A man wading in a pool of his own consciousness, surrealistically draped in the hallucinations of an artificial intelligence, shouts at me about poetry.
He contorts himself with passion as his rhetoric reaches its fever pitch — you might say he ‘peaks’ — and suddenly bursts into self-awareness like a phoenix, renewed.
Finally, he shakes an iPhone at me, declaring it a monument to human ambition and actuation. After watching, I feel like I’m both a tiny worm on a big hook and the master of my own universe.
Greetings humanoids
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These are some wonderfully weird videos.
Describing Jason Silva’s latest project, a series on his YouTube channel entitled “Cyberdelic Dreams,” is no small feat. It’s a psychedelic mash-up of art and technology that must be experienced to understand.
During a chat about the project, Silva described it as:
A breakthrough new visual communication style, a glimpse of the future, where our inner life is externalized as a waking dream, like stepping into our imaginations.
Generative AI has infinite potential and it’s only the beginning. Collaborating with artificial intelligence and my buddy Heuman Instrument is simply a dream! Literally! We are making visual dreams!
I’d describe the videos as powerful.
Cyberdelic is a portmanteau of ‘cybernetic’ and ‘psychedelic.’ As someone who has spent their entire adult life interested in both concepts, I’m happy to report that Silva’s short videos don’t disappoint on either front.
The first video comes on like the initial 45-minutes of an acid trip in the desert:
And then there’s the third video, just released today, a mind-bending resolution to the fervor of the preceding entries. In this entry, Silva ties the concepts of cybernetics and psychedelics together. It’s a masterful way to bring the energy down from the second video, thus leaving the viewer in a state of hopeful contemplation: