Before this site goes live, I have to ping this entry into the mix of my blog.
It has been about twenty seven years since the events which inspired the project that I’m now working on. In this light, I feel in some way that I’m paying a debt to a younger version of myself who was either brave or foolhardy enough to embark on the kinds of activities which left such a potent residual mark on my life.
When I was twenty three I did a lot of personal experimentation on myself, particularly with a persuasion towards psychedelics. There’s a line of thought that I heard fourth-hand from the late Alan Watts who’d read a great deal of the late Aleister Crowley, as communicated to the late Robert Anton Wilson about recognising the causal events of why one finds oneself leaning towards certain situations. Wilson explained this kind of thinking as (to paraphrase) understanding the origins of actions, tastes and thoughts.I can only give my own example to clarify this:
Q: Why did I take a heap of psilocybin mushrooms in a location in Somerset during 1994?
A: 1) Because I’d experimented with various psychedelics before, because 2) It was part of a thing to do with 90s youth culture and 3) A band I was really into advocated intelligent psychedelic experimentation and 4) I was already primed to venture into these territories because I’d had a life-long affinity with dreaming, which 5) is pertinent because my earliest memory of being a sentient human being was the memory of a dream.
I can’t rewind any further back than that, but if you follow the sequence from five to one, it makes its own kind of fuzzy logic sense.
Once you’ve seen how a magician pulls a rabbit from an empty hat, you can never un-see how the trick is pulled. The same can be said for being post-psychedelic, the world returns to base reality but you can never forget what you saw on the other side. I approach my one and only half-century of life and even though my days of somewhat reckless self-experimentation are receding into the distance of memory imprints past, I remain haunted by what I’d seen and experienced. The site that I’ve created and the project which is the focal point, is a ghost from the past which continues to haunt me.
This isn’t to say that the ghosts are unwelcome. Life is full of baggage from times gone, but I’m grateful that some of this baggage has stuck with me, because I think it is colourful and interesting, most of all, it is mine.
During 1996, when the internet had just sat up and began to be its own entity, I was working for a telecommunications business called Talking Pages. It seemed pretty high-tech at the time. rather than looking through pages of a yellow phone book for business numbers, you could just ring a person like me and ask for the number of what you wanted and I would give it to you. The job sucked, but paid ok, so I volunteered to do the graveyard shift as the pay was better and I wasn’t chained to the phone every minute of the shift. It provided me with the affordance of bringing in my drawing materials and sit at a desk throughout the night doing artwork, occasionally being bothered by a phone call asking for taxi numbers, 24 Hr kebab vendors or Elvis fan clubs.
I mention it here as this was around the time that my first ghost manifested. You see, I had avoided and agonised over how to even begin to draw what I’d seen on that night in 1994 and it was during those long night shifts that I decided to tackle the answer, so I drew the image at the header of this blog entry.
It took around thirty five hours to draw from start to finish. At that point, I had considered it the best illustration I’d ever produced. It accurately portrayed in ink and pencil, what I’d seen on that night whilst intoxicated with Psilocybin mushrooms.
It was only a few years after exorcising that ghost that I began to realise that the spirit invoked by the mushrooms had not been laid to rest. This was largely because I knew in my heart and mind that the drawing was a reflection, yet at the same time, it was just a drawing. While it conveyed a visual reference, it sorely lacked the hyperreal fidelity of what I’d seen. For a start, each pole of this scene was experienced as a kind of living glass-like substance, each pole was animated with shifting expressions, the glass had a form of iridescent neon gas shifting through the structure. The infinite grid made sounds, little fireworks of colour popped out of the mouths as it chirped electronic sounding bleeps and linguistic noises. Eventually, the noises sounded like language until my mind tuned into it and I could understand what was being said.
None of which was accurately communicated by my black, white and grey illustration.
When the new millennium kicked-off, I was one of the first of my peers to buy a PC and go online. At the same time, I’d downloaded my first photo editing software and had begun to embrace new tools for my artistry. The pens and pencils rapidly became relics of a bygone era where sitting down to draw something seemed so passé. I embraced the new and never looked back. Technology had given me the keys to pull the contents of my mind out of the skull and onto the screen in ways which drawing them never seemed to satisfy. I thought about The Psychehedron and how to recreate it with these newfound tools.
