Lloyd Dunn
The Hypnagogic Cycles

PLEASE NOTE: Dear visitors, the opening hours of the House of Arts and Vasulka Kitchen Brno differ. The exhibitions in Vasulka Kitchen Brno are open Tuesday - Friday from 10 am to 6 pm.

The series of audio-visual installations Hypnagogic Cycles is inspired by the psychological phenomenon of the so-called hypnagogic state of consciousness, experienced in the moments between waking and sleeping, when we fall asleep and disparate liquid images flow under our closed eyelids and fragments of voices and ambient sounds seem to sound. This state is triggered by the brain's activities in trying to "understand" the processes activated by the neurological changes accompanying the switch to sleep. If the course of falling asleep is interrupted for some reason, for a time the sleeper remembers such phantom images and sounds. The imagery is sometimes reminiscent of memories, even if not directly related to a specific event that was "actually" experienced before. Rather, they are a kind of 'montage situations', modelled from a jumble of randomly emerging fragments of memories, experiences and perceptions. It is no coincidence that the twentieth century has sometimes been called the century of film, and the film medium a mechanism for generating dreams. In a sense, an instance of Hypnagogic Cycles is also a form of the author's looking back at the vanishing art of cinema.

The installation consists of a video projection and a separate soundtrack. The video and sound have different durations, so that the connections between the sound environment and the moving images on the projection screen are constantly shifting, creating new and new metaphorical combinations of image and sound. The projection is composed of several sub-images - two, three or more segments side by side. The overall composition serves to induce a sense of uncertainty and inhibit the viewer's automatic tendency to constantly interpret, complete perceptions and compose them into a rational formula and narrative. The first version of Installation was created for the Igloo sound gallery program in Jihlava, where it premiered in 2022.

Multimedia artist Lloyd Dunn (born 1957) engages in dialogue with devices. He studied multimedia with Mel Andringa and Hans Breder and electronic music with Kenneth Gaburo at the University of Iowa, USA. In the 1990s, he was the editor-in-chief and publisher of the globally distributed art magazine Photostatic and Retrofuturism, which are in the collections of many important collections and archives, such as the library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1987, together with his colleagues, he founded the Tape-beatles art collective, which is considered one of the first experimental groups focused on intellectual property and copyright issues. Tape-beatles realized audiovisual live performances with tape recorders and multiprojection with loops of 16mm films. The Staalplaat labels in Amsterdam and Berlin and other music publishers have released sets of their CDs. Since 2009, Dunn has been working on his latest project - a series of online podcasts under the name nula.cc. He continues to explore art forms using technology, appropriation, collage, time-based media and design, and asks what it means to be human as a sentient being. Dunn lives and works in Prague and completed a 20-hour sound composition, Beyond sublargo, for the Radio Art Zone project in the summer of 2022.

http://nula.cc