Psychonautic Media

Anastasia Yumeko Hill
Film and Media Studies
UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation examines the materials, technologies, and environments intentionally used to alter consciousness as media objects, specifically in terms of how they incite and mediate altered states-as-perceptual events.  As ‘case studies,’ Anastasia Yumeko Hill looks at wilderness landscapes, LSD, and sensory deprivation tanks in relation to the media images they, in part, determine and produce – ‘images’ understood here as the subjective experience of embodied alterity constituted by various mediating processes.  This experimental study therefore disorients and reconfigures the relationships between, and location and materiality of, the medium, the mediated content or ‘information,’ and the act of perceiving – as the event of parallactic perception itself constitutes the image.  Thus the image as thing is displaced by the image as process, while the external or ‘technical’ frame is replaced with an internalized sense of difference.  Premised on the already attenuated status of the image, and consequent emphasis on embodied modes of perception – a central issue within new media theories of the digital (wherein transient, ‘formless’ data is understood to require a form-giving subject) – this research incorporates art and media theory and aesthetics, philosophies of perception, and literary interpretations of altered states.  With a background in art-making and commitment to linguistic and poetic experimentation, Hill’s methodology, however, is most fundamentally grounded in the reflexive use of language – as a ‘mind-altering’ medium itself capable of generating alterity, providing a means to think concepts differently.

Hill received her B.F.A in Fine Art Media from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Her film and video work focused primarily on narrative structure, deconstruction and re-contextualization of filmic conventions, and reflexivity. She became interested in systems of perceived or accepted information, peripheral scientific theories, and diagrams and illustrations in relation to fallacy, corruption, and arbitrariness within the construction of knowledge. She is currently in her first year of the Ph.D. program and is concentrating on the philosophical and metaphysical undercurrents of narrativity and the relatedness to systems of fact and knowingness. She hopes to continue making work balancing on the crux of theory and practice.