A new wave of psychedelic art

The new wave goes beyond day-glo cliches to explore the tensions within the renaissance

A still from Trust The Medicine (2023) by Helen Knowles

If this is a psychedelic renaissance, where is all the art?

Previous psychedelic waves were artistic movements as much as scientific and medical ones – think of the Sixties counterculture or the acid house movement of the late 80s. But the psychedelic renaissance of the 2020s has been much more starch and medicalized, and much less of a cultural movement. Think of your favourite psychedelic-inspired art works of the last ten years…it’s not a long list.

But there is interesting art work being created out of the renaissance, and this week we’ll explore the work of two artists working in the UK – Helen Knowles and Andrea Khora. Neither of them make the typical sort of ‘visionary art’ one associates with psychedelics. Instead, they’re using ‘artistic research’ to critically reflect on the tensions within the medical, spiritual and capitalist tendencies in the movement.

Andrea Khora grew up in the fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventist church, which she left when she was 17. She says:

I feel like that laid the foundation for my art practice, because it showed me the malleability of reality through your own belief structures. I grew up with religious experience, like felt bodily transcendent experience, built into consensual reality. And then I  went to the opposite view - everything's dead, the world is dead. And I stayed in that materialist atheism until I was 21, and took LSD for the first time.

She then had a period of enthusiastic LSD-taking. ‘My boyfriend at the time was connected to MAPS, so we were getting really good drugs. And I overdid it and started getting bad panic attacks. I didn't do psychedelics for another 12 years or so.’

In 2019 she started a PhD in art at Goldsmith’s. Her PhD initially explored the CIA’s Project Stargate and occult techniques of surveillance, but in 2020, she started exploring the psychedelic renaissance, after personal experience of ketamine therapy. She tells me:

In 2020, I was having a tough time and my aunt basically flew me home to the US and put me into this intensive ketamine therapy. And it helped a lot, it really made a huge difference. Having been studying psychedelic culture of the 1960s, suddenly I was inside it, and realized, wow this is a whole industry and culture happening now, I need to shift my PhD to study this.

This led to the first piece created for her PhD – Bolus – which uses AI-generated video to re-create her experiences receiving ketamine infusions in an NHS hospital in Oxford. The rather sterile world of an NHS ward is transformed, in her work, into some sort of NHS hyperspace of endless blue curtains and sanitized corridors. It’s an interesting glimpse into a future where people are being given mind-altering drugs not in boujie retreat centres but the antiseptic world of NHS wards.

She then started exploring deeper into the world of the psychedelic renaissance. She travelled to Psychedelic Science, the 13,000-person conference hosted by MAPS / Lykos in Denver last June. She experienced its bizarre mash-up of the capitalist, the evangelical and the pharmacological:

I think the openness of giving away or selling drugs on the expo floor was something that still stands out in my mind as one of the weirdest parts of PS23. You sort of had to be "in the know" or buy a tee-shirt to be "gifted"  mushroom chocolate with it, but having that happen within the context of a conference was quite disorienting!

At the conference, she signed up for a five-hour ‘ketamine meditation’ retreat at a suburban home in Denver, for around $250.

They moved all the furniture out from the living room and created a circle of sleeping pads with blankets and the classic Mindfold eye mask -- then did meditation and breathing while taking each one of us aside with the nurse to do intake in their home office. It was using intramuscular injection, and we all sat with our syringes and meditated with them and infused them with our intentions before the nurse injected us. I actually felt very well held by the facilitators. The IM injection comes on much stronger than my usual IV Ketamine, and they comforted me when I felt a bit frightened on the come up. I remember having a hallucination that I was a little kid with my mom, hiding in her big skirt, then it transformed into a circus tent. While the participants were still under, they started putting together snacks and cooking for us -- this is really prominent in my memory because they baked some frozen pizza from Whole Foods, which was a very strange smell to encounter while in ketamine space! 

She also signed up for a cacao ceremony at a Denver psychedelic church, Ceremonia, which was started by a real estate entrepreneur, Austin Mao, who got into psychedelics in 2020. Mao launched his own church, which offers three-day mushroom retreats plus coaching for $40,000. Andrea says the ‘church’ is in an mansion transformed into a retreat space, with cushions everywhere, a hot tub and sauna, and a stream running through the rooms.

While at Psychedelic Science she went to a recruitment event for the Integrative Psychiatry Institute’s psychedelic-therapy training course, called Rapture.

Participants gathered in a darkened ballroom in the Denver Performing Arts Centre. A man walked round offering psilocybin edibles (Andrea wasn’t sure if he worked for IPI or not). Then, as the music built up, they were told from the stage:

Rapture is about joy, bliss, connection. Give me a hell yeah if you want that. If you are in this room tonight, you are an extraordinary human being. See the people around you, and feel your greatness. Feel that you are extraordinary among the extraordinary. Share your voice, your voice is needed in this world. If you know you came here to leave this planet better than you found it, I want to hear a hell yeah!

