PROPOSALS:
Options:
1) If the fairy tales didn’t end when they end
2) Dreams experiment
3) Rainy day motion graphic
4) Make people happy
Feedback:
collage, surrealism, dream theory
suggestion: Do Android dream about electrical sheets?
INSPIRATION:
Grete Stern, born in Germany had to flee from the Nazis in 1935 and went to live in Argentina. She was educated in the School of Applied Arts in Stuttgart as a graphic designer and photographer, something quite unusual for a woman in those days. Among many professional activities, in 1948 she was invited to work in a woman’s’ magazine called “Idilio”. There she would illustrate with photo montages the section called “Psychoanalysis will help you”. Her work consisted of representing the dreams that the readers would submit. Grete Stern worked nearly three years on this project and produced nearly 150 pieces. In Argentina this work is considered the most important of it’s kind produced there.
Combining art, photography and technology, French photographer Jean Francois Rauzier creates hyperphotos that will blow you away. Just what is a hyperphoto? It’s a term coined by Rauzier which means ‘stitching’ together hundreds or thousands of enormous high-resolution images into one amazing collage. Look closely and you’ll see that an incredible amount of time has gone into each piece.
Each collage is composed of between 600 and 3,400 individual close-up images, each taken one by one, using a telephoto lens over a period of one to two hours. Once the entire scene is captured, Rauzier stitches them together using Photoshop, working obsessively until the viewer can’t discern where one image begins and one image ends.
Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark “soft watches” that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein’s theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert Cheese on a hot day in August.
The elephant is also a recurring image in Dalí’s works. “The elephant is a distortion in space,” one analysis explains, “its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure.”I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.” —Salvador Dalí, in Dawn Ades, Dalí and Surrealism.
The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love. Various animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud’s house when he first met Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.
THE FOUR WORLDS INSIDE MY DREAMS:
My first step to understand my dreams, was to write all of them in a blog called Tonight’s dream and illustrate them in a way that other people could understand it better.
As I tagged my dreams in the blog, I realized that they are always happening in one of these worlds:
a) Sand: it’s hot and has warm colors
b) Ice: It’s all about snow and white
c) Water: I dream with water all the time, beaches, swimming pools, fountains, etc.
d) At least, sometimes I dream that I’m in a big city and I’m not sure about what it is.
DEFINITION:
Mini-thesis: Exploration of a dream
The project is web based and divided into three parts:
1) The exploration:
An interactive flash page where the user can explore different symbols commonly appeared on dreams, read the stories and their meanings, suggest comments and share opinions. The symbols are divided into four categories: sand, water, snow and city. The user can navigate easily navigate through them.
The dream used as inspiration are registered at this blog: Tonight I had a dream
2) The dictionary:
We can link to an already made dictionary or start to write according to the words that are being mentioned. The important is that we can tag the words that appear with their meanings.
Examples:
http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/
http://www.paranormality.com/dream_dictionary_a.shtml
3) The dream catcher:
Concept: in Ojibwa(Chippewa) culture, a dreamcatcher is a handmade object based on a willow hoop, on which is woven a loose net or web. The dreamcatcher is then decorated with personal and sacred items such as feathers and beads. “Good dreams pass through the center hole to the sleeping person. The bad dreams are trapped in the web, where they perish in the light of dawn.
The object: We’re gonna create a platform where we can filter the twits from people related to dreams. We should be able to automatically tag them to their meanings (from the dictionary we will have built), using the most important word (usually nouns) and relate into groups the dreams, according to these words. Any person can comment and share opinions about the dreams.
Rough storyboard:
SCHEDULE:
WIREFRAME:
Dreamcatcher: a place to share night dreams, their meanings and find people with the same dreams as you
- fed manually and by twitter
- dreams organized according tag
- can be tagged to more than one tag
- each tag is related to a meaning
- proximity is related to similarity among words
- adding dreams to the library
- limit of words
- you tag according to relevance
- for the tags to be recognized, they must be already registered: menus?
- according to your tags, it appears the definition of your dream
- anyone can comment about a dream and share their own interpretation
Inspiration:
PROTOTYPES:
In our first prototype, we we’re able to filter from twitter and add comments to our database. There was no mouse interaction or groups.
Then we tried to work with only the particles’ movement:
Finally, we had the categories we wanted, but we needed more refinement:
FINAL PRODUCT:
This is a demo of the final product:
This is the link to the presentation: dreampresentation
This is the link to the paper: dreamsharing_PAPER
CRITIQUES:
As guest critics there were Lucille Tenazas and Cynthia Lawson, and this was the feedback that I had:
- the graphic should be more related to dreams, it’s kind of superficial
- why does it need to me interactive? it need a better reason to create. what is the contribution to the field?
- check: missed connections and post secret
EXTRA:
After this, I realized that I needed to follow a more surrealist vein and relate my narrative to my dreams. But at the same time, O didn’t receive any specific critique to the functionality of my project. So, instead of changing it, I decided to add a Motion Graphics piece to add more abstractness to the dreamsharing:
and C’est fini!
