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projector self portraits

I have been playing with the projector and my body as a very literal translation of  the dream world meeting the real world. I like these photos, but they are far aesthetically beautiful and not unsettling or raw enough. 

the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie

So Brilliant... Especially the scene when the curtains open and the guest are eating  in front of an audience. The idea of being in the middle of  something ordinary then all of a sudden having an audience is something that  reoccurs  often in my dreams.


  The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, 1972 surrealist film directed by Luis Brunel and written by Jean- Claude Carriere 

Kenneth Anger

  

A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a `light' and is drawn through the needle's eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to bed less empty than before.

In Anger's dreamlike Fireworks (1947), the director uses violent imagery to explore his own homosexuality. The surrealist aesthetic also is apparent in animation, particularly in Japanese animé and in the work of eastern European animators like Jan Svankmajer. European auteurs like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Wim Wenders also owe a debt to surrealism. American filmmakers David Lynch and Terry Gilliam and Canadian David Cronenberg also rely heavily on surrealistic imagery, ironic juxtapositions, misleading narrative devices, and Freudian symbolism to shock, confuse, and challenge spectators. (E.Foster)

Stan Brakhage

I love Brakhages short experimental films, particulay I...Dream, which is remarkably different from his other films as it features a sound track. The  soundtrack is a collage of Stephen foster's songs, composed by Joel Heartling.

In places Brakhage has scatched  lyrics form the song into the films emulsion. The film is composed of "small minimalist images" and often uses a steady mounted camera.

In other experimental films, Brakhage painted or scratched abstract designs directly onto celluloid, and films of his such as Dog Star Man (1962) use repetitive or unrelated imagery in ways that often alienate viewers.

Maya Deren 'Meshes of the Afternoon'

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a short experimental film directed by wife and husband team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film's narrative is circular, and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper--like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality.
"Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) uses a repetitive, loosely narrative structure and Freudian symbolism to examine female subjectivity in cinema." (Erin Foster)

                                            

Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud's  aim was to discover the "mechanisms of dreams in order to reconstitute the violent power of dreaming as a process, overruling interpretation or explanation. 'He formulated the tearing away of image from representation and giving it to the viewer as a pure image." audience were are then in a subdued position to it, and the experience triggers a violent unleashing of their senses. However,  Artaud faced alot of trouble trying to turn his theories into actual films. impressionist filmmaker Germaine Dulac directed Artaud's only completed screenplay, La Coquille et le clergyman ( The Seashell and the Clergyman , 1928), which Artaud rejected as a distortion of his theories on surrealism.


The Seashell and the Clergyman was directed in 1927 by Germaine Dulac, after a surrealist screenplay by Antonin Artaud.
The first authentic surrealistic movie.

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage in Dreams that money can buy

In 1947 Hans Richter released Dreams That Money Can Buy , seven short episodes that examine the unconscious, written by and featuring Richter, Man Ray, Duchamp, Léger, Max Ernst (1891–1976), and Alexander Calder (1898–1976). Besides Buñuel's work, this is the last official surrealist film.

Hans Richter

I looked up two of my reacquiring themes

According to 'Dream Moods.Com' .....




Lick

To dream that you are licking something, signifies your need to be more cautious before proceeding on to new situations or adventures. You need to be more careful and methodical in your endeavors. Alternatively, it may also represent satisfaction in some minor matters. 

To dream that you are licked by an animal, means that you will be called upon for advice.

Bacon

To see bacon in your dream, symbolizes essentials, staples, and life's supply. It may also be a play on the common phase "bringing home the bacon" to refer to earning a living.

To see bacon that has gone rancid in your dream, suggests a forbidden situation. 

Nobuyoshi Araki

Araki Nobuyosh

Araki Nobuyoshi is of japnas best known photographers and contemporary artist.

"Part of Araki's strategy in getting his viewer to read is to present a space, a "landscape" - that lies between the quotidian and the non-quotidian, a space that belongs simultaneously to both times - and to neither. The quotidian was his wife Yoko; the non-quotidian naked (not nude) women. The bizarre appearance of these naked women is an Araki-created fiction, and the landscape consists of both the quotidian and nonquotidian equally suspended within it. If either becomes heavier than the other then the landscape fluctuates drastically. For some time after his wife's death, Araki took photographs of nothing but the sky - a landscape of its own - and later compiled them into a volume called "Skyscapes'. Her death had taken away the quotidian time/space equation from him, and so the quotidian/non-quotidian relation became unbalanced.

