Rapid Eye Movement

Self-published photobook by Anna Karaulova

Hand embroidery on each copy, all 70 copies are signed and numbered
20 pages
15×15 cm
Shell cover and handmade envelope for packaging

Printed in Nemakulatura, Moscow

Curator: Alla Mirovskaya
Designer: Anastasia Suslova

Going through the book

The concept and how the book was created

About the book from the artist

This work is my first experience in creating photobooks. 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 the “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.