MUMA Screens #3: James Lynch and Dr Jennifer Windt in conversation

For the third in the MUMA Screens program, a screening of James Lynch’s animated video work Everybody was (2006) is preceded by a conversation between the the artist and Dr Jennifer Windt, a senior research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Monash University, in which they discuss Lynch’s use of the dream form together with the nature of the unconscious.

In the early 2000s the artist produced a series of animated dream sequences—laboriously hand-drawn in pencil and felt-tipped marker—representing the dreams of other people in which he had appeared. In the manner of dreams, Lynch’s animated narratives are discontinuous, fractured and apparently random. The drawing is fragile and fugitive, much the same as memory. And the work is replete with the magic of flickering light, and the poetic of the unconscious: like the earliest cinema and photography.

Sounds and music—footfalls, laughing, the sound of human breath—stimulate memories and feelings, and moments of heightened recognition. Sometimes the hand-coloured cartoon animations mingle and merge with the ‘real’ space of video footage, suggesting a confusion of the symbolic and the real, the unconscious and conscious, and the relationship between drawing and memory. Lynch embraces the dream form as a symbolic container of unconscious desires and phantasies. He invites the viewer to explore the inner world of fantasy, without abandoning an actively critical attitude towards reality, as manifest in three-dimensional objects and works such as paintings and sculptures.

Lynch’s work is particularly poignant at a time when, unable to gather with friends and family, many of us are craving intimacy and human connection. Our dreams offer a space where we can meet and spend time with our nearest and dearest.

James Lynch is a Melbourne-based artist and curator at Deakin University. He is represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne.

Dr Jennifer Windt is a senior research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Monash University. Her research focuses on philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

Before I start, I'd like to thank Kate Barber for inviting us both to do this. I'm quite excited about this conversation, and also James, I'm really excited to be speaking about your work and interested to see what you might talk about it.

So my interest in dreams, as I'm a philosopher of mind, working on dreaming and consciousness at Monash, my broad research interest is really thinking about what the mind does and how thoughts and experiences, and attention change when the mind is left to its own devices. So essentially, when we disengage from the environment we're not interacting with other people, we're not pursuing ongoing tasks, we're not really responding to anything that's happening around us, but attention is drifting from one thing to another, our thoughts are largely unfolding spontaneously. So think of states such as fantasy, daydreaming, mind-wandering. New research suggests that we spend up to 50% of waking life, mind wandering, lost and spontaneous, and largely associated thoughts. We're also not trying to actively author or control our thoughts in these states.

So I'm quite interested in that and specifically, how the neuroscience and psychology of mind wandering then can also inform philosophical theorizing on questions relating to consciousness and self more generally. The other paradigm state, and I guess this is why Kate asked me to speak to you specifically that I'm interested in, is sleep. So what happens? Sleep is the paradigm state in which we really disengage from the environment in any ongoing tasks, and the mind, thoughts, experiences, attention just unfold and wander freely.

Actually, I started out my career in philosophy, working on sleep and dreaming, wrote a book on consciousness and sleep called Dreaming with MIT Press, where I investigate dream experience. What is it like to dream? How do we experience ourselves in dreams? And so on.

And more recently, I've then been looking beyond sleep and dreams to mind wandering and wakefulness. How do mind wandering and daydreams relate to sleep dreams? Are they the same or different? How much of a difference does it actually make to experience some thoughts, whether we are asleep or awake? Is there possibly something changing in the brain that is common to both states when we engage in spontaneous thoughts? So when we engage in mind wandering, there's some recent work that I've been doing with colleagues at Monash looking at local sleep. So is it maybe possible that when we engage in mind wandering and attentional lapses, part of the brain is engaging in sleep-like activity and is literally falling asleep.

So that's where I'm coming from. And I'd be quite interested to talk a little bit if we have the time, about how some of those philosophical and scientific questions about mind wandering and dreams might relate to your own work.

But before we get into that, what first got you interested in dreams, and what first gave you the idea to use dream reports of other people or to look at reports of other people's dreams of you and really use them for your artwork?

James Lynch:

Yeah. It's a big, big question. I studied painting in the early to mid '90s, and so I had a traditional formal artistic training, but part of that was working collaboratively with people. And that was quite a new thing at that time in the visual arts for questions around authorship to be expanded, and dissolved, and look at ways of creating things collectively.

