My new visual take on Terence McKenna’s "Self-Transforming Machine Elves"

[Jubien31]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a recent visual project I’ve been working on, heavily inspired by Terence McKenna’s classic descriptions of the Self-Transforming Machine Elves.

One detail that always fascinated me in McKenna's accounts is the fluid, ever-changing, almost faceless nature of these entities. To represent this, I specifically designed the character without a defined mouth or nose, letting the geometry, glowing eyes, and shifting patterns express its presence instead.

Here is a breakdown of my process:

The Concept: I merged a central opening mandala with two of my favorite neon shades electric pink/magenta and deep blue/cyan to capture that luminous, high-vibrational DMT space.

Image Generation & Editing: It actually took me 3 full days of tweaking prompts, testing different models, and post-processing the initial renders to finally hit the exact aesthetic and balance I had in mind.

Animation Workflow: Once the static images were ready, I brought them to life and animated the morphing sequence using Seedance 2.0 and Wan 2.2 to get that seamless, geometric unfolding effect.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or personal experiences! Does this resonate at all with what any of you have perceived during your trips or deep meditations ?

 

[Icon]

It's a shame there's not more clarification on what was meant when Terrence said "machine elves". It's probably the most misunderstood phrase related to DMT.

He only describes them as bejeweled self-dribbling basketballs. But no one remembers that part, they only borrow "machine elf".

"Elf" doesn't have to be humanoid, in my opinion. But a lot of people seem to interpret it as a sort of humanoid entity. Your video strongly resembles an elf from world of warcraft.

I don't see entities. There's been times I suspect what I'm seeing might be sentient, but it never resembles anything remotely human or worldly. And Terrence, in that same talk, acknowledges that he's in the minority of people that experience entities or interpret the experience as entities. But since then, it's as if entity contact is the benchmark and #1 goal of new DMT users. Just seems so misinformed.

And the way the AI decorated the WoW elf with gears and transforming patterns just seems so unimaginative to me. It's too literal, just like the people that took Terrence's words too literally. All this does is further misguide people in my humble opinion.

My guess is the "elves" were hardly recognizable as such and the word was chosen more to describe their whimsical nature rather than their anatomy.

 

[TheGreenPhantom]

Cool artwork! I like how she walks and how her face morphs....

...but I have to agree with the first three paragraphs of the above post...

As someone who has seen "entities," I would not characterize them as humanoid. I've encountered ovoid shaped, sentient balls of light... also, floating bricks of fiber optic cables who fluoresced a deep shade of blue or purple and had a large circle of white for a face, in the center of which was a smaller orange circle that was their sensory apparatus... then there was a giant 18-legged spider with 9 eyes on its head, and more eyes on each of its major joints... abstract shadowy faces that were interested in probing my body....

The one time I saw what I would characterize as an elf... well – this is my description from another post:


Through the looking glass, I saw a female spirit. She appeared as a whisp of smoke amongst the trees in the forest – just a line without definite body or facial features. She was at least 30 paces away. As I watched this whisp move past the tree trunks in the dense forest, the trees started to shift left and right so that it was like looking through a picket fence while moving past it quickly, and this helped to give her shape. The trees moved and aligned themselves to produce a sillohuette of her body. Then the trees moved forward toward me and flattened, and the shadow that was her suddenly popped out and leaped toward me. A nerdy/cute girl with glasses and frizzy dark hair, wearing black spandex shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers, gushed with contagious affection: "I'm so happy to meet you!" I smiled and responded likewise: "It's good to meet you too!" The funny thing was, she was 2-dimensional, like a walking paper doll... completely human, but flat...


I hope my descriptions might be of help in your future artistic endeavors.... keep it up – you're doing great!

 

[Jubien31]

I completely agree with you! My main aim here was simply to create something that I find aesthetically pleasing.
You should know that I haven’t yet found the solution or the right AI model to create the entities as you’ve described them, but that’s my next step
Thank you for your comments