Altered States : PsychArt Conference

What does it mean for perception to shift, not once, but continually, subtly, sometimes imperceptibly?

We tend to imagine consciousness as something stable, a fixed point from which we observe the world. Yet experience rarely holds still. It thickens and thins. It narrows and expands. It fragments under pressure, softens in rhythm, reorganises itself through sound, movement, grief, attention, and time. An altered state is not always an exception to ordinary life. It may be one of its most consistent features.

There are states we enter deliberately, and others that arrive uninvited. States shaped by chemistry and Medic*tion, by exhaustion and intensity, by trauma and repair, by art and immersion. There are states that emerge in solitude, and those that appear only in collectivity, where rhythm, light, or shared attention begin to do something to the boundaries between self and other.

This year’s PsychArt Conference, Altered States, invites you into that territory, not as a concept to be defined, but as something to be encountered.

Across the day, we will move between perspectives that hold altered perception in different registers. One speaker traces how systems, structures, and machines can become a language for thinking about perception itself. How repetition, mathematics, and engineered form can open unexpected ways of experiencing time, pattern, and embodiment. Another approaches altered states through light, sound, and perception as participatory environments, where the act of seeing becomes unstable, shared, and continually reconfigured. A third brings attention to the mechanics of collective entrainment and perceptual modulation, where sound and sensory input become tools for shifting attention and dissolving ordinary boundaries of awareness.

Alongside these, workshops open other thresholds. Rhythm becomes a way of entering shared time that predates language. Movement becomes a site where experience is stored, released, and reorganised in the body. Grief is approached not only as emotion, but as a changing field, cosmic, intimate, and unfolding across scales. And embodied psychotherapeutic practice invites attention to how states of being move through us physically, often before they can be named.

Taken together, these sessions do not converge on a single definition of altered states. Instead, they suggest something more unstable and more honest. That consciousness is not one thing, but many overlapping modes of attention, relation, and transformation.

We often think of altered states as departures. But they may also be returns. To sensation, to presence, to shared experience, to forms of knowing that sit outside the familiar hierarchies of mind.

Join us as we explore what it means for perception to shift, and what becomes possible when it does

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Jennifer Crook
Jennifer Crook is the Director of Collective Act, leading the vision and delivery of ‘Dreamachine’ - a one-of-a-kind immersive experience created in collaboration with Turner Prize-winning artists Assemble, Grammy nominated composer Jon Hopkins and a team of leading technologists, scientists and philosophers. Combining flickering light with spatial sound, the experience generates a luminous and technicolour inner world of colours, patterns and dreamlike imagery, created by the power of your own brain and completely unique to you. Winners of Best Innovation (CogX) and Best Immersive Experience (Lumen Prize), Dreamachine is now on the cusp of global touring following sell-out presentations across the UK.

Jennifer has nearly two decades of experience creating ambitious and award-winning interdisciplinary commissions across the world in a diverse range of locations, from rooftops to pavements, clifftops to forest floors. She has collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson, Danny Boyle, Steve McQueen, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Jeremy Deller. From building (and burning) a 72ft community-built temple in a contested interface area set between Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland, to re-enacting the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history in the Deep South at a time of deep political and social division, Jennifer has built an international reputation for creating memorable and transformative participatory events that show the very real potential for art to create change.

Conrand Shawcross

"Illusions of Time - Ways to envision this elusive and problematic dimension"

Imbued with an appearance of scientific rationality, Conrad Shawcross’ RA (b. 1977) often monumental sculptures explore subjects that lie on the borders of geometry and philosophy, physics and metaphysics.

Inspired by different technologies, the artist's structures may retain in appearance the authority of machines – yet their raison d’être remains elusive, filled with paradox and wonder. Some have a melancholy feel, while others tend to the sublime, substituting the purely functional for phenomenological experience. Over almost three decades, Shawcross has paid tribute to some of the great pioneers and analysts, and considered specific moments or figures from the past. Shawcross’ art dons a cloak of rationality in order to conceal its more poetic heart. Interrogating what we take for granted and encouraging us to see beyond the physical and remember how limited our perception envelope really is.

