The leg’s unconscious
We are living inside a world, experimenting within it. The world enters us and then our unconscious is produced. The real world is very restricted; it is full of rules, physicality, narratives, linearity, among others barriers. The unconscious is full of references from the real world, but in dreams it appears without sequence in a bowl mixed with everything you have absolved.
The dreams proportionate an immersion in an environment that ignores all restrictions; everything becomes possible. It generates an experience of a new world inside the old world. It is a randomness trip; it is like programming that has its own way, a trip without directions, very sensorial and emotional. When dreaming we have the notion of the world, life and sensations; however, it is involuntary. We get immersed in an obscure neural network without control in a process full of emotion, sensation, and feelings.
The unconscious is like a disturbed and mysterious net and we can’t control it, it just flows. It is a pure manifestation of the self, an individual trip through our insides. Nobody is able to manipulate your dreaming process; it is extremely individual and unique, it is the emotional expression of our own history in a road through a lonely trip inside us.
The neurons are working in a neural network; they are catching all the time references from the sensations, memories and histories of the past. Through their connections they are conceptualizing new formats for the future. The future is all connected with the past; the existence, the generation of the future depends on the past happenings. It is connected in a chain of moments, like a connected machine. The neural network works as a chain, a connection between the future and the past, such as the consciousness and the unconscious, the body and the mind.
The collective unconscious is a concept to describe the residue of all the energy and history of the world in a population size, which you unconsciously ingest inside yourself, such as religions, politics, rules, patriarchy, media and so on. All the people are involved together in a repression situation, called alienation, mediocrity. The world is composed of bad and good things, but each person absolves themselves from different things. The term collective unconscious was first introduced by Carl Gustav Jung in 1916. “In Jungian psychology, a part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality” [8]
The way the unconscious is modelled, solidificated is similar to the life. It just gets what they want, so each unconscious space is unique as each city, each person of the world. Not only the journey is always unique but also the choices. It is the constant development of new forms of representation and visuals. The dreams happen as a surreal movie in a rhizoidal way, it is deeply rich of meanings.
The unconscious is intricately, connected to memory, it is a memorial conception that happens with people, objects and spaces, being the ground and being capable to conserve and identify them. The unconscious deals not only with people and objects but also with desires, maps and routes. The cartographical conception is very different from the archeological conception. In the archeological there is a progression, a development and origin, where the memories is being registered. In contrast, the maps, the cartographies, there is no origin, beginning; it is about to evaluate the changes of the routes, displacements covered. Each map is not only an inversion of the meaning, but also a difference of nature. For Deleuze the unconscious is as a machine producing desires in an effervescent bow without absence, in excess. The unconscious ignores people, it is a production machine, where it produces flows and cuts; the production is always between people, objects and things. The production happens in the environment between objects, familiar relations, non familiar relations, things, of the desire production that we feel the life and the interrogation of what is life. To Deleuze, the unconscious is orphan; it produces itself in the breast of the identity of the nature and the man. To Guatarri, the lapses, dreams, traumas, symptoms are like a bird that beat with the beak in a glass window. Is not about to interpret them, but to detect their trajectories to see if there is indicative rescues of new universes of references, being susceptible to reverse a situation. [09]
The expression of the Leg robot’s unconscious in the piece Controlled Dream Machine is made by an animation mixed with videos in a sort of fragmented narratives episodes. The film appears as a unique surreal construction of delirious, appearances, deconstructions and illusions, achieving the sense of unreality, impossibility, by manipulating the perception of space, geometry, architecture; also, emphasizing the fragmented layering of images as projections of dreams and desires, immersed and produced by the mind of this robot Leg being.
The system is showed by an omnipresent mechanism of outside (robot leg body) and inside (her dreams), reflecting the behaviors, feedbacks between this relation the consciousness-unconscious, exploring the mental levels of the human psyche. As a result of this interconnection, the work atmosphere is not only an estrangement between awakening state, somnambulant drive and REM, but also it is marked by a fragile tension involving neurosis symptoms behaviors coming from the body of the robot leg passing through the dreams. The Robot Leg is a kinetic sculpture in a fragmented body; she is performing a lonely alive neurotic robot Leg in a semi-conscious process of searching for identity in a dream state process.
The robot leg expresses five mainly important dream’s spaces inside her mind that is its Sensations, Memories, Collective unconscious, Traumas and Nightmares.
