Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny: Nomadism, Technique, and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave

Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny: Nomadism, Technique and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave examines the psychedelic rave music and culture with a focus on the multiday phantasmagoric events organized in mountains, deserts, beaches, and other exotic destinations. Using mobile and multi-sited ethnography, the author follows the routes of a diverse group of Greek EDM and party enthusiasts across the festival map of psychedelic-trance gatherings, including Hungary, Morocco, and Greece, with the aim of investigating the revelatory experience of the chemical psychedelic raving. By situating the rave experience within the phantasmagoria of the festival - a dreamworld par excellence of the alien and the uncanny - the work reformulates questions of ’liminality’, ’spirituality’, ’community’ and ’identity’ while initiating a discussion about the limits of cosmopolitanism and aesthetics as they are reorganized in the techno-political conditions of the 21st century. In an intense and at times demanding theoretical ’journey’, the author reframes questions of taste, consumption, altered experience, and lifestyle through the lens of technology or technoaesthetics, speculating on an impending techno-social world of augmented senses and artificial impressions, thus posing questions to the reader about the mediation of social and public events, and the reification of ’utopian’ paradises in the form of contemporary dreamworlds.

Leandros Kyriakopoulos is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Athens.