Tag Archives: Science

Demystifying the psychedelic experience

Marta Kaczmarczyk is an expert in persuasive science and technology. She is interested in demystifying the psychedelic experience and creating a scientific framework that would be more accessible to the Western mind and more relevant than the shamanic or new age framework which is popular in the psychedelic community. She is a co-founder and a coordinator of Psychedelic Society of the Netherlands; a non-profit organization focused on advocating a safe use of psychedelic substances.

How a trippy 1980s video effect might help to explain consciousness

Robert Pepperell is an interdisciplinary researcher who works between art, science, and philosophy. He has published research in the fields of art history and theory, neuroscience, perceptual psychology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. He current leads FovoLab (www.fovography.com), where methods from art and science are combined to investigate the nature of visual experience and how it can be represented.

How the power of art can help scientists like me understand the experience of schizophrenia

Associate professor and Royal Society Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford.

“My research aims to understand how individual genes impact on the complex brain functions that are altered in psychiatric disorders. I believe that understanding these links will help to explain why some people respond well to treatments, whilst others do not, and will ultimately lead to new and improved therapies.”

Superposition

Steve Sangapore is a contemporary oil painter based in Boston, MA. Using vastly different stylistic approaches with various series’, his work can be described as an amalgamation of realism, surrealism and abstraction with thematic focuses on the human condition.

“Displaying a disciplined technique and great attention to detail, the style of my work blurs the lines between contemporary realism, surrealism and pure abstraction – often in a single painting. Through these modes of technical execution, a deep exploration into aspects of the human condition resonate throughout the work by mode of scientific archetypes and philosophical elements.”

Ecstasis

Fine artist Luciana Haill works with stroboscopic lighting & brainwaves (EEG signal) exploring consciousness & expressing the results through digital media, performance, sound & drawings.
Her artworks focus on liminal states of consciousness, sleep – more specifically the discrete states of Lucid Dreaming (the awareness within a dream & the ability to take control) & ‘Hypnagogia’ which is an inspirational state more commonly experienced at the onset of sleep & day-dreaming. She investigates the neural correlates & reveals these to the audience as changes in textured soundscapes & data visualisations. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Brighton University for the Digital Media Art MA.

Becoming somebody else

Joshua Burraway is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection between social and political theory, cultural phenomenology, addiction medicine, and psychiatry. He is interested in how historical and structural forces shape different modes of subjectivity, in particular with regards to altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive chemicals among homeless substance-users.

Philosophy and Psychedelics

Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H is an Anglo-Scandinavian philosopher of mind who specializes in the thought of Whitehead and Nietzsche, and in fields pertaining to panpsychism and altered states of sentience. In the words of futurist, philosopher and pop star Alexander Bard: ‘One of our favourite contemporary philosophers, Peter Sjöstedt-H…think a psychedelic Nietzsche’.

The Maths of Life and Death

Dr Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath. His job consists of taking real-world phenomena and uncovering the mathematical truths that lie behind them. He extracts the common patterns that underlie these processes and communicates them. He works in applications as diverse as embryonic disease, the patterns on eggshells and the devastating swarming of locust plagues – teasing out the mathematical connections in the process.

Missing Mass

Experimenting with ideas of time, space and physicality, Carey Young’s body of artistic work explores law as a separate kind of ‘reality’, one with its own inherent subjectivities and points of breakdown.

‘Missing Mass’ (2010) is a sculptural work created with the scientific guidance of Prof. Malcolm Fairbairn, an astrophysicist based at King’s College London and is exhibited at the Science Gallery, London exhibition ‘Dark Matter: 95% of the Universe is missing’.