On Acid: A Field Guide to Altered States

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.