Do Androids Dream of Electric Kool-Aid is a snapshot of Self in 2022. The title is a mashup of the title of Philip K Dick's short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", on which the film Blade Runner was based, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Tom Wolfe book about countercultural psychedelic pioneers of the Beat and hippie generations.

It is exactly two years after the WHO announced the Covid pandemic. In that time, my sense of self and identity has shifted, possibly even been subsumed by my explorations in digital art, mixed and virtual realities. In order to cope with the terrors of the physical world during Covid – disease, death, racism, among other things – I willingly plugged myself into the electric network, spending much of my time exploring altered states of consciousness.

I'm conscious of the fact that we are now living in the future we imagined for ourselves, and once-radical ideas have become normal without our even noticing. Blade Runner asked us to consider the essence of being human. Is it our capacity to create? Are we made human by our bodies, or our memories? If we augment ourselves with machines, are we less real? The psychonauts of the '60s ingested psychedelics to access knowledge of universal consciousness and experiences apparently untethered from the strictures and laws of the physical world. Nowadays not only can we trip ourselves out at the touch of a button, but we can communicate with each other, silently, all over the planet, at the speed of thought.

I am susceptible to artificial environments. Life in the cryptoverse has opened my eyes to how quickly the mind can adapt to novel or even impossible surroundings, to pure imagination. When I strap my nervous system into a synthetic reality, it takes almost no time for my consciousness to occupy and interact with it. Then again, some spiritual traditions would say that all that we accept as matter of fact is also a matter of perception as well. Nothing is real.