###### tags: `ONIROSCOPE`

MEET THE INHABITANTS of ONIROSCOPE #1
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-------- NIGREDO BIRDS ---- ECHO KEEPER ---- LABYRINTH PUPIL -------- (our names and link)

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ONIROSCOPE is an artistic collaboration that wants to dive deep into the way creativity works in the thin line between dreams and intuition, our aim is to let the artwork emerge from a state of consciousness as near to dreams as possible, to get closer to that realm and its language…

(continue on the PROJECT here link post and the LAUNCH here link post)

...be ready to meet the first three creatures that got in touch with us, in this post I will introduce them to you by first revealing a still image from the final artwork and then some insights into the birth and construction of what we made.

You can see all the videos here (mintbase store link)


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NIGREDO BIRDS

Birds of the subterranean day

Regular path, blind direction, open senses.

Suspension, flying emotions, unseen gifts, stones, thrown away. Mirrors generating mirrors.

Conscious is far from the truth.

Move.
.

This was the first vision that emerged and started to talk to us, it began like a lense searching for focus with glimpses of clear details into inner sight, followed by research into this connection with deep states of meditation and automatic drawing. The data collected in this way was then mechanically transformed into the digital world allowing us to share our visions with both 3D VR drawing in Tilt Brush and 2D illustrations on Daada.art https://dada.art/pa/125411.
This was a long and continuous process happening inside the digital world, while in real life research into the physical personification of this vision started for me, this was a very intuitive process involving the body. I would say the feeling was to ritually provide images from reality for the alchemical process of digitalization, the medium used by RenderedFlesh.
While the images were developing towards a final form, the creature responded to us with more and more depth of detail in his process of "coming to expression" and we found words, and sounds... and the creature ended up being a sort of collective impersonification.

By receiving the name of the manifestation everything become way clearer: NIGREDO BIRDS

"Nigredo, or blackness, in the alchemical sense, means putrefaction, decomposition. By the penetration of the external fire, the inner fire is activated and the matter starts to putrefy. The body is reduced to its primal matter from which it originally arose. This process is also called ‘cooking’. The black earth is closed up in a vessel or flask, and heated." (continue on Nigredo ...link)

Birds as an archetypal personification is part of an infinite number of stories, and for sure you already have some ideas in your mind, let me express what is in mine:
birds fly, and walk, they have the freedom to be part of ether or earth, some of them even water and fire, that's why I can see them as elemental creatures capable of deep alchemical metamorphosis, and in really fast if not instantaneous movement;
birds sing and talk, they are capable of hours of continuous generation of beautiful melodies that carry and cradle us, but also of silences that breakthrough like a drill or ringing sound inside your head which suddenly recalls you to the present;
birds see a wide and faraway range of space, probably through layered dimensions, maybe back and forth in time, a farsighted capacity is definitely envisionable;
birds appear in coloured ornaments, in many myth they can change colours,
they bridge, bind, make our inner sight open to magic.

(RenderedFlesh) I first saw Barbara's vision for "NIGREDO BIRDS" from the series of sketches that she produced on dadaart. The images immediately gave me a connection to ideas surrounding death, carrion, a dread sense of being watched, of bones and beings held together by memories of form. In combination with these images Barbara also created a physical bird-like mask with colourful patterns and a long beak/nose to bring her vision from dream into manifested reality. Using video taken of the mask we were able to create a 3d scan and bring the object from the physical third dimension into the digital one. From here I constructed an animated scene in Blender using stop motion techniques to give this feeling of removed reality and difference in time. I felt that the staccato effect of animating in 12 frames per second somehow lent itself more to this dream-like realm compared to the +30 fps of our normal human perception. The forest and the environment that surrounds this collective being reflects the skeletal remains of life hanging at the edge of existence. Barbara took this scene and breathed a whole new energy into it by creating a powerful soundscape capturing that feeling of fear and hunger and emptiness of being which I also felt when looking at her original sketches.


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ECHO KEEPER

Echoes of the grasslands

Grave of the heart, wearing necklaces of river pearls.

Notes written in flesh and scars that cannot breath.

Soul voices are flowing, constantly disappearing into the ground, constantly falling from the sky.

Eternally unheard.

Lost.

Faithful in time.
.

This character already presented to me in a dream I had in Milos,https://knownorigin.io/gallery/222550-magic-moon-dream and continued to appear in my meditations, always slightly different in aspect, as if to enhance the morphic characteristic of dreams and vision, but I could always recognise the character as you might recognise a friend after years of distance apart. This time he had a voice, a voice in his head, and the background was an infinite young wood with bended small trees and bushes.
One day I was walking in the woods and encountered this place seen in the vision, so I decided to come back and film the soldier in his environment, I asked my friend Alessandro to be that presence, to give a real body to the "soldier" (that is what we called it from the beginning, that is his archetypal figure) and again the performance became a ritual, a flow into actions, it was like entering effortlessly into a special state and space, where the presence of senses is enhanced and attention is wide open, even perception of time was lost.

