Bad Dreams [Paperback]

Kevin Kelly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 25, 2002

I once took a class with the brilliant black and white photographer Minor White. He had us perform all kinds of wonderful exercises on our photographs. At the time of the workshop (in autumn of 1971), I was spending a great deal of my life trudging around upstate New York with a tripod and large format camera making slightly abstract black and white images. My favorite Minor White exercise was his request that we draw or sketch our own photographs. This non-intuitive idea tickled me, and I got out my pen and ink and eagerly started.

The first image I drew surprised me. What I seemed to see in my own close-up picture of the decaying paint on a rusty outdoor sign was a one-legged man in shorts chained to the night sky. I have absolutely no idea where that image came from.

I continued to sketch what I saw in other photographs I had recently done, and the resulting drawings continue to disturb me. The same guy in shorts kept showing up, entangled in all kinds of unresolved tensions. By the tenth one, I found that I could easily get into the state of mind, or rather state of no-mind, to start drawing. The emerging theme seemed to be "bad dreams." I would probe myself for bad dreams, and record. By the eleventh image I found that I didn’t even need the photograph. I would just relax, try to "see" a bad dream, and then draw.

For several years afterward, long after I had stopped taking abstract black and white images, I would occasionally take out a sheet of typing paper, open my bottle of India ink and with a pen in hand slip into a "bad dream" trance to draw. It was like going to the movies because I felt I was watching someone else draw. Maybe this is what "channeling" feels like, I thought, because I don’t feel much responsibility for what comes out. I’m just passing them on as the delighted messenger.

I kept this pile of sketches in an envelope in a file cabinet and came across them while moving. I decided to reproduce the series here in this homemade book for several reasons. One, why not? The drawings were lonely and bored, and doing little good stuffed in darkness and kept from view. They are inconsequential doodles, but I’ve learned late in life that whatever marginal value they have can only be gathered by being shared. Two, the exercise of drawing photos is a good one to try and to disseminate. And Three, maybe others in the audience can tell me what these images mean. What don’t I see?

Four, and most importantly, I really enjoyed these and maybe others would enjoy seeing them too. I hope so.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired magazine in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently Editor-At-Large for Wired. From 1984-1990, Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. The non-profit Whole Earth Review is a small, yet influential, journal that consistently published trend-making topics years before other publications noticed them. In the late 80s, Kelly conceived and oversaw the publication of four versions of the Whole Earth Catalogs. Whole Earth Catalogs are award-winning compendiums evaluating all the best "tools" available for self-education. In 1988 Kelly edited, published, and wrote much of "Signal," a Whole Earth Catalog of personal communication tools, which evaluated the technologies of faxes, satellite TV, cellular, digital retouching, online systems and the whole emerging world of digital technology. Kelly was a founding board member of the WELL, a Sausalito-based teleconferencing system. The WELL is a pioneering online service started in 1985 by the Point Foundation The WELL is considered by the growing Internet population to be a model of online culture, and a pioneer in developing online communities. As director of the Point Foundation, Kelly was involved in initiating several techno-culture experiments. He launched Cyberthon in 1990, the first round-the-clock virtual reality jamboree. This brought together for the first time, all existing virtual reality prototypes and allowed 400 invited guests to try them out. It was the first chance the lay public had to try VR. Kelly was also co-founder of the annual Hackers' Conference, a weekend rendezvous which in 1984 brought together three generations of legendary computer programmers for the first time. Kelly is the author of "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Economic and Social Systems," published by Addison Wesley (1994). This wide-ranging book is about how machines, the economy, and all large human-made inventions are becoming biological. Fortune magazine called it "essential reading for all executives." His most recent book is "New Rules for the New Economy", published in 1998 by Viking/Penguin in the US and by 4th Estate in the UK. "New Rules" was a bestseller in the US and has been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese and Estonian. Kevin Kelly's writing has appeared in many national and international publications such as the New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, and Esquire. His photographs have appeared in LIFE and other national magazines. Kelly is a member of the Global Business Network, a consulting group based in Emeryville, California that specializes in creating scenarios of the future for global businesses. He is a Fellow at the Center for Business Innovation, run by Ernst & Young. He is on the Board of Directors at the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He serves on boards of high tech companies and is a frequent speaker at conferences and corporate meetings, and is represented by the Leigh Bureau. Kelly is a member of the board of the Long Now Foundation, which is a group of concerned individuals building a clock and library that will last 10,000 years. The purpose of the project is to foster long term responsibility. Before taking up the consequences of technology, Kelly was a nomadic photojournalist. One summer he rode a bicycle 5,000 miles across America. For most of the 1970s he was a photographer in remote parts of Asia, publishing his photographs in national magazines. (The result of those travels is his new book Asia Grace, published in 2002 by Taschen.) He wrote a monthly travel column for New Age Journal. In the early 1980s he published and edited the first magazine devoted to walking, and ran a mail order catalog specializing in budget travel around the world. Kelly lives in Pacifica, California, a small coastal town just south of San Francisco. He is married and has three wonderful children. He was born in 1952. He has no college or university degrees.

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Kevin Kelly (December 25, 2002)
• ISBN-10: 0972392513
• ISBN-13: 978-0972392518
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,084,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. He has just completed a book for Viking/Penguin publishers called "What Technology Wants," due out in the Fall 2010. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control.