every Friday from 7 November until 12 December 2014

'A Distinctly Trippy Edge': named after Don DeLillo's description of the Zapruder footage in the novel 'Underworld' — tries to revitalize the idea of psychedelia after its romanticized, commercialized and ironized romanticism. More concretely, it will feature films, fragments, video's and lectures that look for the psychedelic beyond mere drug culture and its alliance with a so-called inner self or a deeper reality. In doing so, it hopes not to tear down the idea of a psychedelic ‘truth’, but rather broaden the idea of truth itself. Or even link it back to the romantic notion of reality as a creative act and, in its slipstream, the avant-garde visions of the new, the purely material, the unparaphrasable ...

Friday 7/11, 20:00

A Distinctly Trippy Edge: A Primer

Total runtime: 70 mins

The first evening in our calendar sees a program of short films, artists works as well as YouTube clips and fragments aimed at highlighting some of the common themes around psychedelia. The program is intended as a primer to these themes, showing cross-cultural, historic and contemporary manifestations of psychedelia and its good and bad (but always) multi-faceted interpretations.

- Andre Breton's Apartment

- Matt Mullican talks about his Hypnosis Performances

- Rodney Graham: Phonokinetoscope

- A Box with a Secret (a Soviet kids cartoon, in Russian, no subtitles)

- Takashi Murakami's Louis Vuitton Advert Superflat Love

- Laura Huxley talks about Aldous

- Ant Farm - The Eternal Frame

- Bill Hicks - Kennedy assassination routine

- Giles Deleuze - B comme Boisson

- Charles Manson - 'Who are you?'

- Takashi Murata - Silver

- Graham Gussin - Night Street Touch

Firday 14/11, 20:00

Lecture: Dr. David Boothroyd

Dr. David Boothroyd (University of Lincoln, UK), author of Culture on Drugs: Narco-cultural Studies of High Modernity, investigates modernity's relationship to drugs and drug culture through readings of texts by Freud, Benjamin, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Boothroyd does so by what he calls ‘narcoanalysis’, the critical approach to culture from the perspective of its articulation with and by drugs. A central thought in his book, is that we all live in a culture of drugs, and ‘that the effects of drugs are already at work in all our systems (of thought).’

Friday 21/11, 20:00

Ray Kurzweil talks about 'The Singularity'

10 mins

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil examines the next step in the evolutionary process of the union of human and machine. Kurzweil foresees the dawning of a new civilization where we will be able to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity, combining our biological skills with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge-sharing abilities of our creations.There will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality.

David Attenborough: Life on Earth (Termites Clip)

60 secs.

In this extract from the 1979 series ‘Life on Earth’, Sir. David Attenborough talks about termite colonies and the curious ability of the queen to transmit information via a chemical secreted through her skin.

The Congress

122 mins

Ageing, out-of-work actress Robin Wright accepts one last job: the 3D digitisation of her body and voice and the sale of her image to Hollywood conglomerate Miraramount-Nagasaki. She is thus preserved for all eternity as a beautiful 30-something and becomes a star again without ever stepping in front of another camera. Following this shift in technology, Miramount-Nagasaki’s genius scientists — once creators of movies, now computer programmers who have evolved into chemists and pharmacists — will declare the next stage in the chemical evolution. From now on, every viewer can create movies in his own imagination, thanks to chemical selection. Robin Wright is now a mere chemical formula that every person can consume by taking the correct prescription, then staging whatever story they desire: Snow White, personal family dramas, or porn.

Friday 28/11, 19:00

This a marathon double feature event. One beginning at 19u followed by a 15 min. break, then followed by the other.

Jodorowsky's Dune: 19:00

90 mins

Jodorowsky's Dune explores Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky's unsuccessful attempt to adapt and film Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel Dune in the mid-1970s. Know for works such as The Holy Mountain and El Topo, Jodorowsky's vision for Dune was characteristically grandiose and psychedelic with Mick Jagger and Salvidor Dali slated to play parts. A marvel of cinematography, if completed, the developmental process eventually imploded and was later picked up and completed by David Lynch.

The Dance of Reality: 20:45

130 mins

An autobiographical film focusing on his childhood and blending his personal history with metaphor, mythology and poetry, The Dance of Reality reflects Jodorowskys philosophy that reality is not objective but rather a dance created by our own imaginations. Jodorowsky's first film in 23 years was created as a result of the reunion of Joderowsky and Michel Seydoux, who had been of touch since the failed Dune project, but were reunited during the filming of the subsequent documentar).

Friday 05/12, 20:00

The X - Files Season 6, Episode 21: Field Trip

40 mins

In the episode, the mysterious discovery of two skeletons leads Mulder and Scully to investigate. What they discover is a giant fungal growth that causes the agents to have two separate hallucinogenic episodes that eventually merge into one shared hallucination.

Existenz

97 mins

A classic David Cronenburg thriller, the film centers on Allegra Geller, the worlds leading game designer who is testing her new virtual reality game, eXistenZ with a focus group. As they begin, she is attacked by a fanatic assassin employing a bizarre organic gun. She flees with a young marketing trainee, Ted Pikul, who is suddenly assigned as her bodyguard. Unfortunately, her pod, an organic gaming device that contains the only copy of the game, is damaged. To inspect it, she talks Ted into accepting a gameport in his own body so he can play the game with her. The events leading up to this, and the resulting game lead the pair on a strange adventure where reality and their actions are impossible to distinguish from either their own or the game's perspective.

Friday 12/12, 20:00

Lecture by Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys and Erik Thys

Screening Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Die aap van Bloemfontein (The Ape from Bloemfontein), 2014.

Video, colour, sound, 23 min. Courtesy of the artists and galeries Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin and Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels.

23 min.

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys have been working together as an artist duo since the end of the 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects, and videos—steeped in black humor, (self-)reflection and overlapping reality, fiction and suppressed history—play with notions of the superficial and banal. For this lecture, de Gruyter & Thys are joined by Harald's brother, psychiatrist Erik Thys, who often composes their eerie film music. Using excerpts from films and documentaries, the speakers will set out to prove the existence of the Parallel World. They will also demonstrate that the Parallel World is ever expanding and will soon be greater than the real world.

The lecture will be followed by a screening of Die aap van Bloemfontein (The Ape from Bloemfontein), de Gruyter’s and Thys’ most recent film.

Language English