User:Mirjam Dissel/thesis draft

Project Outline

I've been reading bits of "The Interpretation of Dreams" by S. Freud. Poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller gives an example that shows how the creative mind is blocked when dismissing ideas immediately when they enter the gates of our consciousness. When we however leave them to hover and accumulate for a little bit, so that we can assess them all together and see them "in a certain collocation with other ideas", we unblock the creative process. Similarly, Dr. Freud experimented with people asking them to describe their dreams. The attitude people had towards their own dreams (openly telling every detail, i.e. observant, OR, already passing judgement on their own thoughts and dismissing parts of the dream and emphasizing others) had great effect in interpreting the dream.

In a normal dream state, you cannot deliberately choose what to leave out and what to emphasize. The creative process that happens at that moment is the subconscious making up a storyline. Association is a great part of this. I've always been interested in image association, the "Tumblrsaurus" project focussed on image comparison through establishing links between images by choice of human associative brains. Association is really a mysterious process that puts together things (images in this case) in a non conventional, non taxonomical way.
Of course memory has a lot to do with this. The things that make us associate one thing with another can be so small and subliminal, stored away in 10 memories spread over 20 years of our lives. Seeing as one thing can evoke seemingly unrelated other memories, association is a great memory tool. Memory is another subject that has my interest. "Man On A Beach, Posing" was a project experimenting with family memories and the rewriting of these memories and if this affected the original (and for better or for worse?). Memory and imagination formed an integrated whole in this project. Imagination, the building of the plausible while being awake, is somewhat the counterpart of wild dream state association. And that's how we are back again at association.

In the past I have been very passionate about images, the relationship between images, photography and memory. The current exam project has sprung from an obsession with dream narratives. When I started developing this project I wrote down everything I dreamed about, every day; and I wondered how I could make these stories interesting and accessible to a crowd. How are other people's personal and often nonsensical stories interesting to others? From there, I've expanded this into a quartet (go fish) game and slot machine hybrid, that attempts to tap into the unconscious mind, forcing an associative narrative out of seemingly unrelated images, mimicking the workings of the mental images we see during REM sleep.

Coming up with the idea of the slot machine has to do with the game aspect that both the quartet and the slot machine possess. Still with the side path in mind of the Napolitan book of interpretation of dreams or events (La Smorfia Napoletana), the numbers that are interpreted are played in lotto or recited in bingo), the idea of expanding the quartet into a slotmachine came natural.
The quartet has a strict taxonomy. The player associates images that are very similar. The winning system of both games is very much alike. The slot machine asks you to align images that are very similar to win, in order to win quartet you have to gather sets of 4 quartet items. By creating a hybrid quartet machine, and inserting random images, I force people to make winning sets in a non taxonomical way. Here again the mechanism of the slot machine wins from other approaches. By the use of a 'hold' button, the player can create a set at random, dismiss certain images and paste in new ones. The sliding in and out of images is reminiscent of the rough cut and paste work one practices while dreaming. Every time the player chooses to exchange a card and let it slide, the narrative continues continues with the remaining cards and the added one(s), forming new associations with the images at hand, as if nothing happened. The usage of a slot machine structure is necessary because it forces linkage of images, opening up the creative unconscious and allowing a more free and much more personal association.

Questions
There are a few questions that need further investigation; an important aspect of the machine is which set of images to use, how to play with others, what restrictions to make in the game (regarding cards, sets, decks, game rules). What is the central experience? The association is more important to me than to actually be able to play the game afterward, however, the game has to be playable in the same fashion. Should the lever be starting a query, some sort of associative quest, maybe by inputting a keyword at start? Also, going over my methodology once more, it seems that it's important to save what other people have made. Something has to remain. I either simply gather and/or display what people are making, or another side project should originate out of that, where I do something with this data before exhibiting it.
I do however have an answer to why the physicality of the installation is so very important: intensively using a machine/installation and then also physically receiving something tangible that you could even take home with you, greatly affects the memory. This is exactly what I'm my project is about and that's why it is so important the project is not merely shown or played on a computer, but that it in itself gives out memory and association.

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FOR A BETTER WRITTEN VERSION OF BELOW SEE INTERIM ASSESSMENT

What is my project?
A machine that allows the user to make associations that lie deep within them; these are personal for each user.
The machine looks like some sort of box with a computer screen in it, operative by a number of buttons. It uses a slot machine mechanism and has 4 columns of random images set up instead of lemons, apples or pears. The set of chosen images have a meaning. The images will come from scraped data, as random as possible to ensure free association.
By giving the subject boundaries I force them to make associations. They can change the images in the associating row by spinning the wheels. Here the theory of free association by Freud comes in once more. One lets things pass and then things get assessed. Things get assembled/collected.
Created as set that is meaningful to him.
They have to name topic of the set and individual cards and then print it.
This gives me a peek into their inner self = mind/brain
On the table next to it, people can play the quartet game and mix their decks and interpret each other's sets.
What will I do with the data collected? The topic will become the title of an encyclopedia page. The images will be superimposed, and will then become a page in the encyclopedia in which each page reflects a personal association.
My aim therefore is collecting different types of results, whether it will be personal results based on experiences from people, or something they associate through popular culture, actualities, etc.

>>> important to write in thesis is thus difference in mind and brain, psychological and scientific approaches.

Thesis Abstract

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For my thesis, passing through a brief history of photography and the perception of imagery in our brain*, I would like to address image association, the subconscious as a machine that glues images together. Here I will also explore dream analysis and the mind as an open portal. Inextricably bound up with this is imagination. Imagination, the building of the plausible while being awake, is somewhat the counterpart of wild dream state association. From imagination I dive into memory. Here I will talk about the iteration of memory, and the rewriting of it; this refers to my project 'Man On A Beach, Posing'.

