Ludic Dreaming

Ludic Dreaming uses (sometimes fictional) dreams as a method for examining sound and contemporary technoculture’s esoteric exchanges, refusing both the strictures of visually dominated logic and the celebratory tone that so often characterizes the “sonic turn.” Instead, through a series of eight quasi-analytical essays on the condition of listening, the book forwards a robust engagement with sounds (human and nonhuman alike) that leverages particularity in its full, radical singularity: what is a dream, after all, if not an incipient physics that isn't held to the scientific demand for repeatability? Thus, these studies declare their challenge to the conventions of argumentation and situate themselves at a threshold between theory and fiction, one that encourages reader and writer alike to make lateral connections between otherwise wildly incongruent subjects and states of affairs. Put differently, Ludic Dreaming is a how-to book for listening away from the seeming fatality of contemporary technologies, which is to say, away from the seeming inevitability of late capitalistic nihilism.

A very welcome book ... One emerges from a reading in much the same state as one does from a dream: convinced of its importance and excited by the flow and variety of its ideas., Dreams have always been ally to artists, allergy to art theorists. The Enlightenment has been burdened by a sun soaked conceit of waking life that suppresses sounds and the earthly orbits of sleep. Here is a bright eared collective who take the full play of light and shadow playfully and theory-ously. Sounds are wrenched from being physical acoustics of soundscapes ported into the head and bilaterally returned to an electrochemical brain domain where they discourse with the "prerogative of sleep" rather than a pejorative of unenlightenment. What's in the water in Canada? They should export it., Ludic Dreaming is provocative and adventurous in thought and style, offering a fresh approach to the thinking of sound, and a whimsical, highly productive, excursion from the field., The Occulture are the King Crimson of contemporary theoretical pataphysics; and the true inheritors of that special Canadian strain of smart, dark, technically-informed intellectual experimentation represented by McLuhan, Cronenberg, Gibson, and the Krokers. This new collaboration is a playfully serious, mind-bending tour of the current sonic mediascape, and some of the less obvious dream factories which compose it (including, and especially, ourselves). Ludic Dreaming resolders the scattered phantasmagoric fragments of what we might now consider, after reading this collection, the Disunited States of Oneirica., Dreams do not distort reality, so much as they are the reality of that distortion. Ludic Dreaming puts dreams in contact with electronic sounds, and digital devices more generally, in order to trace out the exotic topology of our post-everything society.

Eldritch Priest is a writer and Assistant Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Canada.David Cecchetto is Associate Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University, Canada and a member of the experimental theory group "The Occulture."Marc Couroux is Associate Professor of Visual Art in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University, Canada and a member of the experimental theory group “The Occulture.”Ted Hiebert is Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, USA and a long-time collaborator of "The Occulture."