Mesmer Prism

Citizen-science web infrastructure

Altered Xperience Project

The Altered Xperience Project (AXP) is a live open-science and citizen-science initiative led by CIRCE. It gives participants a way to anonymously share reports of altered states of consciousness, including substance-based and non-substance-based experiences, and turns those reports into an expanding research dataset. My part of the collaboration is the public web and research-infrastructure layer: survey flow, multilingual questionnaire handling, scoring, feedback, persistence, export paths, and collaborator documentation.

Live AXP survey Access guide CIRCE Back to work

Direction

What the project adds

AXP is important because it connects my altered-perception work to a live citizen-science surface. The project is not only a research topic or source map; it is a running web system where public participation, questionnaire design, data hygiene, and open-science distribution have to work together.

The local app work is a Shiny survey pipeline with Google Sheets questionnaire definitions, language-specific survey blocks, MariaDB persistence, canonical ASC scoring, peer-comparison feedback, data-quality metadata, and export scripts for public and private bundles. The companion guide is the public collaborator layer: it explains survey links, questionnaire edits, data examples, peer-plot tuning, and the contracts that keep edits safe.

This gives the site a clearer web-development axis. Viscereality and Rusty XR show headset and companion-tooling work. AXP shows the same systems thinking applied to browser-based research infrastructure: consent-facing flow, participant experience, reproducible definitions, redacted exports, and public documentation.

Current work

  • Multilingual Shiny survey flow for altered-state reports
  • Questionnaire definitions loaded from Google Sheets or local CSV sources
  • ASC scoring, feedback screens, and peer-comparison plotting
  • MariaDB persistence and one-fact-per-key data tables
  • Public redacted exports, private full exports, and OSF handoff tooling
  • Collaborator-facing access guide, diagrams, data examples, and plot lab

Connected projects

  • Brain Candy for non-pharmacological state-shift design and measurement context
  • Prophantasia for citizen-science platform thinking around imagery variation
  • Phenomenological Control for suggestion, imagery, and subjective-report discipline
  • Viscereality for live study systems and participant-facing XR research flow

Boundary

Public role and claim boundary

CIRCE leads the scientific project. My public role is best described as collaborator and infrastructure builder: translating research requirements into working survey, data, feedback, and documentation systems. The public page here does not replace CIRCE's project description, the live survey, or the formal research record.

AXP collects subjective reports. That makes privacy, anonymity, stable terminology, and export boundaries central design concerns. The tooling therefore treats participant-facing experience, researcher-facing data shape, and public documentation as one system instead of separate afterthoughts.

This page also keeps claims narrow. AXP is an open-science and citizen-science infrastructure project for studying altered-state reports; it is not a clinical service, a harm-reduction authority, or a claim that any consciousness-modifying technique is safe or beneficial.

Public focus

  • Citizen-science participation rather than private notebook work
  • Web development as part of research method
  • Open-science data handoff and collaborator documentation
  • Clear distinction between CIRCE's scientific leadership and my infrastructure role

References

Public sources and related surfaces

These links ground the public description of AXP and the surrounding altered-state measurement infrastructure.

Project surfaces

Measurement context