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Nuwan Shilpa Hennayake: New Demons for an Online Age

Sri Lankan visionary artist Nuwan Shilpa Hennayake has drawn a pantheon of demons born from the feed, from Algorithmic Anxiety to FOMO Possession, each a 1 of 1 on Ethereum via Transient Labs.

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Nuwan Shilpa Hennayake calls himself a psychedelic visionary artist, and his work as "digital mind trips" inspired by "latent spiritual dimensions." Working from Sri Lanka, he builds dense fractal worlds and biomechanical surrealism. "Perhaps the most exquisite expressions of these intricacies are perceived in psychedelic and visionary states of consciousness," he writes. "My Art is an expression arising from this seeking."

On October 22 he posted "We have new demons!", pointing back to We Have New Demons: The Pantheon, 7 master works on Ethereum minted through Transient Labs. Each is a demon of online life, with a line of its own. The Glitch Weaver ("Reality is a beta test, and I'm here for the bugs") has a face that is "a living datamosh." Surveillance Addiction has CCTV lenses for pupils and fiber optic hair, feeding itself "to the algorithmic gaze." Algorithmic Anxiety asks: "If the algorithm doesn't like me, do I even exist?" Then come Postcolonial Cyber Haunting, whose empire "just got better bandwidth," Filter Dysmorphia, FOMO Possession ("I wasn't invited, but I still suffer") and Parasocial Bond Syndrome. Each master opens a chapter of 99 works planned for a later public release.

The same day he went back to DreaMTime, a 1 of 1 on Transient Labs that he describes as an early work "from the pre AI era." Its text describes a sip of "the sacred brew," a gecko walking across a setting sun, and fractal patterns braiding "all that is past and all that is to come" until he reached "the in-between dimension of the eternal present." He wrote that the piece marked the moment he stopped hiding the influence of psychedelics on his work, and moved past the idea that it "undermined artistic integrity": "this piece for me represents that freedom."

In the days that followed he shared Consciousness as the Original Sin (October 23), then Original Sin, Consumption and Mahakola, an ornate golden face of stacked figures (October 26), and is-ness, a hexagonal mandala of crystalline detail (October 27). The demons look outward at the feed; these later works look inward. Both sides belong to the same search.

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