MYCO-COSMOS - Paul Stamets and Laraaji

MYCO Cosmos - A Journey Through Matter and Space

A guided exploration of biology, space travel and the interconnected universe led by famed mycologist Paul Stamets, with live accompaniment by new age musical legend Laraaji, which took place Nov. 4, 2017, at Los Angeles State Historic Park. Conceived and produced as part of an ongoing mycelial exploration between Fathomers, an LA-based creative research institute, and artist Phil Ross.

The Nature of Ayahuasca (2019)

Ayahausca is a traditional plant medicine from the Amazon used to treat a variety of physical and psychology illnesses and conditions. This film explores the use of the Ayahausca as a holistic medicine, challenging stigmas around its use and helping people become more conscious and ethical consumers of the plant if that's the path they choose.

With BRION GYSIN in Paris - from Genesis P-Orridge's lost UK-archive

Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was an english painter, sound poet, and writer of the Beat generation who lived right across Museum Pompidou, in Paris, when UK-Avantgarde artist and Industrial music founder Genesis P-Orridge visited his mentor.

Gysin is best known for his discovery of the 'Cut-up'-technique, used by his friend and collegue, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville Gysin invented the Dreamachine - a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed - as a proto-type of modern, electronic mind- or brain-machines.

In this raw documentary Genesis and Gysin talk about the alchemy of making a good tea, the rhizomatic character of their music and art … while listening to Throbbing Gristle and testing and filming the Dreamachine.

Source/Archive: 

Genesis P-Orridge by courtesy of Boris Hiesserer (c) Pyromania Arts Foundation 

John C. Lilly: Interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove (1998) • We are the INTERMORPHS

Thinking Allowed Also emerging from the discursive cradle of the counterculture, John C. Lilly worked as a neuroscientist, focusing on interspecies communication, specifically dolphins, before expanding his intellectual scope to become a consciousness researcher. Much of his work on human-nonhuman communication would serve as the basis for his self-experiments over the course of the ’70s with a systematic mapping of states of consciousness.

Through a series of books—part documentation, part mysticism, part autobiography—Lilly would attempt to chart psychic topographies within “quantitative systems of mind-consciousness.” His methods were notorious, involving extreme dosages of psychoactive substances such as LSD, DMT, PCP, and ketamine, as well as his development of the sensory isolation tank. In fact, Lilly’s lab experiments were one of the inspirations for the 1980 science fiction horror film Altered States. Picking up on the argument proposed in the previous video, Lilly’s conclusions are decidedly cosmo-informatic: the human mind is a “biocomputer” which can, through meditative techniques and self-experimentation, be reprogrammed to its optimal operational capacity.

In many ways Lilly exhibits the merging of the “scientific” (objective) with the “mystical” (subjective) within the noopolitical turn, as the modern glorification of “scientific truth” finds itself reappropriated within the capitalist imagination as pseudo-scientific speculation. Of note in this interview is Lilly’s belief in ECCO—the Earth Coincidence Control Office—an extraterrestrial cosmic agency, “one of God’s field offices,” responsible for programming long-term coincidences (that is, history) on planet earth.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1999) developed the term Noopolitik as a political strategy focusing on the use, and denial thereof, of information. The term, reminiscent to Realpolitik, was informed to establish a policy, that of “Being in Athena’s camp”, in the sense that the practitioner of Noopolitik should belong to the side that handles, correlates and uses the maximal amount of information in a rather decentralised fashion. The emergence of Intellipedia, the crowdsourced intelligence database, is a textbook example of Noopolitik. What this conception of Noopolitik did not, however, is codify a more general geopolitics of knowledge, in which power would not be subserving knowledge, but rather knowledge subserving power. The development of such a paradigm is the purpose of this article. It is especially important to focus on knowledge since early Noopolitik almost only focused on information, which is of a lesser quality than knowledge. Knowledge is intrinsically less perishable than information, for example, and wisdom, which is self-knowledge, is not information. Besides, well-informed is not synonymous with sage; a state or an individual can be erudite but foolish, and to this early Noopolitik offers no particular cure.

