
00:34:22 ►
People equate and see the relationship between creativity and madness,
00:34:30 ►
mental illness or instability, or even just chaos.
00:34:34 ►
How would you describe the rest of your life,
00:34:37 ►
and how does it interplay with what you’re creating?
00:34:41 ►
Yeah, that’s good.
00:34:43 ►
It’s not all sunshine and unicorns and rainbows for
00:34:49 ►
sure um there is i think that if i were to like go back and dissect um the different like the
00:34:57 ►
events in my life and the the moments that created the kind of causality that got me on this path. And if I were to cross correlate that with a lot of the different like
00:35:08 ►
artists,
00:35:09 ►
biographies and autobiographies and memoirs of artists that I really
00:35:12 ►
appreciate the one,
00:35:14 ►
one common denominator that I found,
00:35:16 ►
uh,
00:35:17 ►
it’s,
00:35:18 ►
it’s,
00:35:18 ►
uh,
00:35:19 ►
it’s kind of startling and,
00:35:21 ►
uh,
00:35:22 ►
uh,
00:35:22 ►
a little unnerving is,
00:35:24 ►
uh,
00:35:29 ►
is, is the, is the parallel between trauma and art.
00:35:39 ►
I know very few artists or pieces of art that I don’t revere and admire and have at my house that I cannot find that that artist wasn’t, something really fucked up happened to them.
00:35:46 ►
You know, I got a friend, an artist, Coleman,
00:35:49 ►
that kind of talked about it, like great artists,
00:35:51 ►
like when you’re seeing their art,
00:35:53 ►
you’re really just watching them bleed onto the canvas, you know?
00:35:57 ►
And in a lot of ways it is that some pieces, you know,
00:35:59 ►
some pieces I do do in this moment of joy and celebration and exuberance,
00:36:04 ►
and a lot of them like are there
00:36:06 ►
like they’re battles you know I feel there’s pieces that I’ve done at the end I feel like
00:36:11 ►
there’s like I somehow infused part of my life force that I’ll never get back you know and I
00:36:18 ►
put into that you know I think that a lot of artists like we do suffer for what we do but a
00:36:23 ►
lot of that I mean one of the reasons i
00:36:25 ►
probably became an artist is because i had like my traumas i had a near-death experience when i
00:36:31 ►
was young i had brain surgery and i lost all faith and trust in the world and people and the only
00:36:38 ►
thing that i wanted to do was be alone and be by myself like if I wasn’t so fucked up when I was 11 and chose to not trust anybody and not want friends
00:36:47 ►
and not want to go to school
00:36:49 ►
and that playing Super Metroid
00:36:51 ►
and drawing monsters and spaceships
00:36:54 ►
was the only thing that kept me sane,
00:36:57 ►
I wouldn’t have the skills that I do
00:36:59 ►
and I take advantage of now.
00:37:02 ►
So I think a lot of artists,
00:37:03 ►
it’s like it’s a way of processing
00:37:05 ►
trauma but the trauma can also be like a really fundamental and deeply embedded aspect of like
00:37:12 ►
what got them to the point because being an artist and making an artist is a pretty unreasonable
00:37:17 ►
thing to do and uh you know i think that sometimes it takes some pretty unexpected and unreasonable things to happen in someone’s path to set them in this sort of trajectory and be able to kind of like commit to it and make that sort of thing.
