Eight Miles High (2008) at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is Scottish artist Jim Lambie’s first solo show in Australia and a perfect exemplar of his practice. A beguilingly coherent installation, it in fact represents ten years of the artist’s oeuvre. Lambie’s psychedelic optically pulsing installations might be described as the product of a chance encounter between glam rocker David Bowie and Alice in Wonderland; a space where incongruous mythical worlds collide. Lambie’s art is immediately visually arresting and unashamedly seductive, which, when he began practicing in the achromatic artscape of the mid 1990s, was a provocation in itself. However, this abundance of visual pleasure has, in the past, fended off serious critical engagement with Lambie’s practice. Visual pleasure is a suspect aspect of art and therefore relegated by many self-professed ‘serious’ and dominant contemporary art movements such as modernism and conceptualism and such ascetism has had an abiding influence. This essay proposes that visual pleasure is essential to the bodily perception of art that Lambie beseeches. It employs the concept of haptic visuality, which reasserts vision as an embodied, material contact with the world (looking as a kind of touching) to investigate new ways to understand our engagement with Lambie’s immersive art practice.