On Acid presents a radically subjective re-edit of the history of drug experience, following the emergence of drugs as a technology and modernity’s conflicted obsessions with altered states. Tracing a path beginning with philosopher Benjamin Blood’s 1874 pamphlet ‘The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy’ which declares the existence of a ‘majesty and supremacy unspeakable’ observable only after being dosed by nitrous oxide, On Acid assembles texts and images that draw a line connecting archival works by William James, Antonin Artaud, Timothy Leary, and various modernist explorers, to the practice of contemporary artists such as Rodney Graham, Francis Alÿs, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Removed from the familiar cultural contexts of Haight-Ashbury and Grateful Dead psychedelia, On Acid is in itself an experimental program, a recursive acidic process that mirrors the deconstructive relations to counterculture cultivated in contemporary art. The book concludes with a series of new conversations with Freeman and Lowe, Hamilton Morris and Arik Roper.

TEXTS
Francis Alys, Antonin Artaud, Benjamin Blood, Philip K. Dick, Rodney Graham, Brion Gysin, Dr. Albert Hofmann, Jim Hogshire, Aldous Huxley, International Federation for Internal Freedom, William James, Timothy Leary, Marcia Moore, William Rauscher, Alan Watts.

IMAGES
Brian Aldiss, Francis Alys, Carol Bove, Syd Barrett, Mathieu Briand, Krystle Cole, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Rodney Graham, Brion Gysin, Carsten Holler, Henri Michaux, John Moeller, Arik Roper, Sandoz Laboratories, Ettore Sottsass, Klaus Weber.

INTERVIEWS
Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, Hamilton Morris, Arik Roper.

Llano Community Bookstore is a two-part temporary bookstore, hosted for one day (Thursday, April 5, 1-6pm) at the CalArts Library, and for fifteen days (Friday, April 6 to Friday, April 20) at IKO IKO in Los Angeles.

CalArts graduate students have selected titles from the Textfield Distribution Catalog, to be included in both parts, and will install/deinstall and work as Shopkeepers during PART I of the temporary bookstore, located in the CalArts Library Microfilm Room. PART II of the temporary bookstore will be hosted by IKO IKO in Los Angeles, and includes furniture, used for both parts, designed by WAKA WAKA.

The (fictional) bookstore is based upon, and takes its name from, Llano Del Rio, which was organized under the Llano Del Rio Company and was a corporate-run socialist Utopian society initiated by Job Harriman, following his narrow defeat in a runoff election for the mayorship of Los Angeles. Harriman believed that the success of socialism depended not only on politics, but also on the realization of socialist principles. Harriman did not attempt to reform all of society, but rather, he believed that by creating a functioning socialist community within the larger society of capitalism, the larger society would gradually convert to socialism.