I was a selected artist on Immersive Assembly 4: Dreams and Echoes, a talent development programme exploring immersive arts and technology led by Mediale, in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The theme, ‘Dreams and Echoes’, invited us to “explore the potential of immersive media in interrogating consciousness and enabling new interpretations of reality.” On the programme we undertook tech workshops, conceptual dialogue and collaborated with neuroscientists to develop a prototype with another member of the artistic cohort to be presented at an industry event at the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub – Jesus College Oxford during the Oxford is Extraordinary season of Consciousness.

“Have you ever felt a dream slip into your day, like a shadow you just can’t shake?”

I collaborated with artist Michelle Collier on ‘To Lie Within Another’, an interactive installation exploring multi-layered consciousness, inspired by surrealist dream narratives, collage techniques and contemporary sleep science technological approaches.

APPROACH & TECHNOLOGY

We designed an interactive system using Touch Designer and Arduino, a gestural membrane interface, projection and layers of permeable gauze. The audience member pushed through a physical textile veil to reveal other layers of perception. These layers were animated digital photographic collages that appeared on screen, each layer morphing and blending the given fragmented state or reality. This computer system reflected the fragmented, transitory and fleeting and juxtaposed neurological patterns of association.

Michelle and I adopted surrealist techniques approached in our work (this was 2024, 100 years of Surrealism), keeping dream diaries and conducting sharing sessions in our own dream labs. These conversations informed our visual layers for the piece exploring memory, grief and our relationship to technology – as a mediating layer.

For our research was shaped by conversations with professors of Neuroscience Vladyslav Vyazovskiy and Russell Foster, exploring states of consciousness, notions of time and sensory physicality within dreaming.

PROTOTYPE

This was a stage one prototype, proof of concept. We envisage this piece on a larger scale working with more layers, sensory inputs and complex computational system.

IA4 is supported by the Cultural Programme at The Schwarzman Centre, University of Oxford, the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub at Jesus College Oxford, and Mediale’s talent development focus supported by Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation funding.