Project: "REM"_Audio/Videoinstallation Venice, Italy 2022

Intermedial audio/video-installation about dreaming. Venice, Italy 2022

7 videoprojectors / 6-channel audio / translucent gauze / metal bed / fabrics

Exhibited Oct-Nov 2022 at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Venice, Italy

During winter 2022, Lukas Taido spent a voluntary night at the A.S.R. medical sleeping laboratory in Berlin, Germany. During this night, more than 100.000 units of multichannel digital data were recorded, mainly brain wave activity. Subsequent to this, the data recorded during the four phases of dreaming that night, was used in creating the soundtrack and visual content of the installation on numerous levels.

REM is about dreams, elucidating certain aspects regarding the subjectivity, communicative and technological inaccessibility and the singularity of the multitude of simultaneous dreams taking place globally.

While all people who are awake and conscious at a certain moment around the world share one single, very subjective - but still collective reality, on average approx. 250 million of people sleeping and actively dreaming in that very same moment, inhabit and experience 250 million independent, subjective realities (whilst unaware of their temporary character). These millions of co-existing realities are like quantum levels - all existing in parallel during a singular moment in time.

We can watch the dreaming individual from the outside, nowadays measure their brain waves, rapid eye movements, pulse, respiration and much more, but are unable to look into, and especially to truly share, the experience of their dreams. While the dreamers are unable to ever truly communicate the subjective aspects of their dreams.

While the moving lines, showing the coded animations of the cerebral activity of the artist's brain during the state of dreaming, are projected onto the outer gauze screens, the inside depicts, free artistic interpretations of dreams, based on historic oil paintings by Füssli, Mandyn and Craesbeeck. These were also animated using modules driven by the artist's recorded brainwave data and projected into the air above the center object, a metal bed.

The speakers placed around the square play brainwave-data converted into audio, while the speakers placed under the bed inside, play musical elements, which were also modified using this data, but include subjective interpretations.

The fabric acts as a barrier and represents the outside inaccessibility of the dreams for any other individual but the dreamer itself.

Dreaming is the ultimate subjectivity.