Dreams
by Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

A. Void Visitor

[Recap] When I started writing Stricken, I envisioned an account of stroke survival. Things, as they are wont to do, veered sidewise. In the closing sections of Part 3, “stricken” assumes a variant referential meaning. The shift in focus initiates a dimensional reflection on erasure, stuff being stricken from the record, as it were. The subject, an existential one, can be approached from any number of directions. Death and memory, absence or impermanence, temporality and transition, states of being, ideal form… Philosophy, broadly, poses and and seeks to answer questions we have about the residue of action, in tandem with ethics, presumably to incentivize generally desirable behavior. The imagination becomes a means for the modeling of reality, by prioritizing and directing our engagements in life, honing the mind to govern doing. Where we are picking up the thread is beyond these foundational concerns. Stricken addresses aggression against the archive, against historical accuracy, representation, the real, authenticity… Forceful negation being exerted on the pressure points through which consciousness flows toward movement, activity that effects change.

I come to the project primarily through art, but my perspective is colored by an appreciation for oral tradition, and a primitive regard for the conductive properties of dreaming. Art talk and dreams play a substantial role in my art life, which is true for many others, expressing themselves through a tremendous variety of genres and eras, all over the place. I’m coy above, to call dreaming “conductive.” The implication is that dreams deliver something from somewhere to here. What do I know? It’s true that for decades, since my early 20s, I have sought to satisfy my curiosity on the topic. What conclusions have I reached? Why, none at all! And I’m not alone in my ambivalence. No consensus exists on the phenomenon of dreaming, what it means or does. Dream analysis is ancient, and new theories about its meaning, function and value sprout up all the time, to this day. Oneirology is a fascinating field of study, associating the unconscious (Jung, Freud) with symptomatic physiology (e.g., REM). Whether or not dreaming conforms to any logic or causality, or evades the proof rationality demands, we (humans) refuse to fully marginalize it in an increasingly mechanized and secular world. Collectively, we do wonder about the latest technologies, however. Because we’re alternately thrilled and terrified by the prospects of enlightened, sentient robots, we ask if the advanced systems are self-aware, and moreover, are these thing-beings dreaming? This bizarre transference, shifting our age-old fascination with dreams to humanoid contraptions, I think is exceedingly weird. Art, strangely enough, makes the conundrum of machine dreaming preposterous. Plenty of people appear to accept AI-generated content as art. This is also baffling to me. Dreams and art share an intractable commonality with respect to origination, which evades definition in the formality of language. The poetic and technical aspects of both are fodder for perpetual discourse and innovation, yes, but ultimately wordplay does not meet the challenge. The symbolic is a by-product of their convergence, but a painting cannot only be a symbol of some other thing. Art persists as itself.

In 2026, the pressure on our creative faculties is astounding and disturbing. Authoritarianism decides what is permissible to dream, create and discuss. In the maximally complex post-contemporary society, there are an infinite number of ways to impinge on expression. Power/wealth asymmetry and the organized surveillance/enforcement networks unleash an increasingly robust apparatus for interrupting the conceptual-expressive process. It’s a hybridized, dimensional phenomenon, that can yet be traced and apprehended by a normal citizen, with a rudimentary education and limited access to information. The Net in America for the moment allows a user to obtain a working historical knowledge of what’s what quickly, though malevolent misinformation and fakery abound. The most recent celebrated case of outright censorship involves billionaire Robert Kraft and a cabal of stadium owners, the media (all), and a handful of international pop music performers. The central issues of infringement on Constitutionally protected free speech are in play. This is an important opportunity to correct course on the degradation of American democracy. Already clear is the incredibly potent rapid-response of the key players, including massive cross-sector corporate damage control operations, implicating a foreign government (Israel). The timing is critical. American midterm elections are barely two months away. Public backlash against the Zionist lobby for Israel is accelerating. Trump and Netanyahu (the Israeli PM) are controversially speaking at the United Nations, while thousands protest outside. Social media platforms are pushing narratives that diverge wildly from messaging on legacy or “mainstream” platforms, and the former is moving the needle more than the latter. M-/Billions of dollars are at stake. The consumer creative industrial complex is exposed, and its ugliness is linkable to the contingent domains of pro sports, government subsidies, talent agencies and Wall St.

