Pictographs and synchronicity

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Freud follows me from London.

At Sydney University, some of his art collection, including an Egyptian stele, is installed in an art gallery. The caption for the stele includes this quote from Freud:

If we reflect that the means of interpretation in dreams are principally visual images not words, we shall see that it is even more appropriate to compare dreams with a system of writing than with a language. In fact the interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of an ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian heiroglyphs.

Animating to the voices of people describing an experiences is like using a kind of pictography.

When animating Hearing distance, to the voice of Colin Christansen, the sounds and meanings of the words suggested lines immediately – as if this kind of heiroglyphics pre-existed. I speculate I drew on shared symbols of human communication – simple archetypal forms.

Exhibition:

Sigmund Freud’s Collection: an archaeology of the mind
Monash University Museum of Art / MUMA
Guest curator: Dr Janine Burke
Monash University Museum of Art
5 September – 17 November 2007
The Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney
2 January – 30 March 2008

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This seemed a day of chance connections, or synchronicity.

After seeing the exhibition, I passed the nearby building of Geosciences, and asked the secretary if there were any researches there who had worked in Antarctica.

I was referred to the young scientist, Jo Whittacker, who is doing a PhD. The working title for her study is “Reconstruction of plate movements in and around the Indian Ocean”, and she showed me pictures of beneath the ice at McMurdo. We agreed to meet next week, when she will describe some moments of pleasure in the ice, as she worked on mapping the sea floor beneath it.

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I witnessed, with a crowd of others (at UNSW), a live telecast of our government’s apology to our Aboriginal people. I felt a sense of optimism that we all might adapt to change – towards personal, social and environmental understanding and reconciliation.

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Posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008