Dreaming About Empty Gaps

Most of the dreams are forgotten, but some fragments produce striking images and auditive sensations. Inspired by Freud’s descriptions of the structure of dreams, surrealists experimented techniques to lose control and disfigure socially acceptable representations. However, the exotic power of subjective imagination can be confused with the marvelous fantasy of commercial advertising.

Psychedelic esthetics disrupted its narratives by shifting mental states, working with unwanted representations and left out psychological remains. The spaces left to free associations are now brought to other stakes, as chance operations can be automatized with artificial intelligence. Belonging this young generation, Kyung Ju Park’s series I Dream About appropriate the lack of value of unconscious time in capitalist economy. In the first video installation, the side images of the triptych oppose the artist and its avatar. When she falls asleep, the dreaming double gets up from the bed.

^{Within the virtual room framed by a row of doors, the figure chooses one scenario. Hijacked people and a tiger have to pass an adaptation test to reach the dreamt world. As nobody is able to solve the clue and guess what caused brown traces on the floor, the captives have to attend further courses to learn the social rules of the new world. While these conditions recall the migrants’ constraints, the utopian appealing landscape turns out to be a repressive reality.}

^{In I Dream About (II) (2022), the dreaming space is a green screen used to produce incrustation effects. However, the artist’s body is not projected onto an exotic picture but surrounded by a soundscape. A door then appears and her avatar brings her into the virtual room. Alone, the artist sits at the working table and gets a long-distance call with a friend. While they describe their dreams, her friend’s scenario becomes hers.}

^{In the animated visualization, the two female avatars have another appearance and their movements jerk, caught by digital errors. On a boat, they join Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead whose romantic scene becomes the décor of a fairytale glass castle. Inside the fortress, one of them tests seaweeds. Her dysfunctional behavior is amplified and she becomes as stone as sleeping beauty.  As pink foam spreads out, a question still remains: Do dreams really escape the colonization of imaginary spaces?}

^{Geneva, 2024
Geneviève Loup}