“We have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing space and time as far as our planet is concerned,” wrote Marshall McCluhan…

When NASA’s first images of the “big blue marble,” planet Earth, hit television in 1966, the philosopher Martin Heidegger was overcome by a wave of existential nausea. “The uprooting of…

Whether natural or artificial, psychedelics can be strong and hard-hitting psychological tools provided they are used correctly. Psychedelics raise noise levels in the nervous system, and thereby in consciousness itself.…

Electronic music is a kind of rhythmic intelligence that escapes the boundaries of the tonal. Operating as a kind of sonic life-form, electronica incorporates a host of samples, wavelengths and…

In the course of a research expedition to Sicily in 1638, the alchemist Athanasius Kircher had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius. There, perched on a rock in the…

More than skin and bones, the body is a hotly contested item. Without it we wouldn’t exist, yet our efforts to transcend it, escape it and control it are as…

The sacred dance, in Maya cosmology, was represented in the sinuous curves of the Vision Serpent - a symbolic representation of the axis of communication between the human world and…

Drugs shape the laws and write the very rules they break, they scramble all the codes and raise the stakes of desire and necessity, euphoria and pain, normality, perversion, truth…

The realm of imagination is ethereal to anyone trailing the chimeras to their lair. Down an underground passage, it is a visit to a marvellous palace closed to the light…

In the midst of incessant technological and social upheavals, ecological disasters, and capital excess a band of modern primitives are downloading designer wetware (another term for drugs) and cataleptically conspiring…