Inner Cinema - The Secret Art of Dreamstate Semiotics and Contemplative Pedagogy
Katherine Gurkin
The images and content we witness with eyes closed can serve as original creative momentum and catharsis. My thesis explores how design practices can further connect individuals with the innovative and insightful power of the subconscious by reflecting on and communicating with dreamstate semiotics. I utilized AI algorithms to translate dream image lexicons into visual narratives, working with a group of creatives from various industries who then used the AI collaborations to generate creative content and conceptualizations within their fields. My intention with this design journey is to bring to life what is seen with eyes closed— to make ‘inner cinema’ a shareable art form, accessing creative content that’s often unimaginable in waking life.
Topia Tarot
A contemplative deck of symbols designed to guide you deeper into gratitude and growth as you co-create your topia (place) in the digital age. Each card is embedded with binary code that translates into the story of the card. Bitmapping natural elements creates a melding of the cyber ethereal and the experiential beauty of this physical world.
Lucid Living Capstone
Aid to this research has manifested through participatory designed dream reflection exercises and the utilization of artificial intelligence as a visualization process for inner cinema through text to image algorithms. The development of these AI rendered pieces were then transformed by a series of designers into creative content for their specific vocations or interests such as influential marketing, product sketches, visual activism, and artistic catharsis. Creative inner cinema becomes the content for the design process, versus borrowing from or conforming to external influences. This process is brought to life by AI’s visual translation of the designer’s often uninterpreted or manifested intuition and cryptic inner symbolic landscape, which can be tweaked and edited till the final outcome suits the designer’s true expression.Lucid Living Motion Design
A visual meditation that draws the viewer deeper into a waking dreamstate through hypnotic and surreal visuals. The purple orb is known as a ‘kirlian,’ which are bioluminescent organic lightforms that can fill one’s perception as they go deeper into meditation. This motion design piece was my expression of the kirlian I see as I turn inward through mindful breathing.Dream Cinema
In this docuseries, I collected night camcorder footage of my parasomnias to try to piece together the storyline of my hypnopompic hallucinations (or Night Thrillers as we call them in my family) coupled with artificial intelligence to render the images I was projecting from my dreams into reality. These phantom memories play out through the surrealist renderings of Night Cafe with often profoundly accurate articulations of the vision through the meaningful coincidences the word to image algorithm generates. The documentary film grew to collect interviews of other individual’s dreams which were brought to life through the AI software, as well as accounts of their perception of dreams. These interviews served to guide my direction with how I could help individuals access the creative potential of their dreams by better understanding their current relationship to these states.