Though Lilly always couches his ideas in the idiosyncratic language of his personal explorations, his conceptualization of ECCO has much in common with simulation theory in physics, as well as with arguments from critical theory, such as Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and the Real. Indeed, Lilly’s intentions are to stimulate transformative modes of embodiment, and yet when approaching his work from a contemporary perspective in which notions of self-realization and substance-consumption are standardized and commodified, a decidedly neoliberal, micropolitical agenda is revealed: molecular technologies of mind, materialized as chemical supplementation, can permanently reprogram consciousness, whilst the body finds itself increasingly pushed to its limits of disembodiment, in which information flows reassemble the traces of the flesh—its affects, its soul—into virtual data.

John was 83 when this interview happened. He died 3 years after in 2001. He took his body and mind to the absolute limits of spatiotemporal awareness countless times during his long life. It is therefore not surprising that he mumbles a bit in this interview. A full transcript of it is available here. 

AÏsha Devi Talks Frequencies, Transcendence and Performance

Aïsha Devi uses her voice to break through the din of our current musical moment.

Singer, producer and performer Aïsha Devi speaks with Chal Ravens about her personal philosophy, why the voice is her preferred instrument and how she looks at ritualistic traditions as a source of inspiration for a new transcendental electronic music.

Aluna

Aluna means "conscience ". Enter the last theocratic chiefdom in America, hidden for centuries on a mountain in Colombia. The Kogi have made this amazing documentary to help us understand how to avoid the destruction of the world that they are trying to protect, and of ourselves.

AlphaGo - The Movie | Full Documentary

With more board configurations than there are atoms in the universe, the ancient Chinese game of Go has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence. On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The DeepMind Challenge Match. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as a legendary Go master took on an unproven AI challenger for the first time in history.

Directed by Greg Kohs with an original score by Academy Award nominee, Hauschka, AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?

Yagé is Our Life - Documentary

Yagé is Our Life is a documentary film captured in the Putumayo region of Colombia. For centuries the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon have been using yagé (sometimes known as ayahuasca) for the health, social cohesion and spiritual guidance of their communities. Yagé is rich in the potent psychedelic substance DMT and for these indigenous groups it is sacred, allowing them access to ancient wisdom and the spirits of nature. In their ceremonies, the taitas or traditional doctors use yagé to treat their patients for physical and emotional illnesses and as a guide for making decisions.


The communities are now facing many new threats to their traditional way of life. Primarily, the commercialisation of their yagé medicine and foreign pressures exerted on their homelands by industrialised civilisation. This film gives indigenous leaders from the region a platform to discuss these issues and the importance of yagé as a living tradition in their communities.


Winner of the 'Best International Short Film' at the Respect Human Rights Film Festival, Belfast, 2017.

The Multiverse, New Animism, Wonder and Sacred Matter

A conversation between Erik Davis and the philosopher of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein about wonder, horror, animism, the multiverse, Heidegger, Einstein, Hawaiian telescopes, and her book Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia).

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University; core faculty in the in the Science and Society Program; and affiliated faculty in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She holds a B.A. in Religion and English from Williams College, an M.Phil. in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia University. Her areas of research include continental philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, science and religion, and the history and philosophy of physics, ecology, and cosmology. She is the author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (2009) Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (2014), and Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2018). She is also co-editor with Catherine Keller of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (2017)

Tones Drones And Arpeggios: The Magic Of Minimalism (BBC)

In this episode Charles Hazlewood tracks down the pioneers of minimalism, which began on America's west coast in the 1950s. Describing them as 'prophets without honour', Charles explores La Monte Young's groundbreaking experiments with musical form that included notes held for exceptionally long periods of time, and drones inspired by Eastern classical music and Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.

He drives out into the Californian countryside to the ranch of Terry Riley and discusses the musician's revolutionary experiments with tape recording looping and phasing, along with early synthesizer sound. The episode includes excerpts from key early minimalist pieces, including Riley's now famous In C, performed by Charles Hazlewood's All Stars Collective and detailed workshopping by Hazlewood where pieces are deconstructed musically.

The key attributes of minimalism, its reliance on repetition, its mesmerizing transcendent qualities and innovative use of technology are also discussed with broadcaster and writer Tom Service; Gillian Moore, Director of Music at the Southbank Centre; composers Morton Subotnick, Max Richter and Bryce Dessner, and musicians Jarvis Cocker and Adrian Utley.

