#i would be a live action fantasy costume designer if i could understand patterns and sewing machines

[mistyjessart]

80s/90s/2000s fantasy movies with practical effects >>>

[tarapai-blog]

sur-realize the reality

“Only he who has a different visual opening can see the world in another way.” Bruno Munari

I remember the first time I saw a school of black fish above my head, swimming towards me slowly. I was seven years old and believed I was in a fish tank–until the car horn blasted in my ear. The fishes turned into raindrops and I found myself completely wet, standing in front of my school. My father pressed the horn again, “Why are you standing in the rain? Come! Let’s go home.” I gathered myself and returned to a reality where everything was drab and solid, where I felt loneliness and silence. I was waiting alone in the late evening.

What I experienced was a type of dream, a vision, arising from my unconscious self. But this dream was different from a typical nighttime dream over which we have no control. It was a powerful fantasy over which we can take ownership. A daydream is a subjective and personal mental space where things can be anything we wish them to be. It can inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than the actual world. Dreams and fantasy to me are the purest forms of play. As a child, I frequently focused my attention toward them to relieve myself from exposure to disturbing contexts and stress. As Lynda Barry, an American cartoonist and author observed: “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.”

Dreams are direct projections of the subconscious. They create inherent visions and actions beyond reason, translating inner characteristics and existence into dynamic forms and shapes. Sometimes, these visions can be illogical and last only a few minutes, but they always come from a deep internality. In 1960, D.W. Winnicott, an English psychiatrist, introduced the concepts of the “True Self” and “False Self.” He described a state of being one’s True Self as being in an unforced and spontaneous state. In this state, dreams convey our real self through fleeting imagery. These forms don't occupy a physical space but exist inside us. To reach this alternative space we need to reconstruct our perception. “Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself.”

Most of the time we live within the realm of consciousness—in what we call reality. In this stage, we have a sense of clear straight perception and understanding. Certain aspects of reality, however, can force us into a state of feeling controlled or feeling boxed into conventional and external norms. Winnicott described this state as the False Self. These external forces get us out of our comfort zone, with fear, anxiety, and stress preventing us from stepping outside these boundaries to find the answers to the questions we may have, and stifling our curiosity. Winnicott also explains that the state of being overcontrolled could prevent the potential for experiencing "aliveness" and feeling only emptiness. In this state we feel pain, disappointment and a sense of impossibility. Fortunately, we also possess intellect, enabling us to find ways to get through these undesirable events—dreaming is one such avenue.

To express our True Self, in reality, we start by situating ourselves in the realm of the surreal world. Dreams and surreality are theoretically overlapping phenomena, both are internal, fluid, and ambiguous. The only difference is in their “duration.” A dream is temporary, but surreality can be permanent (Suzanne Césaire, 1941). It is clear that a lens of imagination is required to enter this state. In a heart-touching scene from the 2006 movie The Pursuit of Happyness, Chris Gardner (Will Smith) and his three-year-old son get ejected from a motel after they are unable to pay for his stay. They have nowhere to go, but the father tries to hold things together by making up a fantasy about dinosaurs for his son. The two end up sleeping in the restroom of a metro station that Gardner has convinced his son is a cave. This magical scenario illustrates what Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of psychic productivity and imagination calls "the calm beaches in the midst of nightmares." The father uses fantasy to mitigate his own fear and to prevent transmitting it to his son. The next day, his son innocently mentions he would be willing to stay in the cave again (instead of a motel) seeming not to realize the grim reality that surrounded them. In this state, Gardner creates a surreal world in which his son can place his trust.

