Technical notes:
– I envisioned this piece running as an interstitial, akin to a commercial break, between videos at film festivals. Flexible.
– I have scripted additional ‘commercials’, this being the first
Heidegger observed that technology inevitably becomes instrumentalized as means for consolidating power and control—presenting itself as progress while extending patterns of domination. We see this truth laid bare as technological oligarchs openly embrace political authority, dropping even the pretense of serving human liberation.
The so-called psychedelic renaissance follows this same pattern. What capital markets as breakthrough innovation continues a colonial cycle—first appropriating and patenting indigenous medicines, then selling them back as productivity solutions to workers exhausted by the very system that depleted them.
Yet these substances carry within them something that resists commodification: their fundamental power to dissolve our taken-for-granted reality. Through them, we see how our most intimate experiences—even our understanding of mental health and suffering—have been carefully constructed and categorized to serve market logics across decades. In commodifying expanded consciousness, capital encounters its own destabilization—cracking the programming beneath our reified experience.
The tools marketed to heal us become the lens through which we see what wounded us.
Directed by Flavio Masson (USA)