00:37:33 ►
Wow. Do you have thoughts on from kind of an evolutionary psychology type of background as to how and why that common denominator emerges for people
00:37:45 ►
um i think it’s different things i think that um you know i think that one thing for me if i can
00:37:53 ►
just i can only speak for myself i can’t speak for other people’s trauma like almost dying at 11 made
00:37:59 ►
me realize that like being stripped of this illusion of immortality at a young age and coming so close
00:38:07 ►
to death made me it gave me a new perspective on time and that i didn’t have enough time to
00:38:14 ►
fuck around and that death could come any day and take me at any moment and for some reason i made
00:38:19 ►
up a narrative that i didn’t for some like miraculous reason I didn’t die like odds were definitely
00:38:25 ►
in favor of me dying like without cat scans and technology and really fast ambulances like I
00:38:31 ►
wouldn’t have made it so I kind of just slipped under the radar under like deaths like Sith and
00:38:37 ►
you know I could have I guess I could have I could have had a nihilistic approach but I kind of
00:38:42 ►
thought like well maybe I’m here for something and i don’t have a whole lot of time for that something so i better get to it and not
00:38:50 ►
waste my time and you know i was a pretty serious little kid after that you know i wasn’t i didn’t
00:38:55 ►
really fit in anymore and that that was enough of just like an altering of the fractal infinite
00:39:01 ►
possibility tree to put me in a place that gave me
00:39:05 ►
lots of reasons to be alone
00:39:07 ►
and lots of isolation.
00:39:10 ►
And the sketchbook,
00:39:11 ►
the world of my imagination and the drawing,
00:39:15 ►
I realized I was not in control of anything else.
00:39:19 ►
I wasn’t in control of my health or my life or whatever,
00:39:22 ►
but I could control this pencil
00:39:24 ►
on this piece of paper in this little book
00:39:27 ►
that I can put right here on a table.
00:39:31 ►
And that was enough, you know?
00:39:33 ►
And it was just the fear,
00:39:35 ►
the intense fear of everything else
00:39:37 ►
that made drawing a refuge
00:39:40 ►
that had some semblance of safety to it.
00:39:44 ►
And yeah, I think after enough of it i realized
00:39:47 ►
that you know there was nothing else i wanted to do and i didn’t dedicate any time to develop
00:39:52 ►
any other skills so i was just kind of stuck with it from there on uh just i have two questions one
00:39:59 ►
is a quick one which is what do you have here at burning man that we should be seeing i just
00:40:04 ►
haven’t figured that out yet and want to make sure I see it.
00:40:08 ►
And then two, I was wondering if you also have a distinct or disciplined spiritual practice
00:40:13 ►
that informs your life or your discipline or your art as well.
00:40:20 ►
Yeah, we’re out here.
00:40:21 ►
We’re out at 2 o’clock in G outside Camp Mystic.
00:40:26 ►
We’ve brought, I think for the third year,
00:40:28 ►
we’ve got a 40-foot dome with the Samskara experience.
00:40:34 ►
And we’re going to start on Wednesday,
00:40:36 ►
start showing that Wednesday from dusk till dawn,
00:40:38 ►
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
00:40:40 ►
and I think at least Saturday night we’re going to have that.
00:40:43 ►
And then we have another dome where for the last year
00:40:46 ►
year and a half I’ve kind of
00:40:48 ►
focused a lot of my lasers on
00:40:50 ►
kind of exploring
00:40:52 ►
virtual reality and
00:40:54 ►
our ability
00:40:56 ►
to be creative and create inside of that
00:40:58 ►
and so I have a
00:40:59 ►
I’ve been working on a project called
00:41:01 ►
Microdose VR and we have
00:41:04 ►
another dome out there with like
00:41:06 ►
four or five we call they call them pods but they’re like vr units that people can go in and
00:41:11 ►
kind of experience like a three to five minute virtual reality kind of creative experience so
00:41:16 ►
we’re out there that and that and the two o’clock in g so just kind of follow two o’clock out. We’re there. And spiritual practice.
00:41:28 ►
I’ve studied a lot of religions.
00:41:30 ►
I was born into a Catholic family.
00:41:32 ►
I went to Catholic school.
00:41:35 ►
I was really looking into the Baha’i religion for a while.
00:41:39 ►
I’ve studied a lot of Buddhism and meditation.
00:41:44 ►
I spent a lot of Buddhism and meditation.
00:41:46 ►
I’ve spent a lot of time in India.
00:41:49 ►
I think out of all of them so far,
00:41:54 ►
I find the least amount of bullshit and the most amount of resonance
00:41:56 ►
with some of the practices
00:42:00 ►
and just the things I’ve learned while I’ve been in India
00:42:02 ►
and Hinduism.
