Rapid Eye Movement

Dublin Core

Title

Rapid Eye Movement

Subject

Conceptual

Description

This work is my first experience in creating photo books. It is a kind of collaboration between machine and human minds, as well as an experiment with form. I have chosen my favorite photographs over the past few years for this book. Most of them were taken on film while traveling within different countries - Russia, Armenia, Japan, Estonia, Spain and England. I took these photos intuitively as an emotional response to new experiences and impressions. While working with pictures, I tried to use a computer algorithm for compiling a sequence for the book. I created a slide show in “origami” style - such an option was available in the computer program. Photos appeared on the screen in random order, several pieces at once, changing not simultaneously, but in turn. Gathered this way, they gave me associations with sleeping and dreaming, with traveling to another reality. So, accidentally, in collaboration with a computer, I found an algorithm for assembling the book. And although the final version of the photo sequence in the book I created myself, the computer program helped me with the initial idea.
Now everything in the work surrendered to the idea of the dream. The shape of the book allows us to fall into the images, as we do in sleep. The name of the book - Rapid eye movement comes from the name of the phase of sleep in which we actually see dreams. While dreaming, the brain decides what information needs to be stored and remembered, searches for connecting threads between different pieces of information, moves the “data cards” through the “file cabinet” and builds them according to its own algorithms. In other words, sleep is a process that, on the one hand, is regulated by our brain, and on the other hand, is not completely controlled by us. As well as the idea and form of the book, partly given me by machine intelligence.
In the course of work, I added embroidery to some photos. I was captured by the idea of threads, that, on the one hand, connect sleep and reality, and, on the other, create an extra dimension, as it often happens in dreams. The book includes both scans of these embroideries, and pieces of real embroidery, handmade on the pages of the book. I sewed the book together also by hand.
Like a dream - you can start watching my book from any place. Although there are not a lot of texts in the book, I think you can even read fortune on it - ask a question and open it at a random page, and the photos will bring associations and give answers. All you have to do is accept my invitation to fall into this dream and allow yourself to fly away on the wings of fantasies.

Creator

Anna Karaulova

Publisher

Self-published

Date

2020

Format

20 pages that open up, 6 hand embroideries on each copy, hand Japanese binding, shell cover and handmade envelope for packaging

Book Item Type Metadata

Dimensions

15x15x2,5

Number of Pages

20

Number of images

72

Edition Size

70

Place of Publication

Moscow, Russia

Designer

Anastasia Suslova

Editor

Alla Mirovskaya

Printer

Nemakulatura

ISBN

-

Website

https://www.instagram.com/karaulich/

Where to buy

from the author

Citation

Anna Karaulova, “Rapid Eye Movement ,” Photo Book Cafe Archive, accessed April 30, 2025, https://www.photobookcafe-archive.co.uk/items/show/248.

Output Formats