Background

Following the success of 2024’s Sounding Psychedelia, my team are delighted to be continuing our collaboration with the Mahindra Humanities Center as part of their study ofPsychedelics in Society and Culture.

For our 2026 PISC project, my team will combine the catalyzing power of psychedelic aesthetics using a combination of immersive media technology and consciousness-altering performance techniques drawn from the ritual traditions associated with Daojiao (Taoism) and other shamanic/animistic practices from our ancestral traditions. This represents a long-overdue recognition of a fascinating but uncomfortable truth, on which ancient wisdom and cutting edge science now unequivocally agree:

Recent research on Psychedelics suggests that some of their therapeutic power may derive from their ability to disrupt certain habits of thought associated with mental health challenges. They teach the user to approach the world with fresh, open senses, instead of defaulting to assumptions and projections about reality based on prior experience. Some studies correlate this experience with a reduction of activity in the brain’s Default Mode Network.

The world that we perceive with our senses is not “real” in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a complex system of ideas and projections created by our sensory systems, based on the input of energy that radiates and flows from a more complex, mysterious reality.

Plato’s allegory of the cave represents an intuitive understanding of this, while behavioral neuroscience has made huge advances in parsing the limitations of sensation, and the role of generative fill in the process of everyday perception.

Psychedelics interrupt this process, as do the ritual arts practiced in animistic and shamanistic cultures.

In both cases, you may perceive unusual or impossible things. Some of these are illusions, hallucinations, or figments of the imagination.

Others are aspects of the Spirit World, and they are real

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Project Two