---
type: salon
number: 112
title: Perception
date_recorded: 2026-11-05
date_published: 2026-11-05
video_id: 5I6BswegIss
url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss"
duration_seconds: 5185
moderator: Lee Schnaiberg
speakers:
  - name: Karen LaFleur
    country: null
    start: 191
  - name: Michael Pierre Price
    country: null
    start: 1044
  - name: Lee Schnaiberg
    country: null
    start: 2805
  - name: Keana Sears
    country: null
    start: 3732
transcript_source: zoom-transcript
languages: ["en"]
---

## Lee Schnaiberg [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=0s)

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Expressionism 112. The 112th SALON, Techspressionism SALON, and god, I miss Dava, because he used to have a regular here, and he'd be like, hello and welcome, and it was really cool. So I want to welcome everybody, and thank you all for being here, and today's theme for the SALON technically, is about perception. Which is already a huge, big bag, because, I mean, you go to a gallery, you look at pieces on the wall, you see them. We look at the weather when we hear it's going to rain, and we see that. So, we perceive things, but then there's this whole other crazy… Rabbit hole of that, which I believe Michael Pierre Price is gonna be showing us in his work, and very soon, our first guest is, Karen LaFleur, and her stuff focuses, as well, on perception. And I think it's a really cool concept because, you know, it tells us where we are, and it's… and it's like… it's a… we get a flood, like, everything is dark inside of us. We have no visuals, we have no screen, we don't even have any speakers.

We have cilia and photons, and you know, we have… we have things that can dump data. In different parts of our brain. And we dump data, and then the brain's like, hmm… is it this? Is it this? And it doesn't have my anthropomorphizing. The brain doesn't really do that, but it's like… this curve might be this. Like, we build… The reality of what we see, where we live, our world, and it's all from perception. So I think it's a really interesting topic, and I picked a bunch of artists who I… I absolutely look forward to hearing their points of view.

Karen LaFleur, has some, a medical need to be not near her computer right now, so she sent a video in advance so she can share her work and her perspective on everything. And I'm just looking for our little button which always moves, which says, share screen, God, why is it always… I should have practiced this before we started this thing. It's not here. Where is my share screen? Because I want to show everybody her work first. And… Anybody who knows where the new share screen might be, because it…

## Colin Goldberg [02:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=163s)

There should be a bank of buttons along the bottom of the window. That's weird.

## Lee Schnaiberg [02:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=167s)

They usually aren't, yeah. I found one! Okay, so, alright, so sharing with the… her screen, and also with her sound, so that we hear her voice. And so, I welcome you all to… enjoy Karen LaFleur's perspective, so let's go.

## Karen LaFleur [03:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=191s)

Hi, everyone. It's a delight to speak to you today about perception. When Lee mentioned the topic, I thought of my memoir that I'm writing on my life in the arts. The underlying theme to the book revolves around perception, so I've taken a few paragraphs from the book and combined them with some research, and then roll them together into a short essay. I hope you enjoy the results. Art, to me, is a language of expression, a unique way of perceiving and experiencing the world that resonates with the artist and is universally recognized by those who take the time to notice art. Art is the reason why handprints dating back 45,000 years adorn prehistoric cave paintings in Spain and other ancient sites across the globe. And art is the reason why the viewer's connection to this simple image of a hand on a cave wall transcends its beauty, or antiquity.

We intuitively understand the meaning behind the handprint, as if it speaks to us in its secret language, conveying, this is my soul's expression of consciousness. Some argue that consciousness cannot exist without the ability to perceive and experience the world, then internally process that input into something of meaning. However, this concept remains debated, as brain imaging and neuroscience research reveals that the brain generates continuous intrinsic activity, spontaneous oscillations.

In internal states, such as dreaming, deep meditation, or locked-in states that are not solely driven by immediate external input. Perception, then, can be discussed from many different points of view. For this presentation, however, I would like to focus on our ability to perceive in relationship to inner aliveness, and how the feedback between the two triggers an exchange between the inner I am state of consciousness and perception psychological interpretation of external sensory input.

Inner aliveness refers to your internal world, the direct experience of being alive before you attach words, labels, or judgments to experience. Perception, on the other hand, is the psychological process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting external sensory information. In essence, it's how your brain translates data from the physical world into a coherent mental picture. As an artist, I'm constantly striving to infuse my artwork with a sense of, I am. However, when the sense of aliveness is achieved, an intriguing phenomenon occurs. Perception has a way of mirroring itself.

The viewer becomes the subject of observation, and vice versa. Hi. Are you ready? Okay, I'll just sit over here and make myself comfortable. I'll leave this here, And here. So, hello everyone! The artists of Playtime in the Making asked me to speak to you about their creative journeys to bring this artwork into being, including myself. But that's a big story, so I thought I'd begin with the fundamental skills we all possess. Play… And creativity.

Every day we play our world into being, and create our day anew, tapping exactly the same insights artists use to bring their creative visions to life. In fact, according to recent studies, play is the brain's favorite way to learn. For me, it's always been about this inner aliveness within an artwork that ignites my creative curiosity, as if the artwork is gazing at me. Not realistically rendered, but caught in the act of being alive, akin to the movie scene where the eyes of an old castle painting blink inside cut-out holes, revealing someone's watchful gaze.

Artworks like these possess an uncanny aura that triggers a powerful biological response rooted in evolutionary survival. Our sense of perception becomes hyper-aware of our surroundings. And if the artwork skillfully emulates life, it can hold the audience's attention in a state of suspended belief similar to how a puppet rivets our attention while we ignore its strings. No layer in the art of puppetry hides behind the other. Only by the audience carefully examining these layers and more do they recognize the markers of life.

Once recognized as a living object in the audience's mind, the puppet takes a step further. It becomes an alter ego stand-in that lives and breathes out loud what none of us would dare say, or it reminds us of the things we've long forgotten. Therefore, a puppet serves as a creative medium that subverts, crosses, and mixes layers between the animate and inanimate worlds. It plays with our outer world perceptions of self and our inner secret psychologies.

When you engage with my artwork, it may appear visually appealing or intriguing by design. However, it's not the object itself I'm asking you to engage with. It's the dynamic interplay between the viewer and the viewed that I invite you to participate in. This continuous loop involves the audience's perception of the object and their recognition of its internal life. Once this loop is recognized, the artwork acquires its own autonomous set of rules for engagement with the audience. We observe this connection between perception and aliveness in puppets through the art of movement.

