The Digital Vessel: Google Classroom

Upon registration, participants enter our shared digital workspace. This classroom serves as our collective repository for optional readings, archival imagery and weekly discussion threads. It provides a dedicated room to introduce your research interests, trade strange fragments with the cohort and anchor the collaborative work running parallel to our live sessions.

The Architecture of the Lab

The two-hour sessions operate as an integrated studio laboratory. There is no hard line between the talk and the practice; instead, living philosophy and collaborative experiments are completely interspersed. You will be using historical Surrealist games, cut-ups and text fragments to test these concept-tools directly on the page in real-time.

Week I: The Automatic Gesture & The Marvellous Spark

An entry through the physical threshold of the page, anchored in André Breton’s definitive definition of automatism: “dictation of thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason.”

This session focuses on the raw playfulness of the self - a deliberate letting go of judgment, aesthetics and standard sense to see what actually arrives on the paper when you stop trying to be clever. We bring in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense to investigate how meaning is not a hidden treasure buried in a deep psychic well, but a surface effect that flashes spontaneously at the interface where language and bodies meet. We look at how the surrealist juxtaposition operates on this two-dimensional boundary.

The distant realities forced onto the page cannot be planned or house-trained. Instead, the greater the distance between those realities, the more powerful the spark that strikes between them, generating the Marvellous - the sudden, disruptive landscape where ordinary reality completely overflows its containers to reveal something entirely unexpected.

To navigate this terrain, the studio praxis builds towards the automatic method using collaborative Surrealist games. Approaching nonsense not as a failure of meaning, but as a direct catalyst for generating entirely new ways of being, these games serve to actively loosen up the tight binds of sense. The hand is prepared to generate a sustained automatic piece to take far beyond the laboratory.

Week II: Absolute Chance, The Petrifying Coincidence, & Desire

An entry into the surrealist definition of chance - approached not as passive probability, statistical odds or a neat roll of the dice, but as pure, radical randomness.

This session centers on Penelope Rosemont’s description of petrifying coincidence: the acute, slightly eerie awareness that something massive is occurring around us, that we are actively involved in it, and that our own hidden desire is a crucial factor.

This space moves past the comforting idea that objects are just inert, dead matter. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy that an object or an image possesses its own autonomous impetus, the chance encounter becomes a reciprocal meeting of desires. Through this collaborative, inexhaustible enterprise, things break through the illusory boundaries between the multiple modes of reality, push past the ordinary, exhausting compulsions of daily wants, shifting the focus to discover what it means to simply be a desiring being chasing an unnameable longing.

The active studio praxis intersperses cut-ups and the Exquisite Corpse throughout the session. These collaborative games weaponise absolute, blind randomness on the page to shatter linear structure, allowing an unexpected, desiring reality to flash directly onto the surface of the text.

Week III: The Found Object & The Attentiveness of the Street

An encounter with the market, the outmoded debris of capitalism, and the archive of the everyday. We begin by dismantling the traditional dualism that separates mind from matter.

Rooting the inquiry in Carl Jung’s original concept of the psychoid - and what Joseph Cambray coined the psychoid imagination - this session enters the threshold where the distinction between physical matter and internal psychic states entirely dissolves. We treat the found object not as a passive metaphor for a feeling, but as a material entity co-arising with the psyche and the mind in the live encounter.

Henri Bergson’s philosophy of practical utility serves to analyze how ordinary consciousness restricts perception to a narrow network of practical, survival-driven labels. The investigation tracks what happens when an object drops out of its commercial prison, causing this cognitive filter to smash. Stripped of social utility, both the psyche and the material thing collapse into an unsettling freedom, allowing Georges Bataille’s concept of The Accursed Share to take over - releasing an uncontainable, non-utilitarian energy that overflows ordinary containers. This structural collapse maps onto Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the surrealist’s flea market excursions to test his concept of profane illumination. The work explores whether looking closely at obsolete commodities can generate a materialist epiphany - a sudden shock to disrupt the social dreamworld of consumerism, transforming outmoded debris into an active, revolutionary charge.

The active studio praxis introduces a collaborative Surrealist game explicitly designed to disrupt Bergson's filter of utility in real-time. Participants experiment with describing material objects and common desk spaces entirely stripped of their assigned names, functional definitions, and practical uses.

Week IV: The Mantic Stain & Communicating Vessels

A descent into the esoteric and alchemical currents of the movement, explicitly dismantling the comforting trope of "inner alchemy." We subvert the traditional projection model that treats matter as a passive screen for the psyche. Extending Carl Jung’s alchemical research, we look at alchemy not as a dry mental exercise, but as a tangible, material praxis - an intense doing where you cannot think your way to the Philosopher’s Stone, but must wrestle with the physical weight of the substances themselves.

We explore the radical, collective nature of the Great Work, tracking how the historical practice was built on collaboration. Moving between the necessary partnership of the soror mystica over the furnace and the transnational networks of text and receipts traded between global practitioners, we reframe the alchemical vessel. We move away from the idea of a single, isolated container in favor of the alembic - the twinned, communicating flasks where substances continuously circulate and feed into one another, matching André Breton’s vision of open chambers between dreaming and waking in Communicating Vessels.

This fluid architecture guides our study of the independent, occult work of female Surrealists like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Ithell Colquhoun. For these creators, the image was an autonomous, living substance. This week loops back to the threshold of our first session, treating the alchemical lapis not as a finished, static object to be achieved, but as an ongoing, monstrous coniunctio that is always being unmade and remade in the live encounter.

The active studio praxis directly executes Colquhoun’s concept of the mantic stain as a radical psychomorphology. We overturn the traditional clinical approach to images and dreams, which uses interpretation to filter out and discard the uncomfortable excess that cannot be accounted for. Instead, we house that excess directly inside our practice.

Prior to the session, you will be assigned a blind visual fragment drawn from Colquhoun’s esoteric Tarot of Colour deck to serve as your raw prima materia. In the laboratory, we approach these stains with a highly receptive, automatic focus, allowing the autonomous impetus of the image to dictate its own trajectory on the paper. Through this real-time creative experiment, a new substance is born out of the psychoid imagination - a text that refuses to reduce the strange, but includes the full weight of the unnameable longing.