Abstract

As an artist and researcher I am aware of how technology is reconfiguring our relationship with the world and our own sense of being and consciousness, our thinking. Technology can also enable benign spaces where art can engage easily with an audience and I am currently investigating a meeting space for conscious thought, through notions of techno-daydreaming. The daydream can be understood as a space between, an escapism from the everyday, offering a seamless transition from an awake and rational state to a daydreaming mind where the logical and the emotional are kept in a dream-like state of oscillation. The daydream can be seen as an in-between position where thinking is liberated and allows for free-form connections. To what extent is it possible to artificially emulate or produce such a creative mindstate?

Within this research ideas of daydreaming are derived from Paul Virilio’s work on inertia and picnolepsy. It is this understanding of “movement without moving” facilitated by new technologies within our ordinary everyday life, which has informed the making of three digital non-linear films. This series of work bridges new media and traditional practice using the collage effect enabled by new lens technologies and combinatorial software for the interweaving of moving and still images. The works address the conventional older art media values of structure, colour, tension, harmony and balance apparent within flat surface picture making, designed to move the eye around the canvas. For content, they play with the notion of the ‘spectator’ sport where leisure and daydreaming are encouraged as legitimate forms of time out and therefore allow us a “disappearance” from the everyday. As a spectator, there are moments of concentrated focus on the action, and lapses of interest where the eye meanders around the scenery and the mind wanders into reverie.

• Dr. Dew Harrison, Reader in Digital Media, School of Art & Design, University of Wolverhampton, UK

Full text (PDF) p. 206-207