La Monte Young

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon - 'Fractals and Consciousness'

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon - 'Fractals and Consciousness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Nigel is a film maker who made the films: 'The Colours Of Infinity', 'Is God A Number?' and 'Clouds Are Not Spheres'. He talks about his life and how he discovered Fractals. He raises the question, Is God A Mathematician?

Nigel was part of the central node of the counter culture movement that emerged in London in the mid-1960s. He lived at the famous 101 Cromwell Road house, sharing space with members of various rock groups, including Pink Floyd. He participated and led several famous Happenings at the time and was at the forefront of the psychedelic culture. Since the 1970s he has been a writer and film maker. 

Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations (Full Movie) HD

Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations is an experimental documentary about the chaos at La Chorrera, the imagination, time, the Logos, belief, hope, madness, and doubt. Created by Peter Bergmann, this project is an expansion of ideas first presented in "The Transcendental Object At The End Of Time".

In 1971, Terence McKenna, along with his brother Dennis and three other companions, ventured by plane, boat, and foot to the paradisical Colombian mission town of La Chorrera, where they hoped to encounter the elusive psychedelic oo-koo-hé. Fate would have it otherwise. Their attention soon turned to the large numbers of Stropharia Cubensis that they lucked upon, and before long, Terence and especially Dennis were formulating the psychopharmacological "experiment at La Chorrera" which would eventually give rise to Terence's expanded Jungian notion of the UFO as human oversoul, and his I Ching based TimeWave Theory which holds, among other things, that history as we know it is accelerating and, in fact, will come to a major concrescence.

Based on the underground classic book and talking book 'True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise', this tale of alchemical understanding is a deep dive into the young minds of the McKenna brothers, and an effort to provide some kind of visual aid and emotional center to a much larger story, with details scattered through hundreds of talks. Featuring unearthed photos and notebook pages which have never been seen by the public since generated in 1971.

Special Thanks to Dennis McKenna, Klea McKenna, Kathleen Harrison and Stephanie Schmitz, since their contributions of documents, and approval were crucial in making this film a reality.

Lucky People Centre

Lucky People Center is a Swedish artistic collective, best known for their electronic music, which falls roughly in the Ambient house/Trance genres.

The collective started as an underground illegal nightclub in the city of Gothenburg. Then moved to be based in Stockholm in the early 90's, forming a multimedia and musical collective. Lucky People Center were on tour from 1994 to 1997 and were playing on some major events around Europe during this time. The collective also produced the movies Information is Free and Lucky People Center International.


Lucky People Center is supposed to be more of a loose constellation than a group, and the projects done under the name has various members. The member list is in the sleeve-notes of the album Interspecies Communication listed as David Österberg, Jean-Louis Huhta, Johan Söderberg and Skander Chand, while the movie Lucky People Center International is credited to Söderberg and Erik Pauser.

Genesis P-Orridge about Control, Fear, Drugs, Unity, Love

Genesis P-Orridge speaking on our addiction to control and how to change it. Interview was recorded in Tbilisi, Georgia 26 October 2016. Stockholm Show of Psychic TV 26 May 2017.

Modulations - History of Electronic Music | Documentary

The evolution of electronic music and its many genres. How the wide range of styles and scenes formed through experimentation on sound formation.

Modulations is a feature-length documentary that captures a moment in history where humans and machines are fusing to create today's most exciting sounds.

It traces the evolution of electronic music as one of the most profound artistic developments of the twentieth century. By cutting back and forth between avant-garde composers, Kraftwerk's innovative synthesizer drones, Giorgio Moroder's glacial Euro-disco, Afrika Bambaataa's electro-funk, and Prodigy's current worldwide superstarstardom, Modulations celebrates, replicates, and illuminates the nomadic drift of the post-human techno sound.

The film examines the kids who have turned the turntable into a musical instrument, disillusioned disco lovers who created acid house out of primitive synthesizers, Motor City mavericks who saw the drum machine as their escape route out of urban neglect, and a generation of British youth who transformed these blips and bleeps into dance floor anthems of their own alienation.

