Just finished the holding page for the Dream Machine site with a beautiful illuminated font by mooshpie. It's a good time to explain what this project is all about...
Dream Machine is BANG's 2010 White Night commission. Our idea was to see if a collective could tell a story around a place using a variety of media. We’re laying down a backstory in two comic’s newspapers, which imagines the goings on inside Marlborough House, an Edwardian Mansion house in Old Steine, Brighton. Then we open invitation to animators, comics artists, illustrators and musicians to respond.
The story itself is written as a fun, schlocky take on the festival theme of Illuminations. We used the melting pot of the Enlightenment era as inspiration: a time of invention and expert explanation of biological processes, discoveries that laid the foundation stones for the development of science and technology, yet—at the same time—there was wide public interest in the mysteries: in intuitive, mythic and imaginative life. The spiritual works of Swedenborg circulated around Europe in the late 1700s, Henry Fuseli's painting "The Nightmare" vividly captured the weird alternative reality of dreaming, and William Blake and his wife in Lambeth bore witness to hosts of angels in the trees of Peckham Rye. We grew the story of the Dream Machine from the historical interplay and brewing tensions between scientific rationalism and collective imagination.
The story we are inviting people to create is an alternative history for Marlborough House. As our story goes:
The dream Doctor has retreated into the Brighton mansion with his invention - the "Dream Machine" - pushing away mundane relations, he dedicates his days to his important experiments that will discern and explain the dreams of his patients, and thereby provide a definitive explanation for everything. However, the experiment has gone on a very long time. The patients have slumbered through to the present day: it’s now 2010 outside, though very much still 1792 inside. The Doctor still works away, dutifully repeating his tests, yet deep inside, a fear is growing: perhaps his original premise was flawed? One thing is certain: the dreamers want to wake up.
Comics newspapers will develop the narrative; these newspapers will be distributed around Brighton in October. As well as visualising varieties of histories for Marlborough House, our collective story re-imagines Brighton as a dream city inhabited by many beings: sea creatures on the waterfront, the playful fun-loving cats of the North Laines, and stranger creatures too, lights in the skies above Brighton, presences by the old well of St Ann's Well Gardens. The comics narrative ends on a cliffhanger...
And the story is picked up and brought to life during the White Night festival with a live animation projection finale. If you come down on the night you’ll see animated dreams and visions pour out of the windows of the Georgian mansion onto the facade, and perhaps even meet the dreamers as they escape the building after so long.
The event will be soundtracked by a specially commissioned radio show, that we hope will go out live on the night: we are remixing HG Wells’ War of the World radio takeover, except instead of an alien invasion, the streets of Brighton are visited by the dreams and visions of its inhabitants.
This is a project born out of a love for animation, comics and cephalopods.
Keep an eye on the website as the callout will go live here: www.dreammachine.com
Full details on submissions at www.bangdreammachine.com
