To Dream by the Book

ALIVE in the UNIVERSE, curated by Caroline Wiseman & David Baldry, presents 28 artists over 28 days at the Venice Biennale from May 8 – June 4th. These international and emerging artists express how it feels to be alive in the universe through video, performance and installation. Sharon Kivland TO DREAM BY THE BOOK By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are of course are taking us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer takes as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. Sigmund Freud Sharon Kivland’s black and white film To Dream by the Book shows a slow fading in and out of many vignetted images take from Kivland’s extensive collection of old postcards, which one may think of as thoughts from another place. In the middle of the film there will be a break without images to allow for the turning over from side A to side B of the vinyl LP To Dream by the Book, which accompanies the film, playing throughout the day on a vintage record-player. A hundred readers recorded the stuff of dreams, those with a spatial quality (though perhaps this is true of the structure of all dreams), from Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. (Michel Foucault called Freud the most famous ear of our epoch). Freud points out, comparing dream-content (what is represented) with dream-thought (which instigates the dream, turning the text of the unconscious into a play), that content and its account is ‘brief, meagre, and laconic’ in relation to the complexity and richness of the dream-thought. The dramatisation of the dream is reported, a second edition of an earlier text, but the dream is something new, in which an old wish makes its return. The postcard images at times intersect with the text, yet largely disrupts or displaces it. The film is a single-screen projection. There should be a table, two chairs, one for the invigilator, who turns over the LP (every 19 minutes), one for a listener/viewer. In the middle and end of the film there is a 30-second gap, during which the record should be turned over, the needle placed down after the 30 seconds. Dream readers Gabrielle Abbott, Katherine Angel, Sean Ashton, Angela Bartram, Emma Bolland, Sean Bonney,Elaine Brown, Laura Brunellière, Elina Bry, Alison J. Carr, VéroniqueChance, cris cheek, David Michael Clarke, Andrew Conio, Francesca Costa, Nina Coulson, Heather Connelly, Anne-Marie Creamer, Amy Cutler, David Crawley, Simon Crump, Thomas Cuckle, Karen David, Jonathan Davies, Uma Debray, Richard Dodwell, Cordelia Donohoe, Bryan Eccleshall, Gavin Edmonds, Lauren Elkin, Fiona Furness, Rachel Garfield, Laura Gonzalez, Helen Goodwin, Katie Goodwin,Philip Goodman,Francesca Gore, Ruth Herbert, Dale Holmes, Miranda Housden, Lizzie Hughes, Matt Hulse, Dominique Hurth, Amber Jacobs, Ann-Marie James,Juliet Jacques, Tina Jenkins, Evy Jokhava Metcalfe, Simon King, Nayan Kulkani,Chris Leach, Mark Leahy, Elizabeth Legge, Ann-Marie LeQuesne, Brian Lewis, Conrad Leyser, Trish Lyons, Carol Mancke, Alex March, Caroline May, Katherine Meynell, Kristin Mojsiewicz, Harry Moore, Vicki Morris, Michelle Naismith, Megan Nolan, Hestia Peppe, James Petrucci, Timothy Perkins, Roxane Permar, Lucy Pook, Claire Potter, Theo Price, Rose Richards, Katya Robin, Aoife Rosenmeyer, John Russell, Archie Shuttler, Johan Siebers, Ronnie Simpson, Tansy Spinks, Liz Stirling, Isabella Streffen, Linda Stupart, Mimei Thompson, Elisabeth Tonnard, Graham Tunnadine, Laima Vanaga, Patrick Ward, Emmanuelle Waeckerle, Julie Warburton, Ashley West Leonard, Louise K. Wilson, James Whittet, Ben Woodeson, Dawn Woolley, Gillian Wylde, Katharina Zimmerhackl