Panexlab— un film de Olivier Séror /

Depuis près de dix ans, le laboratoire de la PANEX effectue des expériences secrètes ayant conduit une équipe de scientifiques à enregistrer des rêves de volontaires humains endormis. PANEXLAB présente une sélection de 7 enregistrements de rêves.  

For almost ten years, PANEX Laboratory has been carrying out secret experiments that led a scientific crew to record the dreams of human sleeping volunteers. PANEXLAB presents a selection of 7 of these recorded dreams.

PANEXLAB is an experimental hoax involving fake scientific documents, an exploration of the language of the dreams through the movie language (unless it's the opposite), and experimental post-production techniques. It takes the shape of an hybrid object : seven short films, put together as a musical „suite“ or a rock album. 

In 1890, Von Strümpell, a German neurologist, described dreams as taking only « the initial section of lived experiences, but the next step misses, is transformed, or replaced by another one. »… This definition, with anticipate from many years the invention of movie editing, gave me the urge to experiment on a narrative line which would interrogate the language of the dreams using the movie language… 

I started from memories of personal dreams, or collected around me. From these stories, I imagined mise-en-scenes leading the audience to feel the emotions of the dreamer. These emotions are getting around fear, uneasiness, anxiety, and strange desires… Nightmare’s emotions.

I decided the dreams would be recorded by a machine, the NEUROSCANNER, certainly state-of-the-art, but giving huge technical problems, as all prototypes. In sciences, research workers often deal with an issue : they don’t know if some of the phenomena the observe are artifacts due to all the different machines they are using or if they deal with the very phenomenon they want to explore.
I wanted to give this exact sense in PANEXLAB.

Therefore I first decided to work with a Lo-Res camera : an Iphone 3GS. But the footage was still too obvious. That’s why I worked on a special processing for the images in postproduction, consisting in modifying, almost damaging the signal of the « dreams » I had shot, using "datamoshing" and delaying of the images.

These effects were designed with Guillaume Dumas, a research worker in cognitive sciences in the Center of Brain and Spinal Cord at the Pitié-Salepêtriere Hospital in Paris. Our effects should not prevent from following the narrative line of the « dreams », but stir up trouble, as if the matter of the dream itself was not clearly penetrable, and kept a mystery… Which would be its very center. I perform these modifications LIVE during the screening.