Hardly a revolutionary notion and, when pushed, the similarity is not that striking for there still remains a vast gulf in the experience of the unescapable immersion of the psychedelic world and the neat simulations of the digital. However it is apparent that there is a consistent engagement with the imagery and affects of the hallucinogenic state in the imagining of the look and experience of a new technological space.

If we get beyond the 'got dressed in the dark' similarities of the style of the Haight Ashbury hippies of the sixties and the frontiersmen of the new information technology (think Lanier and friends), the strongest parallels are found not in the realm of the scientists, the artists and the programmers but in the rendering of 'cyberspace' for consumption by popular culture in films and fictions. Here time shifts, time travel and the loss of the corporeal self are consistently rendered in full psychedelic glory.

As Mark Dery has pointed out in his study of 'cyberculture' it is hardly surprising that the realms of 'cyberspace' are overrun with the paraphernalia of the sixties' counterculture when so many baby boomers are re-living their youth through its new freedoms or simply steering the industry.¹ Saturated with the images and mythology of this culture of quick-fix-transcendence from its mysterious brilliant coloured mandelbrots (the mandala of the nineties) to the giant unified global consciousness of the World Wide Web; this yuppie gee-wow techno-pagan revolution is personified in the turn on, jack in, jack off writing of Douglas Rushkoff where the new-gen spokes-people of VR are elevated to pop stars; their fashion statements as important as their sound bite-doctrines. This is the world of the quasi rock star mysticism of Mondo 2000 and the second coming of the late psychedelic guru Dr Timothy Leary.

So why is there this fascination with the 'trip' in the new technological realm. Surely there is more to it than the online ranting of the beatific Leary and the recent run of ecstasy-led summers-of-love techno trance dance bliss. In a 1969 Playboy interview Marshall McLuhan theorised that hallucinogenic drugs were "chemical simulations of our electric environment" a method of "achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip". I don't really know what this means nor am I sure that McLuhan precisely knew either. This image of the electronic environment as a 'drugless inner trip' however is a persistent means of conceiving a place where the rules that conventionally govern time and space have been altered, for opening up the possibility of experiencing space, time, movement and 'other things' in new ways.

If we go back to the source of a thousand dreamings on this new technological realm and revisit the first time when most of us encountered its possibilities in William Gibson's seminal 'sci-fi' work Neuromancer we find precisely this vision as 'Case' projects "his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix".² The trip and all its associated dimensions of loss of the body and altered perception has become a major paradigm for envisioning the electronic space of a 'cyber' future. When this idea came to be portrayed visually in cinematic terms again it was the vocabulary of the psychedelic hallucination that was tapped, bringing to the screen an explosion of brilliant colours and morphing bodies. Every time a character needs to traverse through the new wonder that is the cyber future it is as if they are falling through the Dr Who titles - a tunnel of brilliant light pulsing and moving. This is the consensual vision for cyber travels from The Lawnmower Man to Johnny Mnemonic. The Lawnmower Man is particularly interesting in its use of drug metaphors. It was the first of the big screen cyber adventures, a dystopic story of the dangers of science meddling with nature. In it the relationship of the characters to the 'new electronic dimension' is heavily couched in the metaphors of drug experience from the 'bliss' of the early experiences, to the Lawnmower man's developing psychosis with continuous over use and his girlfriend's 'bad trip' resulting in her being completely brain-fried, an analogue to the acid casualty. Expanding on this drug metaphor The Lawnmower Man makes assertions for the new electronic dimension as able to tap the primal psyche of its users - which is a fairly bold assertion for what really is some trumped up mathematics and its electronic frame.

When we look at the cinema's creation of these high tech adventures they are thoroughly dependant on psychedelic visions to evoke the sensation of a brave new world. For example in the movie Hackers if you were to take away the giant 3d modelled cities of data and the experience of travel in cyberspace as rushing down tunnels of psychedelic light then all you are left with is a new age Famous Five in day-glo and PVC up against those sneaky smugglers for one more time.

The psychedelic vision can be understood as a trope to help conceive a potential spatial/temporal relationships beyond the familiar world. It is part of our need to find a cultural and historical language to cope with the science and aesthetics of the artificial. Beyond entertaining ourselves with new fantasies of the future we are currently engaged in creating a 'metaphysics' for realising the new 'space' of the information age. This is a search for models with which to conceptualise the possible dimensions of an electronically generated frontier. This search has touched upon the altered states created by the use of psychedelic's where time and space appear behave in a manner unbounded by conventional physics. There are very few models for conceiving alternate perceptions or visions of the world . The English psychiatrists Osmond and Smythies and the American researchers the Lab Madness Boys when conducting their pioneering experiments with LSD and clinical insanity experienced when tripping states that parallel those described by delusional psychiatric patients. From their chemically altered encounters they became aware that their patients were not making up fantasies about the world but were in fact providing accurate descriptions of how the world around them was behaving, that it was their perception and therefore their understanding that had been altered.³

The more sophisticated and alien the technology the more dependant we become on tropes and metaphors to explain the concepts of new technology and to bring them within the bounds of cultural understanding. Timothy Druckrey claims that there is a rising cultural anxiety created by the advent of new visual realities in the information age. Objects that are increasingly difficult to comprehend, that have no physical existence beyond the data maps and models that portray them such as the operating system of DNA and the electronic operation of neurosynapses. These otherwise imperceivable objects generate a fear of incomprehensible technologies.⁴ Coupled with this suspicion of technology 'beyond reason' the modernist faith in technology creating a better world has been overridden with a vision of the future where technology destroys the natural world. Technological dreamings of the future now deliver ultimately the Terminator fantasy of a man made technology hell bent in the destruction of mankind.

