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Dream writing telematics

2019 
The Arcades Project evokes a dreamy vision of the seduction of Paris in the 1930s as the city is transformed into a world of decadence, depravity and escape. Benjamin's writing takes us to the Oneiropolis, a social ecosystem saturated by the deluge of a 'dreamy tide of bad taste' bathing citizens and tourists in the narcotic waters of spectacle. Even today, as we read Benjamin's disjointed yet baroque reflections on this Paris, we are pushed benevolently into a labyrinth populated by familiar characters, like the flâneurs, gamblers, collectors, feuilletonists, prostitutes, fashion creatures and fellow dreamers, all of whom energise an ever-present mood of foreboding, waste and collapse with loaded tropological questions about life, modernism and modernity. 'What was gathering there?' 'Where was the light coming from?' Indeed, what would the darkness illuminate? For light and darkness themselves have entered a chiasmus only poetically to exchange properties.
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