AI, Dadaism and Surrealism - Part A

[unknown-know in objects]

‘Surrealist Object’ versus ‘Narrated Dream’

content ‘Narrated Dream’

[Apollonian and the Dionysian]

[input model]

Deciphered Dreams

as it goes: Art critic announced that art wend through metal, fire and bubble.

Artists sought hard romance in objects. Gleeful audience settled as a Catholic school girl. Let there be struggle into the limelight.

1Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Mit, 2009), ix.

2Salvador

3Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “The Politics of the Envelope,” Log, no. 13/14 (2008): 193–207, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41765249.

Tristan Tzara, the great poet of the anti-aesthetic movement - Dada, pointed out that Dada is not a style but rather a state of mind. The question is: what is this state of mind? Why do some artworks like Fountain by Duchamp have this uncanny power (whether it is generated from its aesthetic) to undermine our perception of what is art?

Slavoj Zizek has a methodology for his critical philosophical reading, a process that he called ‘short-circuit’: Intentionally short-circuiting a theme through the lens of a ‘minor’ conceptual apparatus.1 It can dissolve the interpreted text, exploring its ‘unthought’. For example, it allows one to perceive theories of Lacan through the lens of Hegal. On the other hand, Salvador Dalí develops a critical system, which he called Paranoiac Critical Method(PCM): A conscious way of putting oneself into a delirium of interpretation.2 These two methods are crucial for us to study the rational and irrational aesthetics of Dadaism and Surrealism.

In a ready-made object montage, the work is in a state of what Zizek called “a reality in the virtual” which is “produced and generated by something, which does not yet fully exist.” In this sense, architecture as a sphere shares the same analogy as Dada artworks. On the other hand, Alejandro Zaera-Polo points out that “globalisation has propelled a set of spatial typologies primarily determined by the capacity to conduct flow. Architects have tried to engage with this borderless space, the ‘space of flows’ ......presenting an image of the world as a chaotically flowing magma. However, a new picture is emerging in the form of bubbles and containers of a liquid reality.”3 Such reality has the freedom to dissolve, reconstruct and mutate in all forms in different spheres. A question arises, in what way this fluid reality interacts with people and influence beyond its container?

Fg.1.1. Diagram of the inner working system of the Paranoid Critical Method, “limp, unprovable conjectures generated through the deliberate simulation of paranoiac thought processes, supported(made critical) by the “crutches” of Cartesian rationality.

Fg.1.2. Dalí in a diving suit after his performance-lecture in London, referencing to his principles of the “paranoiac-critical method”. July 1, 1936.

Dalí, Secret Life of Salvador Dali. (S.L.: Blurb, 2018), 308–10.

Zizek believes that there is a kind of knowledge, described as the ‘unknown know’: things that we do not know that we know, which Psychoanalysts consider as ‘unconsciousness’4. The art processes of the Dadaism and Surrealism can be seen as a reveal or materialisation of this ‘unknown know’. The obscenity of it (such as the fountain or the Sound Poem “Karawane”) disrupts our bubbles (in the sense of Peter Sloterdijk5), dissolving its structure. Peter Sloterdijk believes that Surrealism presents itself unambiguously as a method of latency-breaking and background-dissolving. It attempts to sabotage the consensus created inside a sphere in order to liberate the radical intrinsic value of the events.

We, as the audience, fail in trying to grasp the meaning of this uncanny artwork. Instead of providing a transcendental experience, a Dada artwork or a Surrealist painting seems to intentionally discomfort or confuse its audience. There is a tension created in the bubble to provoke people to doubt, rethink, discuss and introspect. Such tension is also what helps generate an “authentic public space” mentioned by Zizek, where serious political discussion of the related subject can truly happen. However, these bubbles are disappearing under the air-conditioning inside and outside of today’s museum. The modern museum functions as a cypher of narrative. By providing linear ambulat and creating its own climate, it manages to reject, disconnect, and isolate the public from influencing this public sphere. Museums today are often attributed as a playground for bourgeois, deviating from its role as an introspective public realm. There is an imperative to create alternative art spaces for a new way to interact with art.

4 Slavoj Žižek, “The Reality of the Virtual,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBRToxGyKZo.

5 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres. Volume 1, Bubbles Microspherology (South Pasadena, Ca: Semiotext(E, 2011), 60–63.

6 Tate, “‘Joseph Beuys. Every Man Is an Artist’, Joseph Beuys, 1978 | Tate,” Tate, 2019, https://www. tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-joseph-beuys-every-man-is-an-artist-ar00704.

