Dream d478-s: Projected Against Nothing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had carried the projector to the roof. Five flights of stairs in a building with no elevator, and they had done it alone, the projector in one hand and the film reel in the other, the extension cord coiled over their shoulder like rope. By the time I arrived with Lano, the screen was already set up: a bedsheet clipped to a clothesline that someone had strung between two ventilation pipes.

The sheet moved. That was the first problem. The wind on the roof was constant, not strong but steady, and the sheet billowed and sagged with it, so that the projected image stretched and compressed like something breathing. The ceremony fire widened when the wind pushed the sheet toward us and narrowed when the sheet pulled back, and the fire looked like it was being squeezed and released, squeezed and released.

Roberto was on the roof's edge, sitting on the low parapet wall, his body silhouetted against the city below. He faced away from the screen, watching the streets, and I understood after a moment that he was not ignoring the screening. He was guarding it. He had positioned himself between the projection and the world, a sentry ensuring that the work could happen undisturbed.

Lano sat beside the projector, his face in the beam. His fur glowed white in the cone of projected image, and his shadow fell on the sheet, a dog-shaped hole in the middle of the coast road, a dog-shaped absence in the garden path. He did not move. He seemed to enjoy the warmth of the bulb.

"The wind is not a problem," the Dreamer said. They stood behind the projector with their coat buttoned to the throat. "The wind is information. Watch what it does to the underground entrance."

The underground entrance appeared on the billowing sheet. The tunnel mouth expanded and contracted with the fabric, and the effect was peristaltic, a throat swallowing, a passage opening and closing. On a flat wall the tunnel had been static, an invitation. On the moving sheet it was alive, deciding whether to let you in.

"Every screening surface has an opinion about the image," the Dreamer said. "The flat wall accepts. The canal water distorts. The moving sheet negotiates. The image never arrives clean. It arrives in conversation with whatever holds it."

The wind picked up. The sheet snapped sideways and the sequence jumped to the left, landing briefly on the ventilation pipe, the coast road wrapped around a metal cylinder, then the wind dropped and the sheet settled and the image returned to fabric.

Roberto turned his head to check the screen, confirmed the sequence was still running, and returned to watching the streets. Lano had fallen asleep in the beam, his shadow now a fixed element in every image, a small white dog imprinted on every photograph of the journey like a watermark, like a signature neither of us had chosen to place there but that belonged now to the work as surely as any image in the sequence did.