So this question around the group... And after I graduated from art school, I worked with one group in particular then, a large group of people that made work together. And so after around the eighth year mark of working collaboratively, the question shifted for me from, what is it we want to achieve collectively, to starting to think about in my own practice as an artist, what is it that others want from me? So, yeah. Lots of ideas were really coalescing around the 2000 year mark. And in particular in 2001, I was living in LA on a residency for about six months, actually around this time, around September 11.

And I was away from my family and friends for the first time for an extended period. And so, having a long distance relationship and being a part from your significant others really started to coalesce a lots of ideas from psychoanalysis, from art, really came together. And I created my own meta project of other people's dreams in which I appeared.

So I just collected these stories, not knowing what to do with them for a couple of years. And then I think in 2002, I started turning them into both animations, drawings, prints and paintings. So it wasn't just located in one medium, but stories that were told through different media. And yeah, big questions about the role we have to play in each other's lives.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

If I may ask, why dreams in particular? So do you think there's anything particularly interesting about dreaming?

James Lynch:

Yes. Definitely, definitely. [crosstalk 00:06:31]. Yeah.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

I guess, the question is coming from my interest in what a lot of the research is suggesting that actually when we're engaging in mind wandering and daydreaming, both phenomenologically in terms of the types of experiences we're having and also in terms of the underlying brain activity, actually it could be quite similar to sleep dreams.

So do you think there's any deep difference for you, from your perspective as an artist as to whether you're using a dream report or perhaps a report of a waking fantasy or waking daydream, how important is it to you that you're really looking at sleep dreams as opposed to something else?

James Lynch:

Well obviously, the unconscious as Lacan says, "The realm of the Other", and to explore the other's view of me, that was the key. Someone said to me once that consciousness, being awake is a sliding scale of wakefulness to deep sleep. And it's not one chapter, but a series of a sliding scale that we moved through throughout the day.

So yeah, you would know more about those different levels of wakefulness and dreaming than I would, but to go back and think about dreaming more specifically at that time, I was also working a lot as a waiter in a restaurant and supporting my practice as an artist through casual work, as a waiter. And I had done so already for 10 years at that time. So it was a big part of my life.

But then I had this split I guess instead of defining myself through work or through paid work. I considered myself an artist. So I was spending a lot of time doing work, casual work and then I was thinking about, well, what is my role in people's lives? And not defining myself through paid work, but through an artistic practice. But then doing both simultaneously. So thinking about our roles that we have for each other, how some random person you would sit next to on a tram, for instance, back when we were all on public transport with just appear in your dream five days later, or someone you went to high school with 20 years ago may appear in a dream that you have, and you might not even remember their name.

So we all have unspoken roles in each other's lives. So for me, that was really important to consider not what our jobs are, but what roles we have to play in each other's lives on a symbolic level. Separate to that, in the art world, in the mid '90s there was... As post-modernism considered the social context of art, so that art was moving outside of the gallery into the social space and how art might have a role to play in changing people's lives at a greater deeper level. And also how the social space would come into art and challenge the formal material, aesthetic traditions that was all happening and playing out.

So for me, lots of big questions, Margaret Thatcher stated that society does not exist. For me, I wanted to prove that society existed by exploring the social fabric in the most intricate way I could. So these dreams were a way for me to explore the intricacies of the social fabric.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

Interesting. One thing that struck me about the way that you go at this, so this very social also the way you've been talking about that in terms of using dreams to illustrate the social fabric and how other people have dreamed about you and all of that is that in a way dreams, and I think a lot of the philosophical discussion on dreaming and also the scientific work on dreaming is stem from the assumption that dreaming in a sense is the most private of experiences.

But traditionally people have said dreaming is something that is almost beyond the reach of science because you can't see dreams as they unfold. And when REM sleep and its correlation of dreaming was first discovered in the '50s, but there was actually this uproar in parts of philosophies saying, no, you can't have an objective science of dreaming. It's by definition, something that is basically beyond the grasp of objective markers and objective methods which has similar problems to what you see in consciousness research more generally. But I think there are really exacerbated for the topic of dreaming.

