Brain extention

B R A I N  E X T E N S I O N

EN GE

The mutimedial images (consisting in multile layers, based on photographs, paintings, video-stills, handwritten texts) interpret the inner life of 7 Moscow and St.Petersburg artists. I've known these artists for many years and recently asked them about their ways of escaping their body-cage through their mental potential, in other words of being somewhere else in their minds than their physical location - (through a dream, daydreams, sexual fantasies, drogs or physical excess. Facing their mental monster, their fears, their ways of meditation, their religion, their virtual spaces and cosmic body) - than i tried to create visual psychograms of them. For each psychogramm I have chosen a visual symbol repating multiple times in the immage (for Andrey spaceships, for Alla medusa mingeling wihth spaceships, for Ilia a penis-cross, for Kirill cameleons, for Misha two young dogs, for Sveta rabits and fishes, for Genia scorpions).

The 7 multimedial images (created with the programme photoshop) will be printed in diptychs which are more or less independent from each other. The two parts of each diptych can be shown in different constellations to each other or even in different rooms. The longest side of the diptychs should be about 2m long, the shorter side about 60cm. The vertical images are a little bit higher. (Smaller prints are also possible).

I have joined also the questions to the 7 artists concerning their ways of dreaming, daydreaming etc.

what alian emerges
from your subconscious
what's your daydream
what's your nightmare
where's your cosmic body
what's your virtual space
what planet what extension
where are sexual fantasies transporting
what nightmare what daydream
where's your cosmic body
what planet what extension
where's your last refuge
where to hide
after the final extermination
of your selfconstructed biotope
where's the mindtrip going, and:
do you take hichhikers along
what's your basic fear
what's your basic drug
where's your virtual space
where are monitors transporting
where are dreams transporting
backstage in your mind
incarnation of your nightmares
what alien is drifting
from your subconscious
backstage in your mind
what daydream what mindscape
what recurring nightmares are backstage in your mind
where's your cosmic refuge
what planet what extension
deep-frozen greetings
from your personal alien

He interviews with the 7 Moscou & Petersbourg artists about their wish of beeing elsewhere than their physical location

ANDREY

Dream:
Dreaming I often find myself back at school crushed by an enormous blackboard, deprived of emotions and initiative. It feels like a regression.

Cosmic body + meditation + daydream:
As a child I was deeply frustrated by the absence of any cosmic experience: my life will pass, and I'll never touch a star! It was a feeling of total impotence. Later i achieved the startrack in meditation. Being earthbound, one tries to find the reflection of the cosmos in one's own inner world. I could quite well imagine floating through space as an overdimensional body - as some kind of giant Andreji.
I would really like to be borne into space by my imagination - since i consider fantasy as the strongest human power.

Fears:
In the absence of faith i fear death. My family has always questioned everything, so Ive never believed in life after death. Nowadays i cannot participate in the strong beliefs of our russian people. I cannot embrace religion, or invent a life beyond death. I always doubt.

Sexual fantasy:
My current sex fantasies are inspired by two former girlfriends, though in reality they were less sexy. I transformed my impressions into someone more exiting and complex than they actually were for mesolaris:

Incarnation of ones mind-monster, of ones dark side:
The incarnation of my dark side? The personification of my nightmares? Some kind of man-beast-monster - maybe a kind of were-wolf - more animal then human... Baring its teath and ripping the chicken leg!

Body-excess:
Dancers have a strange relationship with their body. some kind of hate-love. A paradox: I sometimes escape from my body through dance. Dance-trance through dance-marathon.

BRAIN EXTENSION

ALLA

Dream:
This dream i had several times as a child, whenever i suffered from headaches: I am in front of a huge shrinkled skin - later i identified this skin as a giant human brain, but as a child i had never seen this organ - in my dream i put my hand on this skin and concentrated my energy into it. The skin gradually smoothed and my headache disapeared.now i hardly ever remember a dream - the dream-phase isn't necessary, since i don't need to resolve problems and fears with my dreams anymore. I can manage this job awake, having reached absolute transparence to my subconscious. It has actually become part of my conscious mind. So i can actively resolve my psychological problems. I can help my children through their nightmares. I wake up instinctively and try to help them telepathically with their dream-conflict.

Mind-monster (solaris):
My conscious and my subconscious mind function together. ...that's why i don't have any mindmonster, no incarnation of my dark side!

Daydream:
Extreme forms of self-realisation emerge sometimes in my daydreams - it's rather dull. I usually don't allow myself such wishes, but occasionally i can't help it, my daydreams being infected by ambitious aims.