Aesthetics is a function. A function that can even be used for torture or rehabilitation. An example is the secret cells and torture centres inspired by avant-garde art, which was designed by Alphonse Laurencic in 1938. The avant-garde art became the skin and texture of this unpleasant sphere, irritating the prisoners inside constantly to think without having any answer. For Dada, art means life, art means this struggling. As Beuys said, everyone is an artist, social art is an art in that everyone can and must participate.6 Can we imagine an art space or a museum space filled with such cruel bubbles of different scales and qualities, where knowledge (which is never neutral) is not simply imbued and discussion between the art and audience can truly happen?

Fg.1.3. First International Dada Fair, art fair, Berlin, Germany

Mementos: Related Images stored on the Internet

Dadaist poems

input

“short-circuit”

Disco Diffusion AI

A similar process of “The Paranoid Critical Method” to process the materials

Dislocation

Juxtaposition

Transformation

A reference for next image, but as if playing the popular game among the Dadaists - Decalcomania, AI can only see the last drawing.

Image

Animation Viewer

“Paranoiac-critical activity organizes and objectivizes in an exclusivist manner the limitless and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of subjective and objective ‘significance’ in the irrational ...it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.”

Do AI dream of electric sheep?

# Note: If using a pixelart diffusion model, try adding “#pixelart” to the end of the prompt for a stronger effect. It’ll tend to work a lot better!

text_prompts = {

0: [“museum spheres, structure, inmate, art gallery, prison”], 40: [“art critic announced that art wend through metal, fire and bubble, giraffe”], 80: [“artist sought hard romance in objects, rabbit hole”], 120: [“gleeful audience settled as a Catholic school girl”], 160: [“Let there be struggle into the limelight”],

image_prompts = {

# 0:[‘ImagePromptsWorkButArentVeryGood.png:2’,],

} #@title Do the Run!

#@markdown `n_batches` ignored with animation modes. display_rate = 20 #@param{type: ‘number’}

n_batches = 50 #@param{type: ‘number’}

if animation_mode == ‘Video Input’: steps = video_init_steps

#Update Model Settings

timestep_respacing = f’ddim{steps}’ diffusion_steps = (1000//steps)*steps if steps < 1000 else steps model_config.update({

‘timestep_respacing’: timestep_respacing, ‘diffusion_steps’: diffusion_steps,

}) batch_size = 1

def move_files(start_num, end_num, old_folder, new_folder): for i in range(start_num, end_num): old_file = old_folder + f’/{batch_name}({batchNum})_{i:04}.png’ new_file = new_folder + f’/{batch_name}({batchNum})_{i:04}.png’ os.rename(old_file, new_file)

#@markdown ---

resume_run = False #@param{type: ‘boolean’} run_to_resume = ‘latest’ #@param{type: ‘string’}

resume_from_frame = ‘latest’ #@param{type: ‘string’} retain_overwritten_frames = False #@param{type: ‘boolean’} if retain_overwritten_frames: retainFolder = f’{batchFolder}/retained’ createPath(retainFolder)

skip_step_ratio = int(frames_skip_steps.rstrip(“%”)) / 100 calc_frames_skip_steps = math.floor(steps * skip_step_ratio)

if animation_mode == ‘Video Input’: frames = sorted(glob(in_path+’/*.*’));

if len(frames)==0:

sys.exit(“ERROR: 0 frames found.\nPlease check your video input path and rerun the video settings cell.”) flows = glob(flo_folder+’/*.*’)

if (len(flows)==0) and video_init_flow_warp: sys.exit(“ERROR: 0 flow files found.\nPlease rerun the flow generation cell.”) if steps <= calc_frames_skip_steps: sys.exit(“ERROR: You can’t skip more steps than your total steps”)

if resume_run: if run_to_resume == ‘latest’: try:

batchNum except:

batchNum = len(glob(f”{batchFolder}/{batch_name}(*)_settings.txt”))-1

else: batchNum = int(run_to_resume)

if resume_from_frame == ‘latest’: start_frame = len(glob(batchFolder+f”/{batch_name}({batchNum})_*.png”))

if animation_mode != ‘3D’ and turbo_mode == True and start_frame > turbo_preroll and start_frame % int(turbo_steps) != 0:

start_frame = start_frame - (start_frame % int(turbo_steps))

