Altered Sites: On Psychedelic Architecture (1 day Symposium)

About

‘Altered Sites: On Psychedelic Architecture’ aims to explore experimental and critical approaches to architectural form through the exploration of built and/or imagined structures as sites of alterity. The symposium uses notions of psychedelic experience and expansive consciousness to engage with site as a potentially productive form of difference, dynamism, otherness, even the new.

The symposium will explore how structures – in buildings, constructed objects, images, writing, creative practices – in which gestures of inversion, reversal, enfolding, involution, projection, expansion, collapse, and so on – remain present within the resultant construction.

Symposium Speakers:

Maria Prieto - ‘Altered Ecologies of Design Practice: Psychedelic Approaches to Architectural Form’

George Charman - ‘Set and Setting:’ The Mind Manifesting Possibilities of Las Pozas’.

John Clayson - 'Death of (the) Authorship? Text-to-Image AI and the Expansion of Subjectivity’

Melanie Smith - 'Hallucinating Things into Existence’

Dr. Luke Dickens - ‘Entering the Fifth Dimension: Modular Modernities, Psychedelic Sensibilities and the Architectures of Lived Experience’

Dr. David Stent - 'The Riddle of Daedalus: Pavel Tchelitchew as Psychedelic Architect’

Mike Thompson - ‘Fat Chance: Understanding Entanglements Between People and Vibrant Matter’

Andrew Douglas - ‘High Interiors: The Strange Transport of Inside Places’

Curated to accompany the symposium, ‘Altered Sites’ combines work by contemporary artists – including Melanie Smith, Cecilia Charlton, George Charman and Adam Wiseman – with selected pieces from the Archive and Collection at West Dean, including works by Pavel Tchelitchew, Eugene Berman, and Edward James. The exhibition is curated by George Charman and David Stent.

Installed on the Purple Landing of West Dean House, the exhibition will be open throughout the ‘Altered Sites: On Psychedelic Architecture’ symposium