Fear:
I don't have fears anymore. Abstract anguish from mystical mental barriers i experienced for the last time when i was 20, that means about 20 years ago. Since i disciplined myself to live non-stop at the present moment, to ignore the feeling of insecurity facing the future, fears cannot really emerge.

Cosmic body + drugs:
With drugs - especially with kalypso - i experienced my galactic journeys - i was flying at some kind of speed through space - and i seemed very interested by the architecture of the star constellations...

Sexual phantasy:
Sex happens sometimes to be an art-project for me.
My strongest sex fantasy is, to be the sex object myself. In the sense of pure sex!
No dream of some kind of future life together!
A young woman chooses her partner according to her imagination of having children together, a common life, fitting somehow into the social context. I am completely liberated from those patterns. sex for sex. orgasm disconnected from the partner.

Meditation:
To float away through meditation isn't what I prefer. I experienced this too often with calypso. In meditation i accumulate energy in myself - with tantra-yoga.

BRAIN EXTENSION

ILIA

Dream:
I am falling in a deep pond. During the fall i am passing different layers of coloured air. This free fall i experience with terrible horror, since at the very bottom of the fountain stands a tiny man, who' s supposed to catch me! He symbolises absolute horror! So i try to avoid to falling all the way down. Once i experienced this dream on drugs. It was the most terrrible episode of this dream-pattern. After this drug-experience, i never had the dream again.

Daydream:
I have a deep feeling of being lost, since i don't call a house or flat my own. So i often fantasise about a house of my own.

Incarnation from the subconscious:
A boy, just in the age before adolescence, follows me everywhere, staring constantly at me. I am not sure if he doesn't symbolise my own son, living now with my ex-wife.

Sexual phantasy:
Once my strongest sex-fantasies was connected with young men. The fantasy to be surrounded by one, then by many, finally by countless male youngsters and having sex with them until the act becomes just about impersonal: the penis the body, independently and autonomous - standing as a satisfaction symbol - i often used to integrate this image in my artistic work.
Now i believe in god and live in complete monogamy with a woman.
Reality and fantasy became one.

Drugs:
Once i took drugs to drift into different worlds. Now i practise concentration and prayer - so i have to use my own energy to mind-travel.

BRAIN EXTENSION

MISHA

Dream:
Three wheels are turning in the dark. They symbolise past, future and present. At one point they immobilse in one line - simultaniously the sky lights up brightly. The wheels are standing now above a mountain. When the bright light emerges the mountain melts to become an ocean.

Daydream:
Dengi - io to mnogo! Money, and lots of it! My hysterical romantics nearly killed me! Now my dreams happen to be more material, logical. There is money - or there is none! T h i s torture won't ever push me into suicide!

Fears:
What i strongly fear is military service, the army, prison!

Incarnation of my dark side (solaris):
I am a man like a wall : gray, without feelings - some kind of zombie - all his feelings and his physical existance are reduced to a minimum.

Cosmic body:
A star - some kind of light in space.

Computer-virtual worlds:
Gamesgamesgames - sometimes 48 hours a day.

Drogs:
Rasscherjenje sosnanja. Eto bilo u menja ushe a sejitschass, prosto chorosho!
All feelings, your entire being feels different - some kind of enlarged consciousness, as they call it. I experenced all this - but now i just feel groovy - in harmony with the music�

Last refuge:
My friends - if everything turned to the worst, i would run straight to aljosha beljaev !

BRAIN EXTENSION

KIRILL

Dream:
Since childhod i've been persued by the same dream: I am a child and enter the bakery to buy a loaf of dark bread. When i leave the shop i am attacked by a man with a knife - he is the incarnation of horror - it's less the knife that shocks me than this absolutely horrrible man - he invokes primal fears in me - as soon as i recognise him i want to escape. But, as always in dreams, i freeze.the older i get, the faster i recognise the dream pattern and manage to wake up. And so i escape dream-death.

Daydream:
Neprisutstwo - plonaja pustota (ru). My favorite state of mind would be somekind of non-existance - Melting into nothingness. actually a kind of coma. I experienced a coma several times - this state apeals to me . It would also be my fantasy of life after death. The absolute vacuum. Just not to go on living this same life - this insupportable repetition of gestures and feelings.

Fears:
Shodit s uma (ru). Above all i am afraid of losing my mind - to just simply become crazy - the fragile limit i am often close to transgressing. Limit between real and irrational life. I also happen to have castration and impotence fears.

