The authors of the audio-visual hypnagogic experience – Tibor Hrs Pandur (text, voice, direction); Lina Rica (video); Miha Šajina – Shekuza (sound) and Boštjan Čadež – FŠK (code) – explore the phenomenon of public reading as leaks of our most intimate of disclosures.
By simulating and decoding dream protocols, they re-appropriate and extend the military term of “psychological operations” to communication as a whole and try to wash your brain for the good of all involved.
According to Freud, the fight against the censorship of forgetting, involved in the recording, verbalization, or simulation of dreams, fixates the difference between dreams and the subsequent retroactive reproduction of the nocturnal event and demonstrates the tendency of the human psychophysical apparatus to unwittingly appropriate the external world as a projection screen of an internal theater: a theater in which the dreamer is the stage itself, the actor, the prompter, the producer, the author, the audience, and the critic (according to Jung). This is precisely what Henri Bergson emphasizes in his lecture on dreams from 1901, when he compares dreams to the act of reading, in which we do not read actual letters but give meaning and perception to ourselves as a hallucination of our own externalized memory, as a ”projection of memory outwards in hallucinatory form.”
Based on a fragment of a poem from the book Psyops (Litera, 2022) by Tibor Hrs Pandur, the intervention in the space dedicated to the mass hypnosis of viewers rejects the widespread assumption that dreams are only “mental cinema” intended for oblivion or inconsistent entertainment, but rather a self-preserving physiological necessity: the only legitimate, non-pathological hallucinogenic experience of insanity that is still tolerated by society. Psychological Operations are an attempt to transplant this memory of oblivion, which tangibly manifests the extent to which, at the very moment of perception, our perception is co-generated independently of us in a mutual feedback loop with the world.
Tibor Hrs Pandur (1985) is a poet, translator, playwright, and Teslologist. From 2009 to 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of the magazine I.D.I.O.T. In 2013, he received the Young Playwright Award for the drama Sen 59 at the 43rd Week of Slovenian Drama in Kranj. He is the author of several poetry collections Enerđimašina, Notranje Zadeve, Psyops) and has translated scientific monographs about Nikola Tesla. As a playwright, he collaborates with Nina Rajić Kranjac and Livia Pandur. At the 22nd Poetry Competition in Maribor (2022), he received the Vizir Award for the Best Poetry Video.
Lina Rica (1980) is an award-winning intermedia artist who works in the field of conceptual, experimental, and new media art. In her work, she explores the social processes of past and present worlds and their effects on the individual. Her prints are part of the MGLC, Riko, Oficina Arara, Longest Night, Critical Mass Portfolio, and Femicomix Portfolio collections. She is the co-founder of the AV band Marta Fakuch and part of the AV trio Etceteral.
Miha Šajina (1979) is a producer, DJ, keyboardist, composer, and enthusiastic module collector from Ljubljana. He play(s/ed) in Intimn Frizurn, Moveknowledgement, and Ewok. Since 2002, he has been working with the Zvviks collective, where he creates music and sound effects for the Koyaa animated films. Under the name Shekuza, he explores modular synthesis, releasing the albums De Sica (2019) and Coriolis Effect (2020) for Kamizdat, and the Floorcuts EP (2023) for Tehnopolis. Since 2021, he has been a member of Warhorse together with Domen Učakar (Lifecutter).
Boštjan Čadež (1979) is an award-winning intermedia artist. With Line Rider (2006), he gained international recognition and received the prestigious Innovation Award at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. In 2013, he received the Golden Bird Award in the category of intermedia art. As a prominent artist, he’s also active in the field of real-time video projections and video mapping, exhibiting both at home and abroad.
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Conceptual design, texts, voice and direction: Tibor Hrs Pandur
Video and visuals: Lina Rica
Sound and music: Miha Šajina – Shekuza
Code: Boštjan Čadež – FŠK
Coat of arms: Matej Stupica
PSYOPS graphic identity: Tibor Hrs Pandur and Kristijan Robič
Organised by KUD Channel Zero, CUK Kino Šiška and Litera Publishing House.
PSYOPS is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.