Yet we also witness the same element of aliveness in dolls that remain stationary as objects. This stillness intensifies the doll's mystery as its internal life is suspended until an individual imagination intervenes. I find that how we biologically respond to the doll as if alive opens a realm of neurological conflicts that I can creatively explore to express the boundaries of how humans perceive life. A puppet is acted upon by performers, while its audience remains a passive bystander. We impart life into the puppet in our brains through ancient neurological pathways that are hardwired to perceive expressional gestures and movement cues, triggering our perception of life. In contrast, the doll requires an intimate, one-on-one audience to bring it to life.

In essence, the doll's audience and performer become one and the same. While the doll is deeply personal, it generates more confusion in our brains to discern the difference between aliveness and perception of object compared to the puppet. The doll provides fewer clues to its existence. Instead, it activates different triggers in our brains. The first trigger is our almost instantaneous ability to recognize a physical shape as human. The second is to equate stiffness in staring eyes with death, which heightens our compassion instinct to revive.

For a child's undeveloped brain, the leap to giving a doll life comes naturally because it can't distinguish between reality and fantasy. However, for an adult brain, the jump is not so easy. Therefore, contemporary artists who use dolls as expressive mediums ask the adult audience to embrace the doll's uncanniness despite its contradictions, and to see it through emotional channels that the audience biologically possesses. But seldom uses in our modern culture. This pushing of comfort zones allows the artist to express content that is often unspoken, similar to the puppet, except that, with the doll, clues are expressed through visual content rather than through movement. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, after all, what would be beautiful if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself?

Back in the 1970s and 80s, when I was creating doll-like sculptures, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was experimenting with how characters express their inner emotions through gesture in a 3D space, and how they reveal their secret vulnerabilities. This would later inform my moving image artwork. Even if the subject was abstract, I allowed the artwork to move and breathe in its own unique way.

Movement, gesture, visual cues, weight density, breath, focus, resistance, and emotional timing. All these elements combine to help the doll, puppet, or even my moving image artwork cling to a precarious existence, relying solely on the imagination of others to instill it with believability. For me, then, perception between the viewer and the viewed is a two-way loop that I use as a creative underpinning in each of my artworks. It's my starting point before I place pen to paper or move a pixel across the screen. I first ask, who are you?

The reply is as Henry David Thoreau said, it's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

## Lee Schnaiberg [15:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=904s)

Well, that was just awesome, huh? Karen did a really nice thing there. Wow. If anybody does have any questions for Karen, put them in, in the chat, because… She'll be coming, like, she'll be joining us, well, trying to join us, on her way back from, the Massachusetts General Hospital. So, if you got any questions about her stuff. Put it in there, and, I'm gonna… when she's back, I will definitely ask her a bit more about… it sounded very… I love the idea that the observer is the observed.

I think it fits into so many things. Usually, I thought it was in behavioral aspects, you know. I hate that person, he always talks too much, says the person who won't stop talking. You know, I have the gift to grab myself, but… that's just one example. So, I like that, and I think that she was touching on that, how, not just… just before the… the dolls, when the puppets were still moving, she was talking about how the observed becomes… the observer becomes the observed, so I'm definitely gonna ask her more questions about that.

But, our… our next guest… who's here, I'm… I… I love hearing his stuff, because he always blows my mind, personally. And I… I wish I was, even a bit… I wish I was smarter. When I hear him, because I think I always gotta record and playback what he says afterwards. Don't take that the wrong way, Michael. Pierre price. But I'm talking about you, and I think that your stuff is so deep, but it's also a gorgeous just looking at it, so I don't want to over-hype everybody. You're supposed to undersell and let everybody overperform, and I'm here I'm kind of gushing a little bit, but… Michael's stuff is really wonderful, and it's a very different, or maybe not that different, but it's a unique take on perception, and I look forward to hearing that. So, Michael, why don't you, take the stage?

## Michael Pierre Price [17:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1044s)

Alright. Man, that's a hard act to follow, though, Lee. Oh, golly. Actually, there's probably going to be a fair amount of overlap between some of the things Karen talked about and what I'm going to share as well, which doesn't surprise me. So, alright. Let me….

Alright, how's that looking?

## Lee Schnaiberg [18:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1082s)

It was great.

## Michael Pierre Price [18:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1084s)

Alright. So, this, this is, A topic that I feel really, really passionate about, as many of you probably know, and some of you who are getting to know me, I… Tackle rather large subjects that can be challenging to, Digest and take a look at, in the areas of physics and neuroscience and consciousness and spirituality. And how they interact, interplay with one another. Is something that's always fascinated me, and as an artist, it's something for me that's rife with, being able to, challenge myself with creating artwork around some of those ideas.

So… I wanted to sort of put a definition out there, that I'm using for this concept of perception. And this is very similar to what Karen mentioned in her, in her talk. Everything as human beings, as conscious beings, we experience the world Mediated by our brains, and the input signals that come into it, whether it's visual, auditory, or what have you. And our waking consciousness has… Created a model of the world that we perceive since we were babies up until today.

And… That model, actually is necessary because our brains take an inordinate amount of energy to sustain themselves, and we need to be as efficient as we can. So, what happens is that Those sensory inputs get interpreted. And as efficiently as possible, the rest of our reality gets filled in by what we've experienced in the past and what we're seeing today in this immediate moment. So… We never really see… The world, in a raw sense. It's always filtered through this thing that's inside of our skulls.

And that's an important thing to be able to keep in mind, when people say, well, I'll believe it when I see it, oftentimes, that seeing is mediated by a whole lot of stuff that you may not be consciously aware of in the moment. So… Neuroscience tells us that the actual act of seeing is an act of creation. Just by what I was just talking about. So we do literally create our own reality. We take limited amounts of data in the moment, and the things that we need to fill in, our brain seamlessly fills it in, and we go about our days, and everything feels like a continuous story that we're telling ourselves about who we are.

What we believe, what we see, what we feel. Sometimes. Understandable in the moment in our consciousness, and many other times, Filled in by the… Primitive brain that has evolved over millennia, centuries, and we then… I pose a question in a lot of my artwork. Looking at consciousness, where do you actually exist? Is… are you completely contained within the physical limits of your physical body? And I think most of us would say, well, probably not. And so, therefore, it begs a question, what is it to be a conscious human being? What is it that we inhabit in this existence. What is this existence all about? And these are questions that I like to think about, and a lot of my artwork poses. I've been inspired by Cubism in the past, because I like this idea of multiple perspectives in one, image, in one piece of artwork.

And while I.

## Lee Day [22:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1366s)

Reed isn't playing, Michael.

## Susan Detroy [22:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1368s)

Your screen's not advancing.

## Michael Pierre Price [22:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1371s)

-Oh.

## Cynthia DiDonato [22:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1373s)

Yeah, and you're not in the show. Thanks.

