Testimonial Loudspeakers

Public art involving interactive installation, sound, performance and writing.

I installed a coat hanger full of loud speakers in the center of a major crossroad in the suburb I live in in Beijing. Each speaker repeats a different strange dream. After about half an hour, the traffic police came and asked me if it were propaganda against the government.

Here are a few weird dreams repeated by the speakers:

· I dreamed that someone was killing me with a very badly made tool. In fact, the device was so malfunctioning that my murderer kept apologizing, he said ”Sorry. Just a minute… Almost done. Almost.” As I watched him struggle with the device, he gave me an old flip phone to call someone and leave my last words. He said he started being a murderer in the epoch of flip phones. He also mentioned the phone plan was “pay as you go.” I dialed my mom’s number and said: “Mom, all my life and career I had never been able to tell realism from surrealism…”

· I bought a pet lizard as long and thick as my arm. I kept it confined to a corner of my bed. One night when I awoke from a bad dream however, I noticed a yellow liquid starting to drip out of its mouth, very slowly, bright oily drops. I was so exhausted from my bad dream that I fell back asleep again. In that dream, the dripping quickened, and the yellow drops slowly turned to brown, then red. The lizard was writhing in agony. I woke to see a last exertion of thick red liquid before it collapsed…Then I fell asleep again, my face close to the puddle. I remember being disgusted but paralyzed that I couldn’t move. The whole time I was thinking about how to clean up. Then I woke.