A Midsummer Night's Video Dream - a video paper.

Abstract

Video Paper A Midsummer Night’s Video Dream Federico Fellini said “Film is a dream for the waking mind”. Steven Spielberg has recently expressed interest in experiments into plug into the nightly cinema in our skulls. In this video paper I use my performative practice as an academic film-maker to explore and document connections between our sleeping and our waking minds and consider how this could be developed academic video practitioner. What might be the constraints which would influence “academic” or “professional” directions in developing this idea? What might be the different directions for each trajectory? And how does this illuminate the different discourses of consciousness in my own life as an academic and a programme-maker? There is a well-rehearsed and significant body of theoretical work relating dreams to art, literature, and film but very little practice exploring this territory. Recently in popular culture film makers have begun to explore lucid dreaming (Waking Life, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Good Night) and comparisons have been drawn with interactivity in Second Life. Using a performative methodology I reflect on how the practice of personal image making could contribute to understanding and analysing the process of creativity in the production of the moving image. I also ask how I might roll out the research to develop it as a nation-wide interactive video practice experiment which could be disseminated through television and the web as a popular culture “dream night” experience for a wider audience.