Going BEYØND
A "Soft Launch" for Our DAO / NFT project in NYC next week
For those in New York or with a yen to travel here, I wanted to invite you to a reception, a “soft launch,” for BEYØND, a new project I have been working on for the last year with a crew of visionary collaborators. Please RSVP here (this event is free for paid subscribers to this newsletter — please message me and I will put you on the guest list).
I will write more about the project in the months ahead. Essentially, we seek to explore the possibilities opened by “Web3” to bring together art, community, technology, and consciousness exploration in new ways.
Personally, I love starting new things, helping tiny seeds of ideas take root and flourish. With BEYØND, I am finding the opportunity to channel my inner Warhol: We intend to create a new context and a platform for all kinds of creative experiments to take place. Ultimately, I hope to build something decentralized, evolving into new forms without needing my focus.
As I have expressed in past essays, I feel our culture has gotten a bit stuck on repeat. When I go to galleries or museums, I don’t often sense that the art world is exploring new territory or exploding with fresh ideas. Today, we are almost in a Baroque period where artists offer unique elaborations of familiar avant-garde tropes, where literature and fashion similarly reiterate old approaches.
I always loved studying the great art movements of the past— Surrealism, DaDaism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Conceptualism, etc (I recommend The Banquet Years as one beautiful evocation of those heady times). I grew up with the legacy of the Beat Generation, through my mother, author Joyce Johnson (Minor Charactersis her memoir of the Beats). That was mainly a literary movement that focused on spontaneity and freedom, breaking out of 1950s conformism and preparing the way for the avant-garde 60s.
I believe the cutting-edge, today, is the exploration of consciousness itself — what Tom Roberts, in The Psychedelic Future of the Mind, talks about as the vast range of possible “mindbody states.” Some of these altered states of consciousness come with “state-specific knowledge,” or, as The Qualia Foundation explores, particular psycho-geometric structures that profoundly transform our cognitive processes when we are in them.
One area we intend to explore with BEYØND is the final boundary for any living organism, that of death. Alex Ebert, one of our collaborators, often writes about how our culture refuses to face death or integrate mortality. We always seek to push it away. This explains our culture’s mindlessly rote response to Covid, for example.
We want to use art as a vehicle to explore the outer edges of human consciousness, including the psychic, paranormal, and magical. The relatively recent discoveries of quantum physics suggest that the physical universe is ultimately an expression or a projection of consciousness — that the universe is “not locally real,” proved by the experiments that won the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics.
I don’t want to share more about our plans quite yet. If you are in New York, I hope you can make it to our opening reception next week. If you are interested in collaborating with BEYØND and think you might have something tangible to offer at this early stage, please email me directly (daniel.pinchbeck@gmail.com). We are looking for artists, engineers, marketing and operations people who can help us launch successfully.
Amazing !
🌹