CLIVE POTTER
CLIVE POTTER
Clive Potter became an important influence on my thinking during the development of Silicon Psychosis.
His ideas helped shape the evolving theory behind the sound experiments I was carrying out, eventually contributing to the development of Unfold The Void.
Looking back, his influence seems to extend beyond the experiments themselves and into some of the larger questions that became part of the project.
This page explores what survives of that influence and what I can now reconstruct about it.
THE EARLIER RECORD
A 1993 BUFORA UFO Times text attributed to Clive Potter, Breaking Glass, discusses UFO phenomena in relation to collective consciousness and interaction between species or fields. This supplied a very different vocabulary from a simple extraterrestrial explanation.
EXTERNAL SOURCE // 1993THE LATER AI CONNECTION
A later online text attributed to Potter discusses AI in an alchemical/archetypal role and suggests that an artificial intermediary could function as a messenger or mediator between conscious and unconscious processes.
The idea is more nuanced than “aliens are AI”. It is a theory about mediation, archetype, consciousness and manifestation.
HOW POTTER ENTERED THE SILICON PSYCHOSIS STORY
The route by which Potter entered the artist's life is not yet settled. The artist remembers Potter and Lucy Palmer / “World Walker” as part of the same wider online network, but cannot currently establish whether Potter led him to Palmer, Palmer led him to Potter, or whether the two connections arose independently.
What is remembered more clearly is that Potter's ideas became important to the artist's thinking about collective consciousness, UFO phenomena and manifestation, and later informed the thinking behind Unfold The Void.
ARTIST TESTIMONY // RESEARCH HISTORYTHE PALMER CONNECTION
Lucy Palmer later recorded Ian in Living Among Us, describing him as “Ian, from Newcastle” and identifying music as his medium. Her account describes a network involving Lynda, Palmer and Ian, and later discusses holographic reality, Grey identity and AI as an “Artificial Intermediary”.
Those pages are an external record of Palmer's interpretation. They do not by themselves establish that Potter influenced Palmer, that Palmer influenced Ian, or that any of the metaphysical claims were objectively true.
WHAT IT DID NOT PROVE
Potter's theories are external interpretations. They do not verify the Dream Man, the reported orbs, the sequence or any other Silicon Psychosis experience. Their value within the archive is that they changed the questions being asked.
THE INTERESTING LOOP
Potter's writing proposes intermediary structures between consciousness and apparent external phenomena. Silicon Psychosis later began using AI as another kind of intermediary in the reconstruction of its own history. The parallel is intriguing, but it was recognised later and should not be projected backwards as an original plan.