dream interpretation

The final chapter ‘Ten Year of Dreams about Art’ of L.U. Marks book ‘Touch’ offers as a resume of one of her last dream analysis the following:

At the end of the decade, everybody was saying we had moved decisively from a visual culture to an information culture. What, then, would become the role of the audiovisual media that artists had been coddling and pummeling throughout the decade, indeed the century? Now that we had machines to hear, and act for us, raw experience was a more precious commodity than ever before. The processing of information and the debased notion of interactivity were behaviorist, Secondness-based modes, which in any case our computers could do without us. Throughout the decade, experimental film and video artists had been pulling their media from the Secondness-based modes of narrative and critique to a Firstness that was felt only in the body, and a hypersymbolic Thirdness that was experienced as First by the proxy bodies of our machines. We hoped that new connections, new mental images, some Third thing as yet unimagined, would come to animate our minds again.

In her interpretation she leaves an open end and refers finaly to an imagination of a fluid form of database for narratives, which isn’t realized yet.
Stated changes initiated through the conversion of visual material into digitized information have had influence as well onto the production and the depiction of visualizations. Despite this a general definition yet is hard to find to define it clearly – especially if unrelated to the effects on psychic and social influences which technologies inherent. In her book she offers an interesting approach versus tactile perception – which beneath her main reference to Deleuze (and Riegl) also called up McLuhan‘s remark on audile-tactile perception versus a pure visual one.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email