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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.

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.

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

“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”.

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.