Artists often talk about how they hope their work will fundamentally transform the way their audience thinks, perceives, or experiences reality. As members of that monolithic cultural phenomenon "the audience," we should, perhaps, wonder what certain works are doing to our minds. One piece in particu

Deconstructive, Electronic, Enigmatic, Hallucinatory, Improvised, Kaleidoscopic, Machinistic, Net art, Quirky, Technology

In July of 1883, an average middle-class Jewish family in an average suburb of Prague (then in Austria) ushered into the average world a new creature: Franz Kafka. He would never forgive them for this unnatural act of torture. Franz kept his neurosis quietly to himself throughout his childhood, r

Absurd, Anxiety, Dreamy, Dystopic, Existentialist literature, Hallucinatory, Hypnotic, Intense, Modernist literature, Neurotic, Profane

David Lynch has been charged with making incomprehensible films. In fact, they make perfect sense, but not necessarily to us. An exemplary scene in "Fire Walk with Me" (1992) shows this: Two investigators are to receive their assignment from a very odd-looking woman named Lil. What they receive from

Anxiety, Dreamy, Enigmatic, Hallucinatory, Perverse, Quirky, Surreal, Surrealist film

Jean Epstein had a theory. The star of his theory was the machine -- an anti-hero, a character the audience loved to hate. Epstein recognized the machine as an extension of humans, who manipulate objects, but magnificently immortal. A filmmaker, Epstein cast the camera, his own personal extension, in

Clever, Hallucinatory, Intense, Machinistic, Manic, Surrealist film