Inspired by ritual movement patterns and shamanic traditions, The Book of Gestures assembles the vocabulary of the Neo-nagual: Blue Fire-Veil, a key for…
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.
Inspired by ritual movement patterns and shamanic traditions, The Book of Gestures assembles the vocabulary of the Neo-nagual: Blue Fire-Veil, a key for communicating across worlds. Deployed as a series of small displays, the embodied vocabulary is disaggregated into mini-video sequences in a loop that are recomposed in the exhibited space, amplifying the ritual and transcendental aspects of shamanic communication.
Inspired by ritual movement patterns and shamanic traditions, The Book of Gestures assembles the vocabulary of the Neo-nagual: Blue Fire-Veil, a key for communicating across worlds. Deployed as a series of small displays, the embodied vocabulary is disaggregated into mini-video sequences in a loop that are recomposed in the exhibited space, amplifying the ritual and transcendental aspects of shamanic communication.
Installation view of one instance
Series: Dreamcatcher
Version: 2.0.2
Title: The Book of Gestures
Year: 2026
Type: Single-Channel Audio-Video Installation
Authors: CompMonks, Silke Grabinger
Dimensions / Format: 480x 800px, 30fps, 12-14 sec
Materials: var.
Production: CompMonks
Collaboration: Silke Grabinger - Artistic collaboration
©CompMonks, Silke Grabinger