As new media technologies appear increasingly indistinguishable from magic, the Internet is becoming a forum for the struggle between the left-hand and right-hand paths of esoteric revelation and weird mediation. From witchcraft to psychedelia, this exhibition draws together artworks on the theme of weirdly mediated modes of knowing the beyond from within. 

Although psychedelia is often associated with a 60's "flower power" aesthetic, powerful mind altering substances have been imagined differently in different places and times—including in dark and disturbing forms, as for example with the CIA’s “MKUltra” mind control experiments. In spite of this radical contingency, what connects these various experiments is that they are all deeply weird. These drugs, like the technologies of Silicon Valley, can be conceptualized as both a cure and poison—what the ancients called a "pharmakon". Neither good nor bad, they are also far from neutral. 

As we enter the 2020’s, Silicon Valley and biotech are turning psychedelic drugs into big business. For all its therapeutic potential, this renaissance in psychedelic research threatens, however, to eclipse the weirdly mystical dimensions of underground psychedelic cultic milieus, whose secret history reaches back to antiquity. As media technologies are fundamentally changing how we encounter each other, the world and ourselves, what we need are visions of how we would like to be mediated differently. 

United by a long and brutal history of oppression these technologies of the self have long been used to access the divine through self-knowledge, which the ancients referred to as "gnosis". Centered around an online exhibition of video and performance art, Weird Gnosis curates a dialogue with both artists and thinkers whose practices engage with these paradoxes of revelatory and radical weirdness.