Immersion in cyberspace as a psychedelic experience.
Prematurely hyped during the cyberdelic 90s hysteria, virtual reality has actually progressed in amazing ways as an art form.
“Turn on, boot up, jack in”– Timothy Leary Virtual Reality
(VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) can alter our state of consciousness. At least this is the promise of cyberdelics that use external tech-mediated stimulation to evoke out of body experiences and trips. Although the field has been developing over the last 50 years, the recent proliferation of commercial VR and AR devices has driven new attempts to collide psychedelic and consciousness culture of the late-60s with the computer cultures of the 80s and 90s. Today immersion is fast becoming the key indicator of the efficacy of a virtual reality simulation. Developers are preoccupied with fooling your brain into feeling like you’re actually there. Cyberdelic technologies are fast emerging as an entirely new type of experience. Whilst psychedelics can be unpredictable, cyberdelics offer a curated experience for an altered state – one that can be explored in completely safe and controlled way. In the Cyberdelic space there is no such thing as a ‘bad trip’ – unless that’s what you’re looking for? How far can we go using these technologies and techniques to create non-ordinary states of consciousness? How can the sensorimotor data we receive from the outside world affect our brain?
Is the VR headset the LSD of the new millennium?
Text about Cyberdelics : Virtual Futures Conferences
The animations on this page can be viewed with various VR headsets.
