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 drama so real, that its 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. The idea of re-enacting a collected hybrid reality or an imagined reality would be interesting.