In the wake of dreams : an exploration of dream topology through an interactive installation

Abstract

This practice-based research investigates the possibility of representing the dreamscape through an installation comprising of a projected text video, sound, and design adaptations in an attempt to recreate the aporetic (Derrida, 1993) space of dreams. This is a tense space creating a passage that both allows and restricts shifts and overlaps between the various states of sleep and wakefulness. Research and influences for production are drawn from various fields of knowledge: primarily psychology literature, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, art history, and media practice. During the research stage, particular reference is made to the ‘dream’ drawings by Federico Fellini, William Blake, Goya, Salvador Dalì, and Max Ernst, who based their works on dream inspiration and automatism as influenced by the writings of the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The work also engages with readings on the related themes of representation, presence and absence and the space in between, advanced by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin. This research is motivated by a personal need to express the mystery of the dream world, to explore its tangibility once it is translated into words, and the meaning it gains once it forms part of the roused world. It also explores dreams’ quality of bridging relational gaps and bringing people from across cultures closer together. This trans-cultural aspect of dreams is attested to by their mythic quality, as to listen to a dream is akin to listening to a myth or a legend.