## Susan Detroy [22:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1378s)

Yeah, you're not in the show mode, you're in a thumbnail.

## Lee Day [23:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1382s)

You're, you're on the wrong screen, you're on, on the dis… on the, The, the, whatever it is, moderator, not the display screen.

## Michael Pierre Price [23:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1392s)

Really? Why is that?

So I'm not sharing my screen?

## Lee Day [23:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1402s)

Sharing the wrong screen.

## Michael Pierre Price [23:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1406s)

Okay…

## Cynthia DiDonato [23:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1408s)

Michael, can you see from the beginning?

## Michael Pierre Price [23:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1410s)

I'm not sure… well, rats, okay,

## Cynthia DiDonato [23:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1415s)

You're in PowerPoint, correct?

## Michael Pierre Price [23:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1418s)

Yeah?

## Cynthia DiDonato [23:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1419s)

And at the top of the PowerPoint screen, it allows you to share the show. And I don't know that you've done that, and you can start from the beginning. Where it says, at the very top, to the left, it says, from the beginning.

## Michael Pierre Price [23:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1437s)

Right, that's what I did.

## Cynthia DiDonato [23:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1439s)

Well, I guess it didn't happen for us.

## Lee Day [24:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1441s)

But you have two screens going, right?

## Michael Pierre Price [24:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1444s)

Alright, is the full screen showing?

## Lee Day [24:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1446s)

No.

## Michael Pierre Price [24:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1447s)

Okay.

## Lee Day [24:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1448s)

You're… I think you chose the wrong screen to share. Like, when you go to…

## Michael Pierre Price [24:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1452s)

No. No, I didn't.

## Lee Day [24:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1454s)

Nope.

## Michael Pierre Price [24:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1458s)

Okay,

## Lee Musgrave [24:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1462s)

Perhaps there's some, surrealistic figure hiding behind everything and took control.

## Michael Pierre Price [24:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1469s)

So, you're not… are you seeing…

## Lee Schnaiberg [24:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1472s)

We see the picture that says Perception Michael Pierre Price. And on the left, there's… 9 thumbnails?

## Michael Pierre Price [24:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1482s)

Now you're not seeing the full screen.

## Lee Day [24:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1484s)

No.

## Michael Pierre Price [24:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1488s)

How is that possible?

What about now?

## Lee Day [25:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1506s)

I know.

## Lee Schnaiberg [25:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1507s)

It looks better.

## Susan Detroy [25:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1508s)

Yes.

## Michael Pierre Price [25:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1510s)

Gosh. Alright, I have no idea why it's working now. All right. Oh, darn. Okay, so, well, I don't want to necessarily repeat everything I said, but

## Lee Day [25:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1523s)

You can usually click to a middle, screen and start there.

## Michael Pierre Price [25:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1529s)

Alright, so here's…

## Lisa Sutton [25:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1533s)

I certainly wouldn't mind seeing the images that you had already put together, even if you flipped through them quickly.

## Michael Pierre Price [25:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1538s)

Alright. All right, so I'm creating my own reality right now, I guess.

## Cristina Ballesteros [25:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1549s)

3 retrograde.

## Michael Pierre Price [25:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=1551s)

Okay, so, as… I'll try to go back, here. So, as conscious beings, this idea of consciousness being limited to brain activity or, as we tell ourselves, the entirety of our being exists within our physical limitations of our body. That literally is not true, even though our brain might tell us that's the case. And for me as an artist, I like to explore that, and I have been influenced by Cubism, even though I don't do Cubist art in the traditional sense, but I like the idea of multiple perspectives.

Being contained within one, visual image, one piece of art. Currently, there's some really big debates, and these are things that are ongoing in the realms of physics, within neuroscience and consciousness research, and also within, Spiritual teachers who are looking at consciousness as something fundamental in the universe. And there is, a number of research areas, a number of different neuroscientists. Who have this idea of panpsychism, that everything in the universe has some level of consciousness, even of an electron.

And so the idea is, is consciousness something fundamental like gravity, like electromagnetism, or the weak or strong nuclear forces? And there's, I think, a coming understanding that potentially, if we want to try to have a theory of everything, to understand complete existence, we may need to fold in consciousness. Into a grand theory of existence. And I… I'm a firm believer that consciousness is fundamental. There's one neuroscientist, Donald Hoffman, who has even suggested that consciousness is the most fundamental thing, and that our physical universe is a manifestation of consciousness.

So these are… these are ongoing debates, and I… and again, as an artist, I like tackling these questions and these ideas. And for me, Visually and conceptually, and even poetically, I like to think of consciousness as a Mobius loop. Where… what I mean by that is that consciousness can be a bridge between physical and metaphysical reality. And again, I like that conceptually to use as an anchor for a lot of my work.

If… on my… on the homepage of my website, I have four… four truths that I have stated prominently, and I just wanted to talk about the first one, that the world is not as it seems. We live in a very, very small, Continuum within the grand scheme of existence in the universe. We… have a challenge when we try to think of the very, very big, like the scope and the scale and the timeframes about the universe. When we say, oh, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, we can say that number, but it's really hard for our brains to conceptualize that.

And when we go down to the microscopic level of quantum mechanics, and we try to think about electrons or quarks. Again, conceptually, intellectually, we can talk about these things, but when we try to use our imagination, or try to get a gut-level feel for what these things are. It becomes really, really difficult. And what it shows is that our world is much richer and more complex than our everyday lives would seem to indicate. And so, in that small world, it's beyond our vision, and so we've created microscopes and electron microscopes and other forms of seeing that expands what our eyes can see.

And it shows us a universe at such small levels that become very abstract. And 100 years ago or so. The world change in the realm of physics. Our understanding of the universe changed from the old Newtonian way of seeing the grand clockwork universe, where everything was very physical and moved with forces and things like that. But when quantum mechanics came about, all of a sudden, the small, small world of atoms and electrons and protons brought into being something so fundamentally weird and strange that ideas like… Wave equations, and probabilities, and entanglement, and the double-slit experiment. All these things brought into being that the universe now, at the most fundamental level.

Feels porous and ethereal and ghostly in some regards. And so… if… if you're not steeped in the math, which I fortunately am because of my physics background, it's… scientists, physicists, try to paint word pictures that the math is talking about. And as an artist, I try to do that in my own way of expressing some of the beauty that I see that's beyond our everyday experience. And this, this piece right here, is entitled, Two Up Quarks and One Down Quark in the Higgs Field.

