Hello to everyone who has enjoyed  Ken Adam’s American Satori / Terra Lucida (World of Light) with us the past two Fridays. 
Next Tuesday, November 18, we’ll be screening 3 of Ken’s earlier works. Please join us for any or all. American Satori, a series of cardiotonic pictograms, will still be on view in Gallery 1 and Terra Lucida will return for an encore viewing First Friday, December 5, at 9 PM. 

Alien Dreamtime (1993, 60 minutes) 7 PM

Strange Attractor (2003, 85 minutes) 8:15 PM 

Imaginary Muslims & Other Perfect Strangers (2006, 73 minutes) 9:45 PM

Review of Alien Dreamtime by R. U. Sirius Sleeping with the Aliens

The Alien Dreamtime video, produced by Rose-X Media House, is Terence McKenna’s “Greatest Hits,” spoken to the rhythm of the rave, live in San Francisco. Call him unscientific or intellectually lazy, but Terence McKenna’s brand of psychedelic blarney – always more fun to hear live than to read – is so beautifully phrased that it transcends the historic and anthropological bean counters who dis him. In this video, Terence gets off the basic themes outlined in his three books: True Hallucinations, Food of the Gods, and The Archaic Revival (updating McLuhan, McKenna claims that postindustrial cyberculture is leading us back into the future toward archaic prepatriarchal modes of living – witness the rise of Modern Primitivism), the oppressiveness of “mono” culture (”monopoly, monogamy, monotony”), and the place of tryptamine hallucinogens in human evolution (”the psilocybin mushroom is the catalyst of human evolution and language”).Alien Dreamtime is the second video Rose-X has produced with ethnobotanist McKenna. (The first, Experiment at Petaluma, was a 30-minute rap on the possibilities of visual language.) Rose-X’s two-person team – Britt Welin and Ken Adams – cut their special-effects teeth on visual effects for San Francisco’s Toon Town Raves. Alien Dreamtime stretches the duo’s psychedelic computer effects to new limits, and Stephan Kent’s didgeridoo adds a note of primitive intensity to the techno-rave soundtrack. The high point of the 60-minute Alien Dreamtime is the entrancing dance and sway of psychedelic love goddess Kim Kyle. The presence of the feminine form in all of its grandeur provides a humanizing touchstone amid the abstract imagery. (In fact, my only complaint about this video is that we should have seen more of her. But that’s a minor quibble.) Fans of a good psychedelic rant must run out and purchase this video right away!
About Strange Attractor

Why we made Strange Attractor:
making Alien DreamTime (1993) had catalyzed our collective thinking on the potential of media arts.
we wanted to create with new, emerging digital technologies to make art appropriate to its time and place.
full on, over the top,
essentially psychedelic.Britt, Terence, & I were co-obsessed with similar memes in the early 1990’s:
chaos theory, Mandaen gnosticism from Irag/Iran, sacred plants/recombinant DNA.
parallel universes with new Edens to explore.new and very exciting ‘personal’(!) computers where hurling us toward new popular art forms of extreme image and audio manipulation/fx.
(electronic music, raves, & digital design in fashion, graphics, broadcast, and film).
cyberspace was cooking up and the imaginal realm was singing new songs of seduction and destruction.some post-narrative cinema with a sensual edge, more beauty than fear.
we worked(?) for over seven years on the project. it wouldn’t quit growing.
and the world around it, that birthed it, was getting stranger and faster every year.
& digital equipment was getting sexier and cheaper.

by the time this DVD was finally released to the public (2004),
many of the events and processes portrayed had come to pass:
break beat-jungle ambient, personal video- blogging, the war with Irag,
the destruction & looting of Bagdad museums, bio-terrorist attacks,
fully immersive video screens, technoanimist cults in the desert,
the Apocalypse of the Mandaen people from the marshes near Basra,
and the destruction of sacred sites thruout Irag.

it is a very strange movie indeed.
even to me, one of it’s unsuspecting parents.
peace to all.
ken adams/03.08.06
austin

BasementShaman.com review of Strange Attractor

Another stunning drop into the unimaginably weird and beautiful depths of hyperspace. This is the richest, most phenomenally nuanced depiction of the psychedelic experience we&rsquo have seen yet. Created by Rose X in collaboration with Terence McKenna, this work comes closer to anything at giving an eyes open glimpse into the incredible spaces accessible via psychedelics. A relentless mutating ingression of audio and visual imagery that will leave you feeling surprisingly altered, a bit slack-jawed, wide eyed, and wondering what was that and how did they do it?
An Excursion into the Overmind — an Interview with Ken Adams: 
http://www.futures-lab.com/article.cml-id=21.htm


SalaDiaz
517 Stieren
San Antonio, Texas 78210

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