The Astral Archive was unintentionally created as a byproduct of an ongoing decade-long project that has been working to establish and formalize an entirely new field of phenomenology under the name of Subjective Effect Documentation. Thus far, this project has primarily operated in two forms:

• The Subjective Effect Index - a set of over 200 articles designed to serve as a comprehensive catalogue and reference for the range of subjective effects that may occur under the influence of psychoactive substances and other psychonautic techniques.
• The Replications Community - a large and active community which encourages people to create image, video, audio, and other replications of the hallucinogenic experience and other altered states of consciousness. This draws from a wide variety of prominent individuals and creative fields, resulting in a form of media that is a unique mixture of creatively driven artwork and scientifically driven phenomenological documentation.

In the latest iteration of our endeavor to formally replicate and classify the psychedelic experience, we began training an advanced artificial intelligence on a large dataset of thousands of visionary and psychedelic artwork pieces. We hypothesized that this would allow us to automate the generation of psychedelic artwork and, therefore, psychedelic visuals.

This process was successful in generating complex yet abstract geometric forms which accurately portray the experience of a specific class of psychedelic visuals. What we did not anticipate, however, was the emergence of an essentially infinite array of beautifully detailed faces and beings. Somehow, artificial intelligence spontaneously produced images which very closely resemble high level hallucinatory entities experienced under the influence of substances such as DMT or Ayahuasca, perhaps more accurately than any other medium or creative project out there.

After realizing both the artistic and phenomenological significance of what we had stumbled upon, we began to curate and classify these entities. The artists, writers, and other creative visionaries on the team were inspired by these computer-generated entities to manifest a vibrant universe with its own cosmology and histories, inhabited by a diverse population of mysterious beings. The project thus evolved into the Astral Archive, a showcase of 1024 automatically generated hallucinatory beings within an extensive and lore-driven encyclopedia.

For the NFT component of this project, we chose to focus on the Algorand blockchain, an eco-friendly, fast, and efficient network that eliminates many of the widely-known concerns with NFT technology, minting each entity into a 1/1 unique and collectible piece of digital art. The proceeds will be used to support the team who created this project, to advance the field of Subjective Effect Documentation, and to improve the technology around AI-driven psychedelic replications.