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.
These images began by blending my photos in Midjourney: dioramas (New York Museum of Natural History; Yale Peabody Museum), details of my art, my early child drawings, museum exhibits (Tibetan mandalas at the met, the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery, drunken calligraphy), macrophotography from the backyard, etc. Prompts asked for unreal flora and fauna, exoplanets, imaginal discs, dreamtime patterning, latent palimpsests, etc. Images then upscaled in Magnific or Topaz and further rebuilt in Photoshop. Final composites are intended to print at sizes approx 3', here resized for the web.
