michelle collier

Projects

Haunted Wires
IA4: Dreams & Echoes
Beachcomber
Mycomythopoeia
Cract!
Parsing Memory
World of Keepers
Time Odyssey
Museum of Imagined Futures
Distant Librarians
In Search of the Strange
Residue
The Pengguling Egg
this place [of mine]
Macabre Mail
Spook_bot

IA4: Dreams and Echoes – Artist residency

I was a selected artist* for Mediale’s Immersive Assembly #4 – a talent development programme focused around immersive arts and technology, delivered in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The theme for this year’s assembly was ‘Dreams & Echoes’, inviting us to “explore the potential of immersive media in interrogating consciousness and enabling new interpretations of reality.” Over the course of several months, we attended in person and online workshops, collaborated with neuroscientists from the University of Oxford, and partnered with a fellow artist from the cohort to develop a new immersive prototype.

To Lie Within Another (prototype)

I collaborated with artist Vicky Clarke to develop the prototype To Lie Within Another – an interactive installation that uses physical touch, visual projection and sound to immerse audiences in an interactive, multi-layered ‘reality’.

Have you ever felt a dream slip into your day like a shadow you just can’t shake? 

To Lie Within Another explores the idea that consciousness is a spectrum – one composed of contradictory, often surreally juxtaposing states of mind.

Inspired by conversations with Professors of Neuroscience Vladyslav Vyazovskiy and Russell Foster, the work plays on the idea that consciousness is more than binary – not simply awake/asleep, dream/reality, conscious/unconscious, but a many-layered experience, where these different states jostle, overlap and combine.

In the prototype, audiences push at a physical membrane device to initiate this multiplicity of consciousness. Their physical touch is then transformed into a digital signal (via Arduino) that controls and influences the visual ‘dream’ (created in Touch Designer, then live projected onto theatre gauze). As part of the controller, users can also switch between realities and ‘melt’ the visuals away, conjuring the sense of ephemerality that our states of consciousness often have.

The installation uses layers of semi-translucent gauze to allow these different ‘states’ to permeate one another – a dream slips into a memory, slips into the present moment, and so on – to create this sense of a layered consciousness where past, present, dream and sensation collide. At the moment, this prototype is just a ‘slice’ to test some of our ideas and technology – we envision a full scale version of the piece as a fully immersive environment, where audiences can walk among multiple layers of room-scale projections, play and interact, and potentially input more into this collective dream (through sound and movement, for example).

We exhibited the prototype during a public and industry showcase over three days at the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub – Jesus College Oxford during the Oxford is Extraordinary season of Consciousness.

A collage made by Michelle Collier and Vicky Clarke for the To Lie Within Another prototype. The collage is grayscale with a punch of purple, and shows stairs going in multiple directions, a door, a cement mixer, a rose and a person with CCTV in place of a head.
A collage made by Michelle Collier for the To Lie Within Another prototype. The collage is grayscale with a punch of pink and purple, and shows a doorway looked over by a massive eye, a person with a satellite for a head, a giant moon and floating mushrooms in different life stages.
A collage made by Vicky Clarke for the To Lie Within Another prototype. The collage is grayscale with a punch of pink and purple, and shows theatre curtains opening onto Hulme Crescent, with a beach instead of urban landscaping. In front is an old fashioned car, two people with satellites for heads, and an empty bath.

As well as growing out from our many weeks of research into the neuroscience of memory, dreams and consciousness – the work also takes inspiration from 100 years of Surrealism. Particularly the use of fragments and collage to create multiple ‘surrealscapes’ that blend layers of our own dreams, memories and grief. We also included a ‘technology’ layer, to hint at how our lives today are mediated through technology in a way that can itself feel surreal or juxtaposing at times.

We also felt there were many interesting overlaps between the methods employed by the surrealists and those used by contemporary sleep scientists, and took on some of these approaches through our own methodology (for example keeping dream diaries or exploring ideas through free association and automatism).

An assembled poem, made from fragments of our dreams, ideas and conversations.

IN DEVELOPMENT! This is a prototype – essentially a proof of concept for the projection, TouchDesigner and physical computing system. We’d love to scale up our R&D and move towards a more fully realised artwork. If you’re interested in funding or supporting us in any way – please get in touch!

Photograph of me, a white woman in her 30s with a bleached pixie cut, sat in front of one of the projected collages in To Lie Within Another

IA4 is supported by the Cultural Programme at The Schwarzman Centre, University of Oxford, the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub at Jesus College Oxford, and Mediale’s talent development focus supported by Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation funding.

* 1 of 6, selected from over 200 applications.