Angels and Animals: Posthumanism and ‘cosmic consciousness’ in psychedelic ‘expanded’ cinema
Brief Encounters August 19, 2024 Harry Salisbury
By examining Bruce Conner's Looking for Mushrooms and Stan Brakhage's Eye Myth, this paper connects psychedelic expanded cinema with Alan Watts's writings and posthuman philosophy. It highlights how film materiality relates to altered states of consciousness, linking 1960s Californian counterculture to transnational anti- and posthumanism. The analysis begins with Watts's dualism between the 'angel and animal' of human subjectivity, then explores tensions between psychedelic transcendentalism and materialist posthumanism centered on embodied experience. The paper argues that Conner and Brakhage's films stage interventions into debates about human and posthuman subjectivity, offering an alternative perspective on psychedelic expanded cinema and the intellectual history of anti-humanist philosophy.