Social Dreaming Matrix

I came to talk to Mia about my master project, she was very curious about my work with my dreams because she had some interesting experiences from her own field as an anthropology. We decided to meet.

Mia gave me a short introduction to Social Dreaming Matrix and its founder Gordon Lawrence

Social Dreaming is a way of working with dreams where the focus is on the dream and not the dreamer, where dreams are shared amongst people who come together solely for this purpose. With Social Dreaming, the meaning of a dream is about the broader world in which one lives. In a Social Dreaming event, participants are invited to offer their dreams and, through association, explore the possible social meanings contained within them.

It is about how a group’s unconscious manifests itself in dreams. It is not individual therapy it is a group experiment; a number of people gathered together around a theme, their dreams come into each other and it is possible to draw a connection a kind of common unconsciousness which come to the light and can be used for discussion and social development.

In the form of an anthropologist, Mia participated as a facilitator at an international two-day long conference in 2015 made for organization psychologists. The theme was “sibling relationships”. They looked at the workplace/ organisation as a family with constructed siblings (colleagues) relationship.

From being sceptical, Mia was positively surprised.
She wrote down the dreams of the contributors.
One common dream subject was broken glass, she had a view in a dream of broken glass herself during the conference.
A hypothesis could be that it was a few days after the terror attack in Copenhagen, a subject that was not touched at the conference at all but that it affected peoples mind.
Dreams are like compound fragments and in this session, common experiences, from awake state seem to impact the outcome.

We talked about my dreams that I had been a kind of Matrix my self – my MA project is focusing on my dreams, my dreams are started to be about my MA project.
I showed the videos I made and explained my method – building up a pool of elements, words, footage, voices and now the videos and using the material as changeable fragments.
I explained that the elements mixed into new constellations can make hidden messages from the unconscientious. Interesting to compare that with the pool of dream-notes Mia got from the contributors and interesting if it is possible to work with other peoples dreams.
We agreed that there is much to explore in the field of Social Dreaming Matrix and visualisation – an interesting subject in the light of art and anthropology.

 

Conversation and advice from Finn Markwardt

Finn is a sound designer and musician. Previously we have been working together on many different tv formats, the last cobbles of years we had organized and held workshops for design students.

I wanted Finn’s response to my master project, especially to the sounds and voices from my voice replacement tests.
His first response watching the sequences was that he doesn’t miss anything according to the sound.

He mentioned that he knows that I’m working with analogue stuff/material as a great part of my working style, therefore he suggested that I should keep going in that direction also according to the sound. Make a body of sound sequences – the same as I do with the visual material, a pool of material to pick from.

He saw and listened to voice replacement test 03, where I tested the use of music in combination with moving images. And he said: The piano adds in the mood. The clicking folie sound does not have any emotional impact on me.
Using music combine and glue the pieces together. A system, a rhythm make things more predictable and make it more easy to edit.

It could be interesting to combine a specific sound to each scene or element and edit more randomly, to scale the contrast; like heavy punk and silence. In general, do the same to the sound as to the images.

Lip sync is important, I have to be more accurate while matching up sound and image.

When I’m a little further, he encouraged me to think about the final show; how high can the sound be, is it a good idea to let people wear earphones and in this case how many?

Conversation with Cecilia Zwick Nash

I invited my self to my old friend Cecilia’s place in order to talk about my master project, to be more specific; my work with text and talk. Cecilia is an actor, poet, writer and she grew up in Drakabygget, a spectacular artist community, among painters and poets in the seventies and eighties in the south of Sweeden.
I wanted her response to my test sequences of voice replacement. She found it interesting; the visual style the way of acting.
She encouraged me to let the sound follow the image, like what I did in the scene where a cello follows the old man on the beach.
She suggested me to think about the actors/characters having an argument where the timing and speed of lines increases and decreases, like a verbal fight. Where the talking characters create a space while talking from one screen to another.
We talked about using text or not. Cecilia showed me some books of the poem called sound poem. The text is used as visual elements as well as text. The compositions of words are like notes for sound; small size=low sound etc. We talked about having a system or not. Cecilia explained that the idea was not having a system, I mentioned that cut-words, mixed typography, white paper and not having a system are a kind of system.

She liked the three masked men on a line; the tiny difference in their movement and talks. I told her that I one the first hand was annoyed because of the head moves but after found them essential for the sequence. It leads us to talk about chance operation/coincidence. My experiences instruct people, until now, is: say a little and see what happen. Cecilia told about Situationisterne, an art group from 1957 which her parents were part of.
The engine was: spontaneity, improvisations, chaos, turmoil, speech choir, music, etc. and using the unpredictable. The intention was to create a larger living space for an anti-authoritarian dialogue culture by bringing the imagination to power to bring up the rule between ruler and ruler. They were against the fine culture and the convention, the situationists focused on the individual situation and wanted to abolish the difference between the artist and the audience, between everyday life and art.
They infused the concept of “play” as a value criterion in relation to the art

Words, system and Christina

My plan is to make one more session transforming dream images into words like I did one year ago (From images to words). The words became poems and then voices. Now the voices are an important part of my art project.
I will extract more words from the new dream images, expand the list of words. Work with the length of each poem; repetitions, rhythm and tone. Probably still with only 10 words.
Working with words is not my comfort zone, but I like having strong restrictions like the number of words. And I do like, that the source of the words cames from my dream images.

But I still feel insecure about it, therefore I yesterday met Christina Reedz Funder. She is a rhetoric, we have been working together before and now she is at Rhetoric and Design at KADK, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She’s a good friend, a really good coach and she is familiar with my project.

Christina explained that you have always used systems, ever since the start of writing. Not having a system was low status.
A system could be a specific number of lines or chapters, the words rhymed endings, words accentuation, verses, etc.
In Shakespeare, the morale, the good and the rich talks in a system (verse). The poor, lower class talks without a system.
Not having a system was first seen with the modern.
We talked about that from a creative perspective is a system something that links the intellectual- and bodily language. Several senses are activated.
By using a system you can be lead to coincidence; it’s out of my control, the system takes over. I set the work, myself and the viewer free.
I have to think that a system sets the process free. The system helps me to stop communicating (we talked about graphic design vs. art).
The system gives a voice to the project/artwork.
I can continue to make dogmas/obstructions, make a pool of opportunities, and then using its outcome. My role will be as an editor; contribute to meaning via serendipity.

Our conversation reminded me of my research paper “Chance as a trigger”. The difference was that I had not thought about the subject serendipity in relation to a text.
Christiana encouraged me to put my self into a situation in order to achieve the benefit of serendipity.
She mentioned a Danish poet, Inger Christensen, who wrote with a 2000-year-old system. The sentence does not make sense, it leads the thoughts to a room of sens.
Make a room of sens and mood is the way I want to go, including words written or spoken.

We gonna meet again in 14 days. Thanks, Christina.