The Dream Machine: The Convergence of Hallucination and Content Creation

Authors

COM 304-03, Creative & Cultural Industries in Practice

Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

Fall 11-30-2022

Faculty Advisor(s)

Dr. Patrick Fuery

Abstract

Our research project focuses on how a social media campaign was designed and implemented to explore the ways in which people engaged with the ideas of dreams and hallucinations. Specifically, the class project involved working collectively, and in four dedicated groups, to build a dream machine. The four groups were: designers and creators, who constructed the dream machine; social media recorders, who developed a multi-platform media campaign for the project from inception to implementation, including documenting how the other groups worked and researched their areas; music composers who designed a soundtrack to accompany the machine; and multi-media poster designers, who researched the history and culture of the original dream machine to create a series of poster images. Each group required a specific research focus as well as an interdisciplinary exchange across all the groups. Thus our project researched breaking down disciplinary barriers to explore new ways of thinking about complex issues and ideas. Our presentation will articulate three key aspects of the project: how by working across multiple disciplines (notably creativity studies, arts, and humanities, cognitive sciences, and communications) we came to understand better the confluence of ideas in practice; how various elements of social media can be utilized to explore wider philosophical and aesthetic issues; and how our program in Creative and Cultural Industries provided ways to connect across a wide and diverse audience to engage in the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge. In addition to the presentation, we would like to bring the dream machine to the conference so others might experience its hallucinatory effects and better appreciate the relationship between research and practice.*The dream machine was originally designed by the artist Brion Gysin and has been used in research to explore the idea of neuro-diversity and perception diversity.

Comments

Presented at the Fall 2022 Student Scholar Symposium at Chapman University.

Recommended Citation

COM 304-03, Creative & Cultural Industries in Practice, "The Dream Machine: The Convergence of Hallucination and Content Creation" (2022). Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters. 568.
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cusrd_abstracts/568