And so, I'm trying to express something that is quantum mechanical, but something that looks very attainable that might be able to be interpreted in an interesting way. And as an artist, I'm really, really excited by these kinds of challenges. And… and to prove my point here, three of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, Schrodinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg, all realized how challenging this new realm of physics really is. If you just take… if you… if you get a chance to read some of their writings, they sound like mystics at times more than Hardcore scientists and physicists, because they realize that what we see as physical reality around us At the lowest level is something bizarre and abstract, and is not real in the way we see real.

And to me, that makes our existence fundamentally fascinating, interesting, and for me. Spiritually, sacred, just from the fact that these things exist, and that we're part of it. We get to… we get to challenge ourselves to try to understand these things. So, this… this really prompted for me a spiritual journey taking what I had learned, in physics, in astrophysics, in mathematics, with my personal interests with neuroscience and consciousness, I was fortunate to go up to Canada over about a 5-year period to Manitou, Long Island.

And spend time with Indigenous elders learning about their teachings, ceremonies, and spiritual practices that I've integrated into my own personal life but in regards to how I see the universe and existence, I've integrated these things into something that's sort of my own brew, if you will, of how I see the world. And more recently, over the last 2 years, I have been working with psychedelics, taking a number of journeys with psilocybin to understand and challenge my brain, and how I see the world, and how that's influenced me.

So these next several slides are some of my interpretations of some of those experiences that I've had. And… it's very interesting, it's very much hard to talk about the full totality of the experience, in this realm. It… I… I… Liken it to when I went to the Grand Canyon for the very first time. I had seen pictures of the Grand Canyon, and I've heard people talk about it. But until I was there, and blown away by the presence and the majesty of it, it paled in comparison to what I anticipated. It just blew me away.

And that's kind of my experience, not only with ceremony, and the spiritual practices that I Undertaken, but also these journeys and this work with the psychedelics as well. And I've incorporated that, into much of my more recent works as well. I like to think about, metaphorically and also practically. This idea of twilight into, sort of a germination for a lot of my work. I find Twilight to be a magical time. I consider it to be this liminal space between the dream world and our waking consciousness. And when it's… when it's not too hot here in Phoenix, like this time of year.

I go out every morning before sunrise, and oftentimes I get to see the owls in flight, and they'll interact with me at times, because we have a lot of owls here. And I find that really, really cool. And so these next few images are sort of, my finishing up of my presentation that… I think are good indicators of the kinds of work that I like to do, and the kinds of things that I like to challenge the viewers with, with regards to everything that I've talked about today.

I like to have a mix of things in the artwork that challenges the view, like the sky cracking and what that means. Things that look like they're 3D, but also painterly at the same time. And I have a lot of construct images that I included here. That are, indicators of things that I'm… I'm hoping will elicit some sense of reaction and thought. Here, to me, the empty chair of the viewer is really, really key and critical, and Karen mentioned that in her presentation as well. One of the things that fascinates me is creativity.

For 30 years, I was paid as a game designer to be creative. So, as an artist, I'm looking at sort of my brain's workshop. Of taking bits and pieces of things that I've that I found inspiring in the past, and how I might bring them together. And so this is like a work in progress by my brain, trying to come up with new ideas. And I like that. I like… being able to pull the veil and let people take a look, internally, even though that's not always easy to do as a person, especially when you're an introvert like I am. And again, multiple perspectives. How do we see the world? How do we understand ourselves? What gets reflected back to us? What do we remember? What do we fear?

One of the things that I've incorporated more recently is paintings within the painting, within the artwork. And I like that. I like the idea of multiple realities happening at the same time, and what the sources are for those, and the kinds of feelings that might elicit as you look at the… look at the work.

I threw in a little Van Gogh into this one here.

The element of time for me is also something that I find really, really interesting. And there's a lot of physics basis to the arrow of time, and that… this one sort of begs… begs the viewer to think about that. And I wanted to conclude by my last big idea that I've been struggling with and wrestling with, to understand the Totality of existence, and what my… what my existence means, and what the universe means. And so I've… I've come up with this last idea that I feel really good about when people try to ask me about, well, how do you see that? And to me, the vast ocean of oneness is the best metaphor and idea that I've come up with.

That all that exists, all that has, all that ever will exist. Are all these different waves on the ocean. You and me and electrons and galaxies are all part of this oneness of existence. And these waves last for a little bit of time, some very long time, some very short. But we're part of that oneness, and we return to that oneness, and everything that we have been gets put back into it, and so… The next wave may take part of what you were. And for me, I like this idea. It feels really, really special to me. It feels comforting to me. And the sacredness of moment for me is to realize, and Karen mentioned this, is that the universe is a feedback loop.

And so, every moment, That we're alive is potential to be actualized, to be materialized, to come to fruition. Alright. Thank you, Sart. Sorry about the glitch to start with.

## Lee Schnaiberg [41:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2495s)

That was wonderful. Thank you so much. James Michael, that was beautiful.

## Michael Pierre Price [41:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2501s)

Thanks, Lee.

## Lee Schnaiberg [41:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2503s)

So many things I want to ask you about. I think I… some of which… many of which I want to save for our one-on-one conversation that we're going to be having fairly soon. But, yeah, just, you know, I really thought… you know, kind of funny story, Colin's still here. When Colin asked me to do a SALON, the original topic was psychedelica. I guess, like, electronic psychedelics. And while I'm… I'm, like you, I'm a fan of psychedelics. I think, like, right now.

I live a block away from a publicly traded psychedelic therapy place. So, I mean, it's a different world than the 60s, nothing against that period also. But I think that this is a part of perception in some interesting way, and, like, the deeper aspects of perception start getting pretty trippy. Like, when we're talking about the observer is the observed, and we're talking about, the unity of everything, and the interconnectedness, and all these concepts, they go way beyond just perception.

But they're all nested in perception, so I think this is really interesting. And also, I would like to take a moment for a shout out to one tech specialist who's here. I don't see you in any of the pictures, but Moritz, Moritz, Dr. Maurice is here. So, talking about the brain and the, you know, the neuroscience, we have experts here in this group, and it's a really wonderful place to be. And… and Michael, that was just beautiful. The images were beautiful. I knew it. I knew it was going to be beautiful. I kind of… even though the theme is perception and not psychedelica, like Colin would say, I find that this is… I was picking artists who I would like to look at when I'm tripping.

I feel.

## Michael Pierre Price [43:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2631s)

Oh, thanks, Lee.

## Lee Schnaiberg [43:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2633s)

I'm not saying everybody should do psychedelics.

## Michael Pierre Price [43:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2635s)

Not the.

