User:Mirjam Dissel/thesis draft

Prologue

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. I've expanded this into a quartet (go fish) game and slot machine hybrid, that attempts to tap into the subconscious, forcing an associative narrative out of seemingly unrelated images.

Outline

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 to deeply; I am not a scientist after all.

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

[1]