So on one hand we have this idea dreaming is something private, almost something that can't be studied objectively. I should say that my own work has always aimed at looking at both objective and subjective sides of dreaming. So really looking at the neuroscience and empirical data on dreaming. So that's my approach, but it's been an extremely important driver for a lot of philosophical and scientific work or an obstacle to a lot of scientific work on dreaming, I should say. But we have that on the one hand. But on the other hand, there's some really interesting newer work coming out on the social flavor of many dreams themselves.

So a number of studies have suggested that while we're maximally detached in sleep, dead to the world we're not interacting with the external world or other people we're so closed in on ourselves that often after awakening, we can't even remember what we experienced.

So it seems that dreams are almost elusive to our own waking selves. But at the same time, the phenomenology of dreaming is extremely social. So studies suggest that in most dreams we actually have four or five characters that are distinct from the self. So on one hand in almost all dreams, and I would say, this is almost a definitional feature of dreaming. We put ourselves or a dream version of ourselves that can be different to our waking self at the center of dreams.

Dreams are immersive, their self in a world experiences. But it's not just a self in a world. It's typically that we're experiencing a dream self interacting with other dream characters experiencing that separate from the self. And as you were also saying, often these can be people that we know the waking life, sometimes their weird dream versions is merged together.

Sometimes those could be people from a period in the past.

James Lynch:

That's right.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

And it seems that the average dream has four to five characters that are distinct from the self. It also seems that we actually have more social interactions in dreams than if you randomly interrupt people in waking. And this is in normal times.

James Lynch:

It's amazing.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

And I find that so interesting that we have that tension between this private aspect of sleep and dreaming, but then the social flavor of it on the other hand and also how in the pandemic really, this has almost become even more pronounced that we might especially in periods of lockdown social dreams might take on a new significance. And I found that striking and thinking about your work, how you bridge that tension really?

James Lynch:

Well, that's right. I was really interested in... I mean, I was just an artist, but I'm always interested in psychoanalysis in particular, Frederick Perls was the gestalt therapist who did these crazy performative therapy sessions. And I was really inspired by his writing in particular where he did interpretive therapy and it really helped me in my thinking and perspectives to consider the other. So that in the dream, every aspect of the dream is perhaps identifying with the dreamer, both inanimate and animate objects in the dream are all the dreamer. And so with his therapy, he shifted perspectives so that you can interpret the dream and the narrative through these alternate perspectives of the dream.

That was so inspiring for me to consider other views of the self. And so that was a huge part of the work. And so when I started making these, I had lots of fantastical ambitious plans for the work. Sometimes I was imagining, well, with one animation in particular, I made it in three different ways and three different versions of the animation exists. So it's not just one strict story in particular and they're not fixed. Also, I tried to give each animation a different flavor, a different texture in different ways through drawing and basic video editing, color techniques and stuff.

But yeah, I think particularly I was brought up a Catholic and also artistic training. You learn to think about the inner self as being this essential, more authentic version of you. And so I really wanted to play that out and spin that on its head, really to think about our inner world as a social space.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

And you were talking earlier, you were just describing the different formats beyond animations that you've used to depict dreams. And so I just wanted to ask you a question about... Sorry, I might just restart that. So earlier you were describing the different formats that you've used to depict dreams from drawings to animations and so on. And I just have to ask you this because it's so closely related to my own interest in dreaming.

So a central metaphor that has been used quite a lot, coming back to this idea that dreams ourselves in a world experiences, we're interacting with other dream characters, there's simulations of reality, but also social reality. So a metaphor that has been used quite a bit recently in philosophy of dreaming and also in the science of dreaming is that dreams are very much like immersive VR experiences. And I would say that in fact this idea that dreaming really places the self at the center, it's really like an immersive VR experience where you just enter this alternate reality and take it and experience it as real, at least for the time being that that is really central to the phenomenological structure of dreaming.

So have you ever considered, or what might it look like essentially from your perspective using immersive VR to depict dreams and then taking this idea of using other people's dreams of yourself. I was thinking if you did that, you might almost come to bring the viewer to have to share the experience that someone else had a view. So you could almost recreate through VR, you would to have the experience to experience someone else's dream of you socially.

