We’ve been having weird dreams.

We became plants, and our viscera swallowed our legs before pushing them out our torsos and we walked across the sky.

We sprouted wings and reunited with a family we didn’t know we had.

We were buried up to our necks in a beach until we taught the grains of sand to move.

It’s not so much that we’ve lost the ability to dream, but perhaps that our dreams have become so alien that we do not recognize them as our own. Or that if those are our dreams, then we must be somewhere else than we thought we were.

Let’s get this out of the way. We do not understand our situation.

But we need to revalue understanding, because understanding embeds a capacity to act, not because we need recourse to a knowledge authority, but because our technosphere has made action so cheap.

Weird Dreams, Weird Analysis leverages artistic practice, theoretical and humanistic inquiry, workshop and experiential learning and play to chart the new aesthetic and ethical territory we find ourselves in. The world has always been weird, despite our attempts both psychological and scientific to normalize experience, ecology, and cosmology.

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was Speculative Fiction

The products of 1970s cybernetic art (kinetic, sonic, visual, performative) were once described in terms of the interplay of serendipity and the uncanny. Theorists grasped to the uncanny, a prolonged psycho-physiological discomfort arising from the uncertainty of mistaking the inorganic for a biological being. This serendipitous, passing moment when the machine seems to have mirrored our intention gave way to a relieving aftermath which afforded delightful perspectives of human understanding and behavior.

This delight feels quaint. There is no relief from cybernetic systems.

These days, cybernetic technologies have mutated, not ulike how heterodox leftists like Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 2023) or McKenzie Wark (Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, 2019) describe the mutation of capital. Not only through the serendipitous re-engagement of the neural network structure by some graduate students pursuing their advisors’ toy project, but through a disasterous coupling with mammalian nervous systems which allows for the unfettered occupation of collective psychic space during our waking life.

The AI dreams of the 1970s have produced boring AI nightmares. Adjunct lecturers forced to grade ChatGPT written papers before succumbing to exhausted despair and handing the gradebook over to Gemini. Meanwhile, they are thirsty machines; they drink down a bottle of water with each 100-words. This is not to mention the technologies militarization, which is no surprise to anyone who knows how engineering funding works. Meanwhile, the pandemic has left its mark, despite our incredible ability to repress its psychic assault.

The uncanny is out of date. Things have gotten weird.

Let’s be clear, we’ve seen this coming. In 1992, Felix Guattari wrote:

Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally’. Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness […] How do we regain control of such an auto-destructive and potentially catastrophic situation?

- Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (1992)

These days, we are confused by nascent vectors of desire and its sublimations: guarded interiorities balance against “extremely online” hyper expressivity, going goblin mode disintegrates into self-flagellating doom-scrolling, a lock-down induced transformation of sexuality and corporeality alongside a blooming of depressive anxiety, “rise and grind” fading to “quiet quitting”.

When this project started in 2023, we asked “how did we get here?” Now it’s clear there’s no going back, and going forward seems like pulling at one of n-thousand fucking precarious jenga blocks.

Distinct from the unheimlich, Mark Fisher writes about the weird as an encounter that makes us feel that “something is there that shouldn’t be”. The weird is not just something that doesn’t make sense, it is a recognition that there is too much sense, or too many ways to make sense for a specific moment. The weird creates portals to the outside that remind us that even when we are alone, we are not by ourselves. And even when we are here, we are also somehow somewhere else.

Following psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi’s transdisciplinary analytic method ultraquistics and Felix Guattari’s indisciplined diagrammatics, weird analysis necessitates disciplinary concoctions that refuse to integrate, find a solution, or create a hybrid. Drawing on heterodox traditions of psychoanalysis, the practical, experiential, and aesthetic dimensions of this collaborative project are indispensable. To this end, Weird Dreams, Weird Analysis gathers a transdisciplinary array of artists, makers, designers, and theorists.