 
Modulations provides a sense of history and context in which today's electronic music can be understood. It entertains the converted and remixes the mindset of electronica's nay-sayers.
Featuring a stunning collage of interviews, cutting-edge visuals, in-studio footage, and live performances, Modulations moves at a pace that matches the energy and innovation of the music.

Iara Lee, a Brazilian of Korean descent, is an activist, filmmaker, and founder of the Caipirinha Foundation, an organization that promotes global solidarity and supports peace with justice projects. Iara is currently working on a variety of initiatives, grouped under the umbrella of CulturesOfResistance.org, an activist network that brings together artists and changemakers from around the world. At the center of these initiatives is a feature-length documentary film entitled "Cultures of Resistance", which explores how creative action contributes to conflict prevention and resolution.

As an activist, Iara has collaborated with numerous grassroots efforts, including the International Campaign to Ban Cluster Munitions, the Conflict Zone Film Fund, the New York Philharmonic's groundbreaking 2008 music for diplomacy concert in North Korea. More recently in May 2010, Iara was a passenger on the MV Mavi Marmara, a passenger vessel in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla which was attacked in international waters by the Israeli navy, leading to the murder of nine humanitarian aid workers. Among the many people who recorded the events on that ship, her crew was one of the only to successfully hide and retain most of the raid footage, which she later released to the world after a screening at the UN. Iara is very dedicated to the support of Gazan civilians who have been victims of war crimes committed by the Israeli military during "Operation Cast Lead" and who suffer from the Israeli government's ongoing acts of collective punishment.

At the onset of the Iraq war in 2003, Iara, eager to understand the conflict better, decided to travel and live in the MENA region (Middle East & North Africa). While residing in Lebanon in 2006, Iara experienced firsthand the 34-day Israeli bombardment of that country. Since then, moved by that experience, she has dedicated herself to the pursuit of a just peace in the region, and is an enthusiastic supporter of those initiatives which strengthen adherence to international law in enforcing human rights. In 2008 Iara lived in Iran and supported a number of cultural exchange projects between that country and the West with the goal of promoting arts & culture for global solidarity.

From 1984 to 1989 Iara was the producer of the Sao Paulo International Film Festival. From1989-2003 she was based in New York City, where she ran the mixed-media company Caipirinha Productions to explore the synergy of different art forms (such as film, music, architecture, and poetry). Under that banner, Iara has directed short and feature-length documentaries including Synthetic Pleasures, Modulations, Architettura, and Beneath the Borqa.

Iara Lee is a Council of Advisors member of The International Crisis Group (ICG) and the National Geographic Society, as well as a trustee to the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), North Korea's first and only university whose faculty will be entirely composed of international professors.

From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers' Warning (Kogi message)

The Kogi people are warning society of destruction we face if we fail to embrace nature.

The Kogi (/ˈkoʊɡi/ koh-gee) or Cogui or Kágaba, meaning "jaguar" in the Kogi language, are an indigenous ethnic group that lives in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. Their civilization has continued since the Pre-Columbian era.

The Kogi are descendants of the Tairona culture, which flourished before the times of the Spanish conquest. The Tairona were an advanced civilization which built many stone structures and pathways in the jungles. They made many gold objects which they would hang from trees and around their necks. They lived not much differently from modern day Kogi. Before the Spanish conquistadors arrived, the Tairona were forced to move into the highlands when the Caribs invaded around 1000 CE. The decision to flee to the mountains proved beneficial and strategic by the time the Spanish entered modern-day Colombia in the 15th century. In 1498, the Spanish arrived in Northern Colombia where they began to enslave indigenous groups. Threatened by dogs and soldiers alike, the Tairona remained in isolation. Regardless, many priests were hanged, women were stolen and raped, and children were forced to accept Spanish education. Later, missionaries came and also began to influence their way of life, building chapels and churches amidst their villages to train and convert the locals. In the years since, the Kogi have remained in their home in the mountains, which allows them to escape the worst effects of colonization and aids them in preserving their traditional way of life.

