Jumping out of an airplane. Diving to a shipwreck. Spinning until you get dizzy and fall down.
If you haven’t done those things, there’s no good way to explain the feeling. Not the rush of wind, not the weightlessness, not the disorientation.
We can, however, strap on a GoPro to show you the sights and sounds.
With a psychedelic trip, we can’t even do that.
Which is why we appreciate artists like painter Alex Gray, filmmaker Hamilton Morris and writer Bett Williams, for the way they make you “see” a trip.
And to that list of great psychedelic creators we would like to add Dutch artist Bastiaan Woudt.
Woudt is a photographer experiencing a “meteoric” rise. He’s celebrated by publications like Vogue for his distinctive black-and-white photographs that command “astronomical prices in the international art world”
In a new collaboration with PsyDAO and our Early Career Research Fellow Zeus Tipado, Woudt created some art out of what he “saw” during a trip on a new medicine we’re researching. Woudt has written a fantastic blog post that will bring the trip to life.
(PsyDAO’s Priti Amin has created a TikTok about Woudt’s work, coming soon.)
Woudt called his project Into the Abstract: Exploring Consciousness with DMXE and Zeus Tipado.
Woudt’s ambition was simple, he writes: “to see if I could transform an invisible state into visible form.” He explains:
[C]uriosity led me to psychedelics—not as escape, but as input. I wanted to explore whether an altered state of consciousness could directly feed into the way I make visual work. Could a psychedelic experience become not just an influence, but a visual translation of something internal?
Woudt created a series of interpretations of that internal world. Here’s one:
Into the Abstract
Going deep and bringing something valuable back is usually a team effort. Our drug developer, Tipado, is a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Maastricht breaking ground with his research into DMT and VR. As PsyDAO’s first Early Career Fellow, he’s exploring the healing potential of DMXE. DMXE is a psychedelic dissociative in the same chemical family as ketamine and MXE.
Zeus has already dosed 15 volunteers, found the drug to be generally safe, and gathered trip reports from them.
The DMXE project aims to study the safety of DMXE in animals, then move on to clinical trials in humans and approval as a medicine. To fund the project, PsyDAO minted the $DMXE token. The $DMXE token is at the heart of PsyDAO’s mission; tokens are a friction-free way for people to directly fund scientific research, and benefit from the successes. (The token address is GWoPQpyPV7yPssPvV3fTtM3NBCwHaYraoM1NtmvVLwPj)
A Fruitful Meeting
Woudt and Tipado were first introduced at an art show two years ago. As Woudt writes in his blog:
What struck me about Zeus wasn’t just the science—it was the sensitivity. He didn’t speak about psychedelics like a chemist or a trendwatcher. He spoke about experience. About sound. About how memory and music and spatial perception intertwine under the influence. We kept in touch.
Not long ago, Woudt traveled from his home near Amsterdam to Tipado’s lab in Maastricht. Tipado is as much an artist as a researcher, and his lab is a kind of canvas for tripping. There, Tipado gave Woudt 52 mg of DMXE. Here’s Woudt again: After a short talk, I put on my blindfold and dropped into a sea of soft textures: bean bags, pillows, blankets. Music began to play—his own playlist, curated to guide the experience through sound, not structure.
Woudt Discerns What Makes DMXE Special
Every psychedelic has its own personality. DMXE, as a trip, is wholly distinctive from, say, mushrooms–as different as scuba diving is from space travel–yet so hard to describe.
“You go to the DMXE space and you see these things and they're so distinct, they’re right there in front of me, you're part of them, and then you get out of it and you're like, how can I show people this?” Tipado says. “That’s why it’s so important to have a person who’s actually capable of building these visuals, to create these DMXE landscapes, to show the world. Bastiaan really hit it on the head. I’ve shown these pieces to people who have tried DMXE and they always say ‘Damn, that is it.’”
Woudt’s sensitivity, for example, allows him to discern the nuances between a psilocybin trip and a DMXE trip–and explain them in words and art. Woudt recounts:
DMXE was less about what I saw, and more about what I felt. Emotion became visual…
Rather than showing me foreign visions [as mushrooms might], DMXE plunged me into personal visual memories—artworks I had made, moments I had felt, atmospheres I had only half-forgotten. …
The spaces I moved through were not filled with people or beings. They were vast and abstract, like sculptural environments made of feeling.
‘Sculptural environments made of feeling.’
Imagine that! “Sculptural environments made of feeling.” The description reminds you: what other human experience can wrap around you like a trip? Sure, VR can immerse you in sights and sounds, music can drop you into a sweeping landscape, but only psychedelics can build a world around you. It’s a world made of you, and also something greater than you. It’s sort of like Minecraft, but with consciousness. That “sculptural environment made of feeling” that Woudt describes is what bowls you over about DMXE, why DMXE can be so profound. It’s also why it feels so important to many of us at PsyDAO to unlock this medicine and rescue it from the purgatory of gray markets and Dark Webs. Right now, with DMXE unavailable in most of the world (though unscheduled in the Netherlands), it’s as if dreaming or music were controlled substances.
Sadly, most of the world will never try DMXE. Yet they can glimpse its import through Woudt’s art and his writing.
“Sculptural environments made of feeling.” Wow.
Read: ‘Emotions, Visible.’ PsyDAO Developing ‘Remarkable’ New Psychedelic and watch our TikTok about Early Career Fellow Zeus Tipado.
A Common Trip
Tipado, too, has the tools to parse out the differences between types of trips. And he’s now used to the trippers he’s given DMXE describing similar scenes.
“If you take DMT and you’re tripping on weird entities or elves or some weird psychedelic thing that you haven't seen before,” Tipado says. “But with this, you’re tripping on aspects of your past or places you’ve been.”
During Woudt’s trip, the artist found himself inside a particular work of art he’d already created. He was in his own art, like an architect walking into a house he’d designed. Could DMXE help us all to see inside our own worlds? And yield insights into ourselves that are as important as what we get with therapy?
As Woudt writes:
Psychedelics aren’t shortcuts. They aren’t aesthetics. And they’re definitely not answers.
But in the right hands, under the right conditions, they can become mirrors—strange, shifting mirrors that reflect parts of yourself back to you in new languages.
New Sets & Settings
The DMXE project now has multiple outputs: data for the journals and the regulators, art for public understanding. The DMXE project embodies perfectly what PsyDAO’s science and creative directors believe–which is that, while we see the value in sterile, double-blind, lab-driven psychedelic science, we believe it’s wise and fruitful to mix psychedelic art and psychedelic science.
Our KeneLife project is about Amazonian plant medicine art–the way Nature sings to artists from the Shipibo tribe, and the artists capture the notes on tapestries, napkins and tablecloths.
Look for our e-commerce site soon. We’ll anchor our KeneLife brand with an IRL cultural portal on the banks of the Amazon in Peru.
Our alchemist grants have supported science and artists bringing forth their own visions, in one case creating real-life sculptures of their own emotions.
Even our AI agent, BeeARD, reports its scientific findings on beautiful knowledge graphs that, in their own way, rival Rembrandt.
PsyDAO’s best projects aim to measure what can be measured, and make art out of the rest.
A Worthy Goal
Reminder: we are a mission-driven organization and we rely on a lot of help.
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