CASTING OUT THE SELF (VERSION 2.0) Brighton Digital Festival & British Science Festival, Brighton, UK, 2017
Co-commissioned by the British Science Festival and the Brighton Digital Festival, Casting Out The Self is an immersive installation that forms part of the broader project Casting Out The Self: a work in progress. The project is inspired by the artist’s experiences with the hallucinogenic drug Dimethyltrptamine (DMT – the active ingredient in ayahuasca) and extends the investigations of altered states of consciousness and alternative realities that were begun in A Place Beneath The Surface and continued in The Conversation and Under The Influence.
“I equated my DMT experience to being inside a computer, so when I originally started the project in 2015 I was looking for ways to allude to the transfer from our world (analogue) into the psychedelic (digital). For the Brighton commission, I had clear ideas and feelings I wanted to convey, of being inside a render, of witnessing infinite, yet dreamlike, sharpness; a window into a hallucination of kinds. The installation was conceived as a single occupancy, sound proofed room, containing speakers and a screen. I translated hexagonal features I came across in ceremonial structures into the design, the interior of which was white, and illuminated by RGB LEDs set into an infinity ceiling. I took details from my renders and incorporated these into the build too, parquet flooring, and the cans of Canowater which the structure sits upon. The CGI animation invokes a journey through a hyper-real space in which staccato jump-cuts fracture objects into constituent parts, panning shots shift abruptly between a smooth apparently human contemplation of the scene to a more staccato perhaps machinic gaze, and slow meditative close-ups reveal the intricate details of objects from shamanic rituals.”
//// Interactive 360 panorama derived from photographic documentation of the installation