A Note from the Imaginarium

Hi everyone,

I want to take a moment to thank you all for joining me on the long strange trip that is, or will be, SPACETIME MACHINES.

I started this Substack while living in Bali in 2024, reflecting on twenty years of work across filmmaking, art, poetry and writing and figuring out what I wanted to do with the next twenty. I was staying in a bungalow next to the cultural anthropologist Graham St John, who was putting the final touches on his book Strange Attractor, a biography of the legendary psychedelic thinker Terence McKenna, and it lit a fire in me to explore my own writing more seriously. I discovered that Substack was the perfect medium, and decided that rather than upload everything at once, I would use this space to share my projects gradually and give some insight into the creative process behind them.

We live in a world saturated with media, and I appreciate every one of you who has chosen to spend some of your attention in this corner of the vast world of ideas. If you feel moved to share a comment or reaction, I’d love to hear from you. For now I’m keeping comments limited to subscribers rather than opening them to the general public. The troll culture the internet has cultivated is, unfortunately, all too real.

I’ve already published two of my previous books, Portals and Nomadology, which are available to all paid subscribers, as well as a series of articles and essays, poetry and some film and video projects.

I’ll be using this platform to share everything; from poetry fictions and essays with all readers, with special subscriber-only posts offering a more personal window into what I’m thinking about and into the freewheeling years when I was more of a digital nomad. Over the coming months I’ll also be adding short films and feature documentaries from my personal archive such as Aya Awakenings and some of the archives of Undergrowth Magazine which I created with cyberdelic journalist Rak Razam in Melbourne. I’ll also be adding the comics I’m currently creating for Wild North Comics such as Chronos: The Spacetime Machine and The Chronicles of Chimæra.

More recently, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying diving into longer-form essays on politics and culture, such as my thinkpieces The Doctrine of Ignorance on the Trumpian effect on global politics to more environmentally conscious pieces such as If Not This, Then What? about the necessity for AI to help with solving our current global climate crisis if it is to prove it’s legitimacy. These pieces are intended to eventually find their way into a new book which explores truth and misinformation in the age of intelligent machines which attempts to stand outside the contemporary wars and give some perspective take on contemporary culture, media and technology which I’m giving a working title Hallucinations of the Future.

For the time being I’m just enjoying the act of writing for its own sake and not putting too many rules around genre or style. I’m trusting the work to find its own pattern wherever it leads.

In that spirit, I’m sharing the first chapter of Chronos: The Spacetime Machine with all subscribers as the first new publication for this community. Chronos is one of my great passion projects and one that has generated more controversy than almost anything else I’ve made, because I chose to experiment with artificial intelligence in its creation.

AI is a trillion-dollar industry and, depending on who you ask, either the best or the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. It divides the world of cultural criticism so sharply that I’ve held back from publishing this work further than I intended. But my original intention was simply to explore the technology as an artist, to see what was possible. That exploration hasn’t convinced me to abandon hand-made, analogue artistry. Quite the opposite. Familiarising myself with AI has given me a deeper appreciation for the organic traditions of art-making, and for the ancient lineage of imagineers who have always engaged with new technologies to discover what could be done with them.

I hope you find it as interesting as I did making it.

With love and art,
Timothy Parish
July 2026