Helen Knowles
Trust the Medicine
360 Film / AI Installation
Science Gallery London

We worked with UK-based artist Helen Knowles on her project Trust the Medicine: Engaging with AI Entities that was presented at the Science Gallery London on 8th December 2023. Trust the Medicine is a participatory artwork and 360 film developed in collaboration with MetaObjects that documents a staged psychedelic integration group, 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 Knowles’ 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. Knowles has also attended the Maudsley Integration Groups (IG) held for patients and users of psychedelics to come to terms with their psychedelic experiences. Trust the Medicine documents a staged psychedelic integration group, with real volunteers and led by a real psychotherapist.

In the exhibition, audiences can watch the psychedelic integration group as they share their experiences of psychedelic entities. Their entities are visualised as animated 3D renderings generated from a workshop conducted with participants. Visitors can chat with the artwork’s AI generated psychedelic entities, using chat GPT and sentiment analysis, where the animations respond in real-time to audience input.

The exhibition follows a workshop on Visualising Psychedelic Entities with AI conducted in the summer of 2023 at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience in London with participants from the psychedelic integration group. We worked with the participants to sketch out their entities on paper and describe them using keywords. We then fed the text and images into Stable Diffusion to generate images of their psychedelic entities that were animated in the 360 film. Participants could refine their sketches and keywords to produce a more accurate rendering of their entities. The workshop presented challenges in visually and textually representing abstract feelings, sensations and experiences as an experiment to see whether AI could generate images resembling their entities or create other worldly depictions for the human imagination. Trust the Medicine is under on-going development as the artist’s long-term research project.

About the artist

Helen Knowles is an artist and curator based in the UK. She developed the Birth Rites Collection currently housed in the University of Kent. Exhibitions include the Science Gallery, London; Hercules Road Gallery, London; Hyundai Motor Studio, Beijing, 2023; Alberta University of the Arts; Leuphana University, 2022; Hannover project; ‘What Will Be’ Kunsthaus Graz, ‘Virtual Station’, Seoul, 2021; arebyte Gallery, London; Ars Electronica, Linz, 2020; and others. Her work is held in private and public collections including, Kunsthaus Graz, The Magistrates Organisation, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Gallery Oldham, Tate Library and Archive, The National Art Library, and others. A recipient of awards from Arts Council England and The Amateurs Trust, she was awarded an honorary mention at Ars Electronica 2020 and the Neo Art Prize, Great Art Prize.