The latest film by Melvin Moti (b. 1977, Rotterdam) combines hypnotically slow-moving images of a bursting soap bubble with the story of the dream logs kept by J.W. Dunne, a British military officer endowed with paranormal powers.
The artist has been awarded the J.C. van Lanschot Prize for the Visual Arts for this project.
The title of Moti’s new 35mm film, E.S.P., refers to the paranormal Extra Sensory Perception movement of the 1930s. The scenario is based on the figure of John William Dunne (1875-1949), who displayed precognitive powers and recorded them in his ‘dream logs’. Dunne was an aeronautical engineer in the British army. At the age of eighteen he discovered that fragments of his future were appearing in his dreams. In 1927 he published a book entitled An Experiment with Time, in which he describes his dreams as experiences of time in which past, present and future occur simultaneously.