## Lee Schnaiberg [43:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2637s)

Promoting anything that's illegal. In Canada, it's… there's a gray area, but, but I do think, for me anyway. You know, funny story, you know, now they're coming up with all these, all these researchers are realizing that psilocybin can deal amazingly with depression, and can cure depression in a lot of cases. And I just remember family members who know me and know other stuff that… like, I've had some harsh stuff happen, most of us have. But, but not everybody, and, and some are more than others, and I remember her saying to me, with all these things, it's amazing that you're not depressed, and I'm like, I like mushrooms, so… I'm just saying, you know, we're coming around to this, and in a way.

We're perception, and then, in the, in the comments, Cynthia DiDonato mentioned Blake and the doors of perception, and I like to play with, like, all of the artists here play with the drawers of perception, so we get to go and rummage through all the different drawers, and… but altering perception is kind of what art does anyway. So, like it or not, you're all part of it. But Michael, that was wonderful. And Karen is here, so everybody, welcome Karen. And Karen, I showed your video, it was, it was wonderful.

And… and I really appreciated it. And there was tons of hearts exploding and multiple thumbs up, and people really loved it.

## Karen LaFleur [45:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2736s)

I'm glad it was… I'm glad it worked. I literally got out of the car, was dropped off from Boston, and just jumped onto Zoom, so…

## Lee Schnaiberg [45:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=2746s)

Your work was beautiful, and it really touched everybody. Great. I mean, I don't speak for everybody, but now even you're above Moritz is in the pictures now. I get to see you. That's wonderful, and you're above Karen. So, this is fantastic, and I think that you both Michael and Karen touched upon something really, key, which is, what… which is a part of perception, especially the mystical sides of perception, where we come to these understandings that what's outside is really inside, what's inside is really outside, that there isn't, like, we're… it's all one.

Kind of thing. And I know, I don't have the right words for it, but… but your work, Karen, and Michael's both touched on that, and I think that's really fantastic. And I apologize, because my stuff is more in the psychedelic realm, than in the deep thinking, which is wonderful. And, I wasn't gonna be showing my work at all. Somebody who was gonna be in the show had to cancel at the last minute, so I hope you will let me indulge a little bit. And, and last week in the tech specialist co-working group, I said this kind of joke before, so I… and it's not really a joke, but a funny thing, so I'm sorry, Lisa Sutton and Bob, and Cynthia, that it might be a bit too repetitive for you, I apologize, but everybody else who wasn't in the co-working.

If you wanted to hear something funny. I think it's funny anyway. What happened was… I… in 1988, I was in my third year of painting at York University, and I was doing figurative work, always, and I… well, my teacher really came down on me and was like, my drawing is horrible, I need… I need to really work on… well, back then they said draftsmanship, and I don't think they use that word anymore. Because that's kind of sexist addiction now. But that is what they said back then. I really have to work on my draftsmanship skills.

And I was like, yeah, and so I signed up for, like, a drawing 300, and I was so excited. I was like, I want to draw like Michelangelo. I want to draw, like. I want to have perfect skills. And the teacher walked into the class and unspooled this roll that must have been, like, 30 feet long of paper, and waved the picture from the pub. Full of markers and pens, and said, everybody grab a marker, and start drawing a line, and don't finish drawing a line until the class ends.

And I really wanted, like. You know, I knew people in illustration that had to spend, like, 4 months drawing an egg. And now they're in the graduating illustration, their skill set is amazing, and I wanted to be like that, and I was like, what's this artsy bullshit? And I dropped out of school. It was my third year in the university, and I shouldn't have dropped out in third year, but I already got accepted film school. Anyway. But my point is, it's really funny, because they said draw a line and don't finish it until the class is over.

And… and what I find kind of ironic is, a few months later, A few months later, I was… Going to visit some friends. And, The person who opened up the door had a big grin and said… and greeted me, and said, do you like mushrooms? And I was 20, maybe 19 or so, maybe 20, and I was like, yeah! And my mouth was wide enough that he put a whole bunch of mushrooms in my mouth, I don't even know how much. But enough, and I was like, well, I guess I'm gonna be doing… it was a Sunday, so… I was like, okay, I guess I'm gonna be tripping today. And… we wandered through the house, and then for some reason, I'm in the basement, everybody disappeared. I don't know for how long. I was probably starting to get a little bit high, so time was different, but there were so many phones ringing, it just wouldn't stop ringing, and there was no… we didn't have a voice, answering machine, even, and there was no voicemail. So, I answered the phone. It was somebody named Steve asked me to leave a message for somebody who… was one of the people who met… disappeared. So, I did. I wrote an STE from Steve called, but by the time I got to the rest of the word, the mushrooms really kicked in.

And even though I dropped out of school because they said, start drawing a line, and don't finish, I… the… the Steve Calbe got a little bit blurry, and then, I… I, I underlined the blur, and then I underlined the underline, And, I… it must have been, like, 2 hours later, or 3 hours later, I was staring at this thing, and I couldn't believe what I saw. And it's kind of… to me, it's funny, because… they were like, draw a line and never finish, and this is one line, it's just a line.

But I was so blown away by this. That I, I spent, A couple of decades. Drawing this line, almost always, and getting, like, 6B pencils, and, you know, Arches paper, and treating it, like, really serious. And also, it's kind of funny, like, there's a little bit of misto talk going on with, you know, the outside being the inside, and… all that, I would do this, kind of ritual where I would try to be the pencil in the paper, and the graphite, and not even think about The end results at all. Just flowing and… and being involved in the flow. And I realized after a while.

That, and when I say it's a line, like, it's really a line that just repeats and repeats and repeats all the time, and it's… it's like turbulence, and the three-party… the three-body rule, the three-body problem. And, chaos, they call the sensitive dependence on the initial conditions, and whatever the initial condition was, then I, like, it could be a little bump, but then the bump turns into, this long line. And then what I learned eventually was that if it's a line.

You could put something on one sideline and something else on the other side, like, to be really simple. You can see the pencil here, and there's black and there's white. It's black on one side of the line, white on the other, which, you know, not to be, like, segregationist, but to me, it created these really wild experiences. And so, well, I had, quite a few people that would pass these around, and I even was asked to do a show, and I have, like, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these paintings. So, they asked me to do a show at a fundraiser for MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the people who cure soldiers post-PTSD and from firefighters by using MDMA, which used to be really fun for dancing in the 90s, but now it's really good for healing post-deprep… you know, post-traumatic depression.

And then people who are at the MAPS fundraiser. We're involved with this European Journal of Behavioral Pharmacology, and so they got a study done, which was with some of, like, the biggies in psychedelic Research, including Robert Carhartt Harris and, Dave Nutt, which is an interesting name for a guy who does psychedelics, or… with people all the time. But they wrote this thing, tripping on Nothing, Placebos, Psychedelics, and Contextual Factors, and they put about 25 students in a room, told them they were doing this experimental psychedelic, and they were in a room with weird noises. My pencil drawings, but on video, And, also, paintings, black and white paintings.

