Girl and the Trip

Some media only works under the right conditions. You know this. Watch Hangover alone, sober, depressed—it’s painful. Watch it with your best friends at midnight, beer in hand, in a dark theater? It’s perfect. Some art demands you bring everything to it. Knight Rider was the greatest thing I’d ever seen when I was ten. Same show now is almost unwatchable.

Masanobu Hiraoka made a video like that. The kind that only functions in darkness, on a big screen, and while you’re on acid. Alone, or with someone else tripping exactly as hard as you are. Otherwise it’s like watching Cirque du Soleil sober, or Alice in Wonderland at a shopping mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Pointless. Worse than pointless—a waste of what’s actually there.

What’s the video about? I couldn’t tell you straight. Maybe it’s about a girl drowning in the noise of everything. Maybe it’s about colors discovering each other. Maybe it’s about the flood of eternity and how we get swept from one life into the next. Or maybe it’s just about acid. A lot of acid. The kind of video that doesn’t exist without it.