else: start_frame = int(resume_from_frame)+1

if animation_mode != ‘3D’ and turbo_mode == True and start_frame > turbo_preroll and start_frame % int(turbo_steps) != 0:

batchNum = len(glob(batchFolder+”/*.txt”)) while os.path.isfile(f”{batchFolder}/{batch_name}({batchNum})_settings.txt”) or os.path.isfile(f”{batchFolder}/{batch_name}-{batchNum}_settings.txt”):

batchNum += 1

print(f’Starting Run: {batch_name}({batchNum}) at frame {start_frame}’)

if set_seed == ‘random_seed’: random.seed() seed = random.randint(0, 2**32) # print(f’Using seed: {seed}’)

else: seed = int(set_seed)

args = { ‘batchNum’: batchNum, ‘prompts_series’:split_prompts(text_prompts) if text_prompts else None, ‘image_prompts_series’:split_prompts(image_prompts) if image_prompts else None, ‘seed’: seed, ‘display_rate’:display_rate, ‘n_batches’:n_batches if animation_mode == ‘None’ else 1, ‘batch_size’:batch_size, ‘batch_name’: batch_name, ‘steps’: steps, ‘diffusion_sampling_mode’: diffusion_sampling_mode, ‘width_height’: width_height, ‘clip_guidance_scale’: clip_guidance_scale, ‘tv_scale’: tv_scale, ‘range_scale’: range_scale, ‘sat_scale’: sat_scale, ‘cutn_batches’: cutn_batches, ‘init_image’: init_image, ‘init_scale’: init_scale, ‘skip_steps’: skip_steps, ‘side_x’: side_x, ‘side_y’: side_y, ‘timestep_respacing’: timestep_respacing, ‘diffusion_steps’: diffusion_steps, ‘animation_mode’: animation_mode, ‘video_init_path’: video_init_path, ‘extract_nth_frame’: extract_nth_frame, ‘video_init_seed_continuity’: video_init_seed_continuity, ‘key_frames’: key_frames, ‘max_frames’: max_frames if animation_mode != “None” else 1, ‘interp_spline’: interp_spline, ‘start_frame’: start_frame, ‘angle’: angle, ‘zoom’: zoom, ‘translation_x’: translation_x, ‘translation_y’: translation_y, ‘translation_z’: translation_z, ‘rotation_3d_x’: rotation_3d_x, ‘rotation_3d_y’: rotation_3d_y, ‘rotation_3d_z’: rotation_3d_z, ‘midas_depth_model’: midas_depth_model, ‘midas_weight’: midas_weight,

#@markdown ####**Animation Mode:**

animation_mode = ‘2D’ #@param [‘None’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘Video Input’] {type:’string’} #@markdown *For animation, you probably want to turn `cutn_batches` to 1 to make it quicker.*

#@markdown ---

#@markdown ####**Video Input Settings:** if is_colab:

video_init_path = “dali.png” #@param {type: ‘string’} else:

video_init_path = “init.mp4” #@param {type: ‘string’}

extract_nth_frame = 2 #@param {type: ‘number’}

persistent_frame_output_in_batch_folder = True #@param {type: ‘boolean’}

video_init_seed_continuity = True #@param {type: ‘boolean’}

#@markdown #####**Video Optical Flow Settings:**

video_init_flow_warp = True #@param {type: ‘boolean’}

try: for f in pathlib.Path(f’{videoFramesFolder}’).glob(‘*.jpg’): f.unlink()

except: print(‘’) vf = f’select=not(mod(n\,{extract_nth_frame}))’ if os.path.exists(video_init_path): subprocess.run([‘ffmpeg’, ‘-i’, f’{video_init_path}’, ‘-vf’, f’{vf}’, ‘-vsync’, ‘vfr’, ‘-q:v’, ‘2’, ‘-loglevel’, ‘error’, ‘-stats’, f’{videoFramesFolder}/%04d.jpg’], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).stdout.decode(‘utf-8’)

else:

print(f’\nWARNING!\n\nVideo not found: {video_init_path}.\nPlease check your video path.\n’)

#!ffmpeg -i {video_init_path} -vf {vf} -vsync vfr -q:v 2 -loglevel error -stats {videoFramesFolder}/%04d.jpg

#@markdown ---

#@markdown ####**2D Animation Settings:**

#@markdown `zoom` is a multiplier of dimensions, 1 is no zoom.

