The Sleeping Museum
for Christopher Dewdney
Inside the Sleeping Museum the Linnaean taxonomies mash, remix, and mash again.
Flora and fauna, murmuring in their vitrines, swap costumes, birthing unnatural histories.
Under fluorescent suns Victorian wunderkammers slosh and spill their sums, untranslating the narratives back (forward) into primordial swarm.
Here we glimpse the "liminal merge," the "visible join" of slow-wave sleep. Forgotten breeds seaming and sampling themselves, captured on nocturnal camera traps.
Scent of imaginal discs percolating in somnambulistic chambers.
Because the future of specieshood is un-knowable, the Sleeping Museum has gone offline.
Leaking syrupy logics of the future-ancient.
I took photographs of dioramas in the New York Museum of Natural History and the Yale Peabody Museum then loaded them into Midjourney, blending them with close-ups of my paintings and in some cases photos I’d snapped at the Met’s Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet exhibit. Among other things my prompts asked for imaginal, unreal, mutant flora and fauna, with specifications for archival diagrammatic density, irregular micro-patterning, layered particulate detail, and palimpsestic gestures lurking in shadows, while re-running img2img with low denoising (0.25). (And no I don’t really know exactly what I’m talking about here.) Images were then upscaled in Magnific and Topaz, then further rebuilt in Photoshop, adding masks of macro photography textures from the back yard. Final composites are intended to print at sizes up to roughly 3 or 4’, here resized for the web. Additional halls, galleries, and temporary exhibits forthcoming when I get the itch to go digital again.
