Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny
Lexington Books January 1, 2024 Leandros Kyriakopoulos
A mobile and multi-sited ethnography follows Greek EDM and party enthusiasts across psychedelic-trance gatherings in Hungary, Morocco, and Greece to investigate the revelatory experience of chemical psychedelic raving. The work situates the rave experience within the phantasmagoria of the festival—a dreamworld of the alien and uncanny—reformulating questions of liminality, spirituality, community, and identity. It initiates a discussion about the limits of cosmopolitanism and aesthetics as reorganized in 21st-century techno-political conditions, reframing taste, consumption, altered experience, and lifestyle through technoaesthetics. The author speculates on an impending techno-social world of augmented senses and artificial impressions, questioning the mediation of social events and the reification of utopian paradises as contemporary dreamworlds.