Experience Design and The Design of Experience - Erik Davis

"Across the fields of art, architecture, media, music, pharmacology, even spirituality, we are moving towards the intentional and multi-dimensional stimulation and production of a complex range of increasingly immediate human responses, including the direct induction of classic "altered states of consciousness." These responses extend far beyond (and below) the traditional object of communication: the conscious human subject conceived as a rational agent and a reader of meanings. In other words, as science, pharmacology, and media technology deepen their understanding of how the human nervous system joins with the ever mercurial psyche to produce a lived sense of reality, these knowledges are becoming integrated into the engines of cultural production. To put it crudely, our cultural technologies are becoming less like books and songs, and more like rollercoasters or drugs."