About

Collective Visual Unconscious displays a pool of dreams together on one screen, illustrates the connections and similarities between the dreams of one individual and the dreams of the many, as suggested by Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious.

This Project has stemmed from my interest in mysteries, problems, and puzzles. But why dreams and why computer scripting? Well dreams allow an outsider to enter into someone else’s mind. Dreams, when told and analyzed, can tell us about a persons ambitions, what they are currently dealing with, what happened in their past, who they were and who they are. Mythologies have even suggested that dreams can tell us who we will be. On top of that, creating an application through scripting with the computer as a tool, is analogous with putting together a complex puzzle of symbols.

Collective Visual Unconscious manifests itself in two parts. There is the website, at collectivevisualunconscious.org, where participants and audiences are encouraged to submit to the collective as well as be provided with the project’s statement. The second portion of the piece consists of a visualization installation. Dreams are pulled from a database into a processing environment. There, the dreams are visualized as brainwaves (sine graphs) according to dream’s length (graph range), date (ordering in visual), and type of dream (color, thickness). As the collection of dreams increases, so shall the visual.