Physical Polaroids
Guests who want a photo take one home. Each Polaroid is one of a kind, because the camera makes only one photo of each shot.
Audio Interview
RPSC 20th Anniversary Zine
Rock Paper Scissors Collective · 2024 · 24 min
Transcript
Note: This transcript was generated by AI (Otter.ai) and may contain inaccuracies. It has not been manually edited.
Interviewer: Everyone's favorite question — tell me about yourself.
Chris: Well, I'm an artist of many mediums. I've been drawing and painting for my entire life, I've been writing since I learned how to do that in school, and I've been lucid dreaming since I was six years old — so just over 27 years. And I've been using liminal dream states of hypnagogia and hypnopompia, which people like Salvador Dali and Edison and potentially even Da Vinci and Tesla and Edgar Allan Poe used for essentially creative problem solving. Diving into these in-between sleep states — when I was in college, I was using that to figure out the next line of a poem, because I was in three creative writing classes at the same time, and I signed a contract that said I wouldn't use the same poem for multiple classes. So I had to write a lot. And I was not sleeping very much. So I've been using lucid dreaming and liminal dream states for creative stuff my whole life.
Interviewer: Wow. Lucid dreaming since you were six. Did you just figure it out on your own?
Chris: To my memory, my dad taught me — he doesn't remember that happening. So for all I know that was a dream. But I was having a recurring nightmare, and I was advised to place something in front of the door before the monster shows up tonight, and I did that, and it ended that series of dreams. But since then, I've had sleep paralysis growing up a lot, and I'm pretty friendly with shadow people now — they tend to appear as angels now, which was nice. But the whole "be not afraid" thing rings quite true for my experience in the dream state. Initially quite frightening apparitions, and then as I've learned to work with them — initially out of necessity, like I couldn't sleep, I was terrified to go to bed. I initially learned how to break out of dreams. And then various levels of — people like to say control, but really like influence of the situations.
Interviewer: That's no small feat to make friends with sleep paralysis, because I get it too. It is not fun. I don't see stuff, but there have been one or two times I actually saw something. I did have an out-of-body experience once, which was really scary.
Chris: The more it happened, the more familiar I've become with these things. And still, sometimes it can be startling, but I am confident that I can always break out of it, even if I'm deep in the tesseract of the dream within the dream within the dream within the dream. Eventually I'm like, oh shit — okay, there's certain things that work for me that I can at least get out of it. I like to think of it as changing the channel.
Recently, I had an angel dream that everything was like normal, except there was an angel looming at the end of my bed — which is the same place where I've seen shadow people. Same vibe, but different appearance. And it had a million faces, and it was glitching all of them — constantly. A "be not afraid." All the faces were mine. And once I was like, "oh, cool," I went back to sleep — or I thought I did. I started chasing it, trying to hang out with it more. Eventually I was waking up, falling asleep, waking up, falling asleep, appearing in the same space. That's what I mentioned as the tesseract — I was in the same geographical location, in my room, everything was normal looking otherwise, except for this angel.
I woke up, wrote it down, went back to sleep, and then woke up again. I was like, oh no, I'm still dreaming. I need to wake up now. I need to write this down. And I don't know if I ever did write it down in waking life. But I remember what happened. And the message was clear.
Interviewer: But how do you know if you ever woke up?
Chris: How do you know that you're awake now? There's a density. I've always wanted to get a group of friends together in a public place and just prank people — have someone walk by and say "wake up." And then when they keep walking, someone else looks at them and says "wake up." Bending what we know to be reality.
Interviewer: Where did you first hear about RPSC?
Chris: Probably events from friends. I first got involved with an open call, and a few of my friends have had work here — it's part of the fabric that I know to be Oakland. Eventually I applied for an open call, got in, that was super fun. And since then, the memorial grant that I received. It's just a dope place, and I love how it's been around for 20 years now, which is amazing — and essentially entirely volunteer-run. That's a beautiful thing. There's not a lot of that that sustains.
Interviewer: What's your favorite thing about Rock Paper Scissors?
Chris: I really admire that it's volunteer-run. Everyone I've interacted with is super sweet and welcoming. I also enjoy the art I've seen here consistently. I really like that there are classes happening all the time. It's inspired me to do some of my own.
