Helen Knowles

Trust The Medicine

Trust the Medicine is a participatory artwork and 360 film developed in collaboration with design team, Metaobjects. Trust the Medicine documents a staged psychedelic integration group, with real volunteers and led by a real psychotherapist, which focuses on the phenomenon of encountering entities associated with psychedelic drugs.

The work considers what is at stake when psychedelic intelligences look after human health. Can we go as far as to claim allyship with these entities, which constitute a form of more-than-human intelligence? Or is entity encounter just a projection of our internal dialogues?

Trust the Medicine is informed by my artist residency with the Psychoactive Trials Group at King’s College London, who undertake controlled clinical trials with psychedelics and related compounds such as psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT and MDMA. I attended the Maudsley Integration Groups (IG) held for patients and users of psychedelics to come to terms with their psychedelic experiences.

Science Gallery London
Curator, Laura Purseglove worked with me on a prototyping session and premiere of the artwork at Sceince Gallery, London in december 2023. Over the course of a day, audiences interacted with the artwork’s AI generated psychedelic entities as characters which featured in the 360 film, using chat GPT and sentiment analysis.  Data was gathered from these conversations and impacted in real time on the narrative and aesthetics of the film.

Please get in touch if you think this might be of interest to you to exhibit or support the deeper development of this artwork.

The artwork has been developed in collaboration with: Northumbria University, The Psychoactive Trials Group, King’s, College London, MetaObjects.org, psychedelic integration group participants: Raquel Scheid, Alan Wildsmith, Eti Saltpeper, Pierre D’alancaisez, Ben Koppelman, Christina Nteventzi, Grant Foster, Andrea Khora , Muhammad Arif , Holly Birtles, Antoni Tashev and Nicolas Johnson, Ben Huss: Immersive Technologist and Niall Hill and the Public Anthropology department, UCL

The Integration Group was part of a site-specific exhibition called ‘Blake’s Old Haunt’. Hercules Road Gallery presented a site-specific exhibition examining the period in the 1790’s when poet and visionary artist William Blake resided in Lambeth. In Blake’s day the site was called Hercules Buildings and Blake’s address was Mr Blake - Engraver, Hercules Buildings, Westminster Bridge.After relocating south of the river from Soho, it was here that Blake produced Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America a Prophecy, The First Book of Urizen and many of his most celebrated paintings and print works.It was also where Blake claimed to have been haunted. Taking the idea of haunting as the subject in chief, the artists in the exhibition sought to respond to interpret Blake’s work made in this most intellectually prosperous stage of his life.

Performance / Integration Group Location took place in the Park Plaza Hotel Waterloo in April 2023.