The entertainment sector intermixes the business and pleasure of the luxe and popular classes, as none other can. “Entertainment” is becoming fungible, like speech and money. Hollywood’s Dream Machine has metastasized, consuming practically all aspects of human life, our culture, private lives, community rituals, even our reproduction. Baudrillard’s analysis of hyperreality is a perfunctory vision, in the rearview mirror. The profuse radicalism of the Continental Theorists, Frankfurt School and ‘68ers seems quaintly decrepit in 2026. Stardom itself has spawned a perspectival deluge, a mimetic pandemic , a state of dramatic becoming being performed 24/7/365 all over the world by any- and everyone with a fast internet/social media connection, a camera, microphone and idea. The fourth wall has dissolved, and the formula life=art has manifested. The fleeting sensation of euphoria has evaporated, exposing the vast panopticon constructed to contain billions of lives and dreams to facilitate the wholesale suck of value and meaning from them. Parallel to this plantation model, an artificial and symbolic idealization of society is erected, a projection of impossible, irrational promise. The multimedia spectacle competition-lottery, promulgating the myths of talent, meritocracy, heroes and villains, in a miasma of sex and sparkling fashion.

Take the extreme financialization of youth sports in the USA, From this phenomenon, we can access an emergent networked global pro athletics schema linked by money/media/power to industrial gambling consortia, apparel giants and syndicated education, etc. The extraordinary concentration and integration of existence into an omni-market is revolutionary. The professionalization and/or privatization of culture coincides with the general trend of monopolization/absorption across all sectors in society since the eighties at least. Elitism has been rehabilitated through effective aspirational marketing. The top 1% — musicians, artists, athletes — are fabulously compensated, and in turn are expected to conform to the rapacious program of K-shaped post-capitalistic economy. Failure to do so can result in immediate cancellation by owners, consortiums, compliant press etc.

POTUS last week banned several major journalistic outfits from White House access, then promptly launched a state media channel for disseminating curated content, Trump’s “greatest hits.” One of the clever obscurations in the affair involves the blurring of distinctions among domains of public interest and exchange, all of which rely on trust, reciprocation and fulfillment on promise. These “spaces” include speech, commerce, politics and entertainment, all of which the President considers himself to be a master of, an all-time great. America elected this man to its highest office not once, but twice. To understand how and why requires a massive and thorough, dimensional and historical examination of the phenomenal/manufactured perfect storm that brought DJT to Amerca’s highest office…two times… This cringey project is worthwhile, in my estimation, only if it results in immediate corrective action. I recognize that he proposition frankly is absurd, a fool’s errand, Quixotic, because, as we know, the resources to mount such an effort no longer are democratically available. Furthermore, a devastatingly efficient campaign is underway to replace humanity’s ability to pursue an understanding of itself, and exercise that comprehension kinetically. So, what’s the point, man?

As an artist, I don’t have to have one, LOL. Art has been categorically dismissed on the basis of utility for centuries on semantic grounds. Let’s lean into that sentiment. The proponents of uselessness for art unsurprisingly have served at the discretion of monarchs, religions and states for command and control of the many by the few. There’s a fine line dividing the non-essential/utile thing and its complicity in a post-imperial/colonial/feudal revival. Art emerged over time as a vital indicator of the health of a society’s free speech ecosystem. The superiority posture of the wordist over the artist dates to Plato at least — an oddity, since the former’s contingency on the latter’s autonomy is elemental to functional democracy. The computer reduces both to zeroes and ones, which themselves are key to arithmetic and algebra, and — need it be said? —the forging of civilization from whatever preceded it. Now, the big question in the back of everyone’s mind is What survives civilization’s collapse? Bezos, Musk, et al., as we noted, are building rocket ships, space stations and bunkers. Meantime, superciliously, Trump wants a rebrand for AI, which has hit a rough patch with the hoi poloi. He would rather we say “super intelligence,” when describing the commodification of metadata, machine learning, killing drones, large language models, ETFs, Flock camera arrays and other mass surveillance tools, and so on and on. The trick is to link the fiction of artificial personhood with speech with money under the pretense and pretext that that specific tri-partheid configuration constitutes the embodiment of fact, which naturally is truthful, or tantamount to it. Belief and all that goes into it dissolves into this sentient non-entity like sugar in coffee. This is the Beast, the golem, of the post-contemporary drift towards planetary cataclysm. The scheming crazies all fantasize a happy ending for only them and theirs, but the disastrous fix is in, and it’s an alchemical/metaphysical double-cross. The rot of excess gobbles the mirage of future returns, even as the fires, floods, hurricanes, pestilences, etc., decimate the beneficiary class, their properties and delicate, idealized Self-hood, which they wish to perpetuate indefinitely… [POOF] Suckers! I hate to be gloating and pessimistic simultaneously. Talking about those Masters of the Universe/War: They’re gonna get us all killed, and they apparently couldn’t care less, because in their addled brains they will live forever, as futuristic Pharaohs, sporting smart glasses and riding self-driving magic carpets to art fairs in Valhalla or Timbuktu, a hot babe cyborg on each regenerated haptic arm, flexing!

PLATES

The Pattern Series was created for the CONTENT Cycle, which I launched while an MFA student at Claremont Graduate University and continued to develop for a solo exhibition at Yarger|Strauss Contemporary in Beverly Hills in the late 2000s.