And it was really funny, because the people, when the study was done, they were, told that it was just a placebo, and that they actually just drank a little glass of water, and there was no experimental Psilocybin in there, and there's recording… all these people in the journals are like, oh yeah, it was just a… it was just, water, then how come these were all melting? And I thought, well, that's kind of fun. I mean, it was maybe the music, or, you know, it could have been other things, but I do know that, speaking of mushrooms, that they're not just black and white, with the proper amount of mushrooms, they get really colorful. It's usually around 3.5 grams. But my point is this, imagine you walk into a gallery, you turn to your right, and you see an orange ball.

On a beige canvas. And maybe you're not a snob, an art snob, or maybe there's a little bit. Like, to me, if I walked into a gallery and I saw this, I'd be like, huh. Orange ball. But that 2 seconds for me to say, orange ball. There's… A bunch of firings, like we've talked about, Michael talked about, and… and Karen talked about, the firings in the brain. The term they use is bottom-up. Messaging and top-down messaging, though. The bottom-up is when you walk into the room, you turn to this thing, and you don't see an orange ball.

Your cones and rods fire, like, a ton of data into your visual cortex. And it just says, there's a big… The orange thing, and then it goes to your… to your, your, your frontal lobes. Where, like, the memory banks are, and it's like, oh yeah, you're going to a gallery today. And, and then they might be like. Oh, and then it's probably rectangular. And it sends messages back to the eyes of where to look to see do they confirm their guess that it's angular around the sphere, and the sphere is just a painting, and it's a canvas? And by the time you turn around in 2 seconds, you've probably had about… 600 messages going back and forth between your optic nerves and your eyes.

Without words, you don't really… and by the time you go, it's just a painting, or whatever, even if it's shaded, it's like, you know, like, that message, they wrote me back, and they were like, that's what normally happens. And then they said, but that's shape detection, it can figure out it's a round ball, it can figure out it's a canvas. But he's like, but this doesn't give you anything. You don't have shape detection. I mean, I know there's, like, poor vacuumi, like, it's very, like, very, like, Art Brute kind of thing, where every corner is filled up and everything, but is it white on a black background? Is it black on a white background?

Is it… is it round? There's… there's maybe some kind of topography? Well, what kind of topography? There's no resolutions. And so, there's a third thing that happens when you can't figure out what it is. It starts getting noisy. And so, I just tried to approximate the noise. Here, this isn't what it looks like. And then the person who wrote me explained that, like. If you… if you can't get the signal to function, you end up just hallucinating on it, and so it starts looking like.

Well, you know, I mentioned that the place that's the publicly traded psychedelic therapy place a block away from me. I just got an email from one of the facilitators there, and she was calling. These pieces of mine portals. I mean, if you're not tripping, they just look like art. But something happens with the messages going back and forth from your eyes, trying to figure out what it is it's looking at. And not getting any resolution. And then… I, I don't just do black and white with, graphite. Sometimes I will, to visuals, and, like, this is a PC.

You might be able to see a little bit of David Bowie dancing in the background. And the other color is the negative of David Bowie at a different speed. But, after David Bowie passed away. Thank you,. And it's just like… you don't have to worry, it's not actual recordings, we won't get in trouble because it's. Of course, to gain life on Mars. But… so, yeah, I did a piece that's about 2 hours long as an emoji. Just putting it here to show that, like, it's not all just black and white ink on… or black paint on a canvas. I'd like to… use these negative and positive spaces and, and fill them up with other things. One of my favorite things is to do what I call these, Folded rainbows, where it's a whole rainbow colors, but the yellow and the purple, which are complementary colors, and the red and the green, are touching. So it's not a rainbow at all, but it has that vibrancy, and again, they're, my fan base is usually people who ended up seeing these pieces when they were tripping.

And I think that's… Fine, because I think there's… what I've seen myself is that there is something that's not just Of the world, and that's a big thing with perception. With perception, we start to look at that question of… really what we've been told it is, or are we just seeing things in our memory, and we're putting together the story? So, I like to make it a little bit tougher to figure out gone. What's foreground, what's background? What's ground?

And so…. I also should have a warning, in case anybody has epilepsy. But that's the end of my piece, so I'm gonna stop sharing right now. Thank you, everybody, and. Yeah, I hope that's not sounding like somebody who likes drugs too much. I… I don't like drugs, I do like… LSD and mushroom stuff, you know? But you can't do that every day, you know? Or even, you know, every week. So… You know, but thank you, I really appreciate… and by the way, Sahar is here. Hi, Sahar!

Sahar lives in the only country that ever put out a fatwa that says, well, if you're Shia. Eating mushrooms is not haram. It's actually legit and legal, so… I think that's, you know, I'd love to go to those mosques and do some mushrooms. That's a whole different story. And I like just making pictures even more than, I'd probably sound like right now. So, I should stop talking. And we have one more guest. Keana, let me see, there's 4 messages.

From Keana? Might have sorted it out, we'll see. So, Keana, are you there? You're on mute.

## Keana Sears [01:02:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3732s)

I am. Hello, can you hear me?

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:02:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3734s)

Yeah! Cool.

## Keana Sears [01:02:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3736s)

Hey, how's it going? Yeah, talking of drugs, no, I didn't realize I was meant to be doing a presentation for this, so I'm a little bit disorganized. My plan was to try and wing it and, like, waffle something, but I realized 30 seconds into everyone else's presentation that wasn't gonna fly. So, I thought, Yeah, I really enjoyed listening to everyone and seeing the wonderful work. It's, it's been fantastic. But, yeah, I thought I'd just come in, jump in and introduce myself, since I don't really have any… much to present.

I'm a 3D artist, I, on my better days, I take inspiration from psychedelic experiences and try and bring back some perennial imagery and ideas, but, like, on my normal days. I make trippy things for raves, can everyone see my, my screen okay?

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:03:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3799s)

Not yet, not yet.

## Bob Prata [01:03:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3800s)

It's a game, though.

## Susan Detroy [01:03:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3801s)

No.

## Keana Sears [01:03:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3803s)

You can't see the, the messy screen share, keen enough.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:03:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3809s)

But we see one that looks… that there's… I'm in now.

## Keana Sears [01:03:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3814s)

Yeah, they might… I should have two screens up on the thing. Sorry, I didn't realize I was gonna be screen sharing either, so I've just had to try and… figure this out.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:03:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3829s)

Well, you know what? If you're having problems, what I can do is… I'm loading you up right now on Instagram.

## Keana Sears [01:03:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3838s)

I have a better… I have a better idea, one second.

