I should introduce myself. My name is Anton. I am an artist and a researcher of art and consciousness.

I was born in 1985 in the USSR, in Crimea. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world shifted abruptly. The 1990s were unstable, as if the ground had disappeared beneath our feet. When I was fifteen, my parents moved to the United States, to Virginia Beach. I finished school there, went to college, and left university in my final year. For a long time, I worked as a graphic designer. Life gradually arranged itself into something functional, but it felt incomplete.

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Living in the suburbs, I understood I would not find people there with whom I could speak on the same wavelength. I moved to New York.

By 2014, I was working as a full-time artist. It was an unstable life without guarantees, a constant effort to sustain both the work and the conditions necessary to continue it. Each month required solving the same problem—rent, space, materials, time. My studio was in a basement with almost no light, but it allowed me to paint. That was enough.

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I worked constantly. I sold pieces wherever I could, took on side jobs, and used whatever methods allowed me to continue. I painted every day, regardless of circumstances. Over time, I created more than two thousand works, and the rhythm never stopped.

Looking back, I feel gratitude for that period. I went further into the work than most people are willing to go. It absorbed everything.

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By then, a certain context had formed, and within it something important was approaching. In 2017, I was thirty-two and living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The area was changing rapidly. Artists were moving in, opening studios, organizing exhibitions. It felt like being inside a process, watching a new center of gravity take shape.

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I lived with friends—Alex Aliume, Ruslan, and others. All of them were artists. We shared an apartment and treated it as a collective space for creation. Conversations moved constantly between art, life, and the direction of the world.

At that time, I was seeing a girl named Nastya. One day she mentioned a place north of the city called Cold Spring—mountains, forest, the Hudson River. I brought it up to Alex. He and Ruslan immediately picked up the idea, and we decided to go.

The train from Grand Central took about an hour. During that time, the city dissolved into the Hudson Highlands, part of the ancient Appalachian range. I did not want to go that day. I rarely like being persuaded. But they insisted, and I agreed. Some decisions carry more weight than they appear to at first.

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At the time, we did not understand it, but that place would become significant.

Cold Spring is a small town on the Hudson River. One main street, preserved architecture, small shops, a quiet atmosphere. But the force of the place is not in the town. It is in the mountains, the forest, the cliffs above the river. Nature dominates there.

We arrived as people shaped by the city. When perception is formed by buildings, streets, and schedules, space begins to feel structured and predictable. That starts to seem natural. In the forest, that structure dissolves. There are no straight lines. Everything shifts, bends, and unfolds in variation.

There was another factor that day. We decided to enter a different state of perception. It was the first time we took LSD.

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We went deep into the forest and reached the ruins of the Cornish Estate. In the early twentieth century, a large house had been built there. Later, the family died without heirs, the house burned, and the land was abandoned. That night, we stood among the remains—three people with flashlights, sometimes turning them off completely and letting the darkness take over.

In that darkness, perception shifted.

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We began to notice what had always been present but rarely seen. We stood inside a roofless structure covered in graffiti, with a flooded basement where clusters of cave crickets covered the walls. When we moved our hands, motion layered, leaving luminous traces in the air. At times, with my eyes closed, I saw a bluish, semi-transparent structure within my body, as if something was revealing its form from within.

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The space felt dense. Light falling on leaves, branches, and stone exposed repeating patterns. The longer we looked, the clearer it became that the world is organized far beyond what is usually perceived. With flashlights in our hands, we examined plants, rocks, insects with direct attention, as if encountering them for the first time.

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Night settled fully. The forest became quiet and deep. Wind moved through the treetops, and somewhere below, the river flowed. Sound expanded. Thought slowed. The boundary between the body and the surrounding space became less defined.

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We began asking simple questions—do we have water, do we have cigarettes, do we have napkins—and each time the answer was yes. Everything we needed was already with us.

At first, this referred to small things—objects in our backpacks. But the meaning extended further. Life often feels like movement toward something missing, something that must be obtained before anything can continue. Another possibility revealed itself: at each moment, what is necessary is already present, even if it is not immediately recognized.

That same night, this became concrete.

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We got lost in a dark forest near a stream. Anxiety rose. The body tightened, heat surged, a pulse was felt in the temples. Insects flew into the beams of our flashlights. Our phones had no signal, and GPS did not work. We moved without knowing whether we were going in the right direction.

For some time, there was only movement through uncertainty.

Then the trail appeared.

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It had always been there. It led us out.

There is always a way forward, but it is not always visible. Without direction, movement disperses. Once direction appears, everything reorganizes. The situation does not become simple, but it no longer feels like movement into absence. You are already inside a structure where paths exist, and at the moment they are needed, they become accessible.

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When we returned to the town, perception remained altered. The empty street of Cold Spring felt artificial, as if it belonged to another layer. The storefronts appeared precise and contained, almost staged in their stillness.

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Back in Bushwick later that night, our friends were sitting outside. We tried to explain what had happened, speaking over each other, but language could not carry it. Instead, we returned to observation—looking at plants, stones, grass, turning lights on and off, watching patterns repeat.

The behavior was simple, almost childlike, but perception had shifted.

The sense of connection was no longer an idea. It had become experience.

At that time, I did not yet know that this perception would later condense into a simple understanding—one that would return again on the shore of that same river.