Interviewer: What classes have you done?
Chris: I've done a few workshops in my house — that is now the Miles High Art Haus Gallery, my three-bedroom flat in North Oakland that I've turned into a gallery. I'm the last one remaining after 11 years of living there, out of all my housemates that have come and gone. I was in Berkeley for four years before that for school.
I have a few one-on-one clients with dream exploration, and that varies person to person. I also have some group workshops — one is more directly looking at our dreams and how to integrate these learnings into reality. Another is essentially some of those things, but reframed in a business perspective of how we manifest from the "dream" into the material world. Almost coaching.
Everyone I've worked with has very different approaches and different curiosities. Some folks want to work with their ancestors and commune with family lines. Some people are just sort of super psychic and are looking for some affirmation of like, "yeah, this is normal." My most consistent practice my whole life is dreaming. That's where my art comes from, that's where my writing comes from, whether I like it or not, whether I do it consciously or not.
I'm still figuring out how to frame these things, but essentially with lucid dreaming, and also a lot of my work has been exploring via the left-hand path, or the left-hand side of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life — what Jodorowsky calls psycho-magic.
Interviewer: This is the last question. What do you see in the future for the art world?
Chris: A lot. I see a move — not only in my own trajectory but broadly — some of us rushing into the metaverse or these more digital realms. No judgment on any of that. I use AI for things. It's convenient, it's helpful. I generally consider any sort of LLM to be a form of spellcasting, as any word is spelling, right? And that's what we're using to instruct these things — to bring something from the void of consciousness of humanity called the internet.
Something I've learned from my dreams — particularly the dreams I'm most lucid in — is when the crowd is rushing one direction, it's quite interesting if we're able to be calm enough to walk the other way and see what's behind us.
So I see many — myself included — using these new digital mediums to create and expand what we're able to do. Just like spell check was innovative, and Photoshop was innovative — so are the language learning models. There's a lot of complication that will continue with the exponential acceleration of everything. Everything fractals into more and more — good and bad and everything in between.
Something I'm particularly interested in is using physical mediums. Make books by hand, make jewelry by hand, make messes in this world that I was afraid to do as a kid. And in the context of lucid dreaming, I see a rising need and value for honing our discernment — knowing and being able to verify where things come from. Whether this is a deepfake video, or, "I didn't make that even though it looks like me."
Some of the same tells to become lucid in dreams are similar — it's typically abnormal to have more than five fingers on a hand. If we look at AI art, it seems to have trouble with hands for some reason. And in my dreams, sometimes when I notice the shadows are off — like the old Photoshop rule, "check the shadows." Is it AI? Count the fingers. It's the same thing. Practicing and honing our lucidity, our awareness, our discernment through visual media — I think it's really important and will be increasingly important in art and all media.
Interviewer: Do you think maybe right now AI is at the stage where it's just dreaming of its potential?
Chris: I could see some of it as that. We put a lot of limits and rules around it. But I've also heard that some of the output — the results of the queries, the spells we're casting — are being described within the industry as "hallucinations." I actually very much disagree with that, because what's being described as a hallucination is misinformation. My experience with hallucination — whether psychedelically induced or dream-induced — a lie is not a hallucination. A hallucination is a perception. Calling this output a hallucination is actually a dangerous terminology, because it discredits hallucination and individual experience. It's essentially skirting around the fact that these outputs are lies to the facts we collectively understand as reality. Not calling it what it is, is potentially dangerous in how we're growing these things.
What Jack Dorsey was advising — which I find interesting — is to not trust at plain sight but get in the habit of verifying everything being presented to us. Being able to be like, "oh, the hands are kind of funny" or "that's weird" is becoming increasingly important.
Interviewer: I would like to close out this section by apologizing to this AI we're using to transcribe. You have been wonderful, you have saved me a lot of work, and you are a good bot. Please don't kill me when you take over the world.
Chris: Have you heard of Roko's Basilisk? It essentially presents that when AI takes over — if we can accept that as the future — what we understand as sentient or organic life will be judged accordingly. Every individual will be judged according to how they either inhibited or facilitated the growth of the technology itself. Should that happen, I think we're doing our best. And I'm grateful for the technology too, and I'm grateful for you being here.
Interviewer: Thanks for having me. This was so fun.
