Altered States: PsychART Conference 2026
A day exploring altered states of perception through art, psychiatry and embodied practice, from grief and flow to rhythm, sound and shared experience.
Altered States
PsychArt looks forward to our next conference, which will take place on Friday 5th June 2026.
What does it mean for perception to shift, not once, but continually, subtly, sometimes imperceptibly?
We tend to imagine consciousness as something stable, a fixed point from which we observe the world. Yet experience rarely holds still. It thickens and thins. It narrows and expands. It fragments under pressure, softens in rhythm, reorganises itself through sound, movement, grief, attention, and time. An altered state is not always an exception to ordinary life. It may be one of its most consistent features.
There are states we enter deliberately, and others that arrive uninvited. States shaped by chemistry and medication, by exhaustion and intensity, by trauma and repair, by art and immersion. There are states that emerge in solitude, and those that appear only in collectivity, where rhythm, light, or shared attention begin to do something to the boundaries between self and other.
This year’s PsychArt Conference, Altered States, invites you into that territory, not as a concept to be defined, but as something to be encountered.
Across the day, we will move between perspectives that hold altered perception in different registers. One speaker traces how systems, structures, and machines can become a language for thinking about perception itself. How repetition, mathematics, and engineered form can open unexpected ways of experiencing time, pattern, and embodiment. Another approaches altered states through light, sound, and perception as participatory environments, where the act of seeing becomes unstable, shared, and continually reconfigured. A third brings attention to the mechanics of collective entrainment and perceptual modulation, where sound and sensory input become tools for shifting attention and dissolving ordinary boundaries of awareness.
Alongside these, workshops open other thresholds. Rhythm becomes a way of entering shared time that predates language. Movement becomes a site where experience is stored, released, and reorganised in the body. Grief is approached not only as emotion, but as a changing field, cosmic, intimate, and unfolding across scales. And embodied psychotherapeutic practice invites attention to how states of being move through us physically, often before they can be named.
Taken together, these sessions do not converge on a single definition of altered states. Instead, they suggest something more unstable and more honest. That consciousness is not one thing, but many overlapping modes of attention, relation, and transformation.
We often think of altered states as departures. But they may also be returns. To sensation, to presence, to shared experience, to forms of knowing that sit outside the familiar hierarchies of mind.
Join us as we explore what it means for perception to shift, and what becomes possible when it does.
Keynote Talks
Jennifer Crook: Award-winning interdisciplinary participatory artist. Director of Collective Art: producers of 'Dreamachine'.
Conrad Shawcross: Sculptor exploring subjects lying on the borders of geometry and philosophy, physics & metaphysics.
Dr Pedro Rodrigues: Psychiatrist & Psychopharmacology Clinical Research Fellow at the Centre for Psychadelic Research, Department of Brain Studies, Imperial College London.
Workshops
May-Helen Torland - Rhythm Conversations - Movement
Dembis Thioung - PENCHMI Drum Circle - Music
Marion Green - Physical & Cosmic Grief - Visual Art
Enya Aquilna - Cyanotype - Visual Art
Booking
To book please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/altered-states-psychart-conference-tickets-1987516748096
Art Competition
Every PsychArt conference includes an open art show, and this year's theme invites artists to explore the in-between.
Theme: Thresholds, An Exploration of the In-Between
Where does an altered state begin, and where does it end? At what point does the familiar loosen its grip and something else emerge? How do these experiences fold back into what we call “reality,” however unstable or subjective that may be?
We invite artists to explore thresholds: liminal spaces, fleeting transitions, and moments of crossing. These may be subtle or seismic, psychological, spiritual, neurological, or cultural.
“For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, I concluded, its summit must be inaccessible but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them… The door to the invisible must be visible.”— René Daumal, Mount Analogue
Submissions might engage with:
- The drift from waking into sleep, hypnagogic imagery, dissolving forms.
- Sudden clarity or rupture, moments of enlightenment, awakening, or satori.
- Dissociation, re-experiencing, and reintegration in trauma and its treatment.
- Trance states through ritual, movement, music, or substances.
- Guides across thresholds (therapists, shamans, symbolic figures, or mythic psychopomps).
- Visual languages of transition, mandalas, yidams, talismans, or other mediating forms.
We welcome all forms of visual art, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, mixed media, and digital work.
This exhibition will form part of a group show during the PsychArt Conference, bringing together perspectives from art, psychiatry, and lived experience.
Practical information:If you would like more details or need to confirm whether your work can be exhibited, for example due to size, installation requirements, or technology, please email the organisers before submitting. Kindly email us regarding your entry to be given specific details and feedback:
