User:Amy Suo Wu/notes, research and digressions

Hybrid realities

In the third memory (1999), by Pierre Huyghe, the interplay between fiction and reality are blurred and have become hybridized. John Wotjtowicz watches the movie The Godfather staring Al Pacino. Inspired, he commits a bank robbery in 1972 only to have, Al Pacino star in another movie, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) based on the real story of John and the surrounding event that had been inspired by The Godfather. Beyond the beginning of this loop, what inspired the making of the Godfather? Was it a real or an imagined event or chain of events? It is realities' flimsy and shape-shifting properties that are for me a source of infinite fascination. For me, reality and fiction are interchangeable, fluid and continuous like the Ouroboros who eats his own tail. Here , Dutch film maker tries to make a documentary about 'a truth being so strange that it becomes a super fiction'

Which bring me to think of "imagined" realities, dreams, daydreams and of hallucinations. Are these imaginary images a reflection of real events or do they come in from your subconscious, in the sense that hallucinations are perceived realities created in the negation of external stimulus. Made me think of events like landing of the moon and more recently the killing of Osama Bin Laden in which the authenticity of so-called "verifying" documents are challengable and suspicious. How do figments of peoples imagination enter into the realm of collective psyche and then reality until it enters into the stage of memory?

Artist Zoe Beloff is interested in mad women and mediums from last century. The work called 'Shadow Land or Light From the Other Side', is a based on the autobiography written in 1897 by a medium who was know to conjure up full body apparitions. In this work, she reanimates these spirits and shadows in 3D. The illusions are projected in the space and similar to 100 years ago, while the audience knew it was probably a clever trick, they believed it anyway. Interest in the paranormal and spiritualism that was highly popular during that time and had existed and circulated in the collective memory of even scientific men. She literally reanimates the images from the popular psyche of the public. The idea of re-enacting a collected hybrid reality or an imagined reality would be interesting.

Questions, possibilities

• where do the memories of these images come from?
• realities are re-mediated as a result of fluctuations and movements between fiction and/to reality and imagination and/to memory.
• re-enacting/reconstructing images original sources that are of ambiguous nature and yet circulating in the collective memory.

example dream, daydream,  hallucination, imagined realities. or of fake events (landing of the moon), myths, legends. illusions.

• resurrection? --> The War of the Worlds was re-enacted in 1938 by Orson Welles as a radio play. It supposedly caused panic and terror among the listeners due to the authenticity of the broadcasting.
• is consensual hallucination virtuality?

Influencing Machine: paranoid delusions, schizophrenia and alternate realities

• The Air Loom, A Human Influencing Machine, 2002, Rod Dickinson
• Article about Miss Natalija A
• more info about video installation Miss Natalija A
• online version of Miss Natalija A

sources

• re-enactment of dreams by archived by Zoe Beloff
• The Culture of the Copy by Hillel Schwartz
• joe biden copies neil kinnock speech

• cults
• heavens gate
• book
• suicide note
• Heaven's Gate Do's Final Exit Statement 1‬
• re-created official heavens gate website
• Nag Hammadi wiki
• Nag Hammadi documents