“Thus the whole technical effort of Surrealism, from its very beginning up to the present day, has consisted in multiplying the ways to penetrate the deepest layers of the mental.”

- Andre Breton, Surrealist Situation of the Object, 1935

I am new to tribe.net and this tribe, and it’s really heartening to find this tribe and see so many members. Creatively, I’ve been kind of a lapsed surrealist lately; logic and proportion have ruled my endeavors. After years of walking through the wilderness, I’m looking forward to some stimulating communications with fellow travelers.

I always interpreted surrealism as opening the door of the unconscious and of chance into the conscious world, and the artistic creations are sort of snap shots of what was experienced in the moment. The original surrealism was more than an artistic movement - there was also an esoteric side that ranges from the trances of the early twenties to Breton’s writings after the break with communism. He quotes Rimbaud: “we must all be seers”.

What I ‘m wondering about is, what kind of surrealist activities do the fellow tribe members take part in, either alone or in a group? Trance states, exquisite corpse games, derangement of the senses, collages, chance operations, use of psychoactive substances, found objects? And how do you translate these experiences into physical artifacts? How do you open yourself to the surreal experience, and how do you capture it for others to experience?

In my own life, I have used all of the above at one time or another, alone and in various combinations. As a student I wrote stream of consciousness poetry and short prose, and some drawings, usually after use of psychoactive substances. Years later, I started making sculptures out of clay that resembled the drawings of my youth, then went through a phase of found object sculpture from junk on the street, and as I progressed in using tools I went into wood carving. I’m highly influenced by tribal masks and sculpture (as this is another door into the unconscious), so most of my works are some sort of anthropomorphic being, which I think of as someone I met on my adventures – either I was breaking through another dimension to meet them, or they were coming across to me.