The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

My latent Cyberdelic tendencies came to the fore before my recent peregrinations to the Himalayan mountains of Uttarakhand which lasted for over two weeks across the New year and Christmas break. Will upload the trips photographs (on my flickr stream)as soon as I have recovered from the journey and its aftermath (more of which in later posts)

Took these a couple of months ago in a whole series of shots and experimentation with water and oil droplets (mostly shot in industrial settings during visits to some chemical factories in Gujarat producing effluents in the manufacture of industrial dyes and paints)

I rather enjoy the leeway and scope of experimentation while composing Macros as the only real limit is the scope of one's own imagination and ability to "visualize" a shot in the most mundane of settings and objects.



Creatively I find it more satisfying than other genres of photography where scale and composition experimentation can be rather limited in lieu of the bigger picture.. This telescoping down to the microscopic level is really fun and always reminds me of one of the joys which initially attracted me to learn Photography as an art form.

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It's interesting to explore how the mind associates different influences and events asscociated with memory. How unrelated themes can intermingle in the most unlikely ways &

places



Inspiration is that most tenuous of things.. never know when it comes a calling and where it may spark the engines of creativity to come to life..Two random thoughts which collide somewhere inside our smug wooly cotton brains in its infancy

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The title is inspired by the pshycedelic colors and the fact that I was shooting this in Acid Bath and it seemed most apt..

The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was originally a non fiction novel by Tom Wolfe and attained a cult following not unlike " Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintainece" by Lou Prisig in later years

It was released in 1967 featuring the travels of author Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they drive across the USA in a DayGlo painted school bus dubbed "Furthur," as well as the Acid Tests, during parties several of which had early performances by The Grateful Dead.

*(Ken Kasey was the author of two benchmark novels the most famous and my personal fav of them being "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ";and "Sometimes a Great Notion".

He was also a counter-cultural figure who, some consider, was a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s(or Beatniks as they are more popularly known ~Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac) 'and the hippies of the 1960s.