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.

DREAMACHINE CYCLE

According to Sigmund Freid’s “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), a dream is produced as a result of the unconscious process called Dreamwork (die Traumarbeit). The four main mechanisms of this process are: 1. Condensation, 2. Displacement, 3. Visualisation, and 4. Secondary elaboration. Keeping in mind numerous analogies between dream production and art production, I have used the psychoanalytic understanding of the Dreamwork as a model algorithm for my own creative workflow to process the participant’s reports. I tried to apply the above-mentioned four mechanisms to the textual materials collected during the workshops. First, for each participant I condensed the textual accounts to one single sentence, one phrase or one word, thus identifying an individual ‘topic’. Based on these topics I created descriptions for a generative AI and fed them to Midjourney — an artificial intelligence program that generates images from natural language descriptions. In the realm of generative AI industry these descriptions are called prompts. As a result, an AI-generated image was produced on the basis of each dream report. The production of images proceeded in accordance with the Freudian notion of Dreamwork: verbal dream reports were condensed, some of the content was displaced and then visualised by the Midjourney in the procedure that sometimes is called “dramatisation”, while being described by Freud himself as literally “translating thoughts into visual images”. In this light the process of translating verbal reports back into images utilises the same Freudian mechanisms and can be seen as a reverse Dreamwork. The whole cycle of Dreamachinery looks like this: 1. A dream is cast onto a participant during the Dreamachine session, 2. A report is written during the free-writing session, 3. Report is discussed/commented/interpreted by others during conversation or ‘round of reports’, 4. All verbal/textual material is boiled down to one single phrase/notion/idea which becomes a prompt, 5. The prompt is fed to the Midjourney bot and an image is generated, 6. A collection of images constitutes a typology of dreams experienced by participants. The process starting inside the lighting art machine from the 1950-s eventually enters into the contemporary AI machine of the 2020-s, thus connecting the two very different artistic technologies from distant epochs.

NATURAL CYCLE OF IDEAS

In relation to the workshop, the term Dreamachinery describes the circulation of ideas expressed and discussed during the workshop. As already said, the process leading from a state of ‘empty mind’ through dreaming and writing to an associative card, oddly resembled Freudian Dreamwork: the stories were condensed to one word or topic (Condensation/Verdichtung), then the topic was substituted and represented by a certain object (Displacement/Verschiebung), and then the object was visualised by Midjourney (Visualisation/Dramatisierung) . Those AI generated images were eventually compiled into a deck of associative cards. The Dreamachinery in a more general sense is basically a cyclical process of circulation of dreams/ ideas from inner mental states to material artefacts and back again, as shown in the scheme ‘Natural Cycle of Ideas’.

Tip

Tip