Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger, a HyperCard stack produced by Louise Krasniewicz, is part of a larger research project that analyzes Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the most significant cultural icons of the end of the twentieth century. This serious academic research, conducted for the past five years by UCLA anthropologist and artist Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz, an artist, poet, and associate professor of English at CUNY, explores how Schwarzenegger has permeated every aspect of our culture╤from our vernacular language (╥I╒ll be back╙ and ╥Hasta la vista, baby╙), body images, and perceptions of violence to how to be influential and powerful and fulfill the American dream. What does it mean, we ask, to be an American entering the twenty-first century with Arnold as our economic, political, moral, technological, and romantic orientation guide?
The mere mention of Arnold Scharzenegger, we found, elicited amazing stories and speculations. While documenting and analyzing the remarkable proliferation of Arnoldian landmarks and influences in our culture and everyday lives, we ourselves began to be a part of the phenomenon. We began to have dreams about Arnold and our research.
Dreams don╒t have a place in academic research. They are not tangible, can╒t be replicated, and are impossible to analyze coherently. However, we found that these dreams, now numbering around 200, were the bridge to understanding and experiencing how Arnold was arranging the desires and fantasies of our entire culture.
Dreams provide a source of living chaos that rarely exceeds the control of the living organism but always exceeds the previous scope of life and experience. Dreams are wildly imaginative, fragmented, incoherent, noncumulative, and suspect in everyday exchanges. They provide an alternative to our over-controlled existence that can be used productively even when put into a comfortable narrative form. The increase in vantage points dreams provide has been reason enough to include them in our work.
It also makes sense to put this dream work in an interactive, nonlinear form. Computer interactivity is the best technological medium available for the simulation of the dream experience; it allows for the fantastic dream experience even as it adheres closely to the rational world. Our dreams of Arnold Schwarzenegger permitted us to elaborate upon both the minute and momentous impressions, anxieties, and desires that we and our culture have about him. These elaborations give us a much less limited point of view than we would have without the dreams. By making this material available in an interactive, multilayered experience through HyperCard, we hope to provide some variety to a society and mass culture that increasingly devalue such differences.
This version of Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger (1994) is a template for a larger interactive piece that incorporates more dreams, sounds, QuickTime movies, and analysis of both dream experiences and Schwarzenegger, as well as a build-your-own-Arnold-dream section.
About the Author
Louise Krasniewicz is a research associate in the department of anthropology at UCLA as well as an artist and producer of computer-based multimedia and digital videos. She has recently taught a course in 3-D visualization at the UCLA film school laboratory for new media.
