A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’    (Act I)       (2025)

 

A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’    (Act I)       (2025)  

11 mins 45 seconds
Single screen 4K video with sound

Accompanying A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’, as Act II, is The Island’s Collective Dream (2025)

Both videos are part of Adam Chodzko’s The Dreamshare Seer

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Watch  ‘A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’

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A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ (Act I), is a surreal dream-like ‘tutorial’ video.  It shows a guide demonstrating why, and how, to use Adam Chodzko’s The Dreamshare Seer, a public free digital tool which translates sleeping dream descriptions into visual animations. The guide, played by Kent-based musician Angusraze, explores the tool in the style of a YouTube instructional video  – a ‘walkthrough’ – sharing a practical step-by-step process of how to do something. These videos are usually clear, concise and pragmatic, therefore often also dull and cheesy, despite their potential ‘usefulness’. A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ adopts many of the mannerisms of the sensible ordinariness of this form, but here entangling them within the strange, slippery structure of dreams.
Showing off a tool that visualises dreams perhaps needs to follow a dream logic, honouring the extraordinary quality of the oneiric, and the unusual intimacies we each have with our own sleeping visions. It seems that the method of guidance itself must be dreamt. The guide who talks us through the tool’s use is dreaming this process, and, we are told, is themselves being dreamt, by the island.  Nocturnal movements through mosses, grasses, and root systems flow past our guide, and a pair of owls guard the edges of Angusraze’s performance. The Dreamshare Seer is trying to explore, work with and cultivate an ecology of dreaming with a site and its community. The tool offers us the possibility of discovering the place of the dream. Elements of its landscape must then weave into its mediation. ( For more information about the relationship between the specificity of Sheppey, dreams and the tool please see the answer to: Why is this project focusing on, and being pioneered on, the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, UK? )

Angusraze plays the guide as a performer, a persona, along with an appearance by his own recurring character, Soozie.  Angusraze makes music that has been described as ‘all music, all at once’ and dreams can also be understood to share this simultaneity of high energy co-existing differences. It’s an intensity of sound at the opposite end of the spectrum from the generic ethereal music usually adopted to soundtrack a dream sequence in film.  The final images of A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ (Act I) use Angusraze’s ‘For Hanz’ apparently generating the actions of a water fountain in a public pond in Kuala Lumpur. This scene was filmed by Chodzko when researching Malaysian dreamwork there in 2023. The folding together of imagery Chodzko recorded in Malaysia, with Sheppey’s landscapes and dreams also features in The Island’s Collective Dream (2025) (Act II),  with the suggestion that each place could be looking out for the other, another form of guidance.
The role of the guide recurs throughout Chodzko’s work, eg: Better Scenery (2000), Ghost (2010 -) , O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix  (2020) and The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads (2024).

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A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ (Act I), was first exhibited at The Dockyard Church, Sheerness, Isle of Sheppey, Kent (on Imbolc, 1^st February 2024), together with Act II, The Island’s Collective Dream (2025)

A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ (Act I) is a development of an earlier version of a tutorial/walkthrough video for The Dreamshare Seer: The Dreamshare Seer: A 5 minute demo (2024).

Chodzko’s performative lecture about ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ in relation to his wider practice, at Leeds Beckett University, April 2024.

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Credits for A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ (Act I):
The Guide: Angusraze* with Finley Guy as Soozie.
Chorus: Gretchen Egolf, with David Cook, Dave Franklyn, Oliver Edwards and Charlotte Cook.
Music by Angusraze and Shamica Ruddock.

Thank you to the community on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, UK for sharing their nocturnal dreams.
Thank you to Screen South for supporting the making of these two videos.
Thanks also to Catherine Herbert, Emma Leach, Julie Bradshaw, Chris Reed, Shannon Cole, Martin Barbour, James Montgomery at Realising Designs, Isaac Clarke, and the amazing owls at The Kent Falconry Centre/Joe’s Bows.

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*ANGUSRAZE is an extraordinary musician from Deal, Kent, whose intense high-energy experimental sound channels raw radical punk, noise and electronica, all within a wonderful ecstatic spirit of camp; a ‘queer futurity’.  They’ve performed at Café Oto, Ramsgate Music Hall with Melt Banana, and at Contrapop festival.  ANGUSRAZE’s audiovisual work was recently exhibited at Turner Contemporary.