Pina Piccolo in collaboration with lamacchinasognante.com and Micaela Contoli (web designer at Openmultimedia) announce the launch of www.thedreamingmachine.com, a writing and visual arts project, taking a transnational, multi genre, intersectional approach.
To disambiguate the title “The Dreaming Machine”, we can say it is inspired by “La Macchina Sognante” the name of a posthumous book by the late Brazilian and Italian author Julio Monteiro Martins, whose work we introduce in this issue. In expanding upon Cocteau’s notion that a great literary masterpiece is only a dictionary in disorder, Julio Monteiro Martins remarked that in the “explosive” internal economy of great works of literature there is a shift and a poetic enhancement of each word, which is illuminated in a different way than usual inside the dreaming machine which is a great work of literature.
As the very survival of humanity, at this time requires a great deal of illumination and dreams at any longitude and latitude of the planet, as writers and visual artists we feel the need for such a machine. Instead of delegating this task to a single literary masterpiece, we hope to make a dent by creating an online space which, by placing side by side a mosaic of innovative, border crossing writings from all over the world, may contribute to the shifts and poetic illuminations required.
The images that accompany each post are meant to help activate the dreamy location of the senses by dissonance, harmony, irony, the sublime, the grotesque, all meant to push along that shift in paradigm we so much need.
We have experienced some of the potential of this approach in our two year experiment with lamacchinasognante,com, the Italian language online container of writings from the world, which is, so to say, ‘the mothership’ of this new adventure. We hope that this new project can expand the pool of contributors and audiences.
At the risk of being accused of crass pragmatism, for the moment, let us say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so click on www.thedreamingmachine.com and buon appetito!
