Have you ever been to Ozora? Well the sign reads “Welcome to Paradise” and Paradise is an apt description. When you go there you can hardly believe that such a place of music, dancing, love and beauty exists. It’s a “temporary autonomous zone”. A place where everyone decides to be kind to each other and life a different kind of life for a week.
On Friday @ Ozora I gave a talk entitled “Infinite Forms: Psychedelic Coding” about the idea that coding can be used as a means of exploring consciousnesses. We think in language and then construct reality from language. We describe and name “things” and “events” from the continuum of reality thus giving it meaning. In a similar way, the language of computer code becomes non-conscious intelligence’s we call algorithms. Code can also manifest into virtual reality through procedural generation.
Coding can also be visionary, in that I can for example envision a creature like an octopus in my project Infinite Forms, construct the creature from code and algorithms and then in VR the octopus exists. Thus coding is mind manifesting – the very definition of psychedelic.
To demonstrate this, I showed 4 psychedelic coding projects during my talk:
Overthinker – a generative visual and musical journey programmed by Donnchadh McCullagh, Conor Dunne and Marika Robel, three first year game design students from my game programming class:
DEEP – A Virtual Reality Breathing Meditation:
For more information about DEEP see here and here.
Infinite Forms – An infinite generative psychedelic world and what I use to make visuals for Paradiso Party and other festivals and events:
For more information about Infinite Forms, see here.
Emergent Wonder – Emergent artificial life simulation programmed using Unity’s new Entity Component System:
Get the sourcecode for Emergent Wonder on github.
I also showed Robin Arnott’s Soundself project – a beautiful VR experience inspired by a transcendental LSD trip he experienced at Burning Man:
Some other references from my talk:
My teaching hero Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture”:
- Download Processing – An amazing framework and development environment based on the Java programming language for making and visuals.
- Daniel Shiffman’s Youtube channel with lots of great tutorial videos.
- Download the Unity Game Engine
- Unity tutorials
- The procedural generation reddit forum
- Ther VR and psychedelics reddit forum
Some pictures and videos from Ozora:
The vast psytrance stage covered by a spectacular canopy of fabric and light:
Also the Dome area, a sacred space with a sandy floor playing progressive and psybient music. Best experienced around 5am as the sun is coming up. Very groovy.
Me doing demos of Infinite Forms, Emergent Wonder and DEEP in the Artibarn in Ozora. With psychedelic coding wizard Adam John Williams performing jews harp and electronics :