00:42:04 ►
Something specifically about Shiva.
00:42:07 ►
If I had to commit to a team or buy a spiritual jersey,
00:42:14 ►
I guess I would be a Shivite if I had to.
00:42:18 ►
But I find that I have an altar at the house,
00:42:24 ►
and sometimes before i go into
00:42:26 ►
like a journey or a deeper experience like i’ll sit and i’ll meditate um i i have a couple chants
00:42:31 ►
that i do i find a lot of help through some of these chanting like the words of the the yoga
00:42:36 ►
sutras and the vedas have given me a lot of like this there’s some pretty like amazing objectively
00:42:42 ►
awesome life advice things that they figured out that are great
00:42:46 ►
um but i think a lot of like my personal spiritual practice is my as i kind of mentioned a bit
00:42:53 ►
earlier but the access point that i have to the most transcendental supernatural supernatural mysterious thing that i don’t have an explanation for are is the type of
00:43:07 ►
creative you know intelligence that’s separate than me that i encounter during a really deep
00:43:14 ►
creative session like that’s where it opens up to me and um i think that’s i think any type of
00:43:20 ►
spirituality require usually they require like a bit they require some type of a discipline,
00:43:25 ►
some type of repetitive practice to get there.
00:43:28 ►
So I think that through the drawing and art creation,
00:43:32 ►
that’s been the path that I’ve just carved out enough
00:43:35 ►
that it’s given me a semi-predictable route to kind of be there.
00:43:42 ►
And every time, the mystery is as mysterious
00:43:45 ►
as it was the first time that it happens and like i said it’s not about i’m not really into i don’t
00:43:51 ►
i don’t i don’t have any kind of vain need to like know why or what it’s happened as long as
00:43:56 ►
whatever i’m connecting outside of myself as long as i have a feeling that it’s it’s for it’s it’s
00:44:01 ►
a positive entity for the betterment of humanity
00:44:05 ►
and has my better instruments in line.
00:44:07 ►
I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to detect the malevolent forces
00:44:11 ►
as much as I can.
00:44:13 ►
And I think that I’ve built up my radar hopefully enough,
00:44:16 ►
but they’re pretty tricky too.
00:44:18 ►
They’re really, really tricky.
00:44:20 ►
And they’re quicker.
00:44:22 ►
They’re easier to access too.
00:44:24 ►
The darker forces
00:44:25 ►
that can help you out like they are like the good ones i feel you’ve got to work up to them
00:44:31 ►
like they’re really powerful like angelic like amazing like those forces like they they they
00:44:39 ►
require a bit more of like exercise and discipline to like get to and be worth. I feel they have to be like worthy of to receive like the kind of the,
00:44:48 ►
the diviner inspiration from those.
00:44:50 ►
Um,
00:44:51 ►
but man,
00:44:52 ►
the fucking demons,
00:44:53 ►
man,
00:44:53 ►
they’re just,
00:44:53 ►
they’re ready.
00:44:55 ►
They’re like right behind your back.
00:44:56 ►
Like as soon as you want to call on them,
00:44:58 ►
they’re like fucking lickety split.
00:45:00 ►
They’ve got you.
00:45:01 ►
So you gotta be careful about that.
00:45:04 ►
You know,
00:45:04 ►
you just gotta know who you’re working that you know you just got to know who
00:45:05 ►
you’re working for and who you’re working with because i think good and evil are totally real
00:45:10 ►
things objectively real no bullshit there’s good there’s fucking evil there’s evil forces
00:45:15 ►
there’s good forces and i think each one of our lives are a battle between our own individual
00:45:21 ►
soul and the forces of good and evil. I realize it’s a little simplistic,
00:45:26 ►
and we don’t have a whole lot of time to get into the nuances of it,
00:45:29 ►
but as far as a spiritual practice,
00:45:31 ►
I believe in right and wrong, good and bad, truth and fiction,
00:45:34 ►
and I want to align at least 51% of my life on the good side, for sure.
