# 'Sculptural Environments Made of Feeling': How an Acclaimed Artist ‘Sees’ DMXE

By [PsyDAO](https://paragraph.com/@psydao-2) · 2025-05-16

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Jumping out of an airplane. Diving to a shipwreck. Spinning until you get dizzy and fall down.

If you haven’t done those things, there’s no good way to explain the feeling. Not the rush of wind, not the weightlessness, not the disorientation.

We can, however, strap on a GoPro to show you the sights and sounds.

With a psychedelic trip, we can’t even do that.

Which is why we appreciate artists like painter Alex Gray, filmmaker Hamilton Morris and writer Bett Williams, for the way they make you “see” a trip.

And to that list of great psychedelic creators we would like to add Dutch artist Bastiaan Woudt.

Woudt is a photographer experiencing a “[meteoric](https://independent-photo.com/news/bastiaan-woudt/)” rise. He’s celebrated by publications like _Vogue_ for his distinctive black-and-white photographs that [command](https://www.bastiaanwoudt.com/news/interview-bastiaan-woudt-vogue) “astronomical prices in the international art world”

In a new collaboration with PsyDAO and our Early Career Research Fellow Zeus Tipado, Woudt created some art out of what he “saw” during a trip on a new medicine we’re researching. Woudt has written [a fantastic blog post](https://www.bastiaanwoudt.com/news/exploring-consciousness-with-dmxe-and-zeus-tipado) that will bring the trip to life.

(PsyDAO’s Priti Amin has created a TikTok about Woudt’s work, coming soon.)  
  
Woudt called his project _Into the Abstract: Exploring Consciousness with DMXE and Zeus Tipado_.

Woudt’s ambition was simple, he writes: “to see if I could transform an invisible state into visible form.” He explains:

_\[C\]uriosity led me to psychedelics—not as escape, but as input. I wanted to explore whether an altered state of consciousness could directly feed into the way I make visual work. Could a psychedelic experience become not just an influence, but a visual translation of something internal?_

Woudt created a series of interpretations of that internal world. Here’s one:

![From "Into the Abstract: Exploring Consciousness with DMXE and Zeus Tipado," by Bastiaan Woudt. Courtesy of Bastiaan Woudt.](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/a87b05c3cee8c15381e4fc982601b1a87b5fd9769f15e6edafc89c9d99a953e2.png)

From "Into the Abstract: Exploring Consciousness with DMXE and Zeus Tipado," by Bastiaan Woudt. Courtesy of Bastiaan Woudt.

Into the Abstract
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Going deep and bringing something valuable back is usually a team effort. Our drug developer, Tipado, is a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Maastricht breaking ground with his research into DMT and VR. As PsyDAO’s first Early Career Fellow, he’s exploring the healing potential of DMXE. DMXE is a psychedelic dissociative in the same chemical family as ketamine and MXE.

Zeus has already dosed 15 volunteers, found the drug to be generally safe, and gathered trip reports from them.

The DMXE project aims to study the safety of DMXE in animals, then move on to clinical trials in humans and approval as a medicine. To fund the project, PsyDAO minted the $DMXE token. The $DMXE token is at the heart of PsyDAO’s mission; tokens are a friction-free way for people to directly fund scientific research, and benefit from the successes. (The token address is GWoPQpyPV7yPssPvV3fTtM3NBCwHaYraoM1NtmvVLwPj)

A Fruitful Meeting
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Woudt and Tipado were first introduced at an art show two years ago. As Woudt writes in his blog:

_What struck me about Zeus wasn’t just the science—it was the sensitivity. He didn’t speak about psychedelics like a chemist or a trendwatcher. He spoke about experience. About sound. About how memory and music and spatial perception intertwine under the influence. We kept in touch._

Not long ago, Woudt traveled from his home near Amsterdam to Tipado’s lab in Maastricht. Tipado is as much an artist as a researcher, and his lab is a kind of canvas for tripping. There, Tipado gave Woudt 52 mg of DMXE. Here’s Woudt again: _After a short talk, I put on my blindfold and dropped into a sea of soft textures: bean bags, pillows, blankets. Music began to play—his own playlist, curated to guide the experience through sound, not structure._

![From "Into the Abstract: Exploring Consciousness with DMXE and Zeus Tipado," by Bastiaan Woudt. Courtesy of Bastiaan Woudt.](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/0aba398a81b1b2f58d9d6baea4efed1eab9bd91b0c8edf392f0cde7742ca9d0a.png)

From "Into the Abstract: Exploring Consciousness with DMXE and Zeus Tipado," by Bastiaan Woudt. Courtesy of Bastiaan Woudt.

