AND NOW THEY WANT YOUR DREAMS, TOO

CT+CR Collective* for the Social Dream Lab, de Young Museum, San Francisco, California; February 6-March 3, 2013

Series of events:

Dead Straight

Performance

February 10, 2013

Beginning with Bachelard’s notion of “dreams of will,” members of the CT+CR Collective* read from the dream works of the dead, some with resurrectional intent. Taking the form of a live mimic model or exquisite corpse and executed according to strict time-based rules and restraints, first and foremost being the rule that the author must be dead, this performance explores recitation, in and of itself, as a form of social dreaming, involving interpolations of past, present, and future as well as complex aggregates of individual, dyadic, and collective will.

Filmed by Holly Andres and jD White. Postproduction by Miles Johnson and Evangelina Owens.

Waking, Sleeping, and Other Artifacts

Roundtable

February 15, 2013

Electronic technologies produce new images that precede perception in ways that Bachelard, thinker of dreams, could neither have predicted nor imagined. Dreams, wishes, aspirations, nightmares, blessings, and curses circulate the net with lightning speed and equal ease, scrambling delicate ratios of waking and sleeping, memory and forgetting, knowing and unknowing, ownership and appropriation, will and determinism, knowledge and desire, the ingenuous and the disingenuous, the lived and the unlived. Indeed, what if that’s the point? In this roundtable, members of the Collective explore the fundamental ambivalence of social dreaming, particularly in light of current conceptions of the Commons and Hive Mind.

Readings: Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” On Individuality and Social Forms; Michel Foucault, selection from “Dream, Imagination, and Existence: An Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s ‘Dream and Existence,’” Dream & Existence; Friedrich Kittler, “Computers,” Optical Media; and Henri Lefebvre, “Clearing the Ground,” Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday.

Filmed by Amy O’Brien and Cassie Cone. Postproduction by Amy O’Brien.

Manifest Content

Blog

February 20-March 6, 2013

Drawing in more interlocutors, including Wolf, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Lacan, St. Augustine, Kittler, Klein, Kristeva, Simmel, Bataille, Bachelard, Bergson, Bloch, and Binswanger, members of the Collective issue further calls and responses in the form of a blog. The questions remain, What is social dreaming? What does sociality look like and feel like today? How can we transform the merely collective into the social?

Manifesto on the Right to Dream

Closing

March 2, 2013

The CT+CR Collective deliver a manifesto on the right to dream.

*The Critical Theory and Creative Research Collective is devoted to socio-political critique, including the rethinking and recalibration of unstable, fast-changing relations between machine-generated data and human experience, theory and practice, the possible and the real, time and judgment, process and end-driven behavior. Its members include Anne-Marie Oliver, Barry Sanders, Marie-Pierre Hasne, Joan Handwerg, Nicole Eriko Amagai-Smith, Marshall Astor, Carmen Denison, Peter Falanga, Andre Fortes, Dustin Freemont, Val Hardy, Lauren Heagerty, Hannah Horovitz, Evangelina Owens, Mel Ponis, Kevin Smith, Mohammed Usrof, Brooke Wendt, and Chloé Womack.

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