Dream Machines

2004 - Installation (Installation)

Loris Gréaud

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This work refers to the “Dream Machines”, an experimental object invented by the painter and writer Brion Gysin and the scientist Ian Sommerville, and which is composed of a light bulb with light passing through slits in a rotating cylinder. Loris Gréaud revisits the structural mechanism; the light variations, following the frequency shift of the “ Dream Machines”,, which is transcribed here by the undulations of the light produced by the filament lamps. Beyond this technological reference, the artist also quotes stories, legends, rumors about this invention in order to crystallize them in a contemporary technological object. The light frequency generates mental images, physiologically modifying the information transmitted to the brain via the optical nerve and psychologically modifying the state of consciousness of the spectator. These changes in vision need to be experienced in the entire space of the exhibition – as was the case during Silence Goes More Quickly When Played Backwards at Le Plateau, Paris, in 2005. Dream Machines , to be seen with eyes closed, was in parallel with another of his works in the Kadist collection, CFL, watercress shoots that the spectator was invited to consume in order to better perceive in the dark space. The three lightboxes create a screen and the spectator’s mental images are projected on this surface. Gréaud removed the screen from its usual rationales as an optical device, to allow the gaze to enter the imaginary.

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Research by Loris Gréaud is pieced together in the exhibition space in effort to build a total work of art and a world view. “Cellar Door,” his solo exhibition held at the Palais de Tokyo in 2008, is constructed like a movie set, spanning across divergent processes and temporalities. Gréaud’s work, extracted from science fiction literature, technology, and science, questions immateriality as well as the real and the virtual. He is known to make references to Yves Klein in “The Merzball Pavilion” (2008), to spread the smell of the planet Mars in “Spirit” (2005), to remodel an apartment magnetic fields specialist in “Residents 1” (2005), to send messages in Morse code by light in “Limen” (2003), and create nanosculptures with “Untilted01” (2006). The artist does not make the invisible visible, but instead makes the invisible readable. “These notions of invisibility and off-screen non-presence are engines of desire” Gréaud states. Paul Ardenne when speaking about Gréaud referred to him as the “artist as phenomenologist,” describing his works and their high degree of sophistication as a “phenomenological subject.” Loris Gréaud was born in 1979 in Eaubonne, France. He lives and works in Paris.

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Colors:

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• science_fiction.n.01
• phenomenology.n.01
• optics.n.02
• projection.n.02
• lamp.n.01