Though nowadays "psychedelia" conjures seedy visions of black-light velvet posters, gnarly wizard-shaped bongs, and totally rad screen savers, there was a time when the investigation of mind-altering optics engaged a number of serious film artists. "Kinetica," a series of classic and contemporary abstract animation, proves that there's more to turning on and tuning in than merely dropping out. During the counterculture's post-war heyday, the confluence of psychoactive drugs, Eastern-tinged spiritualism, and emerging electronic technologies produced a heady crop of experimental movies that brought the hieratic visual language of modernism to dizzy new heights. An expanded cinema emerged to meet the desire for expanded consciousness, envisioning drugs as a new technology and technology as a new drug. Though the psychedelic moment was soon downplayed by avant-garde historians and the gallery-addled structuralists of the '70s, later generations of artists continued the synesthetic possibilities of... More >>>