* Since I am a visual designer, I believe I can briefly scratch the surface on neurological and psychological subjects, although I do not want to get into it too deeply; I am not a scientist after all.

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scale of thesis: scientific to 'vague' or difficult to comprehend ideas.

- scientific contextualization of how memory works in our brain (think of neurons/neurotransmitters/synapses. when do parts light up in our brain -> we create content groups when we get to know people, recognize objects).
- free association of images (schiller, freud, even jung). make reference to dreaming and how it relates to my project. Relate this back to previous chapter: while dreaming parts of frontal lobe is not active (reason, logic?), this is why our dreams are so illogical and crazy sometimes, we are able think in a much more free way. (literally there are more pathways to follow because the blockers are off). split this up in two?
- data mining of images and how it tries to investigate on the process of reading and matching elements of an images in a computational way. - what do I get out of association? through what we experience in our lives we map our brain. this creates personal pathways.

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• Introduction
  • Anecdote
  • What will the thesis be about

• Explaination of my project and aims
  • By creating boundaries I create an experiment where people are forced to make associations, which is my project. It gives me an insight in their mind and personal views.

• Scientific explaination to.. association
  • What happens in your brain when you are awake (explaination on how the brain works: neurons, synapses, how you create memory. our brain is built over time and therefore concepts could overlap because the neurons were created at the same time or are close to one another (not sure how this works, read more science stuff))

between the former and the below there has to be a transition. Maybe the subject memory and storing memories, accessability of memories and how in dreams there are open portals can link the two. also psychological analysis of one's mind/dreams needs to come back somewhere. or doesn't it?

• What happens when you are asleep/dreaming.
  • Regions of the frontal cortex associated with thought and judgement that working where you are awake, are not working when you are asleep. This could be a reason for the bizarre and illogical content of some dreams.
  • some more about linkage of dream memories long gone.
  • here is where I start talking about the cut/paste feeling in dreams, associative thinking.

• Free association
  • free association is trying to replicate what happens when you are asleep, which is destroying the boundaries of reason. Trying to understand the connections that your unconscious makes. Put example of Freud/Schiller here (ideas pouring in at gates of consciousness).
  • Why can't people do this naturally?
  • example of Tumblrsaurus and how people create sets of images that are in the same category, and also link to your set, through manual choice.

• Semiotics
  • semiotics (third meaning, barthes) is another way to look at how we respond to images, and possible connect or glue multiple images together.
    • literature: Roland Barthes - The Third Meaning
    • literature: Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

• Computer imitation
  • Understanding the way we perceive and store data through computersoftware. How do we try to imitate reading images? Computers run image comparison scripts based on pattern and object recognition.
  • What is lost in this automatized process and why is the manual labour so important in my project?
    • literature: Lev Manovich - The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers

• What can I obtain from all this?
  • There's different ways of looking at what can be obtained out of these associations. Scientific approach, seeing how the brain works, how does it work that connections are built over time. Psychological approach, those connections reveal important information about your inner self, your personality, things you might not even know about. I'm mostly interested in the voyeuristic part of association. It gives me a peek into someone else's life and experiences. Their lives are a source of creative inspiration, as was the photo album 'Man on a Beach, Posing', where I took the experiences and lives of a family and rewrote and twisted the story. I used the story I made up to show how in everybody's lives memory twists and changes pasts experiences.

creative experiment for me to get information out of people, make this more clear. i want to create some sort of mental imagery encyclopedia (think of tropenmuseum). so not images>topictitle, but title>imagecollection on 1 A4.

Bibliography

Dreams:

• Nina Yuen. Lucid Dreaming (2001-2011,Stedelijk Museum Schiedam)
• Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams

Photography/image:

• Don Slater - Photography And Modern Vision (in Visual Culture)
• Kirsten Leenaars - The Kodak Moment (in I Need Truth And Aspirin)
• John Tagg - The Burden Of Representation
• Roland Barthes - the third meaning

Mind/Memory:

• Daniel Dennett - Consciousness Explained

Combo:

• look through Scientific American

WHAT OF THIS?

• Sadie Plant - The Future Looms, Weaving Women and Cybernetics
  
• Janet Murray - Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
  
• Michael Joyce - Afternoon, A Story (hypertext)
  
• Emanuel Swedenborg - Dr√∂mboken [Journal of Dreams] (a scientist in the 1700 starts having his dreams that influence his own behaviour, and his life becomes influenced by his dreams. He becomes a theologian, claiming that God is talking to him)
  
• William Blake (poet, painter, printmaker inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg)
  
• movie 'Waking Life' (about a guy who is lucid dreaming. Or actually: the dream he is having). trailer
• 70 maps (really nice, have a look)
• Kathy Acker's 'A Map of my Dreams'
• Susan Hiller's Dream Mapping (1974)
• Laurie Anderson
• Salvador Dali
• Betty Alexandra Toole - Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers (about Lady Lovelace)
• professor Norbert Wiener's inventions
• Hofstadter - I Am A Strange Loop
• Wendy Van Wynsberghe
• Furtherfield
• Dream Machine by Brion Gysin
• William S. Burroughs using cut-up technique (The Cut-ups)
• Traum, einer Ausstellung by Barbara Breitenfellner (collected her dreams about art, chose two and exhibited them in a gallery)
• Marion Milner - On Not Being Able to Paint

Time schedule

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