dream7

From Rhizome Artbase
1999
Description

Dream7 was a net art website created between 1998-2005. It served as a visual representation of a digital dream state and explored the intersection between visual and textual narrative, animation, collage and sound. It included a number of sub-projects that expanded on the theme of a digital dream. Dreambase was the most well known, and was a searchable database of over 4,000 dreams sent by visitors to Dream7.com. Quartok, one of the final projects, was an interactive sound space that represented a post apocalyptic anti-Utopia. In this world, Quartok, a god-like alien lived, and at the site you could read Quartok’s words of wisdom.

Margaret Penney
12 September 2001

I collaborated on the project with sound artists Duodecimo, Paul Stone and Rupert Cogan.
Since the time that it was originally published Internet speeds have vastly increased, so many of the animations are very fast!!
To view the project in its’ current state please visit http://www.dream7.com.
Sub-projects:
http://www.dream7.com/dreambase (4,000 dreams in flash database!);
http://www.dream7.com/quartok;
http://dream7.com/tt/;
http://www.dream7.com/infomera.
Visitors can still send their dreams to me for interpretation and potential animation, here: http://www.dream7.com/dreamon.html and the original form: http://www.dream7.com/dreamon.htm
More image stills @ art folio site: http://www.studiomagik.com/2012/?p=74

Margaret Penney
12 September 2001

Original Statement:
Dream7 is a net art piece which purposefully lingers in a state of precognition. Using icons, signs, words, sounds, and symbols Dream7 creates sense impressions that attempt to communicate with the viewer on an almost unconscious level.

Dream7's pre-cognitive pieces are not random noise. The narrative slices/trajectories and the vague pictorial objects are purposefully assembled as to evoke a sense impressionistic response. Using Jungian symbolism, tones, themes, metaphor, and characterization the site attempts to lead the viewer in certain narrative directions, and then right before the coalescence of meaning, aborts, and drops them in an in-between space that they then can fill with their own liminal reactions, circling in a vague precognitive state.

The goal in all this is to create an environment of commonality between the artist and the viewer. The belief being that in the pre-cognitive state people are more able to reach a level of true empathy. The precognitive state being the place which exists before the constructs of individual personality are raised, so in a sense it is the place were people share the most in common, and may be able to reach a level of greater core understanding. Or to put it more succinctly, in dreams we know each other.

Dream7 uses the medium of the web because on one level the web is a metaphor for the brain, and even, the collective unconscious: A networked terrain of text thoughts and bit impressions. So an art installation interested in pre-cognitive communication suits the web.

Margaret Penney
12 September 2001
Legacy descriptive tags
Margaret Penney, Carl Jung
Attribution: Margaret Penney
Narrative, Conceptual, allegory, Abstract, underground, netart, meme, Animation, Javascript, HTML, Flash, email, DHTML
Attribution: Rhizome staff
Metadata
Variant History
outside link
1999
Margaret Penney
static files
12 September 2001
cloning
Rhizome staff