#@markdown All rotations are provided in degrees.

key_frames = True #@param {type:”boolean”}

max_frames = 200#@param {type:”number”}

if animation_mode == “Video Input”: max_frames = len(glob(f’{videoFramesFolder}/*.jpg’))

interp_spline = ‘Linear’ #Do not change, currently will not look good. param [‘Linear’,’Quadratic’,’Cubic’]{type:”string”} angle = “0:(0)”#@param {type:”string”}

zoom = “0: (1), 10: (1)”#@param {type:”string”}

translation_x = “0: (0)”#@param {type:”string”}

translation_y = “0: (0)”#@param {type:”string”}

translation_z = “0: (15.0)”#@param {type:”string”}

rotation_3d_x = “0: (0)”#@param {type:”string”}

rotation_3d_y = “0: (0)”#@param {type:”string”}

rotation_3d_z = “0: (0)”#@param {type:”string”}

midas_depth_model = “dpt_large”#@param {type:”string”}

midas_weight = 0.3#@param {type:”number”}

near_plane = 200#@param {type:”number”}

far_plane = 10000#@param {type:”number”}

fov = 40#@param {type:”number”}

padding_mode = ‘border’#@param {type:”string”} sampling_mode = ‘bicubic’#@param {type:”string”}

#======= TURBO MODE

#@markdown --#@markdown ####**Turbo Mode (3D anim only):**

#@markdown (Starts after frame 10,) skips diffusion steps and just uses depth map to warp images for skipped frames. #@markdown Speeds up rendering by 2x-4x, and may improve image coherence between frames. #@markdown For different settings tuned for Turbo Mode, refer to the original Disco-Turbo Github: https://github.com/zippy731/ disco-diffusion-turbo

turbo_mode = False #@param {type:”boolean”}

turbo_steps = “3” #@param [“2”,”3”,”4”,”5”,”6”] {type:”string”}

turbo_preroll = 10 # frames

#insist turbo be used only w 3d anim. if turbo_mode and animation_mode != ‘3D’: print(‘=====’) print(‘Turbo mode only available with 3D animations. Disabling Turbo.’)

print(‘=====’)

turbo_mode = False

#@markdown ---

#@markdown ####**Coherency Settings:**

#@markdown `frame_scale` tries to guide the new frame to looking like the old one. A good default is 1500.

frames_scale = 1500 #@param{type: ‘integer’}

#@markdown `frame_skip_steps` will blur the previous frame - higher values will flicker less but struggle to add enough new detail to zoom into.

frames_skip_steps = ‘60%’ #@param [‘40%’, ‘50%’, ‘60%’, ‘70%’, ‘80%’] {type: ‘string’}

#@markdown ####**Video Init Coherency Settings:**

#@markdown `frame_scale` tries to guide the new frame to looking like the old one. A good default is 1500.

video_init_frames_scale = 1500 #@param{type: ‘integer’}

else:

start_frame = start_frame - (start_frame % int(turbo_steps)) if retain_overwritten_frames is True: existing_frames = len(glob(batchFolder+f”/{batch_name}({batchNum})_*.png”))

frames_to_save = existing_frames - start_frame

print(f’Moving {frames_to_save} frames to the Retained folder’) move_files(start_frame, existing_frames, batchFolder, retainFolder)

start_frame = 0

# Call optical flow from video frames and warp prev frame with flow video_init_flow_blend = 0.999#@param {type: ‘number’} #0 - take next frame, 1 - take prev warped frame video_init_check_consistency = False #Insert param here when ready video_init_blend_mode = “optical flow” #@param [‘None’, ‘linear’, ‘optical flow’] # Call optical flow from video frames and warp prev frame with flow if animation_mode == “Video Input”: if persistent_frame_output_in_batch_folder or (not is_colab): #suggested by Chris the Wizard#8082 at discord videoFramesFolder = f’{batchFolder}/videoFrames’ else: videoFramesFolder = f’/content/videoFrames’ createPath(videoFramesFolder) print(f”Exporting Video Frames (1 every {extract_nth_frame})...”)

#@markdown `frame_skip_steps` will blur the previous frame - higher values will flicker less but struggle to add enough new detail to zoom into.

video_init_frames_skip_steps = ‘70%’ #@param [‘40%’, ‘50%’, ‘60%’, ‘70%’, ‘80%’] {type: ‘string’}

#======= VR MODE #@markdown ---

#@markdown ####**VR Mode (3D anim only):**

#@markdown Enables stereo rendering of left/right eye views (supporting Turbo) which use a different (fish-eye) camera projection matrix.

