Soma by @erikswahn to be released on @verse Solos

🖼️: Placeholder artwork below from the Verse Solos website

An exhibition space for digital art.

https://verse.works/

illiterate enjoyer of crypto and AI art | linktr.ee/buffets.eth

In Huxley's dystopian classic, "Brave New World", soma is a drug taken to produce a sensation of euphoric happiness—a literal "opiate of the masses", promoted by the state to satiate people and minimise the opportunity for them to engage in subversive ideas or actions. 

Huxley himself had based the name of this fictional drug on a ritual drink mentioned in the Sanskrit Vedas, supposedly able to confer divine visions on whoever consumes it.  

That Erik has chosen this name as the title of his upcoming work to be released is perhaps all too apt.

In this vein, I see Erik's Soma forcing us to confront an uneasy reality: as we swoon over the slick, beautiful products created by code, what are we to make of their more insidious underbelly—their propensity to addict and distract?

Its code-based origins should also inspire within us a reckoning about the current state of our media and cultural landscape, where contemporary versions of soma already abound. 

After all, the creations of code can easily enchant and enthrall us today. Even if you might not regard code as God, it now wields near-godly powers—providing the plumbing to our digital infrastructure, and powering the algorithms that mediate what we collectively and individually see.

In creating a generative system from which such gorgeous chromatic bursts of colour can emerge, Erik appears to give us a structure to visualise the mystical associations of "soma", harnessing material form to depict the mental formlessness that this compound is supposed to trigger.