Unwittingly unleashing one of the most transformative substances ever discovered, Dr. Hoffman brought to the world in perfect synchro the stroboscopic antidote to nuclear annihilation. Modern music, art and advertising. The anti-war movement. The civil rights movement. The personal computer revolution. All owe a great debt to his “problem child”, still trying to fit in to a neglectful and judgmental society of fear. The patterns of light and color thrown off by this discovery continue to ripple and refract across the landscape in kaleidoscopic wonder, gradually and steadily recasting our world in the images of reunion. Rewarded with a long life and a glowing historical legacy, Dr. Hoffman has lain to rest in the halls of eternity, ever-present in the world of things, speaking to all who dare ingest his most potent discovery.

May the angels bear you well to the great beyond.

From the Vault at Erowid:

Albert Hofmann was born in Baden, Switzerland in 1906. He graduated from the University of Zürich with a degree in chemistry in 1929 and went to work for Sandoz Pharmaceutical in Basel, Switzerland. With the laboratory goal of working towards isolation of the active principles of known medicinal plants, Hofmann worked with Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima) for several years, before moving on to the study of Claviceps purpurea (ergot) and ergot alkaloids.

Over the next few years, he worked his way through the lysergic acid derivatives, eventually synthesizing LSD-25 for the first time in 1938. After minimal testing, LSD-25 was set aside as he continued with other derivatives. Four years later, on April 16, 1943, he re-synthesized LSD-25 because he felt he might have missed something the first time around. That day, he became the first human to experience the effects of LSD after accidentally ingesting a minute amount. Three days later, on April 19, 1943, he decided to verify his results by intentionally ingesting 250 ug of LSD. This day has become known as “Bicycle Day” as Hofmann experienced an incredible bicycle ride on his way home from the lab.

In addition to his discovery of LSD, he was also the first to synthesize psilocybin (the active constituent of ‘magic mushrooms’) in 1958. Albert Hofmann, known as the ‘father of LSD’, continued to work at Sandoz until 1971 when he retired as Director of Research for the Department of Natural Products. He continued to write, lecture, and play a leading role as an elder in the psychedelic community until his quick and relatively painless death from a heart attack at the age of 102.

This weekend’s Coachella music festival found ex-Floydist, Roger Waters, banging out a full Dark Side to the massive crowds. Of special note, and in classic fashion, a large pig was deployed condemning US warmongering and offering a not-so-subtle solution (click through link for vid):

But Waters’ biggest prop was an inflatable pig the size of a school bus that emerged while he played a version of “Pigs” from 1977’s capitalism critique, “Animals.”

The pig, which was led above the crowd from lines held on the ground, displayed the words “Don’t be led to the slaughter” and a cartoon of Uncle Sam wielding two bloody cleavers. The other side read “Fear builds walls.”

The underside of the pig simply read “Obama” with a checked ballot box alongside.

This is what happens when economic interests get to run the country: short-term profits win over long-term sensibility, business contracts define policy spending, and greed wins over social justice & sustainability.

Housing meltdown
Credit crisis
Inflation increase
Oil skyrocketing
Dollar dropping
Food rationing
Unemployment rising
Record deficit
War spending out of control

Just testing the new Real World Remixed embed player. This is the remix I did for Little Axe:

From the intro to Guy Debord’s situationist manifesto, The Society of the Spectacle:

1
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

2
The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

3
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

4
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

n détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original. The term “détournement”, borrowed from the French, originated with the Situationist International; a similar term more familiar to English speakers would be “turnabout” or “derailment”, although these terms are not used in academia and the arts world as they are inherently ‘anti-art’ as they are often blatant theft and sabotage of existing elements. Détournement is similar to satirical parody, but employs more direct reuse or faithful mimicry of the original works rather than constructing a new work which merely alludes strongly to the original. It may be contrasted with recuperation, in which originally subversive works and ideas are themselves appropriated by mainstream media.

In games, immersive worlds, forums, social networks, and in blogs we inhabit multiple selves. In most cases, theses virtual spaces are walled islands with little relation between them. Increasingly it’s becoming apparent that continuity is necessary to resolve these fractured selves and to open up the channels of communication between the diversity of online containers. This can be seen in the new wave of web 2.0 aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo that aim to collate our myriad profiles, friends and content streams into a single portal. Now, Technology Review reports that several companies are working to enable avatars to move between virtual worlds.

