I'm currently looking at doing a PhD (in a QLD University) in exploring objective psychedelic visual law, where artists are the primary tool used in interpreting the phenomena. I feel like certain studies (especially Dr. Rick Strassman) has focused too primarily on linguistic studies and are constantly falling short at interpreting what is primarily a visual phenomena.

Many other artists are inspired by this challenge, Pablo Amaringo, Alex Grey, Anthony Ausgang, Paul Laffoley, Jim Woodring - but basically fall into traditionalist "still frame" techniques of interpreting these phenomena. They paint or draw a single image from their recollection of the experience as oppose to creating a setting in which the same experience can occur to the viewer. They may draw a portal in the head opening up, but this is only creating a memory of a previous experience, that we the "viewer" cannot enter into.

There is also a large amount of fractal art available which contains no novelty since it is based off a limited, controlled logic. Novelty, or the constant evolution and progression of visions rather it being like a taped recording - is the ultimate excitation of psychedelic phenomena.
This is much the same with sacred geometry, or hypertension archetypal symbols, crop circles, mathematically encoded, higher evolved symbology. All of these are confined to the "gold" being in the "code" behind the symbol. Rather than the actual thing your looking at.

Something much weirder occurs on tryptamine excursions - there is a certain visual law that the world holds true too. Each experience may be vastly different, but there are scientific visual rules in which they are governed by.

There are many difficulties in trying to formalize an approach to this topic, and how to actually create results over a 4 year period - without simply writing them off as deviantArtists. Spice travelers are explorers in every sense of the word, and one area that needs to be focused on is the analysis of what the place looks like through its main communication tool.

I am really interested in anyone who can post ideas on this topic, I am looking for as insane as Gracie and Zarkov, to Krums Zap! comics, or scientific studies. But please be detailed I am just too interested!


The study would involve in depth analysis of hundreds of previous scientific psychedelic visual studies such as "low-level & high-level motion detection in psilocybin studies", the visual analysis of "similarity of technique" over hundreds of online artists, in-depth interviews with leading psychedelic artists (if all goes well) particularly on their difficulties in expressing the visions through classical artistic techniques, and the presentation of both key current unexplored areas (in terms of visual technique) and the most categorically depictive of the psychedelic experience so far.


But basically I am really looking for those techniques that artists are using to create an increased visceral reaction.

Some techniques I have managed to understand are :
- "hyperawareness" where the eye becomes overloaded with individual things that are not repeated.
- "removal of ideology" - things do not look like how we usually see them (utensils for a function). A shirt looks suddenly similar to ripples in water, or a flat color, or a face. It is this that I am most interested in - in how the mind creates and organizes the scene in front as a bunch of specific things, when really those functions are projected onto it.
- Also we start to become aware of our eyes looking out at the scene in front of us - we realize that everything appears only on a film strip, or frames that create the impression of depth - however we can never see past this "flattening" of the world in front of us. Looking up to a night sky we are looking at a depth to infinity, but it looks no deeper than behind closed eyelids. We, our "awareness" inside of us, is just as far away from the eyes, as we are from the sky.

www.liamkey.com

That's amazing! What did you major in?

I haven't found a willing enough university yet, but I have a Bachelor of Arts Film and Animation and Master of Arts Interactive and Visual Design.