Artist Web Projects Spotlight: Mike Schuh Reflects on Susan Hiller, Dream Screens, 1996
Susan Hiller, Dream Screens (detail), 1996– . Collection of the artist, commissioned by Dia Art Foundation for the Artist Web Projects series. © Susan Hiller
By Mike Schuh
Assistant Director, Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
In this series, we revisit works from Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects. Inaugurated in 1995, this series is the longest-running program of its kind in the United States, commissioning artists to create original projects for the internet. The full archive of projects is available here.
Time and space are a wonderful mess in Susan Hiller’s Dream Screens (1996– ). Launched as part of Dia’s Artist Web Project series in 1996, Hiller’s work generates psychological and perceptual discord with subtlety and precision. Users are invited to “start,” “select a language,” and “click anywhere to navigate.” The title of the piece floats on the landing page in front of a rectangle slowly cycling through four pastel fields. This relaxed tempo and the fact that Dream Screens is free of images make the work a welcome alternative to the rapidly paced, image-crammed gifs of today.
The work’s experiential components include words, colors, dreams, and screens. When users click to begin navigating, they embark upon the simple operation of activating various background colors. Aimlessly clicking around the screen reveals many color options, and increased clicking demonstrates that these choices are supported by an organized system. Choosing a language from the selections at the bottom initiates the audio. A feminine voice describes her dreams: “Just fragments, in black and white, somewhere cold, I'm a fashion editor or a model or both,” “I keep seeing myself as a child, my childhood, sentimental scenes like Victorian postcards,” “I have to save the USA by fighting off the forces of evil in the President's nightmares.” At times, she interrupts herself or her voice fades in and out, offering overlapping pieces of information, positing questions, quoting, or describing other dreams. This entails deliberate and engaged listening, and the user may choose to continue clicking through colors while trying to keep up with the audio.
Three guideposts, described by the voice, emerge within the soundscape: the phrase “I am dreaming” in Morse code; a recording of a pulsar one-million-years old and three-thousand light-years away; and a human heartbeat. An attempted communication from the subconscious, the impossibly distant remnants of an exploded star, and a muscle contained centrally within our bodies—laboring to distribute blood throughout—sonically intersect. They provide direction while also further conflating spaces and times. Whether accessing sounds thousands of light-years away or deep in our minds and bodies, Dream Screens invites subconscious-infused existential upheaval.
Detached from interpretative necessity, Dream Screens allows users to navigate virtual space without imposing a clear sense of direction. In this moment when notions of what we do and where we do it have become so drastically disconnected, this piece encourages us to more deeply consider the relevance of our lived and subconscious states.
Dream Screens is currently included in an online exhibition curated by Zachary Cahill and Mike Schuh called Another Idea at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Hiller’s piece is joined by other works that contend with quarantine-induced spatial isolation and the ensuing online social desperation.
Another Idea
June 1–July 31, 2020
Online at graycenter.uchicago.edu
Organized by Zachary Cahill and Mike Schuh
Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