00:45:41 ►
Hi, thanks for sharing so much of your experience with us.
00:45:46 ►
I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your evolving sense of um the community that you’re reaching
00:45:52 ►
and how you interact with your audience and how that that sense of that has changed
00:45:57 ►
as you’ve developed as an artist over time
00:45:59 ►
yeah you know it’s um as an artist none of us exist in a vacuum and i think we all are kind of
00:46:08 ►
artists we’re constantly you know either either we’re aware or are unconsciously incorporating
00:46:15 ►
our environment like into our work um this is my this is my 15th burn in a row and um one of the
00:46:23 ►
reasons that i kind of get a whole team together and
00:46:27 ►
bring out all my most like precious like art and equipment and things is because
00:46:31 ►
i know i think after like the first five or six years you know burning man has been a really deep
00:46:37 ►
uh and important aspect of like the genesis of like my own like unfolding identity over the past like decade and a half like
00:46:47 ►
um and so i feel a like an amazing opportunity and kind of an obligation to try to give back
00:46:54 ►
as much as it’s given me and you know over the years the i think that the work that i’ve created
00:47:01 ►
it’s been it’s been very much like in response to the reflection of the community that I’ve created, it’s been very much like in response to the reflection
00:47:06 ►
of the community that I’ve been part of. It’s been very kind of co-created. I come out
00:47:11 ►
showing art at Burning Man gives me this amazing opportunity to display the work that I’ve created
00:47:17 ►
for the past year in front of probably the most open and vulnerable and receptive audiences i could ever find on the
00:47:26 ►
planet and observing that interaction and what people are responding to and what they’re not
00:47:33 ►
has definitely um you know like i’m i consider myself like i’m a bit of a plea a pleaser you know like i’m i don’t really subscribe to the whole like our true artist
00:47:48 ►
like only makes art for themselves and anything else is kind of selling out you know there’s all
00:47:54 ►
there’s obviously like a bit of truth to that but you can take it too far but i think if any art
00:47:59 ►
if any artist wants to be making art sustainably and they want to be able to
00:48:05 ►
kind of carve out some type of pattern that they are,
00:48:11 ►
all they need,
00:48:12 ►
all they have to do is make art to survive.
00:48:14 ►
You’re going to have to at some point come to some type of reckoning of what,
00:48:18 ►
at least like what kind of,
00:48:20 ►
what kind of positive or what kind of experience your art is giving people.
00:48:25 ►
And the vet, and if that experience is valuable
00:48:27 ►
or not.
00:48:29 ►
I definitely want to make sure that I’m creating
00:48:31 ►
art that has some type of a value
00:48:33 ►
of an experience to people
00:48:35 ►
and I think coming out to these
00:48:37 ►
events and festivals, it’s
00:48:39 ►
definitely gotten me
00:48:41 ►
I’d never be
00:48:43 ►
able to get this sort of one-on-one data mining
00:48:47 ►
when i’m like on the farm by myself and uh so the amount of things that i learn and the uh
00:48:53 ►
you know i think it takes you know a lot of the art in the on the subjects subject matters that
00:48:59 ►
i kind of go into like it’s not for everybody either and it takes a certain level of
00:49:06 ►
when someone really connects with a piece
00:49:09 ►
I try to acknowledge
00:49:11 ►
them for being in whatever place that they
00:49:13 ►
can really receive what I’m trying to
00:49:15 ►
give because it’s a two way
00:49:17 ►
the relationship between the artist and the audience
00:49:19 ►
like it needs to be
00:49:20 ►
it doesn’t need to be but I find
00:49:23 ►
it’s better when it’s something that’s symbiotic
00:49:25 ►
and that there’s a kind of a connection there you know because it’s all you know it’s you know
00:49:31 ►
it’s also an indication like i want to try to when i make a piece of art you know i want to try to go
00:49:37 ►
to like the deeper aspects i want to make something that has like an element of like truth and is
00:49:42 ►
honestly to it and i find that the deeper i can go into an individual truth actually the more i find that other people can
00:49:51 ►
identify and resonate with that and so based off seeing people’s reactions to it it gives me like
00:49:56 ►
another level of indication whether i was kind of on the right path or you know how honest i was
00:50:02 ►
being with myself and if that can connect with people
00:50:05 ►
so i would say like yeah the relationship is is important and it’s inseparable for sure and i give
00:50:11 ►
a lot of gratitude to my community and my friends and the people that have helped me you know i i’m
00:50:17 ►
not able to do this on my own either you know the team that i have and my partner Martha and all my droids like there, you know,
00:50:25 ►
I’d never be able to bring and share the things that I do without my awesome support team back
00:50:33 ►
home. It’s the part where we dance. All right. We got about five minutes left, so once this awesome art car
00:50:46 ►
makes it down the block, kind of think about
00:50:48 ►
if anybody has any, like,
00:50:50 ►
deep-burning questions, comments, concerns
00:50:53 ►
at the time.