Amy there? Can you see that incredibly messy screen?

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:04:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3849s)

Yeah, that I can see.

## Keana Sears [01:04:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3852s)

Okay, sweet, we're there.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:04:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3856s)

And, and Rob is there.

## Keana Sears [01:04:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=3860s)

Yeah, so I thought I'd just play a couple of, couple of things for you.

Yeah, the frame rate dropped out a lot there, so…

## Sahar Moussavi [01:06:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4015s)

They're all new.

## Clayton Campbell [01:07:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4029s)

Is there audio for these, by any chance?

## Keana Sears [01:07:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4032s)

No, not in these ones, unfortunately. I have a little… I have a… there's a mix on YouTube I can share if anyone wants, one with a kudra, but the,. The, they're all very, very slow-paced, the audio-based ones, because they're usually for, like, 30-minute mixes. But they're usually audio reactive and stuff. The frame rate's not very good on this replay either, unfortunately, but… hopefully you get the idea.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:07:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4063s)

But this is great, though, because it gives us a chance to actually ask you questions while we're watching them.

## Keana Sears [01:07:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4069s)

Yeah, yeah, fire away. I'm really sorry I'm not… I didn't prepare more, I was,

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:07:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4074s)

No!

## Keana Sears [01:07:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4074s)

That's totally cool, yeah. Especially after everyone else's, presentations, they were, brilliant.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:08:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4082s)

Key, I'm curious, do you use, any specific, kind of, geometric shapes, like, I noticed that there's stuff that's similar to Flower of Life's, and some stuff that looks like, the Shibobo people, kind of graphic, graphics. Do you do that purposely, or is that just a happy accident?

## Keana Sears [01:08:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4107s)

Well, I definitely use some, Mesoamerican and Shipibo and Indian, geometry in… my work, which… I mean, I have no connection to those cultures, personally, but I thought the amazing thing was, when I first took psychedelics, I had no cultural connection. I wasn't… I wasn't aware of Shapibo patterns or Mesoamerican art. Like, I'd seen a bit of Indian stuff before, but… I was just blown away by the fact that I had these experiences, saw these things.

And then a couple of years later, I came across these things, and it's just like, oh my god, like, it's… it's exactly what I saw, and it… it just got me interested in this idea that there's a certain, like, perennial imagery. That just flows through culture, that is sort of… it just, it points to how interconnected everybody is. It… whether that's a spiritual thing, or, like, Evolutionary psychology? Like, who knows, but… I thought it was a pretty, there's a nice thing to make art about, anyway.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:09:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4177s)

But, and you know, I understand what you're saying about… about experiencing some of those, and then seeing Shapibo's work. Seeing that their, their, their weavings and their patterns are like, hey, wait a minute, I've seen that. I understand that, and I think that's a… that definitely confirms that there's something that it's not just imagination, or it's not just… something that, you know, you hallucinated, you know, 6,000 miles away. You saw something that they saw.

That they saw so much that they wove into patterns. And I see it in your work. Yeah, you're not ripping off their style, bud, you're, you're, you have the feel.

## Keana Sears [01:10:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4229s)

Cheers. Yeah, I'll… I like to… I've got these, A series of work based on the, it's a silly bee shaman? And I like, I like to think of, like, a… you could go back 10,000 years and show the people who did the original artwork, the animation. I think they'd appreciate it.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:11:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4262s)

I'm putting their name into the chat if anybody's curious, because…

## Bob Prata [01:11:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4266s)

Oh, thank you, Lee.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:11:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4269s)

You hear people saying the name, but is… is that a person? Is there an artist named, like, Andre Shipibo, or is it a Peruvian Indigenous group of people?

## Keana Sears [01:11:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4281s)

Hey, Yeah, it's an Indigenous group spread across the Amazon.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:11:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4287s)

Yeah, and there's something about ayahuasca with those people, too.

## Keana Sears [01:11:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4291s)

Yeah, they're… they're probably… they're one of the most linked groups to the… to, like, traditional use of ayahuasca. I think there's quite a few different groups, but they're definitely the most well-known. And I think the pattern, the artwork's relatively similar, but I think most people just refer to it as Shapibo as, like, a catch-all.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:11:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4314s)

Yeah.

There are people commenting in the, in, in the, in the chats about your stuff there. Like, don't stop. It's really fun to look at.

## Keana Sears [01:12:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4344s)

I don't, I don't know how to see the chat, one second.

Boom. Yeah, I don't know how long I should let this go on for, so just… tell me when you've had enough.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:12:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4360s)

Well, I think… is anybody… Want to move on, or is everybody really best? I think we can… we enjoyed them for a little bit longer, but they're really fantastic. And I'm glad. Thank you so much for sharing your work with us.

## Keana Sears [01:12:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4379s)

I appreciate it, thank you for having me. I've had a lovely time, just, I've been sort of in between making my kids' tea and everything, but I've had a lovely time listening to everyone, and check… honestly, some of the artwork I've seen tonight's been absolutely phenomenal.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:13:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4392s)

Well, you're part of the group. You're a Techspressionist, for sure. Whether you like to or not, you're a tech specialist. And, and also, I think that your stuff is really, you know, to me. Key, your stuff is like,. It's… it's like… I've seen similar things through, like, that… with that church, that Entheode church, Entheogen church there. Alex and Allison Gray. There's stuff I see in their work that then I see very similar in your stuff. But the difference is, we need mirth. We can't be too serious, I don't think.

Personally, I think that's a… that's a problem if you're, like, you see the Misto world even just a little bit, and then you take it all seriously, it's not fun. It's more fun to have fun with the images, and like Karen said before, play. And what I see with your work is you're playing with the… with the, mystical… Understandings, instead of being really earnest and dogmatic and… you know, nothing wrong with that, but… personally, I like seeing the fun, you know? I like seeing the fun.

## Keana Sears [01:14:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4477s)

Cheers, yeah, I like doing the fun. I mean, like, one of… I had a really incredible experience years ago, and it's probably been one of my most meaningful psychedelic experiences. But then about 5 minutes later, I was convinced I was an old woman selling cigarette papers at the beach. So, it is a bit goofy, innit, really? It swings between being profound and then just really, really weird.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:15:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4504s)

Yeah. And, you know, the Mystic, even the Mystow people said, like, be the fool. At the zero point. Like, you don't need to be all didactic about it, and all serious, because we might be 100% wrong, we never know. We have to see how it plays out. So, it's a little bit better off to have fun and be like. Who knows? You know, one minute I think I know the whole universe, and then I'm some old lady selling cigarette papers on the beach. Who knows, you know? I think it's better to be in the who-knows camp.

Then, you know, to… To wear rubs and become the high priest.

