Dreamachinery

Ruthia Jenrbekova

The exposition presents individual outcomes of the collective PEEK project “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine: Post-Soviet Queerness, Archiving, and the Art of Resistance” (AR 567), which was implemented in 2020—2024 by four artists/researchers: Katharina Wiedlack, Masha Godovannaya, Iain Zabolotny and Ruthia Jenrbekova. The overall conceptual frame, based on the well-known artefact called “Dreamachine”, has been developed by this collective, however, the exposition at hand present a particular approach and outcomes by its author, a PhD-in-Practice candidate Ruthia Jenrbekova. Our experimental art-research project was a study of queer lives in a number of post-soviet cities. One of the project’s ambition was developing and testing an experimental artistic methodology, which in my version is called “Dreamachinery”. Trying to connect it to a particular artistic tradition that I labeled as “Queer Light & Magic”, I present here a few outcomes of my personal interactions with the participants of a series of workshops that I conducted in the cities of Almaty, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Berlin and Vienna.

QUEER LIGHT & MAGIC

Each workshop was centred around the Dreamachine — a well known device in the genre of light art, which allegedly is capable of producing eidetic visual stimuli. Designed by Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs and Ian Sommerville in the late 1950-s, the Dreamachine was intended by their creators as a means of civil resistance to governmental control, as a vehicle for psychedelic travel and reflective self-discovery, and a remedy against zombifying effects of television. This link to the history of queer art and resistance has been important for our workshops, albeit the machine played a bit different role there, being an engineering task for the collective construction work, a magical device inducing dreams and visions, and a symbolic centre pulling communities together. It also provided a connection to the international genre that I labelled Queer Art & Magic, which, through the figures of Gysin and Burroughs, can be traced back to early proto-feminist artists like Hilma af Klint and Pamela Colman Smith, who are known for creating two very different Tarot decks, and whose influence I'm happy to aknowledge. Each of our workshops had a different Dreamachine in its centre, which transformed the space into a temporary queer utopia, where the shining-and-spinning artefact was gathering people together and casting dreams into their minds.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

The general idea was to use the Dreamachine firstly as a task for collective construction, and secondly as a catalyst for dreams – i.e. any kind of imaginative subjective experience that can be translated into text or speech and further into any kind of artefact such as a drawing, video, poem, etc. A workshop starts from building a Dreamachine (according to Gysin’s original Dreamachine Plans, 1965). When the machine is launched, participants take turns exposing themselves to it, that is to say, having dreams. Third part consists of free writing sessions followed by editing/ identifying the topic of what has been written. The fourth part includes sharing, exchange, reflecting. This last part would often take a form of group conversation during which my usual question was “if you wanted to give your dream any artistic form other than just writing, what form would it be? Which artistic medium seems suitable for this dream of yours?” Discussing the possible form that a creative idea could potentially take in the process of realisation helped me to deeper understand the inherent intermediality of artistic labour — based on 'mediumless' ideas — and even allowed me to draw parallels between production of art as we know it and production of dreams as described in Sigmund Freud’s "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900).

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