#@markdown Note the images you’re prompting will work better if they have some inherent wide-angle aspect #@markdown The generated images will need to be combined into left/right videos. These can then be stitched into the VR180 format.

7 Chitwan Saharia et al., “Photorealistic Text-To-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding,” n.d., https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.11487.pdf.

Do AI dream of electric sheep? The short answer is yes. AIs have learnt to dream for us. They dream with our mementoes, with our most obscene desires. So far, the result of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) often presents us with an uncanny scene of dislocation, juxtaposition, and transformation of symbolic images.7 These images are often considered “meaningless” or “lack of human touch”. Till today, scientists and researchers have been training AI to produce more “meaningful” and “realistic” images ever since the 1960s. It seems only natural for us to try to understand our creations.

On the other hand, Lacanian psychologists develop psychoanalysis so that humans can better understand the dream and unconscious mind. What if we can do a psychoanalysis session with the dreaming AI? When an Algorithm is producing images after deep learning, in a way, it can be more paranoic than most of us. By intentionally short-circuiting this AI, we can use the AI as the collage, dreaming apparatus to serve as a mediator to describe our dream for us. Unlike a common AI illustrator, the program does not aim to create images that “make sense” but for the sake of paranoically exploring our collective dreams stored on the internet.

Fg.2.1. “Art critic announced that art wend through metal, fire and bubble.”

Dadaist poems are like somniloquies – ridiculous, fragmented and meaningless. However, it sometimes shows a rhythm of metaphor, symbolisation and prophecy. As the miserable fate of Cassandra8, people will never take these somniloquies seriously. By inputting Dadaist poems, AI can be short-circuited to generate images that may potentially indicate how we perceive these somniloquies. The AI structure functions like a virtual museum without form.

Surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí, and Andre Breton used automatic techniques to embody art with a higher degree of spontaneity and automatism so they can play with this unconsciousness of humans. Dalí created the methodology - the Paranoid Critical Method to help him perceive reality based on a “delirium of interpretation”. As Dalí writes in Conquest of the Irrational, “Paranoiac-critical activity organizes and objectives in an exclusivist manner the limitless and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of subjective and objective ‘significance’ in the irrational ...it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.” 9

When AI is fed with fragmented poems, it will follow the order to produce irrational images based on photorealism. Just like a Surrealist artist, it aims to produce its precise art as mechanically as possible, representing a subconscious vision of the collective mind.

8 Cassandra or Kassandra, a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed in Greek mythology.

9 Dalvador Dalí and David Gascoyne, Conquest of the Irrational (New York: Julien Levy, 1935).

Fg.2.2. “Artists sought hard romance in objects. Gleeful audience settled as a Catholic school girl. Let there be struggle into the limelight.”

[unknown-know in objects]

Fg.3.1. A Tear-down Diagram of iPhone 12

“My Battle My Participation and My Position in the Surrealist Revolution ‘Surrealist Object’ versus ‘Narrated Dream’

Critical-Paranoiac Activity Versus Automatism.”

Salvador Dali, The secret life of Salvador Dali

‘Surrealist Object’ versus ‘Narrated Dream’

Fg.3.2. Sketch of Salvador Dalí, The secret life of Salvador Dalí, p445

Fg.3.3. Isometric diagram of a building translated from a object of “unknown know”.

Peter Sloterdijk considers the world as a foamy space filled with bubbles and orbs of different scales and qualities in his trilogy Spheres.10 The bubble is not purely a metaphor. According to Sloterdijk and his metaphor of the womb, it is an imaginative constitution of our very existence. In a relationship between a person and a building (or any man-made object), one unconsciously tries to recreate the relationship between a fetus and its first place to exist - the womb to protect itself from the ‘outside’. In order to achieve this purpose, a sphere often functions as an apparatus of narrative.

Spheres, as the first product of human cooperation, are shared spaces set up by common inhabitation within them, as described by Peter Sloterdijk. He also pointed out that “the process of civilization was advanced not by the division of labour, but of spheres; it is the primal agreement of the community about itself within itself.”11 Globalisation creates an illusion that we are in the same bubble. However, globalization is achieved through the infinite procreation of microspheres. Instead of living in the same bubble, people are living in a state of “ko-isoliert”, isolated coexistence. Capitalism prefers this state of “ko-isoliert”12 in the societies where people can be easily guided through a symbolic system. Our modern ideologies often operates with the symbolic beyond the conscious control. Even certain aesthetic functions as the signifiers towards ideologies. On the other hand, globalisation is never a geographical or material globalization. Globalisation is presented as a narrative dream. Some might call this dream in another -name – “ideology”.