00:50:56 ►
With your work with
00:50:57 ►
VR and interest in biology,
00:50:59 ►
do you have any, with your interest in VR
00:51:00 ►
and interest in, like, evolution and
00:51:02 ►
biology, do you have any thoughts as to how things like augmented reality
00:51:07 ►
might be changing us as a species over the long run?
00:51:12 ►
That’s a great question.
00:51:14 ►
Yeah.
00:51:15 ►
I think the things…
00:51:17 ►
I think the VR and the AR, it’s just right.
00:51:19 ►
It’s kind of infancy right now.
00:51:21 ►
But I think the opportunities that it has the potential
00:51:24 ►
to kind of unlock for
00:51:28 ►
us are like i’m very optimistic and excited about what what can come about i mean on kind of a
00:51:38 ►
fundamental element like with the world of you know at least kind of talking about the ar space
00:51:43 ►
and ar would be kind of hey some people call it AR or MR,
00:51:46 ►
like augmented reality or mixed reality,
00:51:48 ►
but that’s just like being able to wear a pair of glasses
00:51:51 ►
and having, you can look at the world,
00:51:54 ►
but it gives an artist or a creative
00:51:57 ►
or like an engineer the ability to overlay in real time
00:52:02 ►
like whatever theoretically kind of like world
00:52:04 ►
or things that you want to see.
00:52:06 ►
So from, and that, you know, there’s great implications for like information and maps and
00:52:11 ►
it’s kind of gives, it’s almost like giving like a superpower. But I think as an artist,
00:52:16 ►
as a two dimensional artist, um, you know, for most of my career, the, the, the opportunity,
00:52:24 ►
the boundaries of the opportunities I had to be creative were either some type of rectangle or a screen or a projector.
00:52:34 ►
We like to think that art is this…
00:52:36 ►
We have no limits as artists, but there’s a lot of limits.
00:52:40 ►
With the areas of augmented reality as an artist, every empty molecule of space then becomes a potential canvas to walk around and have three-dimensional holographic sculptures or paintings or interactive.
00:52:58 ►
It’s really going to widen the aperture of what is is possible um um which is great and there’s of course like a dark side
00:53:07 ►
that that same empty real estate is going to be taken up by advertisements and other things too
00:53:12 ►
so it’s not you know it’s not utopia um but i think you know i i can say like for myself as
00:53:19 ►
far as like art and technology that the tools that i’ve used, I’ve definitely, um, the, the relationship that I’ve
00:53:28 ►
had is there, they’re a fundamental aspect of like how I create. And I imagine like I dream in VR now
00:53:36 ►
or like I’ll dream in the different software packages that I use. Like it’s, it’s become
00:53:41 ►
like, it’s a, it’s a deeply embedded aspect of how my creative mind works and like solves different problems. And just from working in VR, like for the last like year and a half, like I can, you neuron-like huskies,
00:54:07 ►
these new neural pathways just started burning through my brain.
00:54:11 ►
I could feel these new possibilities open up
00:54:14 ►
that were just dormant or not accessible before.
