soft links 01.06.-22.06.2023 saasfee*pavillon

The strange feeling of finding oneself in a supposedly familiar place and yet feeling disoriented. Wandering around in one's own body, externally controlled, without any awareness of its physicality. Detached from time and space, in search of something specific, the unknown destination, and the path to it as an attempt to open one's closed eyes to something that lies deeper than one's own perception, in the subconscious, in sleep, in dreams.

Every day is a sequence of waking and sleeping states, like a rhythm that holds everything together. But only the awake state can be shared with others. What happens in sleep resides in the self and remains hidden from the outside world. The dream is thus a special form of consciousness. While the body is at rest in one place, the mind can experience moving scenes and travel long distances. The former have a tendency to deal with incidents that are theoretically impossible or rather improbable in waking reality. In most cases, the dreamers themselves are not in control of the course of the events, as they are only rarely aware of their sleeping state. Although they are the protagonists of their story, they do not actively drive the plot. Ultimately, they act more as passive observers, let themselves be pulled along and immerse into the world constructed by the subconscious.

Taken from a driving simulation, the setting shown in soft links is based on a digital replica of the Frankfurt underground network. The space of movement displayed there is predefined and strongly limited, just like in a dream. Only plot-relevant information becomes visible and creates a realistic façade in the midst of nothingness. The surrounding soundscape was associatively matched to the locations and generated on the basis of already existing, natural sounds. In this scenery, encounters occur with beings and situations that find their origin in AI-generated images taken from dreams and memories. Translated into the 3D animated space, they merge into monochrome scenes. Such references can also be described as "soft links". The term, which is actually used in the context of computer systems, refers to the symbolic linking in a file set, in this case in one's own (sub)consciousness. How these connections ultimately emerge and unfold before the inner eye, however, can only be guessed at.

Empty streets; unknown animal creatures and a moon that watches the nocturnal activities from the sky – there are fragments that remain in the memory for a moment after waking up, before they slip back into the subconscious in a blur.

Text: Vivien Kämpf