Between Two Breaths is a hybrid performance that inhabits the threshold between presence and disappearance. Dancer Silke Grabinger slips into the skin of the…
Dreamcatcher is a series that investigates the relationship between writing and memory through the prism of digitised dreams, seeking to expose their content to the awakened experience. By materialising personal dream recollections and their aesthetics over an extended period, the project is a continuous research punctuated by mixed-media installations progressively shedding light on mythologies of the transient and liminal. Three questions motivated the project: How can we represent something so elusive that we can only recollect in parts and brief moments? How can we make such an uncertain thing tangible while preserving its polysemy? Can we get more objective sources than their narrations? The interesting aspect of such questions, in both artistic and scientific views, is the tension between our scientific knowledge that establishes strong beliefs about the capacities of the human mind and the desire to deal with the bits that elude representation. Rebuilt with AI in 4 dimensions from brain and semantic data collected during my active sleep sessions and their awakened recollections, oniric landscapes, objects, and characters emerge to reveal this unknown of our lives and its role in human creative capacities. By materialising them, fleeting memories become tangible and make it possible to be re-experienced fully awake, within the aesthetic veil of the Pittoresque and how it deals with spatial compositions and sensible experiences.
Between Two Breaths is a hybrid performance that inhabits the threshold between presence and disappearance. Dancer Silke Grabinger slips into the skin of the digital entity Blue Fire Veil. During the live performance, projected as a large video, the audience can attend lying on the floor; visitors witness how both bodies await activation, encounter, and transformation. Emerging from the liminal space between sleeping and waking, the performer becomes a vessel through which memory and ritual briefly materialise before dissolving again. The performances thus extend Dreamcatcher’s established aesthetics of cognitive exploration, shaping a more tangible and multisensory articulation of the work’s core question: How to navigate in the world of dreams and memories? Displayed alongside the video are the yellow shoes worn by Blue Fire Veil. Presented as remnants of the character, they linger in the exhibition space as traces of a remote body, as the presence of the live performer acting from a different location and time. Suspended between prop, costume, and relic, they mark the fragile and fleeting boundary where digital apparition and physical presence momentarily overlap, synchronise, and then depart.
Between Two Breaths is a hybrid performance that inhabits the threshold between presence and disappearance. Dancer Silke Grabinger slips into the skin of the digital entity Blue Fire Veil. During the live performance, projected as a large video, the audience can attend lying on the floor; visitors witness how both bodies await activation, encounter, and transformation. Emerging from the liminal space between sleeping and waking, the performer becomes a vessel through which memory and ritual briefly materialise before dissolving again. The performances thus extend Dreamcatcher’s established aesthetics of cognitive exploration, shaping a more tangible and multisensory articulation of the work’s core question: How to navigate in the world of dreams and memories? Displayed alongside the video are the yellow shoes worn by Blue Fire Veil. Presented as remnants of the character, they linger in the exhibition space as traces of a remote body, as the presence of the live performer acting from a different location and time. Suspended between prop, costume, and relic, they mark the fragile and fleeting boundary where digital apparition and physical presence momentarily overlap, synchronise, and then depart.
Close-up view on the video installation
Series: Dreamcatcher
Version: 2.0.0
Title: Between Two Breaths
Year: 2026
Type: Dance Performance, Interactive and Generative Multi-Channel Audio-Visual Installation
Authors: CompMonks, Silke Grabinger
Dimensions / Format: var.
Materials: var.
Production: CompMonks
Collaboration: Silke Grabinger - Artistic collaboration
©CompMonks, Silke Grabinger