“Surreality is a perfect nonsense that goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all.” – Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Living in surreality can influence how we perceive the real world. We may have an illogical perception or see irrational images. Salvador Dalí, a prominent artist and surrealist of the 20th century, has proved how rich the world can be by embracing pure and boundless creativity. “Surrealism is destructive,” he said, “but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” In Dalí’s work, he shows us visual representations of his dreams and hallucinations through exquisite paintings, suspending reality and discovering a new universe. His True Self is communicated and he makes his mental spaces permanently visible. Within his paintings, there are levels of strong emotion that embed true narratives about himself. For instance, his painting The Great Mastubator (1929) is not just a fantastical painting, but a representation of Dalí’s severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse. In his youth, his father left out a book with explicit photos of people suffering from advanced, untreated venereal diseases to educate him about the dangers of sex. The photo horrified, yet fascinated him. He continued to associate sex with putrefaction and decay into his adulthood. In adopting this approach, he recontextualized the reality about sexual disease into an engrossing vision.

Recontextualizing reality is to consider reality from different perspectives. These perspectives come mostly from one’s internal latencies such as the subconsciousness and sometimes from deep memories. When Ettore Sottsass, an Italian designer and the founder of Memphis Group, was a small boy, he loved to design cemeteries: “the tombs looked to me like small architectures, very much my size.” His sketches of cemeteries were outwardly patterned and colorful, removing the implication of death from the landscape. Later, his playful visions turned towards furniture and architecture. In this work, he invented unusual and hyper-functional objects based on his moods that he considered to be a major ingredient in his work–more so than any logical function. Sottsass fully lived in the realm of surreality until his last breath.

Considering these examples, what is interesting about dreams and surreality is that we can use them as a filter to reimagine and to irrationally change the assumptions of the immediate world. It allows us to see alternative contexts. As Lubomir Dolezel writes in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, “Our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.” Once we transport ourselves to somewhere else, from a real-time situation, we enter the sphere of surreality. In doing this, we must be concerned that entering this state can be either positive or negative. Horrific hallucinations can occur when we are awake. They are caused by one’s personal traumatic experiences–a stifling sense of insecurity or a response to a natural disaster. They are reactions to situations from which we want to escape rather than situate. When this happens, severe experience or memories overpower the subconscious producing zone of discomfort in reality. In this state, our memories and fears reinforce the False Self. We must be aware of never letting them become a wall between ourselves and our dreams.

Dreams are not just fantastical perceptual visions, they can be realized through the form of action. In early 2017, there was a sense of emerging political chaos as many people were upset at the result of the U.S. presidential election. To some, it was a traumatic experience, having a person who had taken positions and made statements that were regarded as offensive to women. This trauma significantly impacted many women’s subconsciouses. The sense of dread became a wall seemingly built to enclose them and increase their insecurities and fears. However, for many this new reality awakened their aspirations. This resulted in the Women March in January 2017 in Washington DC where dreamers rallied for change and opposition to the new regime. The protest was a manifestation of the expression of True Self in action. Dreams were represented through protest signs using strong symbol of womanhood, the uterus, to comically represent the power of women. Wearing costumes, and bearing protest signs, men and women of all races joined together, and visually colored the city using fantasy and humor in response to the actual, severity of the situation. This surreal phenomenon re-established trust among the American people and released the tension from the protesters’ insecurities, encouraging belief that an idealistic change in the country was possible.

“Surrealism is psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” – André Breton

Dreams and surreality guide us to see better alternatives. In his 1516 work, "Utopia," Sir Thomas More introduced the concept of utopia and the opposite concept, dystopia. These ideas were presented as unrealizable fictions in the form of socio-political satire. Utopia is presented as an imaginary place that possesses perfect qualities for its citizens, and a complete absence of political problems. More presented utopia as place of eternal peace and happiness—a place that was obviously unrealizable. In their book, Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby describe a vision of Utopia that is far more interesting as a concept used as a stimulus to keep idealism alive, not as something to try to make real–a reminder of the possibility of alternatives, as something to aim for rather than build.