Cosmic body:
I'd like to be part of space - part of this eternal inertia, as i personally sense the universe - why should existance be corporeal ?

Sexual fantasy:
Sex dosn't really interest me passionately any more - i am so familiar with my body and my sexuality that normal sexperformance fails to have an effect on me. I feel like i have experienced technique and romance so often that it seems an endless repetition of feelings and gestures. So my sexuality drifts elsewhere - i am actually astonished, that i am still doing sex. My greatest fantasy is to transcend my being. - A paradox : daily life is defined by my physicality rather than my abstacted sexuality . Men and women equally interest me but only if they have a strong charisma.

Drogs:
Sex and drogs have a simillar effect on me.
Thanks to endorgin,a substance which orgasme and heroin free in the human body, i have during my orgasmes flash-backs to past heroin-trips.

Physical excess:
S a boy i used to be very good at high-jumping. The short moment of flying sometimes felt artificially long like being in slow motion. I felt far from my own body. Also during a fast run i feel for a brief moment as if I am in a trance.

BRAIN EXTENSION

GENIA

Dream:
I enter the appartment block in moscow where I've lived for many years, but there have been changes! This is a repeatered dream with various episodes: wandering through the rooms, i sometimes meet people or strange animals, which i have seen in other dreams but never in reality. These meetings are sometimes scary, sometimes interesting, or emotional. But most of the time i don't meet anybody, just rooms and rooms, which metamorphose from dream to dream. Then i enter my own flat, which sometimes happens to be messy, dusty, even dirty. Sometimes it smells freshly painted and all the furniture has been carried out. So an empty space is opening. But most of the time the whole building is split up into tiny rooms all communicating with each other. So i wander from room to room like in a labyrinth.

Daydream:
My dreams and hopes were non-stop smashed: traveling somewhere, possessing something, some ambitious aims, dreams of self-realisation. Now i don't want to own, travel or be someone, i'm just trying to be myself.

Fears:
I experience the strongest fears, facing a reasonless, unmotivated anxiety.
Faceless and transparent as terror from the dark. uncertainty brings great danger.
I was confronted with this kind of fear when i realised the hoplessness and fragility of the world sourrounding me.

Sexual fantasy:
Appetite desapears by constant rejection of food. Sometihing similar happens when you consciously reject sexual desire. Simultaneously sexual fantasies disappear. Since for the time being i live in sexual abstinence, my life has become lots easier.

Last refuge:
My last refuge woul definitely be an orthodox monastary. There i feel like i did in my childhood: no physical, no mental danger. I don't feel the urge to sleep or eat nor to feel afraid. This space isn't real. It floats somewhere between earth and sky. another refuge i could imagine is my country house, my datcha. i did the design for its construction. there are 60 square meters which belong to me - not just legally but also energetically. everything there is in harmony with my being.

Physical excess:
Dancing a long time alone, without music, just listening into myself, i feel my thoughts gradually drifting into my body. I become lighter and finally transparent. Later i see myself from a distance, see the physical expression of my thoughts - than i start doubting - are these really my reflections? I realise how my body starts to speak its own strange language.

Meditation:
Prayer is my meditation. Sometimes i communicate worldless. To drift away, get an anwser- and return to life.

BRAIN EXTENSION

SVETA

Dream:
Since childhood i have experienced this dream:
- I am standing in a very light room, which happens simultaneously to be an aquarium. some kind of underwater world. So i float through light and water. Tiny golden-yellow rabbits jump around. But leaving this room, one enters a tunnel with thousands of light burning, forming light-lines which run towards eternity. I myself am flying at light-speed between the lines of light towards the center of the tunnel.

Last refuge:
... there isn't any hidingplace. For me it`s more the opposite: a large open plane, the surface of the ocean - an unlimited space - that seems cosy for me.

Meditation:
My ego becomes huge and my body floats inside it, breathing - this breath being very present, nearly material.

Fear:
Sometimes i have this vision of being in a mirror of the real world - some kind of reverse of all rules and situations - the feeling i experience, is not unlike the simulation of death. - Whenever i have this vision, i am unable to face real life, everydays situations... I can't even enter the metro - and cold gains my intestines.

Sexual fantasy:
My strongest sexual fantasy isn't directly connected with humans. When i was about 17, i observed horses in a hippodrome having sex. Their natural force and sexual aura electrified me. Today i am still under the influence of this memory.

BRAIN EXTENSION