James Lynch:

Yeah. I think when I was practicing and making these works, yeah. I don't think VR was really realised yet. The project began in around 2000. And I think the last work I made was maybe 2007. And so I don't think VR was realised yet, but I did think about them as installations. So as a physical immersive experience and the project really isn't finished yet. I always wanted to return to it at some point when I had the time.

And so with the first group of works, with the first group of stories that I collected, they were with my most intimate circle of family and friends and partner. The stories came from them. But I imagined as the project became more public that colleagues and people who don't know me in particular could dream about me so that this work in particular that Monash has in the collection, 'Everybody Was', is the first work that is actually from a colleague who I don't really know very well.

So the work isn't really about me at all, because I don't know them. But it's got me in it and I'm starring in it, but it's all about them. Do you know what I mean? This was the work that moved it from intimate relations to this role of the fantasy, more like celebrity culture, where we're identifying with people we don't even really know.

So it's a project I would love to have time to get back to. And since I stopped making them into artwork and I stopped having it as a public project, there's a couple of dreams that have came in that my kids have had, but also other people have had that they've mentioned to me because people stopped talking after a while because they didn't want their dreams revealed. So the stories dried up.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

Thanks. Thanks. That's great. I can't help, but ask another pair of questions which comes back to dreams themselves and their relations to your artwork.

So I guess on one hand, how have the people whose dreams you have used then reacted to those animations? Do they recognise their own dreams in your work? And perhaps has the way they have seen that work then changed and reflected back into their own dream lives on one hand.

But on the other hand also what about your own dreams? So do you think that what you believe about your own dreams, how you experienced them, to what extent would that have influenced the way you've been depicting dreams in your artwork? And at the same time, for instance, do you use your own dreams perhaps to spark creativity, or have you maybe dreamt of dream stories that you've collected that have led you to achieve that?

James Lynch:

Possibly, possibly. Yeah, it was really significant that it wasn't my unconscious, that it was the others' version of me as told by me. So it was this waving of the other's view of me with my own interpretation.

So it was neither one or the other, but an intricate kind of connection of the both. So I stayed away from that. And then when the works were first publicly critiqued and reviewed, a lot of critics or whatever you'd say, writers quickly went back to modernist conceptions of the dream that they were surrealists, that they were mine, and that they were reflecting some inner version of my unconscious, which missed the whole purpose of the project.

So in a way I shifted again and then started making paintings based on people's earliest memories. So then I started a new project because quickly things went back to that surrealist, isn't a crazy interpretation which was not the point of my project. So I wanted to diversify as an artist. Yeah.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

Interesting. And do you think that through all of this, I mean, you've spoken to this a number of times, but do you think through thinking about other people's dreams of you and as you were earlier saying, sometimes that's not really you at all because they don't actually know you and didn't actually know you that well. Do you think that has changed your view of yourself?

James Lynch:

Oh, for sure. I've worked collaboratively for such a long time that internalising the other and being exposed to other's perspectives has been a constant in my life, and I think in everyone's life. So of course constantly I'm in a state of change in relation to other people's lives, and their perspectives. And I think that's what creates growth and development in people. But yeah, I'm not sure. I think the dreams were outcomes from those experiences rather than the beginnings, if that make sense.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

Interesting.

James Lynch:

Yeah.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

Very interesting. Sorry. I think my partner just runs through...

James Lynch:

No worries.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

Awesome. What do you think, should we keep... I mean, I could keep going for a long time or is there something that you really wanted to say, or should we do it?

James Lynch:

Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure Kate might chime in. But perhaps thank you so much for casting your expert eye onto my work. I actually, haven't had an opportunity to show my work to an expert in that regard, someone who is so literate around these deeper areas of thinking philosophy, phenomenology psychoanalysis. So it's great to have your perspective. Thank you.

Dr Jennifer Windt:

Thanks. Well, for me, it's been an absolute treat that really, I thought was really interesting to see the work that Kate sent through. I really, really enjoyed it. I was quite interested to see how many connections I wasn't really seeing in terms of scientific debates and that's for me just been a real treat thinking about this. And also, hopefully viewers will also have that, just a really nice break and an alternative to every day, middle of lockdown and what we're going through right now. So it's a real pleasure and a real inspiration.