The Kogi base their lifestyles on their belief in "Aluna" or "The Great Mother," their creator figure, whom they believe is the force behind nature. The Kogi understand the Earth to be a living being, and see humanity as its "children." They say that our actions of exploitation, devastation, and plundering for resources is weakening "The Great Mother" and leading to our destruction.

Like many other indigenous tribes, the Kogi people honor a holy mountain which they call "Gonawindua," otherwise known as Pico Cristóbal Colón. They believe that this mountain is "The Heart of the World" and they are the "Elder Brothers" who care for it. They also say that the outside civilization is the "Younger Brothers" who were sent away from The Heart of the World long ago.

From birth the Kogi attune their priests, called Mamas (which means sun in Kogi), for guidance, healing, and leadership. The Mamas are not to be confused with shamans or curers but to be regarded as tribal priests who hold highly respected roles in Kogi society. Mamas undergo strict training to assume this role. Selected male children are taken from birth and put in a dark cave for the first nine years of their lives to begin this training. In the cave, elder Mamas and the child's mother care for, feed, train, and teach the child to attune to "Aluna" before the boy enters the outside world. Through deep concentration, symbolic offerings, and divination, the Mamas believe they support the balance of harmony and creativity in the world. It is also in this realm that the essence of agriculture is nurtured: seeds are blessed in Aluna before being planted, to ensure they grow successfully; marriage is blessed to ensure fertility; and ceremonies are offered to the different spirits of the natural world before performing tasks such as harvest and building of new huts.

The Kogi Mamas have remained isolated from the rest of the world since the Spanish Conquistadors came to plunder South America for gold. In order to preserve their traditional way of life, they rarely interact with the modern world or with outside civilization. Outsiders are not allowed inside their ancestral lands. The Kogi Mamas say that the balance of the earth's ecology has been suffering due to the modern-day devastation of resources by Younger Brother. The Kogi Mamas in turn believe that their work as Elder Brother is instrumental in helping to prolong and protect life on earth. In a desperate attempt to prevent further ecological catastrophe and destruction, the Kogi Mamas broke their silence and allowed a small BBC film crew into their isolated mountaintop civilization to hear their message and warning to Younger Brother.

Kusama's Self-Obliteration (Jud Yalkut, 1967)

Yayoi Kusama's film Self-Obliteration documents a distinct period in the Japanese artist's work. The 1960s represent a period for Kusama where she is working and living in New York surrounded by the popular avant-garde of the time. Happenings, performance art, improvised and experimental music and the developing psychedelic consciousness are what define the film Self-Obliteration. These elements are added to Kusama's own philosophy of overcoming the boundaries and burdens of self-identity.

The film Self-Obliteration joins Kenneth Anger's Invocation of the My Demon Brother and Ira Cohen's Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda as a classic psychedelic visual document from the 1960s.

“‘Obliterate you personality with polka dots,’ exhorts Kasuma at her strip-and-paint exhibition, which she calls ‘naked happenings.’ ‘Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment. Take off your clothes. Forget yourself. Make love. Self-destruction is the only way to peace…’Kusama is prepared to obliterate any country that indulges in war games, particularly Australia."

High Anxieties – The mathematics of chaos (2008)

The documentary looks at the modern advances in mathematics and how they affect our understanding of physics, economics, environmental issues and human psychology. In the 20th Century mathematics has affected our view of the world, and particularly how the financial economy and earth’s environment are now seen as inherently unpredictable.

The film examines the work of Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov and its influence on later developments in mathematics. It includes interviews with David Ruelle, about chaos theory and turbulence, the economist Paul Ormerod about the unpredictability of economic systems, and James Lovelock the founder of Gaia theory about climate change and tipping points in the environment.

As we approach tipping points in both the economy and the climate, the film examines the mathematics we have been reluctant to face up to and asks if, even now, we would rather bury our heads in the sand rather than face harsh truths.

Afterlife

Afterlife, Ishu Patel, National Film Board of Canada

This animated short film attempts to answer the eternal questions, What is dying? and How does it feel? Based on recent studies, case histories and some of the ancient myths, the afterlife state is portrayed as an awesome but methodical working-out of all the individual's past experiences. Film without words.

Soul Survivor - The James Brown Story

This documentary explores the life and work of soul singer James Brown.