Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This ...
Installation, Jan Rohlf & Maverick, dimensions variable, 2000 - 2002

The project Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This... is a cluster of closely linked works. In changing constellations they create an open archive of intimate gestures which represent formative human experiences that are connected to the reception of contemporary pop music. The archive is a mobile platform in the form of a modular installation that could temporarily take over and define any given space. The original aim was to initiate a personal exchange of people’s pop-biographies and thus collect new entries to the existing archive. The project is finished and no further entries are collected.

At the core of the project was the series of events Personal Abstracts to which guests were invited to present aspects of their own music collections to a small audience through biographical and anecdotal perspectives. The presentations were documented in audio-documents and detailed playlists, supplemented by short interviews and photographic portraits, which later were made accessible in the archive. Every guest choosed his/her own title for the presentation, which lasted from two up to four hours.

Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This ... deals with modes of identification and self-invention initiated and influenced by contemporary pop music. Pop music here acts as a referential system to provide a common vocabulary that makes intimate experiences translatable into expressions that are largely understandable for many. Although individually loaded with feelings, memories and moods, these expressions are bound to specific codes that produce divergent statements to like-minded and outsiders. The same vocabulary thus gives the option of correspondence and continuous differentiation. "Listen to my music and realize what I would never dare to say to you..." Pop music supplies a channel under individual control that mediates between the subjective inner view and the outside world. In possession of such a channel one’s own pop-music-personality for many becomes the most important organ for self-expression. This way pop-experiences achieve a biographic relevance that later are recalled and shared in the famous "musical conversation". The common value that is ascribed to pop-phenomena as part of one's own way of life provides a secure bridge of understanding that leads to a communication which reaches deep into the personality´s multiple encoded intimacy.