OMSK Utopiates Extension Pack

This app allows you to explore a unique AR work by artist collective Omsk Social Club entitled “Utopiates Extension Pack” commissioned by the 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Iskra Delta opening on 12.09.21 running until 21.10.21. The AR installation follows the themes explored by the collective in their work “Utopiates: The Freedom Cell” which was led by a group of eight practitioners. Their experiments centred around the thematics of understanding acid as a primal technology and the tab as a console for another world. The work used the material substance of concentrated LSD to open up a collective performance of artificially induced virtual reality. The users explored the collective mind made neurocosmic through social intelligence, technological extensions and radical holographic imagineering. Leading on from this Omsk Social Club produced “Utopiates Extension Pack” a gateway work that allows any user to step through into a graphic third dimension.

Credits
Omsk Social Club, Artist © 2021
Lemonboy, Sound composition
Nicholas Delap, Augmented Reality Design

“Well let me start at the beginning...

The 1960s saw the genesis limbs of both the psychedelic movement and the birth of computing technology. Timothy Leary, the pioneer of the former and influential advocator of the latter in the 90s declared “the PC is the LSD of the 90s” and so “Utopiates” aimed to unpack the thinking of this by traversing backwards into the analogue technology of LSD in order to uproot new and alternative modes of thinking about technology today.

The group “Utopiates: Freedom Cell” explored and well still does... the profound and pervasive influence that LSD has had on contemporary technological culture.

Its aim was to begin to understand the many ways in which the modern world has found itself on drugs - I don't mean here street drugs, I mean the psycho-pharmaceutical, enhancement technology, virtual reality etc etc - we are drugged. It is well known when you follow the drug-trail, that psychoactive substances have been integral to the building of new economies, politics, media and of course code. Drugs are culture, they have also influenced art, poetry, philosophy and therapy — opening up debates on the neurochemistry of a human brain which like its subcultures have never really been drug-free.”

Utopiates: The Freedom Cell

Scripts Mundi is the remaining documentation of a real game play “Utopiates: The Freedom Cell” which was led by a group of eight practitioners. Their experiments centred around the thematics of understanding acid as a primal technology and the tab as a console for another world. The work used the material substance of concentrated LSD to open up a collective performance of artificially induced virtual reality. The users explored the collective mind made neurocosmic through social intelligence, technological extensions and radical holographic imagineering. Leading on from this Omsk Social Club produced “Utopiates Extension Pack” a gateway work that allows the viewer to step through into a graphic third dimension.