Colour Out of Space: Altered States and Cosmic Legacies - Camden Art Centre

'Colour Out of Space' is a one-day programme of readings, screenings and performances focused on radical perception and associated countercultural legacies.

The programme refers to the cosmic horror story by H. P. Lovecraft, as well as its subsequent film adaptation directed by Richard Stanley and starring Nicolas Cage. It examines how narrative shifts when reality itself becomes unstable and, like the work of the programme’s participants, engages with psychedelia, spirituality, pharmacology and the aesthetics of altered experience.

Curated by Susan Finlay, Didi Wambugu and Matt Williams to celebrate the launch of Finlay’s latest novel, The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, with contributions from Stephen Barber, Dave Green, Amber Husain, Susan Finlay, Mariel Franklin, Jamie Sutcliffe, Zoë Taylor and Richard Stanley, among others.

About the book

Legal high addict, gaming enthusiast, and principal shareholder of AstroLabs™, Lex Rameses has recently discovered—and purchased—Proserpina: a planet with a near identical ecosystem to Earth. Yet although his humanistic, hipster pretensions mean that many people admire him there is still one thing standing in the way of his space-colonization program: as of yet there is no way to travel to Proserpina safely. Enter a cast of mad scientists, Astro-Marxists, a neurorobotic AI hivemind, an extinction anxiety addict, the victims of an interrelated crypto-currency gaming scam, and a seemingly endless succession of ravers and gamers in search of the ultimate hallucinogenic, carcinogenic, neu-space-age high…