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The Acid Aesthetic: A Brief History of Psychedelic Design
- bcks 10y agoVery brief, indeed. It left me wanting more. In particular, I would have mentioned the explosion of independent printing shops in the 60's. There’s a great list of counter-culture and political print shops here: http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/BayAreaRadicalShops.html http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/BayAreaRadicalShops.html I would also love to see more on the role of experimental, underground comics in the psychedelic movement. But then comics are not quite as beloved by design historians and critics the way posters are.
- DanBC 10y agoIf you're interested in the counter-culture of the 1960s the book BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera, 1965-70 is interesting. https://www.amazon.co.uk/BAMN-Any-Means-Necessary-Manifestos/dp/0140032673/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/BAMN-Any-Means-Necessary-Manifestos... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/987215.BAMN https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/987215.BAMN https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/BAMN_By_Any_Means_Necessary.html?id=dHK6AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/BAMN_By_Any_Means_Nec...
- api 10y agoThere was a renaissance of grassroots psychedelia in the overlapping hacker and rave culture of the 1990s. I miss that stuff. Today's culture is disturbingly vapid. There is little in the way of either genuinely creative counterculture or mainstream high culture. The pop culture is five chord pop that all sounds the same and endless remakes of the same film, and geek and fringe culture seems full of low effort meme trash and mean spirited nihilism. It's not at all surprising that fascism has risen up in those festering swamps. It reminds me of the eerie artistic anticlimax that served as a prelude to collapse in one of Lovecraft's stories about the history of a vanished elder race. "The Cursed City" I think. Like the old ones our art and culture reached a peak from the 60s to the 90s and then gave way to blobs scrawled in MS Paint.
- cobbzilla 10y agoare you lamenting today's mainstream culture in contrast to previous decades' counterculture? seems like apples and oranges. i'll posit that today's counterculture is more vibrant than ever, and 60's-90's pop culture was as vapid as today's.
- losteric 10y agoThis era of digital media and unprecedented discoverability amplifies our differences and similarities. Counter-culture and subcultures find, share, fork, and reinforce ideas faster than ever before. The blandness of mainstream media is a red herring, that content was always designed for mass appeal and it's now appealing to a far wider audience than ever before...
- coldtea 10y ago>i'll posit that today's counterculture is more vibrant than ever Not even close.
- cobbzilla 10y agoThen i'd posit that you need to get out more often :) you don't know what you're missing out on.
- mythrwy 10y ago"The pop culture is five chord pop that all sounds the same and endless remakes of the same film" Hahaha. I remember lamenting about the same thing back in the early 90's. Most of everything is always dull and vapid and so are most people who at best are imitators. When you are there anyway. Looking back it always seems the past was so groundbreaking and exciting. In my late teens/early 20's I wished I could have lived through the 60's (this was in the late 80's- early 90's). Because that was such a truly great and groundbreaking time according to the books. Now I realize it was probably a general stifled societies with a bunch of copycat posers growing their hair out and saying silly things they thought were cool and taking LSD. I laugh my ass off whenever I see 90's idolizing millennials. Old man rant aside, there has been a pretty big cultural movement in the last 6 or 8 years. I guess a big part of it is the internet. In a way I'm glad I'm not 23 again, what a confusing age, but in some ways I'm a bit jealous. Ah well, I got the 90's. There were some cool times.
- castle-bravo 10y ago> Nazi scientists were among the first to explore LSD’s psychopharmaceutical potential I'm gonna need a source for this. My understanding is that Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann discovered the psychedelic effect of LSD in April 1943 [1], and I think it very unlikely that the Nazis could have incorporated it into their purported mind-control experiments before the end of the war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD#.22Bicycle_Day.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD#.22Bicycle_Day....
- dreamdu5t 10y agoAccording to Operation Paperclip [1] part of the motivation for the US investigating weaponized LSD was the fear the Nazis were investigating it. But I'm not sure Nazi use was documented to the extent it was in the US, with the CIA's MK-ULTRA program experimenting on unknowing citizens by dosing them with LSD [2]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Program-Scientists/dp/031622104X https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Prog... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#Drugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#Drugs
- eip 10y agoCIA. Nazis. Tomato. Tomato.
- castle-bravo 10y agoIf I understand correctly, saying that Nazi scientists were experimenting with LSD is technically true, but very misleading. The "scientists" (read: professional torturers) were /former/ Nazis working for the CIA /after/ the end of the war. This source [1] states that a paper-clipped Nazi scientist brought LSD to the attention of the CIA in 1948 (though its credibility is suspect because it suggests that a CIA operative died die to LSD poisoning, a highly improbable occurrence). [1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/what-cold-war-cia-interrogators-learned-from-the-nazis http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/what-cold-w...