"Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished."
-- Thomas De Quincey, "Suspiria de Profundis"

"Machinery for Dreaming" takes its cue from Thomas De Quincey's "Suspiria de Profundis" (1845), in which De Quincey devotes a chapter to the palimpsest in order to explore the relationship between memory, hypnogogic states of consciousness, and technologies that allow the human mind to sustain lucid dreams. Through years of laudanum use, De Quincey discovered that the opiate functions as a kind of soft technology with a knack for allowing the user to navigate consciously through the palimpsest of memories, phantasms, and symbols embodied in the dreaming mind. De Quincey observed that the power of dreaming rested in the sleeping mind's ability to combine disparate content from various layers of the mental palimpsest into the new, meaningful coherencies for which he eventually coined the term "involutes". Abdicating any direct compositional control over this process, De Quincey repeatedly acknowledges that opium functions as the true author of his dreams. De Quincey thus builds a model for artistic generation that sets aside human agency and control, rather constructing systems of interacting software (opium) and machines (the dreaming mind) that process raw data (human experience, stored in memory) in order to output new artistic objects (the dream). In this model, the "artist" functions as the gatherer of raw material and the recorder of dreams, taking very little ownership over either.

"Machinery for Dreaming" treats De Quincey's work as both a model for composition and as the primary data of a palimpsest. Practically speaking, in the initial stage I translate textual sources (passages from De Quincey) into raw MIDI. This MIDI information is then fed into my Dream Machine patch in Reaktor, where it is used as compostional score; for sequencing; and to determine the movements of all controls, filters, and switches on the software synthesizer. Conceptually, each phase of the work's development mirrors De Quincey's interest in the progression of raw experience into memory, which then becomes recombined into a figural object through what he calls "the machinery for dreaming". My own minimal function as recording agent replicates De Quincey's view, as well.

The completed work features three different tracks of sources from which others may add to the palimpsest. I've included three of the initial .txt files, quick Burroughsian cut-ups culled from De Quincey's section on the palimpsest; these three .txt files were used to create channel control values used by Reaktor. I've also included two .midi files generated from the text, one longer file used for sequencing, which came from the unaltered text, one shorter file generated by a cut-up. And finally, an .mp3 file documenting the Dream Machine's performance of these .midi elements.

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