The following extracts have been taken from a COLLABORATIVE DREAMSCAPE written on a shared Google Doc by participants of SPAM Press's Digital Dreamland workshop led by Kirsty Dunlop & Maria Sledmere at the the Still-at-Home Fringe Literary Fest 2021 on the 23rd May 2021.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTOR: Derrida once claimed ‘the dreamer invents [their] own grammar’. In this workshop, we’ll be delving into the realm of dreams from a post-internet perspective, exploring overlaps between dream language and the psychic environments of digital platforms. From lightweight writing activities to readings of dreams and poetics, we’ll think about questions around time, memory, intimacy and association within the dreamscapes of sleep and the attention demanding, hyper-environs of social media. Writing about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972), Jonathan Crary notes that ‘loss of diurnal time loosen[s] one's psychic hold on a stable present, allowing dream as the bearer of memory to be relocated into waking life’. While Crary is talking about life on a space station, might the ‘artificial environment’ of the internet effect a similar temporal displacement? In ‘Digital Dreamland’, we’ll use poetry to venture through a post-internet grammar of dreams and offer experimental approaches to the electronic (un)conscious, both on the page and the screen.
Elephants never appear in the pink sky upside down, because the blue scares them.
They only persist. Surrender, Persist. Add a square frame.
Streaming pop music purple sunrise from the other side. In hiding myself I see others as well, I get hungry often.
A convex of colours
In a lovely convex
Lovely complex in its acceptance of the world
Secret pathway lined with
Doors
Held by string to dormant spaces/add a stroke of blue
and then red
Balloons are everywhere
Little floating pockets of your breath
🎈
I'd like to be Elon Musks's baker on Mars - where is my
heart?
Pixelating in the cloud - little byte-size loafs
(+ marathon, snickers, Toblerone cheesecake)
Musk of musk and grim - a fr538ants
All the drams I typed
All the dreams I typed into the document that summer
All the documents of that summer that burned my flesh
All the dreams that have disappeared
All the disappearances that were dreams
All the disappearances that were drawings
All the summers I typed into that document that dream
All the dreams in that document that burned my flesh
All the summers have disappeared.
🎈
is so much of wat yet to be asked, the tooth in question, a platonic tooth sweeter than air and milky the tooth would be anonymous tooth or would it be named, gosh I I need a dentist!
(when we asked about teeth we were asking about two things: the ability to consume, and the inner strength that our bodies possessed)
What do my retainers say about me?
My dentist recently congratulated me on keeping the
plastic sleepers for two whole years, so I bit into the
plastic mould of the next decade
Or my recurring dream about the supermarket?
Absinthe supermarket
Absent nourishment lies
sparkly processes of fluorine and euclid
put green on you tongue and grow sapling from
language <3
I never go to the dentist in dreams which is unwise I lie
🎈
I am not a planet.
I might be a piece of forgotten, wheeling, plummeting space trash.
To cross the event horizon of a black hole as a human body ends/begins/becomes in something called "spaghettification" where the body is stretched and stretched without stopping and time slows because
that's what gravity does to time and ou move
infinitesimally towards the centre of the supermassive
and you are only a noodle or perhaps trillions of noodles
Put your coin into the bubblegame machine, or else
Because your furniture is not FREE of charge. You need
to pay for the window too
Find a lamp on the street - it belonged to the
neighbours - such a nice lamp - take it and keep it and
now you can't be friends with the neighbours because
you have their garbage lamp in your living room - but
the lamp is beautiful and it was decidely worth it. Some
kind of blue-skied feeling is clear as the animal that
lingers at the side of my dream and is it drooling it is
only as small as the marble-eyed.
The bubbles run from the bubble-gun.
🎈
Forgetting about step 2 is part of the process
Kp the bodies OUT
It rains
At this point you will feel no pain, you just couldn't
Let the bodies in
Let em in
If you're cold, they're cold, let them in! LET THOSE
BODIES IN BABY
Cold Bodies
BABY tiny little baby youre features are so small! The
baby is a red herring
Cold babies stacking at your front door
Waiting/wanting
🎈
any died. Im stealing these words
Not if I steal them first
~
Text: Collaborative text from participants of 'Digital Dreamland' workshop
Published: 23/06/21
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