The project
Trust the Medicine documents a staged psychedelic integration group, with real volunteers and led by a real psychotherapist, and focuses on encountering the entities people associate with psychedelic drugs. It draws on Knowles’s artist residency with the Psychoactive Trials Group at King’s College London. The group was staged at the Park Plaza Hotel Waterloo in April 2023.
Visitors talk to the artwork’s AI-generated psychedelic entities, developed with Metaobjects using ChatGPT and sentiment analysis. The animations respond in real time, and what visitors say feeds into the film’s narrative and look.
What we did
Ben Huss is credited as the project’s immersive technologist. In his account, that meant practical and advisory support on the technical side, post-production advice, and putting the team in touch with a sound engineer.
How it was shown
It premiered at Science Gallery London on 8 December 2023, at a drop-in day with an artist talk, Trust the Medicine: Engaging with AI Entities, part of the gallery’s AI Season.
In April 2025 it was shown at Northumbria University’s Gallery North, in the exhibition More-Than-Human Healthcare, alongside Knowles’s films Indexed Beings and Caring Code: the three works together for the first time.
Credits
- Artist
- Helen Knowles
- Design team
- Metaobjects
- In collaboration with
- Northumbria University; the Psychoactive Trials Group, King’s College London; Niall Hill and the Public Anthropology department, UCL
- Immersive technologist
- Ben Huss, Immersi