Some Notes on Fantasy

Mind
• Imagination
• Mental Image
• Hallucination
• Illusion
• Make-believe
o Unachievable

Fantasy / Wish / Hope / Dream/ Desire
Private/ Personal
Collective/ Shared by a society/ Community
Challenge the boundaries between REALITY and FANTASY

Actually I was thinking
You put one small paper there
The paper is the screen
Then you project the money note picture
But as the ppl walk closer to the money
Then the picture change or disappear? - Greed?

Dark room, use video tvs to create windows - Illusion?

Mannequin projected face, face of viewer - Like Oursler

Use of Distorted lenses

Respond to the site

OVERLAPPING VIDEO EFFECT?

Using tv to create sounds, and placed beside a plant = garden
• Shakkei 借景
• Borrowing outside scenery

Scene of murder, blood on the walls, etc, surveillance camera
Bench, tv person sitting beside you
clock

Play with size
Miniature models of a city, viewer is giant
• People from the city react to viewer

Person flying in the air
Camera from the person’s view point, projected in the

Make screen using spoon? Or other materials, cloth diffuser

derive
• Meditation
• Go to the place and let location lead on journey

DIALOGUE
• Back and forth
• Surrealist technique
• Exquisite corpse
• Things can get modified in the way

Involuntary sculpture
5 minutes of material
impressions made by the smoke of an candle

Use of linguistics
Use of surrealist techniques

Automatic techniques
• Indecipherable writing
o Illegible writing
o undecipherable
• Involuntary sculpture
o Absent minded sculpting
 Bending a paper clip
 Rolling a paper
• Latent News
o Newspaper article, individual words cut out and rapidly assembled.
• Movement of liquid down a vertical surface
• Outagraph
o Cut out the subject from the artwork
• Paranoiac-critical method
o [research about this]

• Hidden Messages, subliminal message
o Message embedded in another medium
o Pass the limits of human mind’s perception
o Unrecognizable by the conscious mind
 Affects the unconscious
o Use of
 Inferences
 Innuendo
 Allusions
 Propaganda
o Negatively influence the mind
• Psychorama
o Communicating subliminal information
o Flash images on screen so fast that it cannot be perceived by the conscious mind
 Evanescence – sweet sacrifice music video

There is a man cut in two by the window – Andre Breton
• Surrealism as juxtaposition of two distant realities brought together to create a new uncanny union

Surrealist manifesto
An attempt to reach and explore the most intimate parts of the human psyche and the most sensitive areas of human perceptive agencies lies at the foundation of collaborative works by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Complex structures that combine the miniature, model-like architecture wit the audio and video projections are construction sites where the poetics of illusion is studied and the viewer is exposed to an artifice of theatrical and cinematic experience.

In such a manipulative realm, the imaginative dreamlike reality of the viewer’s fantasies and desires replaces the physical surroundings of everyday life and offers the conventions of cinema and theatre as a frame to investigate the potentialities and limitations of subjectivity and to enact the intricate play between the viewer’s expectations of spectacle in the labyrinth of perception and belief.

Cardiff/Miller – Muriel Lake Incident 1999
• Takes viewer on journey into alternative illusionary landscapes where reality on the verge of collapse remains only as a vague and faded memory of restricted experience.
• Sculptural object turns the viewer into a giant participant in a drama played inside and projected on a screen
• Expanded in the aural space of the theatre through a set of headphones with hyper-real sounds of ‘a person next to you’
• Perception of space and sense of scale are blurred through the juxtaposed realities of a film and the unusual surrounding and theatrical setting
o Generating an extreme sensual vertigo of childhood memories and voyeuristic experience.

Spaces need not be defined by walls
Lines need not be boundaries
Objects seen maybe be both illusory and tangible
An elusive object might be related to something tangible and tactile but not too obviously.
sy
Intrinsic mystery and playful aura
Phantasmagoric
Exuberant, pragmatic, ingenuously defiant, anti-mysterious
We are all dreamers, producers of images, fragmented narratives: seductive, mysterious, unexpected – expressions of our fantasies and desires, only partially remembered and recorded

Abstraction, dissolves, superimpositions, de-framings, complex camera movement and special effects

Investigation of poetics and polities of artificiality and illusion

I often find that although I am working on an idea without knowing exactly what it is I think, I am engaged in thinking an idea struggling to have me think it. – Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known

Lack of knowledge that makes the viewer subjected to its magic
Even improvisation requires memorization of the structure that sustains it.

Time is where subjectivity is produced: over time, In time, with time.
Dreams: use synaesthetic sense impressions as well as linguistic wordplay to perform its revelation
Connect mise-en-scene with psychoanalysis
• Science of the unthought known
• Mise-en-scene provides an internal connection between narrative, still, visual imagery and psychoanalysis

Uncertainty and reality: inorganic bodies
• Visual entertainment always played with this
The mind doubts the reality of what it sees with its own eyes and then brings its forces of rationality into play only for the illusion to return more powerfully.
• An otherwise confident and competent relation to the world is suddenly faced by a sense of uncertainty.
• Effect is strong is images conjure up the profound uncertainties that preoccupy the human mind,
o E.g. The passage between life and death

Organic body has become inanimate
Inorganic body takes on the appearance of animation
• Human fascination

The uncanny – Freud
• Only that class of frightening that leads back to the old and familiar can be of interest to psychoanalysis
o For an emotional effect to have a relation to the unconscious mind, it must have undergone a process of repression from which it may return.
 Something which is familiar and old established in the mind
 Formative structure for the unconscious

In the semi-darkness, it is often especially difficult to distinguish a life-size wax figure from a human person, whether animate or not


Don’t see, photographic realism (Lumiere), See, conjuring magic and special effects (Melies)

Figures of ordinary people moving about in everyday life are figures of the dead.
• Inanimate images of the filmstrip not only animated by the mechanism of cinema in projection,
o Ghostly images of bodies resurrected into the appearance of life.
o It is impossible to look at them as a result of a simple demonstration of a machine (every gesture, expression, movement of wind or water are mysterious)
o Life is FOSSILISED
o History of cinema
 We see the dead alive on screen
 Mechanism that started out creating an illusion of movement {woman walking down stairs} changes into a means of creating an illusion of the living dead

Cinema transforms organic movement into its inorganic replica, a series of static, inanimate images, which once projected, then become animated to blur the distinctions between the oppositions.

Blurring of boundaries between the Organic and the Inorganic
• Difficulty of understanding time and the presence of death in life.

Tony Oursler – You/Me/Them,1996
Features (Skins), 2002

The German word for attraction is “die Anziehung”
• Signifies either an attribute or an action
• Designate the charm which a person or thing has for others
• Or signifies a pulling on the part of that person or thing of other people or things towards it.

Freud uses die Anziehung in both senses in his book – Interpretation of Dreams
• The dream thoughts, which are primarily verbal in form, find the predominantly imagistic qualities of the unconscious memories fascinating.
o The unconscious memories flaunt these qualities
 In hope of drawing the dream thoughts in their direction
• First of these interpretations makes evident, how central the visual is to our psychic existence
• Second interpretation imputes to the unconscious memories a kind of agency.
• Memories seem to be the site of a certain desire
o Of a desire for what might be called ‘affiliation’