Agence5970, an independent laboratory dedicated to conceptual art, is active in the domain of hyper-media art since 1996, with the publication of the first interactive multimedia narrative, “Sale Temps,” Editions Le Seuil, Paris.  Since, Frank & Lee have been producing conferences, publications and artworks, notably dedicated to the question of perception and representation of Time.  The ongoing work on the system of Time Icons with the Laboratory Musique Informatique de Marseille is manifested by a series of audio-visual pieces exploring the translations of temporal qualities from music to images.  “Acoustic Shadows,” exhibited in 2010-2012 in various venues, including The Fondation Vasarely, France, The Dallas Museum of Art & dallas contemporary, is a complex interactive system measuring & analyzing the sonic changes caused by presence and movement of bodies, affecting the visual and musical components of the environment.

The current work, DREAMARCHITECTONICS, aims to translate the process of remembering dreams through the presentation of audio-visual sequences evocative of the particular temporality of dreams. We assume that Time is structured along this flow in a manner different from the order of succession that prevails in the awakened state. Time is not passing linearly in its attachment to space, but instead appears to flow vertically along a percolation of movements through multiple temporal layers.

The departure of this work is the observation that a vast part of the scientific endeavor dedicated to the study of dreams, focuses primarily on symbolic content and its interpretation in the perspective of the understanding of the regulatory function of dreams.  In contrast, DREAMARCHITECTONICS explores the grammatical organization of the temporal sequences of narrations of dreams in order to render perceivable the structure of oneiric Time.  Particular attention is given to the form and mode of appearance of movement with the objective of addressing the paradoxical status of images and sound, generated by neural flows, distinct from those originating from ordinary ocular and auditory perception. Our intuition is that these neural flows are similar to the mirror neural flow triggered by the actual perception of movement.  We further assume that linguistically organized Long Term Memory is at the origin of these flows of virtual images and sounds; therefore, text is used in our work to stimulate this process.

DREAMARCHITECTONICS seeks to make the viewer aware of this fragile and fugacious sensation of movement occurring in dreams and takes its visual cues from European experimental cinema and fashion photography, while the majority of the texts presented are poetic citations originating from the work, “L’Air et les Songes” by Gaston Bachelard.