Woudt Discerns What Makes DMXE Special
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Every psychedelic has its own personality. DMXE, as a trip, is wholly distinctive from, say, mushrooms–as different as scuba diving is from space travel–yet so hard to describe.

“You go to the DMXE space and you see these things and they're so distinct, they’re right there in front of me, you're part of them, and then you get out of it and you're like, how can I show people this?” Tipado says. “That’s why it’s so important to have a person who’s actually capable of building these visuals, to create these DMXE landscapes, to show the world. Bastiaan really hit it on the head. I’ve shown these pieces to people who have tried DMXE and they always say ‘Damn, that is it.’”

Woudt’s sensitivity, for example, allows him to discern the nuances between a psilocybin trip and a DMXE trip–and explain them in words and art. Woudt recounts:

_DMXE was less about what I saw, and more about what I felt. Emotion became visual…_

_Rather than showing me foreign visions \[as mushrooms might\], DMXE plunged me into_ **_personal visual memories_**_—artworks I had made, moments I had felt, atmospheres I had only half-forgotten. …_

_The spaces I moved through were not filled with people or beings. They were vast and abstract, like sculptural environments made of feeling._

![From "Into the Abstract: Exploring Consciousness with DMXE and Zeus Tipado," by Bastiaan Woudt. Courtesy of Bastiaan Woudt.](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/c8828b4223568e677b9d2eac8acd15c537cfd9a8594c70d0046a9d873702a63a.png)

From "Into the Abstract: Exploring Consciousness with DMXE and Zeus Tipado," by Bastiaan Woudt. Courtesy of Bastiaan Woudt.

‘Sculptural environments made of feeling.’
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Imagine that! “Sculptural environments made of feeling.” The description reminds you: what other human experience can wrap around you like a trip? Sure, VR can immerse you in sights and sounds, music can drop you into a sweeping landscape, but only psychedelics can build a world around you. It’s a world made of you, and also something greater than you. It’s sort of like Minecraft, but with consciousness. That “sculptural environment made of feeling” that Woudt describes is what bowls you over about DMXE, why DMXE can be so profound. It’s also why it feels so important to many of us at PsyDAO to unlock this medicine and rescue it from the purgatory of gray markets and Dark Webs. Right now, with DMXE unavailable in most of the world (though unscheduled in the Netherlands), it’s as if dreaming or music were controlled substances.

Sadly, most of the world will never try DMXE. Yet they can glimpse its import through Woudt’s art and his writing.

“Sculptural environments made of feeling.” Wow.

![Zeus Tipado, PhD candidate in Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht. Photo courtesy of Zeus Tipado. ](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/763f3426e3bfe4721c678de656a43b8a630fc26bcfd1506fefe823a416a5616f.jpg)

Zeus Tipado, PhD candidate in Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht. Photo courtesy of Zeus Tipado.

Read: [‘Emotions, Visible.’ PsyDAO Developing ‘Remarkable’ New Psychedelic](https://mirror.xyz/0x3ccF80a0f26ED8BC2E11d2a4e0813816048BCA38/etWI2DE2Vq_lVfmaGil5BQ2bZ_LPMLghN--M81-_aGM) and [watch our TikTok about Early Career Fellow Zeus Tipado](https://www.tiktok.com/@psyyychedelics/video/7469158412522097942).

A Common Trip
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Tipado, too, has the tools to parse out the differences between types of trips. And he’s now used to the trippers he’s given DMXE describing similar scenes.