The 3D composition and sound editing was really fluid and quick, this character was really happening, without words it was communicating, the sounds of his obsessive mind and relaying on of traumatic events and emotions were bringing us to a deep core of ethics and fear, life and death. Something Echo Keeper has to face.

About the soldier archetype, it is sort of derived from 'the warrior' which involves a different theme of consciousness, directly connected to post traumatic stress disorder, it reminds me of this old film "let there be light" that was produced in 1946 but kept under censorship until 1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_There_Be_Light_(1946_film)
https://youtu.be/uiD6bnqpJDE
(RenderedFlesh) The Soldier also spoke to me very clearly after seeing the images and photographs that Barbara had sent over. Here was a damaged person blind to the world outside and sealed within an internal world of trauma. The young forest around may have been partly sensed by him but it was filled with projections and memories of battles that never ended. Once the video of the soldier and the forest had been converted into digital 3d the scene really started to take on its own life. I wanted to give a fractured feeling of time and space similar to "NIGREDO BIRDS" but with more violence. The animation is edited to give a sense of flashbacks, the environment itself is chaotic and splintered, the character's fears and trauma externalised onto the world around him.


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LABYRINTH PUPIL

metropolis

iperuranio

shambhala

nirvan

cenote

limbo

orco

walhalla

lete

nil

duat

thunder

electricity

matrix
.

This is a RenderedFlesh vision, and it is really interesting how communication can also bridge the key for access to a shared etheral creature, how the intuitive intent can lead you to find in real life the pieces needed to build shareable content. One of the pillars of ONIROSCOPE, together with the liminal state through which we search and produce, is the alchemical process of materializing objects and experiences into real life. These materializations are then transformed via digital devices into artworks, making them available for sharing what we perceived through our senses. The passage into matter and transformation into a new etheral realm of the digital is a ritual, a framed representation of the natural process of experiencing life, which is what we do, constantly.

The perception and co-creation of reality is mostly kept unconscious because it requires a lot of energy to pursue it with constant conscious focus... but that is the art-making process, a glimpse of what a Shamanic Being does.

To go back to the process, what happened after receiving the description and the sketched drawing from RenderedFlesh, was that I found an unexpected surprise along my usual path of wandering, the "pipes" he saw in his vision were there in front of me, a pile, tons of them... something which provided me a solution that was much more easy than my imagined plan, I felt it was a gift.

The digitalized video created by RenderedFlesh brought me his vision so clear and loud that I started to hear the voice, the sound, instantly.

Labyrinth Pupil is a presence trapped in a space that he cannot conceive, in a space that calls him, in a moment of awakening, curiosity, his expansion starts into a chaotic form but is just a beginning, he is young... and probably is already perceiving himself from outside.

Our third character was complete and ready to take his place.

(RenderedFlesh) LABYRINTH PUPIL includes the first of the beings that manifested itself to me. To get into the required state of mind I decided to soak in the bath and practise some deep breathing exercises. After getting to a point where I felt deeply relaxed, I extended a mental invitation for the character to show itself. Quite quickly this being wearing a mask made of metal pipes and breathing tubes started to materialize. Peering out from between the tubes and pipes was an eye looking around at me. Surrounding the being was a black empty void which seemed like it extended forever. It felt lonely and trapped, maybe it was the dripping tap in my bath and the clang of the enamel tub but sounds seemed to echo in that world. After Barbara made her discovery of the pipes when they materialized in the real world, we made a 3d scan of them which I used to build the character in 3D. As I worked on the piece, the being stayed with me and started to evolve in different ways. It became less and less human and more machine-like until in the end the only recognisable human part was the eye staring out from multiple screens. I felt like maybe this was some trapped soul unable to free itself from the technological prison it had built for itself. Slowly forgetting its humanity until it was too late. Now all it can do is stare out at the world it left behind.

ONIROSCOPE is now the home of NIGREDO BIRDS, ECHO KEEPER and LABYRINTH PUPIL,

and we are in conversation with the other creatures that desire to move in!


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You can see here the incredible home that RenderedFlesh built for them in virtual reality, by walking inside you will feel the experience of discovery that we went through, and the magic geometry of the architecture can have some secret to tell you personally.

Enjoy and leave us your comment on the post.

(LINK TO THE GALLERY)

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___________________________FOLLOW THE ART____________________________

_______BARBARA TOSTI_(link)____________________________RENDERED FLESH_(link)______