Composed of readymades mounted on acrylic, Dream Alarm Clock A1 emerges from a REM-state vision in which a kinetic sculpture—fully operative and calibrated to local time—assumes a dual role that is at once functional and symbolic. Kyle Yip presents timekeeping not merely as a pragmatic system, but as a metaphysical constraint, revealing how mechanical cadence conditions desire, habit, and hallucination. The hybrid circuitry of the object functions simultaneously as portal and pulse: a luminous articulation of the reciprocity between memory and moment, automatism and agency. Through the juxtaposition of technological precision with recursive unconscious logic, the device becomes an ontological catalyst oscillating between the sacred and the mechanistic. The assemblage resists temporal linearity; instead, it stages time as recursive—a structure that governs both dreaming and waking life while confounding their presumed distinctions. Within the AWAKENING series, this Dream Artifact serves not only as a direct transmission of its oneiric origin but also as a phenomenological cipher: an interface through which viewers may apprehend the entangled stakes of sleep, sentience, and symbolic order.
