Who needs to spend money on a blow torch when you already have a Crème Brûlée torch? I had to heat the eye of the screw enough to open it wide enough for the pulley’s eye to fit through it.

Then the screw was reheated to close it again. Big science here people!

Now that I think about it, I should have tempered the screw by plunging it into a water bath. I’m hoping the heating process didn’t anneal the metal to the point of making it too soft to bear the weight of the lower torso. Hmmm. Perhaps I will try and temper them tomorrow. It should make a really cool hissing sound.

The Dreamer will “pull herself together” utilizing the patented Ovarian Pulley System by Somnabulist Pictures.

The system utilizes the power of the human reproductive system to hold the entire puppet together. It also distributes the weight of the lower half of the body between 3 points of contact instead of one shaft or connection thus making the lower half more stable and reducing stress on the “spine.”

It’s odd… When you consign yourself to a certain path of thinking, ideas previously unknown arrive to walk with you. Thinking about body as landscape has conjured similar ideas presented by different people. The book “Atrocity Exhibition” by G.J. Ballard processes that idea in several places within its pages. Here’s an example: For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature.

Another great landscape/body reference from the same book: A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune… Looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest…

William S. Burroughs put it eloquently in his introduction to the book: The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments.

Right before I started the Ghost Conversation project I happened to see see the film Control. It’s a bio-pic of Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis. Since then I’ve been on a heavy Joy Division kick. For some reason the darkness made real through the music resonates deeply with me. Browsing through a wikipedia article on Joy Division’s album Control I was amazed to find it reference the book Atrocity Exhibition! Atrocity Exhibition is the title track on Control. Apparently Ian Curtis was very fond of the book and worked it into his lexicon of imagery.

Was I subconsciously picking up on Ballards imagery in Curtis’ music? Do themes in Joy Divisions music share a certain resonating intellectual similarity with Ballards writings? Do I somehow resonate with the same themes presented by both artists? Perhaps my ideas are not my own and I’ve unknowingly tapped into a collectively unconscious universal theme.

The other night a striking scene came to me. The Flak sits in an impossibly deep valley waiting. The valley visually parallels the dreamers sexual being with the canon being at its center. As her legs part so too does the valley open giving the Flak an unobstructed shot of the P-38. The analogy here is that the Dreamer is using sex as a weapon to detain her lover the pilot from going to war. She would rather selfishly destroy him herself than have him sacrifice his life to the war.

 
This shooting session also included slow panning landscape shots to inter-cut with the dreamer’s body. Thanks to Jim V. for helping out with the shoot. The picture below shows him set decorating by adding brambles and brush to the landscape.

1 Cup form

2 3/4 Cup light

1 Tbs image capture device

Marinate form in light-image capture device for several moments until light reflects off object.
Remove quickly for 1/60th of a second. Serve warm.

And now begins the most delicate of constructions by a ham-fisted know nothing. The metaphorical crown jewel on the Dreamer puppet is it’s hands. They are designed to be stop-motion functional or at the least, poseable.

First the fingers were life-cast with plaster then set rigid with wood cores.