In the audience, in front of Andrea’s camera, you can see an excited David Bronner, the millionaire who more than anyone else has funded the psychedelic renaissance, shouting ‘hell yeah!’ and punching the air (1.37 mins into the video). It’s an extraordinary scene – this is a recruitment event for therapy-training but looks exactly like a psychedelic church / cult. A video of it made it into the exhibition Andrea eventually made reflecting on the psychedelic renaissance:

She called her own latest work Rapture. It’s showing at the Blessed Foundation in the Bacon Factory in London until the 27th of June (open Tues - Thurs 3-6pm). Rapture centres on a video of an interview between two fictional characters - a psychedelic podcaster, Kate Thompson, host of Mystical Misadventures, and Ethan Grant, CEO of a company called TranscendX, both played by actors for the video.

TranscendX is a (fictional) psychedelic church, a bouji retreat company, and a synthetic-psychedelic biotech firm. It’s somewhere between a start-up and a cult, and Ethan is somewhere between an ecstatic visionary and (possibly) an SBF-style fraud. Kate represents, perhaps, Andrea’s own mixed feelings about the psychedelic renaissance – on the one hand, she enjoys psychedelics and has been helped by ketamine therapy, on the other she voices the critical concerns of researchers like Nese Devenot about the potential for abuse, commodification and cultural appropriation.

Devenot has written about how psychedelics and AI can be engines of inequality-amplification. Andrea sees problems and potentials in both technologies, and she uses AI technology like Runway to create interesting and disturbing effects in her art. She ran thousands of clips from her video of the interview through Runway to create these moments when Ethan and Kate slip into other realities, sometimes rapturous, other times eery, alien or hellish. At one point, Ethan talks about the entities he encountered in an ayahuasca trip, and how everything TranscendX has built comes from their ‘injection’ of love into him. And you wonder…who is he working for?

All this in a 20-minute work. This is the value of the arts - they can condense all this nuance and complexity into an interesting and affective work far better than a journal article or, for that matter, a blog post.

Trust The Medicine

The second artist whose work I want to highlight, Helen Knowles, is also doing a PhD in art (hers is as Northumbria University), and is also using the methods of ‘artistic research’ and AI art to explore the creative tension between the medicalized, the animist and the capitalist within the psychedelic renaissance.

Helen’s PhD explores humans’ relationships with non-human carers. She tells me:

I've been making work about the social implications of technology since around 2012. In 2015, I made a work called The trial of Super Debt Hunter Bot, where I put an algorithm on trial. I was at Goldsmith’s at the time, and there were lots of conversations about algorithmic capitalism and surveillance capitalism. That work was about a fictitious bot that tracked down student debt, and I was interested in the question, if an algorithm caused harm who was to blame – the coder, the company or the algorithm? It got me interested in how we relate to the non-human. I arranged real lawyers to prosecute and defend an algorithm in Southwark Crown Court with a real jury, as a 45-minute installation. 

A few years later, Helen drank ayahuasca for the first, and had a powerful experience of entity encounters.

I started thinking about about the sentience or potential consciousness of technology, and also of plant spirits. That's where I came up with the idea for the PhD, which is looking at the cosmologies that inform these tools.

Her PhD involves three works exploring our relationship with non-human carers – one will focus on a conversation between a botanist and a Colombian shaman about whether plants are sentient and how to treat them; another will explore AI medicine and how a coder relates to the algorithm she creates; and a third is called Trust the Medicine, and grew out of Helen’s work as artist-in-residence at the Kings College London psychedelic medicine lab.

The KCL psychedelic lab is doing trials of psilocybin, 5-meo-DMT, DMT and other psychedelics under clinical settings. Helen met the team of psychiatrists and therapists, witnessed the mechanism of a clinical trial, and also attended the KCL / Maudsley integration groups, where people who’ve taken psychedelics get the chance to discuss their experiences with others.

She was struck by how, in the integration groups, people often talked about encountering entities during their trips, but this wasn’t mentioned much within the scientific paradigm of the clinic (although some of the lab workers had their own entity encounters in ayahuasca retreats). She did however notice that one of the KCL therapists would say ‘trust the medicine’ – this struck her as an interesting sort of animist comment about a synthetic chemical. 

Helen ended up organizing and filming an integration group session, which was held in a hotel in Southwark, built on the site of a building where the artist William Blake had once lived. ‘He was renowned for connecting with and drawing entities’, she says, and in fact Blake drew his famous entity encounter ‘the Flea’, while living there. 

She filmed participants with a 360 camera, talking about their unusual experiences on psychedelics – one participant discussed meeting and interacting with entities while on DMT, another spoke about visualizing a tree growing and expanding during a ceremony. 

She then installed the two 180-degree perspectives of the integration group film in the round. She premiered the work at the Science Gallery in London in December 2023. Over the course of a day, audiences interacted with the artwork’s AI-generated psychedelic entities through ChatGPT on iPads, having conversations which were then analysed by sentiment analysis that informed the entities’ behaviour, making them more or less trusting, active / static, friendly / wary, big / small, and so on. 

Below is a clip from the work, where one participant, Christina, is talking about her encounter with entities, who healed her voice when doctors said she required an operation on her vocal cords.

Next week (or possibly the week after), I’m going to write about a very different part of the psychedelic / art nexus - the NFT market.

After the paywall, what are people’s favourite psychedelic-inspired art works from the last 15 years of the psychedelic renaissance? I asked my followers and got 10 great recommendations.