Shawcross has completed numerous monumental public commissions across the world, including Paradigm (2016) outside the Francis Crick Institute in London, the 50 metre tall The Optic Cloak (2016) in Greenwich, the 18-metre tall Exploded Paradigm (2018) inside the atrium of the Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia, Schism (2020) at Château La Coste in Provence, France, the 4.5-metre tall Enwrought Light Fracture in honour of the poet W.B. Yeats in Chiswick (2022), and Manifold 5:4 (2023) at the Liverpool Street Entrance to the Elizabeth Line. He has exhibited at institutions across the world, including Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, USA, the National Gallery in London, ARTMIA in Beijing, Château La Coste in France, the Mathematical Institute in Oxford, Glyndebourne Opera House and MICAS in Malta.

Dr Pedro Rodrigues

"Dissolving the Frame — Psychoactive Substances, Art, and the Science of Consciousness"

Pedro Castro Rodrigues, PhD, is a psychiatrist and Clinical Research Fellow in Psychopharmacology at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College London. He has over 15 years of clinical experience across outpatient, inpatient, and emergency psychiatry, with a particular focus on depression and addiction, and the integration of psychotherapy with novel pharmacological approaches.

His research bridges psychiatry, psychological therapies and neuroscience, with expertise in computational models of brain function, neuroimaging, and the therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelic substances. He has contributed to advancing theoretical models of psychedelic drug action and has published in leading journals including Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Mental Health. He is also the author of "Revelar a Mente" (Leya), a book on psychedelics written for a general audience in Portuguese.

Beyond the clinic and the laboratory, Pedro works at the intersection of psychedelic science and lived experience. He serves as a medical doctor with Kosmicare — a pioneering harm reduction organisation — at Boom Festival in Portugal, one of the largest psychedelic gatherings in Europe, supporting people through acute psychological crises in celebrational contexts. This experience has deeply informed his understanding of altered states not merely as pharmacological phenomena, but as profoundly human experiences shaped by context, community, and meaning.

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1st Slot

May- Helen Torland (Movement psychotherapist)- Rhythm Conversations - Movement

Dembis Thioung (West African Drum Master & Griot) - PENCHMI drum + Dance + chant portal - Music

Marion Green (Art psychotherapist)- Physical & Cosmic Grief - Visual Art

Enya Aquilna (Psychiatrist)- Cyanotype - Visual Art

2nd Slot

May-Helen Torland (Movement psychotherapist) - Internal Movement Pathways - Movement

Dembis Thioung (West African Drum Master & Griot)- PENCHMI drum + Dance + chant portal - Music

Marion Green (Art psychotherapist) - The Clinician's burden - Visual Art

Enya Aquilina (Psychiatrist) - Cyanotype - Visual Art

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Every PsychArt conference includes an open art show, and this year's theme invites artists to explore the in-between.

Theme: Thresholds, An Exploration of the In-Between

Where does an altered state begin, and where does it end? At what point does the familiar loosen its grip and something else emerge? How do these experiences fold back into what we call “reality,” however unstable or subjective that may be?

We invite artists to explore thresholds: liminal spaces, fleeting transitions, and moments of crossing. These may be subtle or seismic, psychological, spiritual, neurological, or cultural.

“For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, I concluded, its summit must be inaccessible but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them… The door to the invisible must be visible.”— René Daumal, Mount Analogue

Submissions might engage with:

• The drift from waking into sleep, hypnagogic imagery, dissolving forms.
• Sudden clarity or rupture, moments of enlightenment, awakening, or satori.
• Dissociation, re-experiencing, and reintegration in trauma and its treatment.
• Trance states through ritual, movement, music, or substances.
• Guides across thresholds (therapists, shamans, symbolic figures, or mythic psychopomps).
• Visual languages of transition, mandalas, yidams, talismans, or other mediating forms.

We welcome all forms of visual art, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, mixed media, and digital work.

This exhibition will form part of a group show during the PsychArt Conference, bringing together perspectives from art, psychiatry, and lived experience.

Practical information:If you would like more details or need to confirm whether your work can be exhibited, for example due to size, installation requirements, or technology, please email the organisers before submitting. Kindly email us regarding your entry to be given specific details and feedback: [email protected]

Info: Ways to envision this elusive and problematic dimension

Info: Psychoactive Substances, Art, and the Science of Consciousness

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Garrod Building, Turner Street, London, United Kingdom

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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