Friday, 13 December 2013

Text & Image - Group Meetings and Deadlines

 
Week 3: As a group we decided we needed to start setting deadlines for when we should have our contribution to the publication finished by. We decided that our last week should be spent reproducing the images (there have to be 10 copies of the publication) and putting them all together.
We were all unsure exactly what was expected of us for this final producion.
After a discussion we decided  that if each of us did 5 pieces of work (whether that be scientific or illustrative of your dreams it is up to the person) in A5 size with an inch margin, it would be easier for us to put all the images together and bind. We set the deadline for the next monday to have 5 finished works and a piece of writing explaining what you were trying to achieve with your work - this would amount to 30 pages overall for our final publication.
However, what I had noticed was that we were finding it difficult to meet all at the same time as a group; there was always one or two of us missing. As this was the case, even though they were told the main points we decided in the meeting some of us didn't know the exact decisions and were unsure as to what they were expected to do. I feel that this project would run much smoother if all of us came in every day into the same room and worked together, even if it wasn't on the same piece of work.


Text & Image - Mengyu Chen

 I knew that I wanted my pages to be interactive but I have never done any kind of interactive work before so I felt that my images so far were very amateur and messy. After some research, Chen's work immediately stood out to me because her designs seemed simple yet effective.


After staring at the computer screen for a while I could kind of figure out how she had done most of them and wanted to convert some of my ideas to use her techniques.
My forest dream seemed to fit in best as I wanted my family to emerge through the trees as if they were really moving through the forest.


Text & Image - MOSI, Brains

As it's our second week and we all agreed we would spend this week gathering images, we decided that it would be a good idea to arrange a trip to a gallery to get some inspiration. As it so happens there is an exhibition on at the minute at the MOSI that focuses on the combination of art and the science of brains. This fits perfectly with what we want to try and achieve - a combination of science and dreams. It would be very beneficial to see how others have combined science and art.




The exhibition took a very scientific look at brains, with video's of people dissecting brains and exhibiting objects used to measure and "treat" medical issues with the brain from history through to modern day. However, some of the products scientists had produced to show the function of the brain and their theories were very artistic. Such as the above image of the brains blood vessels and the sculptures of how the shape of the head develops through to more "intelligent" people.
What I found very interesting was that by the end of the exhibition you were looking at these brains and objects of basically torture completely unsympathetically - they were just objects of interest. I had completely forgotten that these brains had been the life and soul of a human just like me and now here was the essence of that person being prodded, poked and observed with a complete lack of empathy. However, at the end of the exhibition they showed pictures and recordings of the people that had donated the brain. Suddenly it all comes rushing back that these were living people and I felt almost guilty and sad that I had been thinking watching them being picked apart so easily.

Text & Image - Dream Diary images

We all agreed that we would spend this week gathering images and putting together some work on our dreams as we can then come back at the end of the week and discuss what we want to be included in the publication and what could be improved. I like this idea as it means I can produce my own work without much pressure of it having to fit to someone elses.

 Saving Dracula. Underwater shopping mall. Decaying. A ship. Diving. Eating lots of rice.





With these images I really wanted to capture the eery feel of the dream, and also the abstract vagueness of it. It seemed to jump from one seemingly important thing to a completely irrelevant, insignificant thing and also accepted the abnormal as completely normal.
I put all the aspects of the dream into images, using dark colours and ink to keep things pretty fluid and abstract. To anyone else these images would appear completely irrelevant and bizarre and I think this is what the finished piece needs to be like; people will guess at what the images mean and reflect and therefore creates dialogue amongst the viewers.
At the minute I am not thinking about how I could reproduce all these images, just trying to get my ideas down on a page.

Violence. Escaping with family. Have to carry belongings. Walk through supermarket/forest. Starts to snow. Put on winter coats. Dance with JK Rowling's mum and dad. Going to magical land.




There was so much imagery in this dream that I didn't really know how to present it all. I wanted to show that places merged and blurred the lines of reality hence why I combined the printed image and the painted image of the forest. I don't like this piece though, I think the colours of the painted trees don't fit with the images and it lookRecurring. Dog yapping. Calling monster. At the door. At the window. No escape. Try Again. Making pasta, wrong ingredients.s childish. However, I do like the little caricatures of my family as they are quite humorous and the dream wasn't serious.
I think that there was so much weird imagery going on in this dream that I would quite like to make a couple of pages on it.

Clean kitchen - All apart from my pots.

 

Recurring. Dog yapping. Calling monster. At the door. At the window. No escape. Try Again. Making pasta, wrong ingredients.

 
I wanted to create a vague yet frightening monster for this dream as I can't remember what it looked like in the dream. I do a few little sketches but none of them fit so I did a little bit of research as to how other artists had portrayed monsters. The ink drawings immediately caught my eye as they were abstract yet disturbing.
It seemed to me that someone had just put ink to paper and seen what had happened so I decided to do the same. Without any plannign I created the monster on the left and was very pleased with it.
 
 

 


Text & Image - Dream Diary

These were written the moment I woke up but I didn't want to edit them as I wanted to achieve the raw feel of a dream.


  • Cheese toastie. Frankenweenie characters on them. Very tasty. 
  • Clean kitchen - All apart from my pots.
  • Saving Dracula. Underwater shopping mall. Decaying. A ship. Diving. Eating lots of rice. 
  • Recurring. Dog yapping. Calling monster. At the door. At the window. No escape. Try Again. Making pasta, wrong ingredients.
  • Cast of Game of Thrones. Running away from home. Go along with them. Castle. Real life/actors.
  • Violence. Escaping with family. Have to carry belongings. Walk through supermarket/forest. Starts to snow. Put on winter coats. Dance with JK Rowling's mum and dad. Going to magical land. 
 


Text & Image - Carl Jung, The Red Book


 As I wanted to produce some scientific work on the meaning of dreams and so on I had a look to see how others had tackled this. However, very few people have created illustrated dream diaries apart from, funnily enough, Jung himself. This was perfect as I knew his dream diary would attempt to combine the scientific side and the dreams themselves as he is the top researcher into dreams.


 
His illustrations are weird and wonderful! Yet he sides them with an in depth discussion - I like this juxtaposition and I would like my work to have a variety of confusion and order. 

Text & Image - Dreams Meanings Research

With my research I decided to look into what definitions Psychologists had of the meaning of dreams.

Freud:

  • Dreams are a representation of our unconscious wishes. 
  • They are formed using these processes: 
    • Condensation - Many ideas and concepts are condensed into a single thought/image
    • Displacement - Confuses the significant and the insignificant
    • Symbolization - Objects can be references to messages
    • Secondary Revision - Elements are organised to make the dream comprehensible 

Jung:

  • Believes dreams are repressed wishes
  • Dreams reflect our personalities and real lives
  • They compensate for psyche that is underdeveloped in real life

Hall:

  • Supports Jung's theory as he found in a study that our traits/choices in dreams reflect those in reality.
  • Claims you can interpret dreams by studying the following:
    • Actions of the dreamer
    • Objects and figures
    • Interactions between characters
    • Setting, transitions, outcomes

Dornhoff: 

Lots of people believe that shared dreams such as teeth falling out, flying or falling, serve to connect us as a human race; we all have common concerns.

I would quite like to produce some work on this scientific research as I think it would be nice to have a mixture of dreams and science in the final publication so that it sort of blurs the lines between dreams and reality.