Araki's literary orientations do not take each photo as being equivalent to, say, a word, quite the contrary. His is non-verbal literature, and he discovers it beyond - no, inside - photography. It is within photography that the quotidian and non-quotidian are inverted and exchanged as having equal value. Photography does not effect the inversion from outside the relation.

Beings possessing substance exist by chance; they exist only temporarily in time, and have no beginning or end. Hence all things are of equal value, but time creates differences among them. Araki's work is nothing more than manifestation of his obsessive desire to confirm that things substantial or non-substantial, things with or without form, are equal. From the beginning of his career he knew that this obsession would be intruded upon by that small number of photos labelled "Masterpieces" or "Decisive Moments of the Century", by photographs that would expose the obscenity of society in the cause of justice, or even with malicious intent. Araki's own shameless presence in so many of his photographs might also be due to his compelling desire to prove things equal."

( article from design autopsy.com )

Anna Linderstam

Anna Linderstam creates quiet dramas. In constructed interiors, performative action is condensed into expressions of emotion, within photography and video. The models have been instructed by the artist, who carefully has planned each image. By controlling the visual elements, space and light are utilised as tools, to create an atmosphere, reducing the subjects to objects outside of determinable time and place.

Linderstam creates her own photo aesthetics, reminiscent of trompe- l'œil painting with a chiaroscuro effect. There are formal references to classical sacral paintings, which when combined with the large scale of the works, allows the viewer to identify with the conditions explored, and to relate to the subjects depicted as something levelled and important, almost like icons.

All of the works contain an ambiguous relationship between the constructed scenery and the authentic physical state of the model. Hypnosis, blindness and physical exertion have been used to temporarily disrupt emotional patterns and common habits, so that the subject is letting go of control and ‘gives herself over’ to the photographic gaze. Linderstam emphasises how this process doesn’t have to imply only a loss, but also a tender act of becoming something new.

Anna Linderstam is a Swedish artist, currently working and living in Stockholm and London.


(words and images from Peter Lav Gallery site)

Lina Scheynius

Excerpt from interview by Johanna Reed from This Is That

3. The Instant Itself Can Never Be Changed
TisT: I love the idea you talked about with your "forced disregard of the viewer," and your letting the images come to you and happen as your life happens. It's always been a point of interest for me as a photographer, that the medium is one of documentation. Where it can get tricky, or maybe interesting is a better word, is this idea of who gets to see those documents, and how they are important as little objects themselves. Are they documents for me, or for a viewer? Is the moment elevated or glamorized now that there is a photo of it? There's something inherently public about a document, the need to preserve something, or this kind of tangible memory. For you, after you capture your moments (like the “red” photos, which are some of my favorites), does the fact that you've photographed them ever change the memory for you? I guess what I'm trying to say is, does photographing these instances change, for better or worse, the instant itself?
LS: That is a very philosophical question about memory and time and people's perception. In my opinion the instant itself can never be changed. Yes, bringing out a camera has already made the moment different from if one hadn't brought it out. But the fact that there is a photograph of it doesn't change what happened. Only perhaps the memory of it. My memory of it. The importance of it in relation to other instances that might be similar but not remembered.

Bringing in a viewer gives the instant even more importance in relation to others. It doesn't really make the single picture more important to me. I am not sure, but it could even be the contrary as it is no longer a secret personal thing but some kind of official object.

But the image itself gets a new and perhaps more important life with all these eyes viewing it and hopefully relating to it in whatever way.

On another note I have noticed that bringing out these instances in public has an effect on the future ones. For better or worse.

Six months ago someone sent me an email after having found my work online and asked if he could publish my personal work on his blog. Later he arranged an exhibition in Paris and asked me if I wanted to take part, and we met up and I fell in love, and my newly published diary series is very much about him.


4. A Series of Very Intimate Images
TisT: Since you mentioned your latest work focusing around your new love, I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about what you've been working on recently, or what you're planning for the future? I'd like to know a bit about how you see your development and trajectory as a photographer. Where did you start, and where are you going?
LS: My diary is a constant ongoing project. It is not a new or original idea at all. It is something I have, like most people with a camera, been shooting since I got my first camera. It is very affected by what I see and where and how I live. So it is only natural that the people I spend a lot of time with end up changing it in one way or another. I love seeing the process of this.

Lina Scheynius

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These photos never cease to amaze me and feel like the barren (yet urban) landscapes I often wonder around in , in my dreams.
I can't find a full name for this photographer. Again on flickr he doesn't give a full name. I think it may be Benjamin San ( the last name I'm uncertain of) Originally from Michigan , he now lives in Japan.