Dali’s “Persistence of Memory” & Alice 2

The DreaMR series “Dreaming with Mixed Reality” engages with the human experience of dreaming through art, music and consciousness science via surrealism. We position the audience in a liminal space that blends the real with the un-real, the conscious with the unconscious, the physical world with the world of dreams.

In the first scene, you will hear the second movement of Prokofiev’s Sonata N4, Op.29 (1917), “After Old Notebooks,” and explore our 3D representation of Salvador Dali’s surrealist painting “The Persistence of Memory.” When you go through the portal, you arrive in the second scene, inspired by Dali’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Here, you can grow flowers, invite butterflies to land on your palms, and feel the magic of mind wandering. The scene features three chapters from Carroll’s second Alice book “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There” with narration by Mads Haahr and music by Svetlana Rudenko with some quotations from classical music.

Both Prokofiev (1891-1953) and Dali (1904-1989) lived in the period of surrealism’s bloom. French critics regarded Prokofiev’s opera “Love to the Three Oranges” (1921) as highly surrealistic due to its juxtaposition of tonalities and themes, and the choice of libretto. Music consciousness is associative: The perception of time is the connecting element in Prokofiev’s sonata and the melting clocks of Dali – both engage with the subjective nature of memories of the past.