Oneiric Archaeologies (2025)

‘Oneiric Archaeologies’ (2025) is a mixed-reality work by artist Gayle Chong Kwan that explores archaeology, deep-time, and dreaming to ask how we might experience the deep-past through the digital and material. The installation features computer game landscapes and a circle of tactile wearable headphone sculptures developed through research at the largest Neolithic stone circle in the world, Avebury UNESCO World Heritage site, UK. ‘Oneiric Archaeology’ features sounds recorded at Avebury’s Neolithic megalith stone circle with voice-overs of historical archaeologists’ dreams about Avebury from the Alexander Keiller Museum archives and contemporary dreams from Avebury archaeologists. The work reimagines the collective ceremonial ritual and re-shaping of megaliths at Avebury since the Neolithic period, through digital computer-gaming landscapes. Ten wooden tripods stand in a large ceremonial circle, on which sit wearable stone-shaped fabric forms with headphones, and projected moving-image computer-game landscape. Viewers listen to historical and contemporary dreams by archaeologists about Avebury, voices that recount seasons, earth, digging, tools, clay, desire, ritual, and touch. The work can be shown as a looped moving-image work of a player moving through the landscape, and/or using a controller to move through the digital dream landscapes, with people able to listen to sounds and voices of dreams on wearable headphone fabric sculptures. 

The player always starts in the centre of a circle of ten Neolithic stones, which are actually 3D scans of hand-held neolithic tools, clay versions of tools used by archaeologists, scans of combined hands of archaeologists and lidar scans of stones at Avebury, with a map from the 1950s of Avebury at their feet. As the player moves towards one of the ten stones, close enough to touch one, they are transported into a new digital landscape, a new gaming level, each inspired by a different historical and contemporary dream by archaeologists about Avebury. Gayle Chong Kwan created the digital landscape in Unreal Engine using a complex combination of clay imprints, archival objects, 3D scans, lidar scans, hand-sewn sculptures, photographic collage, recorded sounds, archaeological tools, and tactile sculptures through site research and dream workshops she ran with archaeologists.

Gayle Chong Kwan was an Artist Fellow on Avebury Papers AHRC funded project. The Avebury Papers is a four-year Arts and Humanities Research funded project to digitise, explore, and share the multimedia archive of Avebury’s Neolithic origins and its subsequent life-history.  Currently dated to the first half of the 3rd millennium BCE, the megalithic monuments at Avebury, North Wiltshire, form part of the UNESCO Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Avebury includes the world’s largest stone circle at almost 350 metres across, with avenues of paired standing stones that extend for 3.5 kilometres.