Unsurprisingly at the end of the millennium there is an interest in the new frontiers of technology and representation and in the continuous process of making and remaking of the world. In this decade photography, which transformed philosophies of visual representation last century, is suffering a well documented fall from grace as a testament of visual truth. The new technologies of representation have robbed it of its high modernist notion of visual truth and it is no longer recognised as the purveyor of an objective scientific fact - for today photographs are not as real as they once where.

'Cyberspace' is a construct of representation and perception, of information in various forms. Unlike the other great space explorations of the twentieth century that saw the human race both circling the planet and circumnavigating their own lower intestine, 'cyberspace' is not out there to be discovered and conquered but is itself a creation of science. Not only is this new information space an invention of science but in part the actual 'construction' of 3D 'cyberspace' is grounded solidly in the most conservative of scoptic regimes, the mathematically precise grided creations of an ideal cartesian perspective. In its vision of the future the information age has endorsed and reproduced cartesian space once more as the dominant model for western perception.

Imagining a new electronic space demands a language to represent it. This is not merely a vehicle for expressing thought but the driver of thought. How we imagine such space will eventually dictate how it will be designed and worked. If this is so what is the status of the psychedelic hallucination as metaphor? Postwar experimenting with psychotic substances began within the realm of scientific experiment. The original psilocybin experiment of thinkers such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard were dedicated to expanding the human consciousness in pursuit of a better society. The imagined utopia of Huxley's Island was the LSD paradise at the end of the psychedelic rainbow. The experiments of the Lab Madness Boys and their ilk were to develop a better knowledge of how the human brain worked and of the tentative structures that defined normality. What these early pioneers discovered was that the laws we constructed to govern our perception of the world, its structures and its sanity, were far more fragile than we had been led to believe and when new factors were introduced they could be completely ruptured. What these visionaries and scientists set out to explore were the frontiers of human perception. Ultimately, however, LSD instead of creating a taste for enlightenment promoted a love of sensation, the more intense the better. "In the end what LSD offered was a trip to Disneyland - lots of scary rides and laughs but no wisdom".⁵

Well, there is the parental warning out of the way and who knows there may really be some interesting parallels in the seduction of the promises of 'new' information space and a good old fashioned trip. However, at the moment, 'cyberspace' remains predominantly a semiotic fiction. It is apparent that to immerse oneself in a fully credible 'reality' you need to imagine a simulated world every bit as complex as the 'real' world it tries to re-present. In imaging a bold 'new' electronic frontier 'cyberspace' is presented as both liberating and exciting, exploiting tropes of adventure and exploration - of boldly going where no one has been before. The rhetoric of 'cyberspace' is rich with the ideology of both evolutionary and revolutionary change. It is personified as a source of counterculture without seemingly contradicting its 'inevitable' status of scientific progress on the march.

In the conception of the new technological space these are revolutionary times and there is some borrowing from the great counterculture revolution of the drug awakened consciousness of the sixties. As a counterculture it shares with these dreamers of the past the fantasy of an escape from history and a short cut to the land of plenty. However 'cyberspace', instead of existing as a place of limitless possibilities and connections, remains locked in the constraints of oppositional logic and the mind/body split of western metaphysics. Between the rigours of its mathematic axioms, its alliance to cartesian dualism and its fantasy of transcendence, no wonder it is difficult to imagine. Robert Markley has described 'cyberspace' as "a consensual clich³, a dumping ground for repackaged philosophies about space, subjectivity and culture" that does not offer any 'breakthroughs' but "merely a seductive means to reinscribe fundamental tensions within western concepts of identity and reality".⁶ Markley's assessment of cyberspace as one more territory enshrining the western tendency to privilege mind over materiality is a far cry from most of the prosaic imaginings of a new technological realm. Take for example one architect of the futures helpful description: "Cyberspace is a habitat of the imagination, a habitat for the imagination, - the place where conscious dreaming meets subconscious dreaming, a landscape of rational magic, of mystical reason, the locus and triumph of poetry over poverty, of 'it-can-be-so' over 'it-should-be-so'."⁷

Hmmmm , I think I will need drugs to explain this one.

1 Mark Dery, (1996), Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the end of the Century, Hodder and Stroughton, London 2 William Gibson, (1995), Neuromancer, Harper Collins, London p.12 (first published 1984)
3 Jay Stevens, (1989), Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Paladin, London, p.53
4 Timothy Druckery, (1996) Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, Aperture Foundation, New Jersey, p.13
5 Stevens, ibid
6 Robert Markley, (1996) "The Metaphysics of Cyberspace", Virtual Realities and their Discontents, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
7 Marcos Novak, (1991), "Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace", in Cyberspace :First Steps, ed M.Benedikt, MIT Press, Massachusetts, p.225