Utopia / Dystopia: The Doors of Platonic Perception

Join us for this fall’s first installment of Utopia / Dystopia, an ongoing series co-presented with Morbid Anatomy. Philosopher and professor James Frederick William Rowe will discuss the work of William Blake and Plato in relationship to explorations of consciousness and perception.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.“” – William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)

This series of talks, screenings and events, produced by Morbid Anatomy for Hauser and Wirth, will explore the possibilities of human consciousness. We will touch on the relationship between magic and the human faculty of imagination, the power of the mind to heal or harm the body, the world of dreams, the psychedelic experience, and possession in music and religion.