We are delighted that the triptych of The Brain 7 - Playful Media Residency is exhibited at Französische Filmwoche 2021.

The artists Marie Dahlén (SE), Jeanne Susplugas (FR), Jay Palmer (CA), Sara Lisa Vogl (DE), Lilian Hess (DE), Émeline Néant (FR), Emilie Breslavetz (FR) and Laura Kuusk (EE) were participating in the The Brain - Playful Media Residency series that runs from 2015 until today. This years partners are Institut français Deutschland, Institut français Suede, Institut français Estonie, Goethe-Institut, A MAZE.

The theme of The Brain 7 - Playful Media Residency Online is „Dream“: the dream about a society where individuals can live in peace, where humans can live and work in a socially, culturally and naturally durable environment.

For the Thorsten S. Wiedemann, curator of The Brain series and artistic director of
A MAZE., the final piece will be a playful media triptych, where the individual work serves its own artistic purpose but all three works combined.

Final presentation video (via youtube) is edited by Tatiana Vilela Dos Santos

Book a 15mins slot on November 26 to 28 from 3pm to 6pm for the full Dream experience at Institut français Berlin. Contact: cinema@institutfrancais.de

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Dreamdancer (via youtube)

The text element is written and performed by Lilian Hess, who is an independent writer/director across film and immersive media. Interpreting the theme “Dreams”, she engaged in the practice of Psychography, or “automatic writing”, while channeling the visual and auditive impressions from early recordings of both dance and music. Passages from the resulting text were then fed to an open source text generating AI, which in turn offered its own associations. The resulting prose poem, a collaboration between human and AI consciousness, is to be understood as a hopeful “Dream” of the future, a mutually nurturing and peaceful co-existence of AI and humanity.

R00T, the dancer, was born in the metaverse. She changes appearance depending on her environment and the angle you spot her from. This might be reflecting her inner nature - she is a dancer and fighter that reacts to energetic streams transmitted through the metaverse. An Android at heart, she always thrives to mimic and interpret human arts. Embodiment and exploration of her humanoid form are her passion. She feels that pole-dance is like dreaming with your whole body: Squeezing, pushing, pulling, cracks, burns and bruises - you don’t feel them in the moment but they let you feel the moment of timelessness - pure focus, charged bodies spinning their soul, loosing yourself and finding yourself at the same time. R00T is a creation by Sara Lisa Vogl.

The sound environment and composition were created by Marie Dahlén aka AMUSED, a multidisciplinary Swedish artist with an expertise in sound art and music production. Sharing Sara’s passion for pole dancing, she worked with the pole as a musical element. Attaching microphones to it, she recorded samples while dancing, processing them into dreamlike textures and working them, along with the text element, into the visceral rhythm of the music. “I wanted these raw elements to mingle with fragile sounds, as the dance is gracious but also it’s painful and hard on the body.”

The environment the dance is set in connects this piece with the artistic creation of the fellow residents of The Brain 7: A partially 3D scanned, partially illustrated mind-bending “garden of Eden” that exists on the threshold between dream and reality, and which can be experienced in VR.

The Quilt

The Quilt is an interactive installation taking the form of a patchwork blanket made of various fabrics and textures. People can sit around it and interact with it by touch and pressure to activate some sound and light events. The Quilt represents the frontier between dream and reality. It shows the dream from the dreamer perspective by recreating their environment and making the dream overflowing on reality.

Artists: Jeanne Susplugas (FR), Émeline Néant (FR), Emilie Breslavetz (FR), Laura Kuusk (EE)

Nature Dreaming (via youtube)

Nature Dreaming is a multi-layer immersive experience which can be collectively experienced in VRchat. Visitors can wander the landscape of melted 3D Scans, drawings, field recordings, and voices - which reconfigures itself when touched. The dream world touches on various shades of human-nature connections, playing with time and space indiscriminately. On rare occasions, one may see the dream dancer, a denizen of the dream world. Visitors in the space are invited to speak with each other and attempt to interpret what they find there.

Jump into the world (via VRChat)

Artists: Marie Dahlén (SE), Jeanne Susplugas (FR), Jay Palmer (CA), Sara Lisa Vogl (DE), Lilian Hess (DE), Émeline Néant (FR), Emilie Breslavetz (FR) and Laura Kuusk (EE)