James Khazar /Illuminated Dreams
James Khazar & Illuminated Dreams
Illuminated Dreams is an installation consisting of an interactive book of narratives from dreams chronicled by the artist over the last two years. The manuscript is presented as an Adobe Flash application playing on a self-contained computer system in a lecturn with a vertically oriented 24-inch diagonal 1920 by 1200 pixel resolution monitor. The interactive book is situated within a form resonant with medieval illuminated manuscripts.
The Illuminated Dreams Project MFA Thesis
About my work
My work emerges out of the uncanny, the double-take, out of those things which make us think twice about the meanings, intentions, and hidden connections in the world around us. My practice seeks to engage my audience with the fluid inter-connections that are all around them. I do this through works which turns viewers into more than just a passive participants, but into inter-actors – individuals who through their agency within the work becomes intimately engaged with the it in both active and reactive ways, and modifies the state of the work itself.
Images from the Installation
Images below are liscened under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License and should be attributed to James Khazar, 2007
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Flash Movie
The Flash Movie which makes up the on-screen installation is 1200 pixels wide by 1920 pixels high in size. Click 
here to see a scaled down version (640 x 1024)(warning: this is a non-streaming 30 MB file and will take a while to load), or you can download the .fla source file here.
About Illuminated Dreams
Illuminated Dreams’ format is based on illuminated manuscripts. Those manuscripts were developed in the early part of the Middle Ages as a form of reproduction for sacred texts. By the thirteenth century these manuscripts start to demonstrate sophisticated use of textual devices, including glossa and marginalia. Glossae were usually commentary texts laid out between the lines of the main text of the manuscript. This inserted text spoke with a critical and authoritative voice, often guiding the user – clergy who presented the scriptures to their flock – on the institutionally official interpretation of the text. While glossa served an institutional and exegetical function, marginalia – often a lined area on the side of the main text and filled in by the individual clergyman who used the book – served the function of localizing the commentary for the use of the presenter.
Illuminated Dreams, is an artwork that engages its inter-actors with the fascinating allusions in dream narratives and brings them in direct contact with those allusions as floating or empty signifiers. It gives them a field of associations in which they are actively liberated to make their own interpretations. It bypasses traditional narrative forms – stories with a beginning, middle and end – and uses the intentionless narrative of dreams. It bypasses traditional illustrative forms – images with manifest connections to the narrative – with images generated by a process that explicitly circumvents those manifest connections. Illuminated Dreams’ inter-actors are thereby freed from dealing with the dream narrator as an author who tries to dictate closed meanings on the text, but are instead connected with minimal authorial mediation to an open plane of interpretation in which they are actively engaged in experiencing Roland Barthes’ structuring of myth. They are invited by the structure of Illuminated Dreams to freely bring their own “tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” into the process of interpretation. Further, in bringing the dream allusions to the connections brought by the inter-actor, Illuminated Dreams engages Freud’s uncanny through the sometimes explicitly uncanny connections in dreams and through the irrational process of consciously examining unconscious allusions for their connectedness to the waking world.
Further Developments
After June 2007
Exhibited @ Compass 2007: New Art from the University of California's MFA Programs
New dream added.
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