Digital video, 3’41’’, 2019, UK
Stuff as Dreams (Melt into Air) is a digital edition by Guli Silberstein derived from the longer work Stuff as Dreams. The work is part of the Cornea collection of three works which explore digital vision and image-making.
Family, nature and scenes of human panic - that may have been real or imaginary - are composed in an elusive loop where images fall into each other, following the unfathomable logic of a dream. The shifts in perception unfold an unimaginable surface under the banal, exploring perceptions of what seems an increasingly fractured world of 'fake news' and 'post truth'.
To create the work, the artist combined shots from his daughter's birthday, family trips and mass media news into an associative yet developing sequence, and then broke the video's digital compression to achieve fluidity of time and space. The texture of the video seems at times like an oil painting, and fragmented to pieces. The realistic source footage turns in this work into a vision of the mind, as a subjective experience, deforming the light rays reaching human eyes. It’s cognitive processing - as code processing, revealing further layers in, under and around the immediate see-able texture. Image is perception. We construct the meaning of ourselves. As Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest: "We are such stuff as dreams are made of".
Stuff as Dreams (Melt into Air) is a new digital adaption of the original work Stuff As Dreams – which won Best experimental film awards at Short Movie Club, Minsk, New York Film Week and Sydney World Film Festival and the third place award, International Videoart Festival of Camaguey, Cuba. Stuff as Dreams has been shown internationally including at Watermans, London, UK, Kinodot Experimental Film Festival, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Bogotá Experimental Film Festival | CineAutopsia, Bogotá Colombia and Media Art Festival, Rome.
