Felix Colgrave animated this wonderful video for Nitai Hershkovits' Flyin' Bamboo. Read the rest

Finger Machines will likely give viewers a visceral reaction by design. That reaction will vary greatly, from joy to arousal to disgust, and maybe all of the above. It's totally safe for work, but it may be better to wait till you're able to watch away from passersby who might get the wrong impression from a quick glance. Read the rest

Watching the interplay of liquids used to make these beautiful calligraphic letters looks like geothermal vents opening and releasing gases and lava into the air. Read the rest

The animation team from Big Hero 6 did some cool experiments for the "Into the Portal" sequence, and this week they shared one: an exploding 3D pastel fractal. Read the rest

UK animator Cyriak Harris celebrated getting 1M YouTube subscribers by livestreaming this trippy Mega Dance Party Mix. It's a 20-minute long retrospective remix of some of his past music and videos.

No, you're not hallucinating. It just feels like it.

Thanks, Heathervescent! Read the rest

Thunder Tillman is a Swedish musician whose work lends itself to trippy animation, like this piece for Alignments by Mario Hugo and Johnny Lee. Read the rest

Roman De Giuli created MATEREALITY, his latest in series of abstract films of chemical and physical reactions shot in extreme closeup. Read the rest

Ari Weinkle created this cool animation he calls Moodles, where human forms made of noodles reconfiguring as they come in contact with a solid plane. Read the rest

In their new video, the band Spoon pays homage to the designers who slave away on Photoshop all day manipulating images. Read the rest

Alexa Sirbu and Lukas Vojir created flow/er, a lovely animation programmed to mimic growth patterns of flowers. Read the rest

Hailing from near the Pennsylvania shores of Lake Erie, musician Jack Stauber has released a couple of trippy VHS-inspired videos to support his album Pop Food, and if you like interesting outsider music, check it out! Read the rest

Sojiro Kamatani just released a an otherworldly CGI rendering for the new single titled Baku by Suiyōbi no Campanella (aka Wednesday Campanella). It's a dizzying, candy-colored confection reminiscent of a coral reef on LSD. Read the rest

Animator Miao Jing created Hills Beyond a River, which follows several animals traveling through a stylized geometric landscape. Great full-screen with headphones! Read the rest

Lately I've been staring at an awful lot of line art GIFs.

This one via Pinterest. Read the rest

What starts as a live action hand extrapolating a line along a grid gets real trippy real fast, but the fanciful hand-drawn extrapolations follow a discernible mathematical pattern. Read the rest

Philosophy and Predictive Processing is a new online research compendium in which neuroscientists, psychiatrists, philosophers-of-mind, and other big thinkers explore the theory that we're always hallucinating. Our brains aren't just processing information from your senses so we can perceive reality, the authors argue, but also constantly predicting what we'll encounter, presenting that to us as what's actually happening, and then doing error connection. From New Scientist:

...Predictive processing argues that perception, action and cognition are the outcome of computations in the brain involving both bottom-up and top-down processing – in which prior knowledge about the world and our own cognitive and emotional state influence perception.

In a nutshell, the brain builds models of the environment and the body, which it uses to make hypotheses about the source of sensations. The hypothesis that is deemed most likely becomes a perception of external reality. Of course, the prediction could be accurate or awry, and it is the brain’s job to correct for any errors – after making a mistake it can modify its models to account better for similar situations in the future.

But some models cannot be changed willy-nilly, for example, those of our internal organs. Our body needs to remain in a narrow temperature range around 37°C, so predictive processing achieves such control by predicting that, say, the sensations on our skin should be in line with normal body temperature. When the sensations deviate, the brain doesn’t change its internal model, but rather forces us to move towards warmth or cold, so that the predictions fall in line with the required physiological state.

Photographer Brian Tomlinson creates beautiful stills of liquids dropped into an aquarium. Some of the results are below: Read the rest