Regime of Dreams
Regime of Dreams - REM
Regime of Dreams is a spatial installation consisting of three works: Dreamers, Bottles of a Bread, and Regime of Dreams - REM, which deals with dreams in a figurative and literal sense. The central part of the work, which was developed for a solo exhibition, most directly deals with the issue of control in cognitive capitalism, as well as the conditionality of thoughts and dreams. In other words, how our daily external stimuli affect our subjectivity and dreams, both literally and figuratively.
Dreamers is a photo-installation of 168 photographs of the documentary type, where every day, after getting up, I photographed the bed in which I slept, during the last six months of my life spent in Serbia. I recorded the appearance of the bedding, which remained as an imprint of my unconscious movement during sleep. Bread Bottles is a film made in the first six months of my life spent in Vienna, where I moved to start my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. Regime of Dreams REM, following the line of interest that I temathize in my doctoral art work Consciousness as an artistic medium, is connected not only thematically, but also in a methodological sense (we are conscious on some level during the rem sleep, although not rational). Namely, I am both a subject and an object of experimentation, which is problematic in the scientific method, because it insists on subjectivity, and which I believe can play a key role in art in the future, because we are already witnessing that AI can recreate visually-auditory-tactile almost indistinguishable "works of art". Also, the pervasive connection is reflected in the connection between psychological and economic conditions, with synapses as the main currency in cognitive capitalism.
Regime of Dreams - REM is a wordplay that refers twice - on the one hand to the REM phase of sleep (rapid eye movement, the phase of sleep in which we dream), and on the other to REM (Regulatory Body for Electronic Media of the Republic of Serbia).
Regime of Dreams - REM is based on the methodology I have used for two projects, one of which was realized for the show at the GMK in Zagreb with the title Swimming Against the Stream of Consciousness where I used non-invasive brain stimulation (transcranial direct current stimulation) stimulated the brain regions that are used to process language in order to describe, with the support of phenomenological introspective method, I pronounced an induced state of consciousness in the form of spoken poetry, thus linking the human aspect of subjectivity with the mechanical and informal processes, establishing a link between human and machine. The second project is Dreams of Reality where I used EEG (electroencephalography) method to detect brain waves, using electrodes, emitted by the brain. I am especially interested in the so-called REM phase of the sleep cycle in which the brain emits recognizable waves, in which our dreams are also most vivid and in which if we wake up in the end we can best describe the very content of dreams. For the work Dreams of Reality, I realized at the Vienna University Library, I started from the two films (La Chinoise from Godard and Matrix from the Sisters Wachowskis) taken from the library archive, which I watched individually without interruption for 17-18 hours straight , in the loop, after I lay down to sleep. While I slept, I carried my EEG device and with the help of my assistant that could follow my brain activity and awaken me during the REM sleep phase, which happens three, four times during a single sleep cycle during one night. At the end of the REM phase I was aroused and awaken by an audio signal and I pronounced / described in the camera the content of my dream. In the site specific settings, in the library, among the infinitely many books and archives of films, that infinite maze of possibilities, to use the Borges metaphor, I set up and encountered the films I used as input (La Chinoise, Matrix) and the videos I used as output (videos where I describe content of my dreams).
For the Regime of Dreams REM, I start from the interesting fact that the "regulatory body for electronic media in Serbia" is shortly called REM, and during 18 hours straight I watched RTS 1 (Radio Television Serbia 1), in strictly controlled conditions, without looking to any other content. Then I lie down to sleep, and the assistant woke me when she detects the end of the REM phase of sleep when the reports are the most precise. I did this kind of performance for each of the national frequency channels in Serbia.
In this setting you can see the RTS1 viewing performance documentation on March 5th, 2020. years. During the performance of watching TV, in controlled conditions, the content that is broadcast on the screen is recorded, which I later place in the setting next to the video in which I describe my dreams after watching that program for several hours. Those two videos, a recording of a TV program and my description of a dream, I play on two screens placed next to each other at the ends of old hospital trolley beds, which suggest an ad hoc laboratory setup typical for torture rooms, brain washing rooms. During the viewing process, using the printscreen, I tried to record each of the key parts of the TV program, which I edited into a stroboscopic video stream. In the installation itself I subsequently placed parts of the dream content as a some kind of a glitch of consciousness
- 1. Dreamers, 2013/2020, photo-installation (168 photos on forex), 1,36 x 2,31 m
- 2. Bottles of a Bread, 2014/2020, video, 26 min
- 3. Regime of Dreams - REM, (Segment of the project of the same name), 2020, video installation (video works, objects, hospital trolley bed), variable dimensions
