Trust the Medicine is a participatory artwork and 360-degree film developed in collaboration with the design collective Metaobjects. The work documents a staged psychedelic integration group, featuring real volunteers and facilitated by a practicing psychotherapist, that centers on the phenomenon of encountering entities frequently reported in relation to psychedelic drugs. By bringing this process into an artistic frame, Trust the Medicine asks what is at stake when psychedelic intelligences appear to care for, guide, or intervene in human health. The project considers whether we might legitimately describe such entities as allies—forms of more-than-human intelligence with whom humans could conceivably share a relation of reciprocity—or whether these encounters are better understood as projections of our internal dialogues shaped by memory, affect, and expectation. These questions unfold within an installation in which AI-generated visions of these entities surround the viewer. Drawn from participants’ descriptions and sketches, the entities are reconstructed using generative AI systems such as Stable Diffusion. The resulting images are refined through cycles of participant feedback, making the AI not simply a tool but an iterative collaborator in imagining the beings that emerge from psychedelic experience.
Trust the Medicine builds on Knowles’ artist residency with the Psychoactive Trials Group at King’s College London, which conducts controlled clinical trials involving psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT, and MDMA. During the residency, Knowles attended Maudsley Integration Groups (IG) in which patients and psychedelic users worked to make sense of their hallucinatory encounters. These clinical conversations, together with the emotional and linguistic textures of participant testimonies, informed the film’s script and guided the behavior of the AI models used in the work. In bringing together therapeutic practice, participant narration, and machine-generated imagery, Trust the Medicine explores how trust, care, and responsibility are redistributed when humans and artificial systems jointly shape the meaning of psychedelic visions.