The screening includes the experimental documentary True Hallucinations, directed by Péter Bergmann based on Terence McKenna’s book Journey to La Chorerra. The film details his brother's journey to Putumayo and the experiments that ensued, blending 90s computational aesthetics with found footage of McKenna and his brother, alongside McKenna’s famously hypnotic oration. This complex historical work forms the basis for understanding the problematic, extractive, Western-centric botanical objective to discover and sail the psychonautical seas of inner consciousness.

From here we see more contemporary takes on the points raised (or ignored) in McKenna’s lifework: Ursula Biemann’s exploration of intelligence in nature from both shamanic and scientific perspectives and Patricia Dominguez’s enquiry into experimental ethnobotany and organic connection technologies that expand the perception of the vegetal and the spiritual world.  Looking towards an embodied approach of psychedelics in medicine and mental health, Andrea Khora visualises the effects of 10mg of ketamine inserted intravenously, creating hallucinogenic and otherworldly images. Suzanne Triester approaches non-colonialist plans towards a techno-spiritual imaginary of alternative visions of survival on earth via a body of work titled Technoshamanism. This sees an expansion and redefinition of technology that is engineered and redirected in new ways for global positive futures away from mainstream economic, corporate and governmental forces. Rebeca Romero’s Voyager also questions the legitimacy of the notion of  “discovery” and proposes a reassessment of dominant notions of intelligence, technology, and knowledge. 

Péter Bergmann is a Hungarian electronic music artist from Budapest, who since 2010 has produced seven full studio albums of uplifting songs. In the ten years between 2012 and 2022 he has created over five hundred videos related to the late ethnobotanist and philosopher Terence McKenna and published them on his YouTube channel. In 2014 Peter released his first documentary about the ideas of Terence McKenna titled "The Transcendental Object At The End Of Time", which encompasses McKenna's most famous ideas and insights. However a story was yet to be told, McKenna's most famous true story of venturing into the Amazon rainforest in Colombia to find an elusive psychedelic substance called oo-koo-hay, which turned into a life changing adventure thanks to an abundance of psilocybin mushrooms at the remote location he and his friends found themselves in. The experimental documentary "Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations" was released in 2016.

Thanks to some meme magic in the form of fake movie posters, a rumor was launched which was written about in major news outlets all over the world, that Jim Carrey was about to star as Terence McKenna in the live action version of the story. That never happened but the documentary has reached millions of viewers.

Instagram @wpahp

Andrea Khôra is an artist and researcher based in London. Her practice seeks to comprehend the malleability of reality on personal and societal scales. As a PhD researcher in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, her practice-led project New Sight: The Alchemy of Surveillance into Resistance in Near Future Worlds looks at the history of surveillance, specifically focusing on the mining of occult knowledge systems by the CIA in the cold war as well as the correlation between 1960s-1970s utopian countercultures and the rise of Surveillance Capitalism. Through the uncovering of systems and correlations, she is creating a speculative proposition for the future reclamation of personal and community agency through the creation of sculpture, writing, and performance.

Instagram @andrea_khora

Patricia Domínguez is an artist, educator and earth defender based in Puchuncaví, Chile. She is the founder of Studio Vegetalista, an experimental platform for ethnobotanical research based in Chile.

Bringing together experimental research on ethnobotany, healing practices and the corporatization of wellbeing, her practice focuses on challenging the increasingly globalized corporate cosmologies that are emerging, by tracing the precarious relationships between species that are contextualized the current digitization of the living. Her installations take the form sculptures, videos and publications which are designed to exorcise the effects of late capitalism and ecological destruction in the physical and social body, while exploring the emancipatory potential of artistic imagination as a form of psychic emancipation and as a path of healing our colonial trauma.

Rebeca Romero is an interdisciplinary artist born in Peru and based in London.

Through a range of media that includes sculpture, ceramics, textiles, sound, performance and video, she explores concepts of diasporic identity, truth, fiction, and their relationship to the digital age.

Often combining Pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning and printing technologies and materials ranging from clay to plastic, her works swing drastically between the past and an alternate future. Examining the story-telling potential of artefacts, Romero looks into the intervention of the digital archive as a history-making technique. Online museum archives become an excavation ground for the collection of data that she later recontextualizes, reassembles and re-presents.

With a focus on new materialities, processes of production and collaboration between artist and machine, her work seeks to question ideas and practices of representation, appropriation and authorship. The recent inclusion of AI image generators into her work proposes a further re-understanding of hegemonic notions of intelligence, technology and knowledge.

Instagram @romero.beca

Suzanne Treister (b.1958 London UK) studied at St Martin's School of Art, London (1978-1981) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-1982) based in London having lived in Australia, New York and Berlin. Initially recognized in the 1980s as a painter, she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Utilising various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour, Treister has evolved a large body of work which engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military or paranormal. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.

Ursula Biemann is an artist, author, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water.

In her multi-layered videos, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, SF poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including experimental video, interview, text, performance, photography, cartography, props and materials, which converge in formalized spatial installations. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects.

Instagram @ursulabiemann1