In adopting this attitude, we may see a great potential to put our trust in dreams and surreality as they have the capacity to recontextualize the undesirable parts of the actual world. There are many artists who are fascinated with visualizing a mental space through fantastical drawings. This approach invites us to view these visions as inspirational daydreams rather than as serious proposals. Paul Noble is a British Artist whose work is full of rigorous detail, so much so that it might best be viewed through a microscope. In his large scale work, Nobson Newtown (1998), he visualizes a vast phantasmagorical universe rendered in graphite pencil using a technique known as oblique projection. In his work, he presents a parody of various architectures; shopping malls, tourist spots, hospitals, factories, etc. but behind this humorous immersive drawing, is a caution—the drawings contain a total absence of human representation. Noble claims that “the truth is that wherever man goes, destruction and sadness aren’t too far behind.”

These examples address serious issues, through the lens of fantastical activity and imagery. They demonstrate how one’s personal creativity can address inaccessible and undesirable problems, and become clear significant manifestos regarding concerns in society. In this state, the appealing quality of fantasy can attract us more than a quality of realism. We can observe that the power of imagination or enter a state of being our True Self, which carries our internal exuberance and control forward and perhaps help us to conquer severe situations. As the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland observed: “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” As Vincente Minnelli, an American Stage Director, famous for directing classic MGM musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis, Gigi, and An American in Paris, said: “Surrealism is a way of life–” not just a cultural movement in the art history.

Living in reality, we follow the world. But living in surreality, the world follows us. We all know the world is what it is, it can’t physically be something else, but as Albert Einstein once said: “Logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere.” Perhaps, somewhere we never expect. If we want the world to exist in the way of our choosing, it is important to see the potentials of everything in our life. Once we give ourselves over to the realm of possibility, we are one step ahead of realism. Norman Bel Geddes, an American theatrical and industrial designer, mixed technologies with dreams, fantasy, and the irrational. In his work, he went beyond seeking functional solutions to problems, but used design to form dreams. In 1939 New York World’s fair, he designed an environment of large-scale models featuring a national network of expressways. It was viewed very much as an America of the near future: a realizable dream. Addressing a less optimistic reality, Herman Kahn, whose radical phrase was “thinking the unthinkable,” reconceptualized the practicalities of nuclear war by thinking through the aftermath in a rational way: how could America rebuild itself after an Armageddon? This speculative fantasy alerted people to the possibility of a nuclear war from the realm of the unimaginable to something much closer to everyday life.

Surreality is not the realm of the insane–whatever appears in our mind is eventually fantastic. In 1966, Yoko Ono, debuted her installation “Ceiling Painting” at London’s Indica Gallery where she and John Lennon first met. As with her instruction paintings, the “Ceiling Painting” was not a painting at all but an installation. It included a ladder with a magnifying glass suspended from the ceiling. In its original incarnation, the audience was to climb the ladder to see a word written in minuscule letters on a white canvas suspended from the ceiling above. The word was “YES.” Resolutely positive and elegantly simple, its humorous, intelligent twist gently transformed the audience into participants. The ladder and its accouterments are only the beginning of the artwork; its completion is in the “audience’s mind,” rolling over the meaning of that small yet powerful message; a word with an infinite definition. As John Lennon experienced this installation, the positivity of the word “Yes” incredibly conveyed Ono’s attitude and personality. Lennon was full of wonder and excitement to know her and ultimately made her his wife. In this work, Ono coupled a path to mental space with the action of climbing a ladder, metaphorically recreating the experience of a dream. If the word had been “No,” the power of negativity would have virtually eliminated all possible visions.

To perceive the value of dreams and surreality, we must understand the intimacy between our internal and external realities. In doing so, we can understand that the imagery that often occurs in our mind is never illogical. The irrational isn’t always impossible. It is important to listen to our True Self and let it speak in a way. In this world, with many unpredictable situations, we should appreciate that some people prefer to occupy the realm of surreality. By their examples, we will know that we have to do this for ourselves as well. Such an attitude can only enrich and broaden our minds. As Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst and follower of Sigmund Freud, once said “Our perception will become clear only when we can look into our soul.”