Kevin Regan reads the work of counterculture psychonaut Dr. John C. Lilly at the Tunneling show at Famous Accountants gallery. Click for more photos from this show>> — Photos by Ellen Letcher.

According to Dr. John C. Lilly, circa 1976, there exists a Cosmic Control Center with a Galactic substation called Galactic Coincidence Control. Within which is the Solar System Control Unit, within which is the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.). Buried within E.C.C.O., a pigeonhole in a lowly clerical desk in a far cubicle called Ridgewood, is Famous Accountants.

Gates Avenue’s best art gallery may only be a railroad-style basement but there’s meditative potential in these confines, a potential explored by the current group show, Tunneling. The ten artists selected by curator Will Pappenheimer have turned the corridor into an artistic cave system of branching paths and surprise destinations, digging through strata of the imagination like our own local MTA. Before we get into these, however, we turn to Dr. Lilly to get us in the right headspace.

Lilly, who died in 2001, is here in word, read by Kevin Regan to an audience lounging on exotic silk dollar store cushions. Regan – who is half of Famous Accountants even in ordinary spacetime – offered tonight’s reading as his contribution to the show, leaving more wall space for the other artists. His choices from the writings of the counterculture psychonaut Lilly, best known for talking to dolphins about cosmic intelligences, start with his introduction to the aforementioned E.C.C.O. Perhaps Lilly’s colleague Timothy Leary (who first spoke of the reality tunnels we inhabit) would have been a more obvious choice, but if most tunnels ultimately lead into the self (they do, right?) then Lilly is way ahead of us.

We proceed to metaprogram our biocomputers with five repetitions of Lilly’s Belief Unlimited, a warm bath of post-hypnotic suggestion which compels us to understand that in the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true. Steeped in this heady infusion, the artwork – now flickering back to multimedia life – takes on a stronger presence.

At a shallower level of consciousness, the readings remind us that Famous Accountants is too friendly to be a real gallery and ends up more like hanging out in a basement with friends every time we visit – friends who are either very cool or very uncool. The 1970s metaprogramming business also reinforces that we’re all in this together and agreeing to take it seriously, if only for tonight. To transcend one’s limiting set, one establishes an open ended set of beliefs about the unknown, Lilly repeats.

Some of the tunnels are purely visual, displaying radiance and depth like Meg Hitchcock’s termite-mandalas of reprocessed holy texts (Genesis, Nagarjuna, Darwin) and Rico Gatson’s video abstraction of a corridor-running scene from Aliens. Others deal with the trip itself, in every sense of the word, or with the wonders, horrors, and unknowns that lie at the bottom. All three are evoked by Luke Murphy’s Geiger counter measuring the gamma decay of some vintage uranium-glazed Fiesta Ware, wired to roll virtual dice with each click (sparing Schrödinger’s pet but not Einstein’s God, who is a gambling man after all.) That which exists is allowed.

One of the most literal and grounded takes on Tunneling is also the most virtual: Mark Skwarek and Joseph Hocking’s the leak in your home town, which takes the distinctly un-mystical form of an iPhone app. The software uses any BP logo (such as the one provided on the gallery floor) as a tracking marker to insert an augmented-reality rendering of the Deepwater Horizon gusher into the room. This technology-aided intrusion of a technogenic monster brings in more immediate threats of digging deep. Visually related in an inky and top-heavy way is the carcass of another demon hanging in the corner: the remains of the Aztec mask from Death of a Ghettoblaster, Irvin Morazan’s opening night performance. There are unknowns in the forms into which changing will put me.

While the media are very mixed and the connections to the central theme not always obvious, everything here is worth experiencing together. Tunneling has less of a theme than it has a personality, one that is intense and searching and yes, a little crackpot. If Famous Accountants was built to be “gallery as sketchbook,” these look like the dense notes of a far-sighted thinker, perhaps even a counterculture scientist who talked to dolphins.

Tunneling is on at Famous Accountants, 1673 Gates Ave., until September 4. In the province of the mind there are no limits.