Fg.3.4. Diagram of a iPhone 12 : the bubble does not exist ‘inside’ the smartphone but on the screen, where the liquid reality is projected.

Fg.3.5. Diagram of Russian Surround Cinema, design from 1920s : the sphere is placed within a container.

Fg.3.6. Diagram of Walt Disney Concert Hall, modified from Los Angeles Times : The outside container is isolated from the inner sphere, projecting another bubble.

[input model]

Fg.3.7. Isometric Drawing of the building developed from the “unknown know”: a shifting space connects to the street.

13

The museum, or a gallery, is a typical sphere of architecture. As a reactive matrix of the city’s cultural information, it allows different spaces and times in a city or a bigger collective being to be connected, examined, contested and represented. A heterotopic space13 such as a museum will require the process of gas terrorism to control the climate within the sphere. The cultural security of museums is archived ironically through this terrorism.

The air conditioning inside the museum is not only a thermal phenomenon but a representation of the inert atmosphere within. As Peter Sloterdijk states: “Humans create their own climate -not of their own free will, however, under self-chosen circumstances, but under found, given and handed-down ones.”14 The museum refuses its visitors from modifying the public sphere and capture them with an exquisite container. Boris Groys points out that the story told by the exhibition in a particular order ensures that the exhibition space is always a narrative space.

Fg.3.8. Schematic diagram of Enigma machine (from Scheribus 1928). A machine of narrative production.

10 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres. Volume 1, Bubbles : Microspherology (South Pasadena, Ca: Semiotext(E, 2011), 60–63.

11 Peter Sloterdijk and Wieland Hoban, Spheres. Vol. 2, Globes : Macrospherology (South Pasadena: Semiotext(E), Cop, 2014), 965–66.

12 A state described by Heidegger as being isolated while coexisted with one another.

Heterotopias are worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

14 Peter Sloterdijk and Wieland Hoban, Spheres. Vol. 2, Globes : Macrospherology (South Pasadena: Semiotext(E), Cop, 2014), 965–66.

Fg.3.9. Isometric section drawing of the building developed from the “unknown know”: a shifting space connects to the street.

Before Dada, one may consider a ‘container’ is necessary for artwork, such as a picture frame for a Renaissance painting, presenting a picture like a solidified, narrated reality. The performance art and ready-made from Dada and Surrealism are attempts to eliminate the ‘container’ by disrupting the climate inside a museum. According to Boris Groys, originally, art obtained the art status through decisions of the curators rather than artists.15 It sustains the inert atmosphere within the museum. However, when Duchamp exhibited the urinal or Dalí presented his lobster telephone, the power of art definition is transferred from the curator to the artist. At the same time, the surreal object is able to create its own autonomous sphere. It provides its audience a margin of freedom to interpret with the artworks.

Fg.3.10. Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain”, 1917

Fg.3.11. Short Section Input Diagram

Such artworks, are identified by Dalí as the “surrealist objects”, as a weapon for him to fight against the “narrated dream”. The concept of surrealist object is not an invention of the 20th century, but has been living with human cultures for a long time. However, it is difficult to define what is a surrealist object as this very concept constantly reinvents itself to escape the capture of narrative. Unlike reading into a narrated story, in order to perceive a “surrealist object”, one must project itself into the sphere of the surrealist object while standing outside of the sphere. One may say it feels the “ecstasy” when encounters a surrealist object. “Ecstasy” is described by Lacan as an experience beyond the symbolic and the subject. Therefore, it is “outside the unconscious”.16 Lacan takes the ‘The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’ by the Italian Baroque sculptor Lorenzo Bernini as an example:

“[I]t’s like for Saint Teresa - you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing of it.” 17

16 Soler 2002;107

17 Lacan, 1998 [1975]: 76

Fg.3.12. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”, 1647-1652

“Ecstasy” is derived from the Latin word “extasis”, which means “to displace”, “out” and “stand”. Such experience is anti-narrative, anti-symbolic, anti-linguistic and even anti-subjective. This is also the experience that Dalí pursue to reconcile and fuse his artistic minds of Apollo and Dionysus.18

Now, we are approaching the very first question of what is the Dadaists’ state of mind. Even though the Dadaists refused to explain in words, it appears that they were fighting against the “narrative dream” as well. For a Dadaist(or Post-Dadaist), an encounter with “true art” should never be a comfortable journey or pure entertainment. In order to not be captured by the narrative dream, Dadaists became hysterias. They questioned the traditional notion of art, raging against the existing system. Dalí inherited this mind of Dada and hysterically declared his war on the “narrative” and the “territorialisation”.

