This past summer, the artist Brad Necyk stayed at the home of Paul Stamets, the renowned mycologist, writer, artist and psychedelics enthusiast. “I'm going to do a piece with him,” Necyk said to me in a  recent interview, speaking from his studio on Vancouver Island. ”He lives up island from me – only a few hours away on this island called Cortes.”

Necyk and Stamets’s art plays with cycles of symbiosis, like how storms make mushrooms grow, or how “the human history of song and dance enriches our environment through mycelium,” Necyk said, “It’s a beautiful conversation.”

Stamets became somewhat well known via the 2019 documentary film, Fantastic Fungi, but his name’s long been synonymous with mushrooms. He sells mushroom supplements, holds numerous patents for mushroom-based technology and his work in mycology has touched everything from martial arts to Star Trek – even the blockchain. In 2022, he launched Mycelial Earth, a carbon neutral non-fungible token (NFT) project meant to “develop and distribute connected bee feeders” to help “restore our ecology.”

Stamets also features in the teaser video for Necyk’s latest project, Psychedelic Puppet Show. “Breaking news!” Stamets announces in the one minute clip. “We are all animals, and all animals dream.”

In the video, Stamets is in a web conference with Rick Doblin, the founder of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). “We all enter into the psychedelic space every night when we fall asleep – we dream,” Stamets says. “I think we explore altered states of consciousness as a natural state of our being.”

As they speak, their images oscillate between regular footage and animated, muppet-like visual treatments. Colorful, play-doh-esque worlds flood our regular one, briefly turning Stamets and Doblin into puppets meant to help people understand their “altered states.”

The Psychedelic Puppet Show was conceived on Cortes in the summer of 2022, during the Canadian Psychedelic Summit (hosted by MAPS). Alongside a small group, Necyk was tasked with imagining a project that could emerge from the conference.

“Everybody wanted to make something fun with psychedelics that was also educational," he said. The rhetoric that surrounds psychedelic experiences is either “kind of dry,” he noted, or “things that people can't make sense of, like you saw ‘machine elves’ – what the fuck does that mean?”

“In both ways,” he continued, “the communication of this profound and ineffable experience was lacking.”

When someone mentioned puppets, the group latched onto them as workable “avatars” for a psychedelic trip. “We drew a bunch of puppets and wrote our names on it,” Necyk said. “We wrote on the back that this is going to be our first NFT, and that this was going to be the birth of the DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] that we would create.

“I don't really know why that emerged,” he continued. “I'd never sold an NFT. At that point, I didn't own any cryptocurrencies. None of those people were in web3. It just seemed to be an emergent property.”

Later that night, a Bitcoin philanthropist named Scott Nelson approached Necyk. “Everyone's having a rave and partying like crazy, and he and I were just sober having this deep conversation on psychedelics and web3,” he said. “And that was the birth of the Psychedelic Puppet Show.”

Nelson helped fund the project, and joined a board that included Necyk, filmmaker Aaron Munson and Dr. Pam Kryskow, Stamets’ fiancee. "She and I just loved the project,” Necyk said. “[After the summit], everybody else went on with their lives, and Pam and I willed it into existence."

They incorporated as a non-profit, with plans to develop a DAO down the road. They wrote a whitepaper, and built a collection of puppets that will be part of an NFT series he plans to launch in January.

“These psychedelic puppets can be this stand-in for humor and irony and metaphor, which science and burners haven't been able to communicate about the [psychedelic] experience,” Necyk said.

The puppets will feature in one-minute stories that help illustrate moments of “human consciousness expansion,” like “the fumbling discovery of LSD with Albert Hoffman,” Necyk said, or “helping Timothy Leary summarize his famous line, ‘tune in, drop out.’”

Necyk started doing psychedelics while pursuing a PhD in psychiatry. In 2008, during the financial crisis, he left his banking gig and went to art school. He earned a BFA and an MFA from the University of Alberta before he “stumbled his way” into a doctorate program, where he explored psychiatry through the lens of an artist.

“I was with all these neuroscientists,” he said, “and I was there living with psychiatric patients and cancer patients and making my own art about those experiences.”

Necyk lives with bipolar disorder, and it “was a big part of [his] life at that time.” While writing his dissertation on altered states of consciousness, he found an article about psychedelics and the brain. Carl Jung featured heavily, Necyk remembers, and it framed the unconscious as this “wellspring of all of our myths and religions and art.”

Curious, Necyk started doing psychedelics every two weeks. “It was the same space that I experienced in mania,” he discovered. “And also the same space that I experienced in creativity – all overlapping on top of each other.”

After a year, his bipolar disorder disappeared, he said. “It changed my life."

Speaking from his studio, Necyk had just gotten off the phone with his collaborator, the television personality and futurist Jason Silva. They’d had “a super engaging conversation about psychedelics and AI,” Necyk said. “I'm coming out of that dream world right now.”

In November, at Mexico’s Baja Summit, Necyk and Silva – whom The Atlantic has described as "A Timothy Leary of the Viral Video Age” – will premiere their short film, Jason Silva meets the Psychedelic Puppets. Its sequel, The Arrival of the Psychedelic Puppets, is already in the works. 

The second film riffs on Denis Vilnueve’s 2016 movie, Arrival, where aliens come to earth with inscrutable intent. To understand the visitors’ aims, humans must decipher their language, which is depicted in odd, circular symbols. A linguist, played by Amy Adams, deduces that their speech is nonlinear, and that the implications of their “arrival” could extend to the fabric of reality itself. 

Predictably, the rest of humanity doesn’t get it. Unable to see beyond their own myopic self-interest, factions emerge. Chaos ensues. And viewers are left hoping that Adams can make people understand before it's too late.

Behind Necyk, in his studio, there was an easel with an incomplete painting. Its background was a wash of dark grays and blues. At its center was a rainbow. Rendered as a circle, it blazed bright against the grays, like a bolt of clarity – like waking up and realizing it was all a dream.

“This is a rainbow portal,” he said, pausing to consider it. “It’s meant to be very psychedelic, you know, like a moment after the storm.”

lead image: Brad Necyk