I soon realised that my 3GB ram, Windows 95, Pentium computer wasn’t up to the job. This was clear when I at first tried to model the image using VRML software using the unfortunately titled Spazz 3D. The output was far from satisfying. I briefly tried to use 3D studio Max but there was no Youtube, there was very little in the way of accessible tutorials, the software seemed overly complicated and impenetrable, so I gave up and did easier art instead.
The Psychehedron never left my mind, it was always an image which floated around somewhere in the realm of ‘art that I really want to try and do justice to when the time is right’ I suspect that every single artist knows this particular itch. They never go away until you eventually succumb to scratching them.
It is now 2021, 2022 is fast approaching. My life has changed so much, I’ve mostly grown up, got married, raised a child, found a career, haven’t jumped off any psychedelic cliffs for a long time, but now, as much to my surprise as anyone else’s, I have found myself doing a university degree, which turned out to be the antidote for another itch that I’ve been gagging to scratch since I realised that I royally f*****d up my education in my late teens.
My subject of choice, an MA in Virtual and Extended Reality Storytelling seemed to be a perfect fit for the kind of person that I am. I’d been patiently waiting for Virtual Reality technology to manifest into something affordable and meaningful since I’s sat down and watched Lawnmower Man during 1992. The seeds of where I find myself today were planted then and cross-pollinated by the late Terence McKenna (another psychedelic enthusiast) who waxed lyrical about the potential for VR to ‘turn the imagination inside out.‘
I find myself in a dystopian, pre-apocalyptic world where there appears to be a neck and neck race between the best of what humanity can achieve and the worst. I might be more cynical and jaded than my twenty three year old self was, but part of me remains optimistic about what VR can bring to the table for communicators and creatives.
When my final semester of the degree became ‘a thing’, my mind battled between two ideas for what to do with the final project. This quickly whittled down to one idea which I tendered to my course leaders as a proposal. While the idea had its own merits and felt close to my creative heart, something was said which caused me to doubt whether I was adequately skilled or ready enough to tackle the project that I had in mind. I was left with less than a day to reconsider my proposal, I found myself not reverting to the first idea, but sidestepping to The Psychehedron as a VR experience. It was as if that old image, having simmered for nearly three decades saw an opportunity to manifest, then shot to the front of my mind to be the first in line for contingency measures.
Within that limited window of opportunity to pull a u-turn, I quickly drafted a new project proposal and presented to my tutors. The comedy of the situation wasn’t entirely lost on me, after all, I was suggesting that my final ‘big project’ should be a virtual reality simulation recreating an episode where I had temporarily lost my senses on magic mushrooms. The punchline of this apparent pratfall was that they consented with me to go ahead. It is entirely possible that they were suffering some kind of shell-shock as my project pivot happened on the morning when they were expecting me to press on with my thinking about the first proposal.
So, you the reader and myself, the creator find ourselves now. It’s mid October, I’m just past the halfway point of final project work. You are possibly deserving some kind of reward for reading this far. This website is representative of a journey which started six weeks ago, but as you’ll now appreciate has been brewing for a very long time.
My VR project has a story to tell and I intend to tell it well. During 2002, I made efforts to convey my experience to a wider, global community of people who’d understand, or at least appreciate the nature of what happened to me. I posted a written account on a site called Erowid.Org and have since kept an eye on the readership of that article. In 2021, that little missive has almost received 47,000 views. I’ve seen it referenced in academic research papers and journals, it has inspired artworks, music and 8bit computer games. I feel now it is time to reclaim The Psychehedron and do the original vision some justice. I’m not entirely convinced that the technology of 2021 is quite up to the job, but it is still the best it has ever been, so therefore it is much closer to being able to allow me to turn my mind inside out for people to experience. I have also developed the necessary software skills in order to make this seem viable.
I am duty-bound to use this blog to record my process and progress, as this incarnation of The Psychehedron bridges the gap between real and virtual, between thought and manifestation. If you own a VR headset and a PC, watch this space if you are interested in experiencing something close to what I saw. If you don’t have a VR headset and a PC capable of delivering PCVR, then you might as well pop over to this link to get a better idea of what all this fuss is about.
https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=15902
(Note: The original title was ‘The Psychohedron’. Over the following decades, I began to wonder if my inner ears had misheard the title that the god-like entity had spoken. I personally thought that altering the O to an E made more sense and felt ‘right’. A literal translation of this hybrid word from ancient Greek to modern English is ‘The Mind-shape’.
