Intro to Visual Practice / Fall 2010

Though some may not consider Carl Gustav Jung an artist, his Red Book is one of the most closely related works to my dream drawing machine.  As an avid dreamer, I write down my dreams every morning when I wake up.  Some dreams are vivid, strange, and colorful.  Others are mundane and ordinary.  I then decided to record these dreams by creating a machine that could draw them for me.  The idea of documenting dreams with text as well as images was what Jung did with his Red Book.  Jung was a close friend of Sigmund Freud, until they had a break caused by personal and theoretical differences in 1913.  Following this beak, Jung had a series of very portentous and vivid dreams, which he wrote down and later embellished with drawings (Art Therapy by David Edwards).  Though Jung was not thinking about a machine that could record dreams, he still recorded them manually to better understand his subconscious.  My drawing machine also aims to explain the emotions (using background colors) and main themes (which images appear the most) of dreams.  His Red Book has been displayed in the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

An image from the Red Book