Utopia:Sleepwalking

Writer and conceptual artist Yason Banal‘s ongoing curatorial project:

Young Star @ Philippine Star
Utopia in Progress
SLEEPWALKING
By Yason Banal Friday
December 7, 2007

Since SLEEPWALKING came out in STAR two years ago, it has been interested in exploring the potential of “the printed page” as an imaginative space for art and ideas. There had been e-mails, phone conversations, dream sequences, suicide notes, conceptual works and critical theories, punctured with sex, politics and culture. Beginning this month, I will occasionally be converting this newspaper column into a curatorial space, inviting creatives, thinkers and curators to make unique works or organize special projects specifically for publication — the works will not exist anywhere else in the same form as they will have here. Spread sporadically over 12 issues in the course of one year, UTOPIA:SLEEPWALKING will serve as a platform for exciting and experimental “young stars” from various disciplines and countries to create “projects for the printed page,” thus communicating such “propositions” to a broader public. It is imperative for an exchange to happen, not just of ideas and images, but of communities and contexts; these gestures, this space, can only hope to be insightful and transformative for both creator and audience.

First to be featured in UTOPIA:SLEEPWALKING was the world premiere of John Torres’s “film for the printed page,” Flash Elemental, which appeared with the above quoted text on December 7, 2007. A version of Flash Elemental appears on the project’s blog. More of these online versions will be uploaded every month.

[Above image is a “still” from Flash Elemental.]