Thursday, December 4, 2008

dreamlines

Well, I made a bit of a dent in my card signing. Most of them are scattered across the dining room table, waiting for me to pass by and add a signature to a few more and move some from one pile to another. It's rather like a jigsaw puzzle that sits and waits, patiently, not changing, or finishing itself by itself.

I kept getting distracted.
Then I thought: just how long have you been sniffling, anyway??
Damn.
Kleenex.
Bed.
Duvet.
Warm cat body warming cold feet.
Strange intermittent dreams.

I kept waking up every hour and wondering about this strange dream I was having that was rather like my brain trying to tell a long story. In serial form. Of course, it kept slowly disappearing once I'd woken up, so I'm not sure if each time I went back to sleep my brain picked up the story exactly where it left off, but I would wake up an hour later exhausted with the weightiness of the words swirling in my brain.

Then, I was reading The Unbearable Oddness of Stevyn where he had a link to a site called Dreamlines. And I thought: how apropos. So I spent many, many minutes watching the images swirl and morph on the screen as it transformed my keywords into a free association of images. This is all the ingenuity of an Argentinian artist who explains his process here.

I watched and waited for the image gallery to finish so I could enter a new set of words to see what would emerge. But it just kept on and on, reinventing itself along the same themes I had given it to work with. Some of the images were very clear, though most were not and mostly I could see no connection to anything. Kind of like my 'real' dream serial.

Try it for yourself and see what comes up.
I have no idea how he managed to save the images, so I can't show you mine.

15 comments:

  1. I tried it and wanted to copy some of the pictures it was producing but couldn't figure out how.

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  2. Do you think you need to get more sleep?

    CJ xx

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  3. CotW: frustrating isn't it?

    CJ: I always need more sleep!

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  4. Dreamlines is fascinating. Thanks for pointing me there.

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  5. This sounds so cool! I went to the Dreamlines site and launched it, then typed my word/s and it stopped with a blank box. :( I'll try again later.

    Can you save the images by right clicking and "save image as"?

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  6. I hate it when that happens. It's like you're not really sleeping all night and working or something instead so you feel all exhausted in the morning

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  7. XUP: and the worst part is my serial will never get published.

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  8. Figured it out, and posted it today, thanks.

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  9. CotW: alright HOW did you manage that? I've been trying for hours.

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  10. Very cool. Grabbing a screen shot works.

    Thanks for this.

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  11. Thanks for the mention! As for your screen grabbing question, most art software like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro will do lovely screen grabs. However, if you have nothing like that, you can press the 'Print screen' key on your PC which grabs the screen as an image and adds it to your clipboard. You can then open up Word and paste it into a doc.

    Or, if you have a Mac, press Command (Apple)-Shift-4. The pointer turns into a bull's eye.
    Select the area of the screen you wish to capture. The screen is captured and saved as a PDF file called Picture 1 on your hard drive. If you hold down the Control key in addition to the Command (Apple)-Shift-4 while clicking the bull's eye, the image is stored on the clipboard. Apparently.

    Or just download some shareware screen-grabbing software. there's plenty of it about.

    I sound like a huge nerd, don't I? Bumsticks.

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  12. Stevyn: Oh but nerds are so helpful to have around. It just really bugged me that I couldn't figure it out. Thanks. Print screen worked, yay!

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