18 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, The Birth of Tragedy. (Paw Prints, 2011).

Fg.3.13. Interior thresholds of the input building.

Aesthetic is the skin and texture of the sphere. Instead of following a narrative, or a certain logic of aesthetic, a surrealist object offers its viewers a new way of looking at this membrane of bubbles, not only from the interior of the bubble but also from the “outside” of the bubble. The way we are having dialogs with the art and history needs to be changed for us to face the appearing social challenges. And it would not happen without the innovation of space. As Lefebvre argues, “To change life, we must first change space.” Architecture, as the collective dream of its viewers and users, is often designed as a narrated dream. Museum, as discussed above, can explore more of its potential if it becomes more than a matrix of fragments or a space of fixed narrative. This project will try to restore the autonomy of art and its observers through designing architecture as the “surrealist object”. One is encouraged to interpret with artworks, collections and architecture itself in this space of surreal objects and construct their individual connections with the signified topics: Art, City, History and so on.

Deciphered Dreams

[Apollonian and the Dionysian]

“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.” - José Saramago, The Double

Fg.4.1. Quadratic functions and Thompson transformations based on parametric variation. Thomas Fischer, “Design Enigma: A Typographical Metaphor for Epistemological Processes, Including Designing,” Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), 2012, https://doi.org/10.52842/ conf.caadria.2012.679.

The AI can be considered as an Apollonian apparatus which presents divine shapes and forms from the dream (Traum), however, the poem input is on the side of Dionysus, an analogy to intoxication(Rausch). A dreamer following the principle of individuation can be seen as an apollonian, but if a dream is derived from the mementoes, it became part of the Dionysus choruses.

Dalí is often perceived by the public as a follower of Dionysus. However, Dalí is not a total Dionysian artist. At a certain point, he even paranoically identified himself as a humble apparatus of Apollo. Dalí often wrote for the opposite of what is attributed to him. As Dalí describes in his manifesto – My Battle:

“Against simplicity, For complexity

Against the collective, For the individual

Against mechanism, For the dream

Against music, For architecture

Against abstraction, For the concrete …” 19

19 Salvador Dalí, Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. (S.L.: Blurb, 2018), 334–91.

Music, the Dionysian enchantment without a form, was rejected by Dalí. Architecture, the plastic, rational art of Apollo, was pursued by this delirious artist. Dalí refused abstract expression in his works. It will start to make sense when we short-circuit Nietzsche with Dalí’s Paranoid Critical Method. Dream, as the realm of Apollo, where sacred forms and images appear, is never abstract, but rational and comprehensive. On the contrary, Nietzsche describes music in its fully absolute power, unlike visual art, which does not need images or ideas, but only allows them as something additional. For Dalí, his illusion is always based on Cartesian rationality. As Dalí states: “the only difference between me and a mad man is that I am not mad.”

He placed himself on the opposite side of Dionysus. With the Paranoid Critical Method, Dalí was able to obsessively follow his path to principium individuationis.20 His chaotic dream is not a mystery for himself, but a deciphered dream. Dalí immersed himself in this delusion of pursuing Apollo so deeply that he unavoidably fall back into the delirium of Dionysus. Therefore, Dalí became a hybrid artist either of Apollonian dream or Dionysian ecstasy. Nietzsche believes that this artist is simultaneously an artist of intoxication and of dreams as in Greek tragedy:

“As the last, it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in Dionysian drunkenness and mystical obliteration of the self, alone and apart from the rapturous choruses, and how, through the Apollonian effects of dream, his own state now reveals itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world, in a metaphorical dream picture.” 21

20 Principe of individuation, World as Will and Idea, I.1.3, quoted by Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm in The Birth of Tragedy. (Paw Prints, 2011), 12.

21 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, The Birth of Tragedy. (Paw Prints, 2011), 14.

Fg.2.2. “Artists sought hard romance in objects. Gleeful audience settled as a Catholic school girl. Let there be struggle into the limelight.”