00:54:19 ►
And that’s my hope through VR,
00:54:20 ►
that there will be experiences that can like provide us like measurable results of you know really expanding consciousness on a scientific level
00:54:32 ►
not just like a woo woo i trip i trip shrooms and now i’m like a higher dimensional being you know
00:54:38 ►
but like really like you know working with i think with with vr we also like we work with guys that
00:54:43 ►
work at like stanford where you’re we’re doing VR and, like, EEG.
00:54:47 ►
Like, we’re actually, you know, I’m able to be in VR and directly interact with my own brain waves.
00:54:52 ►
And, like, that’s just, like, cool stuff that’s never happened before, you know.
00:54:58 ►
And so me and my team are just really passionate about that and open to kind of exploring that in whatever way creates a
00:55:06 ►
beneficial and valuable and meaningful experience for people so that’s it cool all right guys
00:55:14 ►
thank you very much unfortunately i’ve got to get back to building a hologram but um that’s been a
00:55:20 ►
pleasure hope you guys all have a unbelievable burn and come check us out Wednesday night.
00:55:26 ►
We’ll be out there at 2 o’clock in G.
00:55:28 ►
Yeah.
00:55:31 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:55:33 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:55:38 ►
I was glad to hear Android mention virtual reality just now
00:55:42 ►
because, as it so happens, that is very much on my mind today.
00:55:47 ►
In past podcasts, I may have mentioned that one of our fellow salonners, Darren Bazil,
00:55:53 ►
had stopped by and loaned us the use of his wonderful Vibe VR hardware that runs Tilt Brush.
00:56:00 ►
Needless to say, my granddaughters loved it.
00:56:03 ►
And later this week, Darren is stopping by once again,
00:56:07 ►
and he said that he’ll let us borrow his VR setup for a few more days.
00:56:11 ►
Now, before I’d used this amazing technology myself,
00:56:15 ►
I was wondering about all the hype that Oculus Rift was getting.
00:56:19 ►
But now having experienced virtual reality firsthand,
00:56:23 ►
I’m here to tell you that should you ever get a chance to try this tech, you shouldn’t pass it up.
00:56:28 ►
The other day, my youngest granddaughter, who’s in fourth grade, told me that she wanted to study art so that one day she could be an art teacher in grammar school herself.
00:56:38 ►
For a nine-year-old, I’d say that she already has her act pretty much together.
00:56:43 ►
And you should see her and her older
00:56:45 ►
sister when they put that headset on and begin painting with light in three dimensions. Already
00:56:51 ►
they have taught themselves how to create 3D virtual art that, well, that us adults find not
00:56:56 ►
only interesting but beautiful as well. I can’t even imagine what great art they’ll be able to
00:57:02 ►
create in the years ahead. So now I’m going to turn them on to the work of Android Jones, just to let them know what
00:57:09 ►
they can do if they really want to eventually head in that direction.
00:57:13 ►
But you may be surprised to learn that, for me, one of the most important things I got
00:57:19 ►
from listening to Android Jones with you just now was the fact that he likes to be alone,
00:57:24 ►
even to the point of being
00:57:25 ►
hermit-like at times. And the reason that resonates so deeply with me is that, well, I feel the same
00:57:32 ►
way. And while that may seem kind of a non-issue with some people, I can assure you that my friends
00:57:38 ►
and family often find my desire to be alone, well, it makes me somewhat difficult to live with,
00:57:46 ►
my desire to be alone, well, it makes me somewhat difficult to live with, particularly when they’re in the mood for more of a social Lorenzo. I guess that what I’m saying is that after hearing that
00:57:52 ►
Android feels that way too, well, in some way that makes me feel a little less strange.
00:57:58 ►
Not that I want to be normal, of course. And now that we’ve spent so much time talking about the
00:58:04 ►
beautiful creations of Android Jones, I’m going to sign off and go back to watching another
00:58:09 ►
of the fascinating videos of his work. So for now this is Lorenzo signing off from
00:58:14 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well my friends. Thank you.