Psychedelic Peace

Psychedelic Peace is a psychedelic moving-image work I made in Blender, built to make the tangled stress that modern life produces visible — and then to heal it with music.

Those are the two halves, and they are in that order on purpose. The stress is shown first. Nothing is resolved until it has been looked at.

Making the invisible thing visible

Stress has no shape, which is why it is so easy to keep carrying. Naming it does not help much either; everyone has heard the word. What I wanted was to put a form on the screen that a person recognises before they can explain it — the specific texture of being wound tight, rendered so that watching it is slightly uncomfortable.

Psychedelic imagery is the honest register for that. It distorts, it repeats, it will not settle. It behaves the way an overloaded head behaves.

And then music

The resolution is not visual. Music does it. I wanted the work to end somewhere the viewer’s body agrees with rather than somewhere their eye does, because the release I am interested in happens below the level of an argument.

This piece is the closest thing on this site to a statement of what I am doing in all of it: show people the loop clearly enough that they see they are inside it, then hand them a way out that is not a lecture. Melotox is the same idea built as software. This one is the same idea with no interface at all.