DoubleMoon’s inaugural project brings together four connected elements: an exhibition exploring light and perception in Town Hall’s Salon; a three-day presentation of Phillip Vermeulen’s Chasing the Dot light installation in Town Hall’s spectacular Vision Hall; an installation of Chris Levine’s major laser work Higher Power, and a symposium of artists, neuroscientists, philosophers and researchers working across consciousness studies and psychedelic science.

This exhibition in The Salon traces a lineage of artistic practices that employ light as a medium for affecting the mind, exploring how artists have anticipated questions that are now at the forefront of neuroscience and consciousness studies. A number of these artists began treating light as an active psychological and perceptual medium beginning in the 1960s.

At a moment when expanded consciousness and psychedelic experimentation were reshaping ideas about the mind, figures such as Brion Gysin, Liliane Lijn, Amanda Feilding, and James Turrell explored how flicker, rotation, optical phenomena, and altered sensory conditions could transform conscious experience. Their work proposed that art could function not simply as an object to be viewed, but as a catalyst for perceptual change and a means of expanding or recalibrating the processes through which we experience reality.

This dialogue continues through the later work of artists including Loie Hollowell, Leo Villareal, and Tomás Saraceno whose practices encourage viewers to become aware of vision as an active, embodied process. These works draw attention to how art is not simply experienced within the gallery space, but within the physiology of the eye and the interpretive activity of the brain.