More and more, such affordances will move into virtual spaces. 2D content streams and communication pipelines will feed into and across immersive worlds. A WoW player should be able to call up a HUD console in the game and locate their friends across all of the virtual worlds they’re currently in. They should then be able to communicate with them through IM or VoIP and subsequently transport to join them in another world. GTA4 has announced a feature to allow users to call each other in-world using the game cell phone. Shouldn’t this extend across game worlds and out into real-world mobiles? API’s could evolve to mine user communications (Twitter in WoW?) and chart locations on world maps. In the age of digital society, findability is key.

The vast amounts of personal profiling we’re building up around ourselves in MySpace, Facebook, blogs, and other forums should be accessible through our avatars and from all places we inhabit, virtually and in reality. It should be present in our devices and our profiles. As avatars, it should follow us like a digital skin (secured and opt-in, of course) layered in transaction-appropriate trust profiles that fly-out on mouseover. My avatars should contain more information than just polygons and scripted motions. Social transactions are information exchanges. My LinkedIn profile should be accesible to anyone in 2D and 3D if I so desire.

The realness of immersive worlds should leverage the fundamental reality of our digital profiles and interests. If these platforms are going to become truly compelling, they must work to integrate the API’s, content streams, and communication channels of the web2.0 revolution. We’re in the midst of a completely unprecedented historical shift as all of our cultural and intellectual content is going digital, made manifest in searchable, findable, and persistent datalogs. The profiles we create around our virtual selves are growing larger and larger, and they are being recorded and left open for many eyes to see. Imagine the political candidates running 10 or 15 years from now. So much of their lives will be a matter of public record easily searchable and graphed out to show affiliations, donations, histories and contradictions. So much of who they are will live online like a shadow. SO much of who we all are.

Virtual worlds are poised to engage directly in this shift and draw culture and identity into their domain. Instead of closed platforms, worlds like Second Life must open up and grow to become contiguous spaces whose character arises from the types of people that choose to gather there by affiliation, interest, and intention. MMORPG’s like WoW will continue to offer highly crafted narratives, specialized social groups and hierarchies, and bleeding edge rendering tech but will acknowledge the tremendous personal content within each player distributed across their digital and analog lives.

Of course, if virtual platforms become more open, their business models will inevitably shift towards advertising. Space is space, whether 2D, 3D, or 4D, and eyes are eyes especially when they gather in great enough concentration. As in the real world, the exchange of goods and services will always be of great value in any domain, so the shift towards continuity will be a shift towards reality. Virtual worlds have the unique proposition of creating fantasy within the world of life. So the shift towards reality in the context of a realized fantasy brings both closer together. It is part of the alchemical formula of bringing spirit into matter. It is the power of gods to create in an unlimited universe. It is the movement of the ghost in the machine as our real selves grow more and more to include virtual, digital, non-local aspects of identity and presence. Who am I but the sum of my transactions with the world? These words I’m writing and posting on the global billboard become preserved bits of my self. Your interactions with them extend my identity into the virtual world. All my words are facets of my expanding digital identity. My self-reflection extends from my body, my deeds, my actions towards others around me, to include the ideas and statements I leave online, the avatars I inhabit, and the webs of disembodied people I associate with. In 100 years I may roll up in bits under some social anthropologist’s data-mining PhD nudging their graphs this way or that with my Tweets and posts.

Aggregation of social data serves a very practical role of making it easier for us to manage an increasingly vast amount of data, but it also serves a larger role of helping us defragment our sense of self as it fractures out across so many new digital domains rising and falling daily. If we’re to walk like new gods through worlds both real and virtual, shouldn’t we do so with as much wholeness as possible? In a world that’s made it so challenging to have a fully integrated psyche it’s really imperative that we lay down a strong foundation of holism and continuity as we move into the unfettered vastness of the digital noosphere. As strong cohesive selves we can better wear the masks of avatars and wield the power of virtual gods.