Dreaming, memory and the imagination
Time
- Time (Geological, non-human vs biological, human)
- The temporality of imges
- The Interpretation of Dreams by Freud
- Freud gets his ideas about dreams partly from the German Romantics (Hegel). Dreams not unlike a psychosis
- Dreamtime in Aboriginal culture. Dreamtime chart offers a different way of mapping the world (time/spatial). Also a uninstrumental way of looking at the world (unlike the enlightenment).
Memory
We imagine a place we go to for memories, but that doesn’t exist in the brain.
[Fayum Portraits]
[Drean Journey to the peach blossom]
Shows a transition between a real landscape and a dream world.
‘A bar at the folies bergere’ is a realist ainting, but the more you look at it, the more it seems like a dream. Blank eyes / White lights, suspended figure in the corner.
[Max Klinger: The Glove (1881)]
Gauguin’s sketchbooks from when he went to Tahiti. He brings with him images of Japanese prints, sculptre, Egyptian culture. He collages these into a kind of dream images. Memory / IMagination / Dreams
[Rousseau: The cream] post-freud
He that has eyes to see … every pore
Freud views dreams at the “Royal road” to the unconcsious.
POst-Freud you get experimental photography: Man Ray
Paul Klee: My fevour is …
Max Ernst
When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement
Hallucination is thughts first form, and dreams are its afterglow
Uses non-modernist visual material from the 19th century in collages to find a way to the unconscious
Dorothea Tanning at the Tate
The imagination had this great status under Aristotle, then lost it under Christianity, which viewed dreams with suspicion. Part of the enlightenment is the restoration of imagination (Kant divides it into productive and reproductive)
DaliL The persistence of memory Melting watches are time disintegrating
Bachelard:
We always think of imagination as the faculty that forms images: On the contrary it deforms images…
Benjamin: The optical unconscious
The camera introduces us to the unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis ..
Also echoes bachelard about the idea that imagination de-forms the world
Surrealism begins to appear in pop culture. Hitchcock: Spellbound
The AMerican Dream
COunter to the dreams of surrealism
X-rays, cinema and psychoanalysis were all established in 1895: These trasform he structure of visual perception: From the visual to the a-visual, imagined visions.
La Jetee, Aplhavile are films from the 1960s about notions of time; circular time, non-linear time
Rauschenbergs screenprints are not about single moments (ie single images), but about extended temporality.
Hollywood: The Dream Factory
- Gysin, Burrows: Dream machine. Experiments not just with drugs, but also machinery to try and induce changes to the brain, induce different states of consciousness
- Warhol’s first film: Sleep (1968)
- Tarkovsky: Stalker
- Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture of Time. Cinema photos, and also Ocean images, adn images of architecture
- Tian Zhu: Hey (2015)
- Hito Stetel: Free Fall: An essay on vertical perspective