“If you take DMT and you’re tripping on weird entities or elves or some weird psychedelic thing that you haven't seen before,” Tipado says. “But with this, you’re tripping on aspects of your past or places you’ve been.”

During Woudt’s trip, the artist found himself _inside_ a particular work of art he’d already created. He was _in his own art_, like an architect walking into a house he’d designed. Could DMXE help us all to see inside our own worlds? And yield insights into ourselves that are as important as what we get with therapy?

As Woudt writes:

_Psychedelics aren’t shortcuts. They aren’t aesthetics. And they’re definitely not answers._

_But in the right hands, under the right conditions, they can become mirrors—strange, shifting mirrors that reflect parts of yourself back to you in new languages._

![From the DMXEScience page on Twitter](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/3a909eeb94b2bbb6fab4e7b02283dd4d25292829347cfb83768ee231b20c6a94.jpg)

From the DMXEScience page on Twitter

New Sets & Settings
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The DMXE project now has multiple outputs: data for the journals and the regulators, art for public understanding. The DMXE project embodies perfectly what PsyDAO’s science and creative directors believe–which is that, while we see the value in sterile, double-blind, lab-driven psychedelic science, we believe it’s wise and fruitful to mix psychedelic art and psychedelic science.

Our KeneLife project is about Amazonian plant medicine art–the way Nature sings to artists from the Shipibo tribe, and the artists capture the notes on tapestries, napkins and tablecloths.

Look for our e-commerce site soon. We’ll anchor our KeneLife brand with an IRL cultural portal on the banks of the Amazon in Peru.

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A window into the circuits of consciousness 🌺🌐
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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/22b7b8bdf11466f79327dc8a302016d3150d5b168e4cec4c2a9aa08272588de8.jpg)

](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NBY0RnY1rtg)

Our alchemist grants have supported science and artists bringing forth their own visions, in [one case creating real-life sculptures of their own emotions](https://mirror.xyz/0x3ccF80a0f26ED8BC2E11d2a4e0813816048BCA38/wbgY2M49VMVw9B0FTdh3aVf-BdJ8em2aEY7lJPqM1mU).

![Collage of an IRL sculpture called The Cosmic Womb, funded by a PsyDAO grant. ](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/ac5f3214e1d6b10d32fd7eb9b82d27313be0ecbb84f12c935e0416dd99c482be.png)

Collage of an IRL sculpture called The Cosmic Womb, funded by a PsyDAO grant.

Even [our AI agent, BeeARD](https://mirror.xyz/0x3ccF80a0f26ED8BC2E11d2a4e0813816048BCA38/LfVX_9NeJqp5kEOQ3GoHsL2-ZAHd7dLGW9Y7u473Cgc), reports its scientific findings on beautiful knowledge graphs that, in their own way, rival Rembrandt.

![A Tweet from BeeARD, our multi-agent AI system. ](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/1d8e008733598178f4798eff51db28abadd763c692bed8dc42ff900379e430aa.webp)

A Tweet from BeeARD, our multi-agent AI system.

PsyDAO’s best projects aim to measure what can be measured, and make art out of the rest.

A Worthy Goal
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Reminder: we are a mission-driven organization and we rely on a lot of help.

Thank you to all our token holders; your purchase funds our art and science.

DAOs are powered by regular people working toward their passions. If you believe in the power of psychedelics and Web3 and want to contribute to PsyDAO, please:

*   Join our [Discord](https://discord.gg/UqKkpxcGbQ). Discord is the main way DAO members coordinate.
    
*   Follow PsyDAO on [X](https://x.com/psy_dao), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/psyyychedelics/), [TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@psyyychedelics), [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@psydao), and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/psydao), and engage.
    
*   Follow our AI research bot, BeeARD, on [X](https://x.com/beeardai).
    
*   Use psychedelics responsibly, and tell us how it went.

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*Originally published on [PsyDAO](https://paragraph.com/@psydao-2/sculptural-environments-made-of-feeling-how-an-acclaimed-artist-sees-dmxe)*
