The Dream Machine 2: The Beirut Festival of Audio-Visual Arts

Organized by the Beirut Art Center and Irtijal and programmed by Hisham Awad, Lamia Joreige and Sharif Sehnaoui, the Dream Machine takes its name from the flicker device designed by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville in 1961.

The second edition of The Dream Machine festival attempts to trace the technical, artistic, and theoretical attributes and operations mobilized by the term “audiovisual” itself, assessing the ways in which the juncture in audio-visual has been theorized, undone, and reformulated.

In addition to hosting a series of live collaborative audio-visual projects, this year’s edition comprises talks, performances, lectures, screenings, commissioned works, and a workshop that revolve around two main clusters. The first relates to the soundtrack, analyzing the ways in which montage, the cinematic and post-cinematic mix, and voiceover interact. Translations and displacements of the voiceover-image coupling, such as those designed in the audio-essay, will also be discussed and performed.

Moreover, the festival will host conversations around the production of and the writing on image editing and sound editing/mixing, in the light of recent theoretical and artistic engagement with what is called “post-cinematic” montage, in which sensorial, extra-narrative associations proliferate. The second cluster of concepts and practices investigates the connection between sound and location, tapping into the spatial and temporal systems assembled by the field recording and the sound map.

Cost: 10$ only for the first two days.