Acid media

“First synthesised in 1938 but not tasted until 1943, acid is essentially a creature of the postwar era. As such, it enters the human world alongside an explosion in consumer advertising, the rapid development of electronic and digital media, new polymers, and a host of increasingly cybernetic approaches to the social challenges of control and communication. For many of its early enthusiasts, acid was like a cosmic transistor radio. As the historian and curator Lars Bang Larsen writes: ‘Hallucinogenic drugs were often understood as new media in the counterculture: only machinic and cybernetic concepts seemed sufficient to address vibrations, intensities, micro-speeds, and other challenges to human perception that occur on the trip.’ LSD seemed to, as Timothy Leary suggested in 1966, ‘tune’ the dials of perception, altering the ratios of the senses, ‘turning on’ their associational pathways and gradients of intensity. The actor and author Peter Coyote, who was a member of the visionary Diggers collective in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the 1960s, wrote that ingesting LSD ‘changed everything, dissolved the boundaries of self, and placed you at some unlocatable point in the midst of a new world, vast beyond imagining, stripped of language, where new skills of communication were required … [because] everything communicated in its own way.’ Similarly, Marshall McLuhan, the pop media prophet of the era, told Playboy that LSD mimes the ‘all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness’ of the new electronic media environment. All this set the stage for a kind of technical mysticism that pervaded LSD culture in the late 20th century, one that framed the drug and its physical manifestations with a luminous sense of immediacy. Alan Watts, commenting on the question of how often to take LSD, turned to another media metaphor, arguing that when you get the message, you hang up the phone. But what if the medium is the message? Of course, the primary medium is the LSD molecule itself, known as LSD-25, the 25th variation of lysergic acid synthesised by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938. But unlike macroscopic drugs such as cannabis, LSD is so small and so powerful that its consumption almost always requires an inert housing – water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string or pieces of paper – that transports the drug from manufacturer to tripper. In the law, this vehicle is described as the ‘carrier medium’, an object impregnated with drugs that can be sold, seized, presented as evidence, and dissolved into the hearts, minds and guts of consumers. …”
Aeon
W – Blotter art
amazon: Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium

Sorcerer’s Apprentice, cardboard container, San Francisco, late 1970s.