“While countless artists and inventors have tapped into the subconscious using meditation, Chavez is taking the idea a step further by exploring how human consciousness, including her own, can itself become an art material.” —The Wall Street Journal
Mystical Vision (2014-Present)
Ongoing Meta-Performance and Scientific Inquiry
Presented by Lia Chavez, Dr. Caroline Di Bernardi Luft, and Dr. Joydeep Bhattacharya
Mystical Vision is a decade-long investigation into the neural correlates of visionary states, conducted through durational meditation under real-time electroencephalographic monitoring. Working with neuroscientists Dr. Caroline Di Bernardi Luft and Dr. Joydeep Bhattacharya, Chavez serves as both artist and research subject, entering prolonged meditative states while brain activity is recorded and analyzed.
MYSTICAL VISION
Details
On the Science of Mystical Vision, 2014-present
Ongoing Meta-Performance and Scientific Inquiry
Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary, University of London
Credits
Artistic Director and Performer: Lia Chavez
Scientific Directors, data collection, and analysis: Drs. Joydeep Bhattacharya and Caroline di Bernardi Luft
Host institutions: Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary, University of London
Research funding bodies: Creativity Enhancement through Advanced Brain Mapping and Stimulation (CREAM) and Seventh Framework Programme
Selected Press
“Chavez is interested in the Subject’s potential to create.” – Image Journal
“For Chavez, inner and outer space are connected, both literally and through the production of certain congruencies that exist between the mind, the world, and the cosmos.” – Image Journal
The collaboration has produced findings published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, demonstrating that visionary experiences correspond to high-amplitude occipital gamma wave activity—the same neural patterns associated with ordinary visual perception. This challenges the neurological distinction between "real" and "mystical" vision, positioning visionary states not as imagination or hallucination but as genuine perceptual events occurring through different neural pathways.
The research further demonstrates that visual content characteristic of meditative states can be induced through transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) applied to the occipital cortex, suggesting that phenomenological states previously considered subjective or ineffable can be reproduced through controlled neurological intervention. This positions consciousness itself as medium—subject to modulation, investigation, and artistic deployment.
The work operates across three registers: as scientific research contributing to neuroscience of consciousness, as durational performance in which the artist's body functions as experimental apparatus, and as epistemological inquiry into the conditions under which perception is classified as valid or dismissed as subjective. By sustaining all three simultaneously over a decade, Mystical Vision examines how disciplinary frameworks determine what counts as real—and proposes that rigorous attention to interior perceptual states can disclose phenomena as empirically verifiable as external sensory input.