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'.