Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies
Gayle Chong Kwan is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and academic whose work is exhibited internationally in galleries and the public realm. Her large-scale photographic works, immersive installations, and sensory ritual events are at the intersection of historical and archival research and fine art practice, and position the viewer as one element in a cosmology of the political, social and ecological. She has created a new installation work, ‘Oneiric Archaeologies’, in VR game design, sound, tactile wearable sculptures, and social dreaming to explore the collective re-shaping, re-use, and understanding of Avebury Neolithic site through dreaming.
Artist Gayle Chong Kwan has created a new installation work, ‘Oneiric Archaeologies’, in VR game design, sound, tactile wearable sculptures, and social dreaming to explore the collective re-shaping, re-use, and understanding of Avebury Neolithic site through dreaming.
The work has been developed through immense research into archaeologists’ dreams about Avebury in the Alexander Keiller Museum archives, workshops and activities. Gayle explores contemporary dreams of archaeologists and volunteers at Avebury, ritual dream incubation, and the science of more than human dreaming.
The work is a VR landscape of 10 stones, with the installation comprising 10 wearable sculptures. Gayle has expanded her practice with this work and explored working in a new way using Unreal Engine.
‘Oneiric Archaeologies’ is constructed as ten ‘stones’, each of which takes you into dream landscapes populated by clay and photographic objects, lidar scanned stones, archaeological tools, and in reference to more than human encounters.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies, 2025.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies, 2025.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies, 2025.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies, 2025.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies, 2025.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies, 2025.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies, 2025.
Visitors will be invited to put on headphones covered in tactile wearable form to touch/engage with when viewing the work, listening the VR dream work, watching the VR dream landscapes on screen, while sitting on a carpet. one person controls the movement through the VR game, but all viewers will be able to watch and can take turns. The tactile wearable forms will be returned to wooden stands where they sit as sculptural works in themselves. Visitors are also invited to contribute to an ongoing dream archive.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies, 2025.
Gayle Chong Kwan says; “tactility and temporality are integral to archaeology and to more than human dreaming, and that empirical observation and scientific approaches in archaeology may be inadequate to fully describe a site, engendering an “inevitability, even the necessity, of recourse to the dream rather than to the deliberately observed reality.” (Warwick, 2012) Virtual reality and digital devices can result in a poverty of touch in which smooth, screen, swipable surfaces become more common than dirt, dust, earth, stone, and soil, as everyday experiences.”
Gayle Chong Kwan draws upon her own methodology of ‘Imaginal Travel’ as fine art practice to ask how tactile and temporal entanglements can be explored through dreams and archaeology at Avebury – to inform future technologies of digital heritage and ontological and ethical considerations of more than human ecologies.
……………………………………
Gayle Chong Kwan – ‘Oneiric Archaeologies’ (2025)
‘Oneiric Archaeologies’ will be shown later in 2025 touring to universities participating in the Avebury Papers AHRC project.
A ‘Social Dreaming’ walk and artists talk for ‘Oneiric Archaeologies’ is on Friday 4th July, 14.00 – 17:30 at Avebury. All welcome.
The Barn, National Trust, Avebury, Wiltshire UK, UNESCO World Heritage Site
Avebury is managed by the National Trust.
For more Information on this project and where to see it visit www.gaylechongkwan.com
………………………………………..
All images copyright and courtesy of Gayle Chong Kwan
Get the Full Experience
Read the rest of this article, and view all articles in full from just £10 for 3 months.
No comments yet.