Elastic is an eye-catching new magazine exploring beyond the accepted boundaries of visual art and writing. It aims to ‘bend time and genre and perspective, blur waking and dreaming life, find sublimity and absurdity in the everyday, magnify the senses, multiply and distort the possibilities of narrative, and interrogate power by breaking form.’
Phew. No talk about ‘blowing minds’ there, and Elastic understandably avoids such lazy and well-worn expressions in an attempt to offer a more accurate positioning or reading of psychedelia in contemporary times. We can probably all agree that the original psychedelic era delivered radical artistic innovation but it’s easy to think of that time as a drug-driven, Day-Glo hippie bacchanal – a reduced perception or, as the magazine shapes it, a ‘wall’ around understanding the genre. They say, ‘Elastic is interested in taking the walls down. Or, rather, Elastic is interested in demonstrating that the walls were never really there. These pages conjure a truly expansive vision of psychedelic culture, bringing together a vast body of contemporary psychedelic work and paying tribute to an overlooked archive’.
This first issue is published on the theme of dying: ‘all kinds of endings, all kinds of new beginnings, transitory states, portals, and processes by which the self is shattered and transformed and transcended.’
