Super-Conscious Dreams: Martin Arnold’s In Tinseltown (2021) and Full Rehearsal (2017)

In Tinseltown and Full Rehearsal are examples of digital found-footage practice that explore the creative potential of the glitch. Featuring Monroe and Mickey, the two films conjure up what Walter Benjamin called figures of a “collective dream”. In his recent work, the artist blasts these two figures open and subjects them to a drastic process of digital decomposition, revealing the inner workings of the imaging system that determines their appearance on screen. In doing so, the glitches and malfunctions of the software reveal the presence of a machinic substratum—the convulsing expression of encoded dreams that carry the repressed traces of the mechanical, the graphic, and the organic. However, in their reliance on live-action footage on the one hand and animation film on the other, the two works arguably stand as examples of two separate forms of unconscious, as introduced by Benjamin in “The Work of Art”. In our analysis of In Tinseltown and Full Rehearsal we suggest that Arnold’s work allows for a radical reconsideration of the visual unconscious as previously defined in 20th century thought, exposing the ways in which not only the frontiers between the functioning of the psyche and the machinic have become progressively more porous, but how the very notion of the unconscious is in question.