All of these spaces are hooked through Transpassages and they are all immersed into another. Transpassages is a term used by Deleuze. These transpassages symbolizes the labyrinth passages of space or transportation of the dreams sequences, the passages between the sensations stages. When dreaming we are guiding by sensations in the dream body, it leads us to referenced spaces of desires, memories, traumas, etc. All these feelings are connected and sometimes they are experimenting each other’s at the same time. For example, in a dream if you deal in a traumatic situation, the road to nightmares is very close and it will affect the conscious of your body, giving rise to anxiety, fear, neurosis, obsessions, depressions, hysteria and so on. Sensations are like the avatar of the mind and the body system, being the primordial feedback from everything, also being the generator departure point to build the actions and the space.
The memories is the huge part of the unconscious, everything is connected to the memories. The memory has the ability to retain and recall past states of consciousness. Memories bring symptoms to the body by recalling forgotten and repressed traumas. The Leg robot are floating in the process of getting a trauma, repressing it, trying to forget, (it is kept under lock and key inside the unconscious), after then, it generates a symptom in the legs body in formats of hysterical behaviors, the legs is remembering everything to finally be healed. “As Freud’s model of heal: trauma / repression / forgetting / symptom / remembering / healing. Freud said, hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences”. [10]
The leg robot is dreaming the environments “Locked memories” and the “Connected Memories”. In Locked memories she is calling all the lost memories of the cell’s body since it grown up until her old days, the process of being someone, it is all happening inside a glass head locked by a key. The Connected Memories are exchanging all the remembering, thoughts the leg had with very important people. It is exchanging affections, caress, love, affects; the process is done by two glass heads looking each other faces. “Eugen Tarnow suggests that dreams are ever present excitations of long term memory, even during waking life. The strangeness of dreams is due to the format of long-term memory, reminiscent of the Penfield & Rasmussen’s findings that electrical excitations of the cortex give rise to experiences similar to dreams. During waking life an executive function interprets long term memory consistent with reality checking. Tarnow's theory is a reworking of Freud's theory of dreams in which Freud's Unconscious is replaced with the long term memory system and Freud's “Dream Work” describes the structure of long term memory”. In psychology long-term memory is the storage of information indefinitely so that it can be used again and again at a later time. Long-term memory (LTM) is memory, stored as meaning, that can last as little as 30 seconds or as long as decades. It differs structurally and functionally from working memory or short-term memory, which ostensibly stores items for only around 30 seconds. [11]
The collective unconscious environment is fully immersed of eternal sensations and humankind’s memory that is passed through generations by generations to the individual body, immersed into the genetic DNA of the individual as the history of the human evolution. On the Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung says that “It seems to me that the origin [of the archetypes] can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity” [12]I am trying to build the robot Leg dreams as I look to my self. According to my daily process of writing and drawing dreams, I perceive that my unconscious reveals many symbols that are common almost everyday. Symbols such as the water, keys, waves, family, friends, farm, height, airplanes, day rescues, and so on. The water is presented in almost all of the dreams. I hook the water with emotions. Also family and friends are very much observed; it comes across important memories. These memories can sometimes follow to traumas and obviously the road between traumas and nightmares are very close.
Adventures are very present and active. Theses adventures are always corrupting the limits of the physical principles of the world such as gravity, materiality, death, pain, and so on. The interesting point is that all the symbols can always exchange between them, especially people, sizes and meanings of everything. That is why the unconscious is so abstract, surreal, mysterious, rich and full of interpretations. Sometimes, the symbols inside the dreams can have all the meanings you need to understand a situation or reverse a problem. Then, this can take you into a new step or floor.
References:
[1] http://www.answers.com/topic/unconscious
[2] http://www.answers.com/topic/unconscious
[3] Adam Budak (2004), Videodreams Catalogue, German:Kunsthaus Graz, p. 12
[4] Peter Cook (2004), Videodreams catalogue, German:Kunsthaus Graz, p.10
[5] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, (1990), ‘The Desiring Machines’ in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (first as L’Anti-Oedipe in 1972) trans. Robert Hurley et al, London: Athlone, p. 3
[6] The American Heritage Dictionary
[7] Norbert Wiener (2000), Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
[8] The American Heritage Dictionaries
http://www.answers.com/topic/collective-unconscious
Jung, Carl Gustav (1990), The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series: Princeton University Press
Jung, Carl Gustav (1916), The structure of the unconscious, Coll. works, vol. VII, London: Routledge & Kegan Pau
[9] Deleuze, Gilles (1987), A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press, p.96
[10] Sigmund Freud (1895), Studies on Hysteria, London: Penguin Books, p. 7.
[11] Tarnow, E. (2003) Dreams And Memory May Be Related Neuro-Psychoanalysis, Thompson, B.C. p. 177-182
[12] Jung, Carl Gustav (1919), Psychology of the Unconscious, London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, p.69)
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