## Keana Sears [01:15:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4551s)

Yeah, sometimes I wish I could do the High Priest thing, but I'm definitely more in the Who Knows camp.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:15:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4557s)

I think it's more fun, and less pressure, but… again, who knows, you know? I have to know about that snake. That, Sahar was talking about, and… and everybody who participated, and everybody who's in the… in the group here, Lisa, and Cheryl, and Lucy, and Steven Pare and Lee M, I don't know why they call you Lee M. You're Lee. And… and… and Judith and Sahar, thank you so much. Mary and Moritz? It's such a pleasure to see you, and to share the art that I really appreciate with you, and to explore everybody's work, Karen. And, before we close off, does anybody have any questions? Because Karen's back.

Now, about her work, or do you want to say anything to Karen about what you saw?

## Lisa Sutton [01:16:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4617s)

I would love to find out more about, like, just where I can look at your work. Like, well… Y'all, you put links, in the invitation, correct, to people's websites and…

## Karen LaFleur [01:17:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4630s)

Yeah, I can put the website there. The figures and dolls are from an earlier period, so they may not be on my website. It was very interesting when Lee asked me to do the presentation, I had to kind of think, like, you know. What is the influence on my own work in terms of the moving images that I'm doing right now. And so I started to pull out all these different hands and faces that I have left over, from that era. And, Lee, you'll be very happy to realize that I finally got them 3D scanned. So, I've gone back to my storage unit yesterday and pulled out boxes of these hands and faces that I'm scanning to get into my moving image artwork, so it's like, you know… artwork never goes away. It's like 35 years ago, pull it back out of the drawer, use it again.

So thank you, Lee, for the opportunity. And Lisa, to answer your question, really the only way to see the dolls are when I do a presentation. Because that was not an internet era. So…

## Stephen Paré [01:18:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4696s)

It's the drawers of perception.

## Karen LaFleur [01:18:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4699s)

There you go.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:18:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4700s)

They're in the drawers. Jen, Karen, I don't want to put you on the spot, but I did hear a rumor. Is it true?

## Karen LaFleur [01:18:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4709s)

-Oh.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:18:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4709s)

And you don't have to say it's true or not. You can just, you know, take the fifth. But I heard a rumor. That you were at Woodstock.

## Karen LaFleur [01:18:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4719s)

I was halfway to Woodstock. One of those masses that was supposed to get there, and then the car broke down, and I ended up being pulled back the other way for a family situation, and the people that went brought their car to Woodstock, but everybody stood on it. So, when they came back home, the roof of the car was only about 6 inches high above the chassis of the car. So, it was probably good I went home when I did, so almost late, almost.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:19:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4752s)

Sounds like you… sounds like you didn't lose out in the long run. Mostly, you know, from… I don't know, because I wasn't even born yet.

## Karen LaFleur [01:19:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4761s)

And I used to hang around the jazz clubs in Boston prior to Woodstock. It was all the big people used to come in and play after hours, 1, 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning, and they'd just come in and jam. And so that's… that's where I saw most of the people that were at Woodstock.

## Lee Schnaiberg [01:19:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4780s)

Well, it must have been a good time. I mean, I can only imagine, but… feels like there was a bit of a renaissance starting. That got stopped, and it seems to be… you can't stop these things. It's… it's… it's coming bigger, you know? I remember reading something a long time ago that said the hippies were right, and they started listing all these things, you know, like yoga, and vegetarian food, and, like, all these things that the hippies started.

And… and then eventually they became… normal, like, normal, like, normal people would do. And, and I think that's a really interesting thing. I'm… I'm a big fan of, well, obviously, I'm a big fan of the grateful Dad, and… you can look at how they were involved in the beginning of the internet. And… and that was an accident, and the farm, to me, the farm in Tennessee, is where midwifery comes from. Well, I mean, historically, there's been midwifery for thousands of years, but, like, modern midwifery all goes back down to, Ina Mae.

Gaskin, Ina Mae Gaskin, and Ina Mae Gaskin, and Steven Gaskin, and the whole experience at the farm. Ended up doing all of these other things that we wouldn't even know about, but, like, the well, the first, the World Electra… the World Electronic Link? The very first BBS, and… and where the term, the expressions, stop spamming me? Comes from the farm. You know, so it's all from these hippies. And I think that's a really unique thing, and it's really fantastic that we're having this opportunity to look at perception, because I think that this is a really important part. We see pieces, we get data floods.

And then we have to use our memory. To create the reality. And I think that I hopefully tied that all up with a nice bug, Colin. Did I? I don't know. I'm looking at you to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

## Colin Goldberg [01:21:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I6BswegIss&t=4907s)

Yeah, no, I think it was a great, a great session, and, really appreciated seeing, you know, all the work and presentations and everything like that, and, definitely would like to thank you, Lee, for pulling it all together, and, you know, invite you to come back and moderate. Again, in the future, absolutely, you know? Cool to see some… you know, some work from some of the regulars, and also, some new people in here. So, absolutely. So yeah, I think maybe, before we stop the recording, I just wanted to share one thing, which is this, exhibition reel teaser from the Paris show, since it does, include the work of quite a good number of artists from the community, so I'm just gonna share my screen here and give that a play. Actually, let me make sure I have my, audio turned on.

Great. So, very excited to see all this work come in the door. I think it's gonna be, you know, a really great piece, and I think the real is something that probably could be shopped around for exhibition other places, I started noticing that there were A number of different opportunities out there, like, sort of, like, online film festivals and other things where, you know, work of this nature could get submitted. So, you know, pending getting permissions from all the artists who are in the reel, which, you know, already, said, you know, they're cool with it being shown in Paris, that's another way that this, project could move around the world, so… many thanks to everyone who submitted work, and, you know, it'll… it'll really be something special. 24 countries at this point represented in the reel, so, so very cool.

Alright, so I guess we'll wrap it up. Again, next month, the salon topic is going to be India, and Malavika, is going to be the moderator, and she's going to be showing some work, done by, Indian, students. Using digital technology, as well as some other artists, you know, practicing in India, working with technology, so I think that's gonna be a really good salon. And, and again, I just wanted to thank Lee, for pulling this all together and, you know, organizing, bringing in some great artists, and to all the artists who participated. So, Without further ado, I'm going to wrap it up. We do have a little bit of a tradition here, which is the afterparty, so anybody who wants to hang out after the recording stops just to shoot the shit or whatever, or if you have any… if anyone has any inclination to jump in for the January salon, and has a topic, and an idea, and would like to moderate, by all means, you know, happy for somebody to step up to the plate with that.

So, without further ado, I am going to stop recording in 3, 2, 1, and cut.