trip toys
Mesmerizing Gifs by Hexeosis Are a Trip All By Themselves
Gifs may be best known as a format for eminently shareable memes, drawn from films, TV shows, and YouTube videos and shared around the Web as bite-size reactions to every possible situation. But in the past few years, a few creators have raised them to the level of art form. And some of those artists appear to have gone deep down the psychedelic rabbit hole, because their colorful, ever-looping creations speak the visual language known by every tripper. One such gif artist is Hexeosis, who has been producing animations at the intersection of mathematics and psychedelia since 2013....
This Cube of Infinite Mirrors Expands, Contracts, and Blows Your Mind
This light sculpture by Numen/For Use bends reality to a new level. It’s a large cube of one-way mirrors lined with bright lights along the edges. Three of the cube’s six surfaces are made of flexible membrane, which bend as air is pumped into the cube by a huge compressor on one side. The other three surfaces are semi-transparent mirrors, so you can see into the cube’s infinite dimensions without leaving a reflection. In other words, you get to peek into the Escher-esque abyss as it changes shape: “By inflating or deflating the air tank, the membrane turns convex or concave,...
Squareeater: Entrain your brain with strobes & binaural beats
“Welcome to a new generation of brain exploration,” says the front page of Squareeater, a free service offering audio-visual experiences called “squares.” The squares are described as “meditative devices” with names like “Chakra,” “Deep Down,” “Upper,” and “Strange Night.” Each square uses binaural beats and other unusual sounds to achieve brainwave entrainment — the fairly recent and not-well-understood practice of causing one’s brainwaves to fall into step with an external stimulus. What’s a binaural beat? It’s the pulse or tone created in one’s mind when the left and right ears hear two distinct tones that are very close in pitch. Searching “binaural beat”...
The Perception Scope How to Promote Visual Imagination and Conjure Open-eye Visuals at Will
People talk about how subtle psychedelic hallucinations can be. As long as your eyes are open, they say, objects may appear different — more vibrant, breathing in and out, or covered with patterns — but they won’t morph into faeries and slithering monsters like they do in the movies. Unless, of course, you take a heroic dose; then anything is fair game. I disagree. I see “things that aren’t really there” on any decent dose, sometimes into the following day. If you haven’t seen more than patterns and wobbling walls, you probably just need some direction and practice. In...
How to Conjure Visions in Ribbons of Smoke
The image of smoke swirling through the air, catching the light as it dances upwards, can be absolutely breathtaking. In a dark room with a single stick of incense, you can follow the threads of smoke as they weave about, reacting to your every breath. Here’s the exercise. You will need: incense, a candle, and materials for getting high (not strictly necessary, but cannabis amplifies the imagination in my experience). This works best indoors. Turn off all the lights except for a single candle. I mean all of them — if you have so much as a dim...
Tree of Light Sculpture Diffracting Into Rainbows
I discovered this temporary light sculpture in a park in Austin, Texas and had to take a video. I was wearing diffraction glasses and tripping on shrooms, so every source of light exploded into a dazzling spectrum of colors. The effect was magical, as though the tree was scrawling across the sky with bright and fiery fingers. The music completed the experience. Nodding my head to the Geographer song playing in my headphones (“Paris”) and watching the colors drift across my vision, I had one of those moments. You know the ones, where the scene is so perfect...