THE NEON HIEROGLYPH / VIRTUAL FATORY MANCHESTER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 2021

The building of a house we will never live in – a house for our ghosts where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide.

For the second project in the series, artist Tai Shani presents her first online artwork The Neon Hieroglyph. Nine hypnotic stories expand her ongoing creation of a feminist mythology of psychedelics and bring together hallucinatory CGI with video and a haunting soundtrack by the Manchester-born composer Maxwell Sterling.

Shani creates worlds that are at once dark yet luminous, both feminist and fantastical. The Neon Hieroglyph is inspired by her research into ergot as a psychedelic catalyst, a fungus that grows on rye and other common grains from which the hallucinogenic drug LSD is derived. There were many ergot poisoning outbreaks linked to the local crops and rye bread which caused mass hallucinations, with the last reported UK incident during the late 1920s in Manchester.

For Shani the psychedelic is a space that can drive new visions of society, an imaginative space where new futures can emerge. The Neon Hieroglyph uses these experiences to spark new visions and alternative realities: a dreamlike CGI journey that takes us on an epic journey across time and space - from the cellular to the galactic; from Palaeolithic cave markings to the optic markings left by drone photography as well as dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches and hyper-sexual fungi.

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Adam Sinclair VFX Director, 3D Artist, Animator

Maxwell Sterling Score & Sound Design

The Spirit of Molly Moody

Stefano Tsai Additional CG Artist

Lotti V Closs Additional Modelling Support

Mika Lapid Production Assistant

Recorded at Supersymmetry Studios with thanks to Aurelien and Solène.

The Neon Hieroglyph films are commissioned and produced by Manchester International Festival with in-kind support from the Centre for Creative and Immersive Extended Reality at the University of Portsmouth. The research and ongoing project is also supported by the British Art Show and Serpentine Galleries’ Back to Earth project.