NEON DREAM

Autographic expedition into my own relationship with technology.

00 / Summary

My bachelor project took the form of an introspective journey through my own habits and relationships with technology. Using photography, datamoshing, programming and self-writing, I investigated an experience that had disrupted my habitual relationship with the familiar digital environment of my computer.

The investigation eventually crystallised as Neon Dream.

01 / Autography

Autoethnography, except without the ethno

I borrowed methods from autoethnography, but considered myself the subject of the investigation rather than a means of studying a culture. Free-writing and an archaeology of photographs, music, digital artefacts and other memorabilia became ways of accessing and reconsidering a past experience, and in turn "writing" those reflections into an artefact.

The investigation increasingly became about habit: what I had stopped noticing, and what might make those familiar things perceptible again; introspective autography.

“And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”

— Viktor Shklovsky in Art as Technique (1917/2013)

02 / Datamoshing

Moshing memorabilia

Datamoshing became one way of putting Shklovsky's defamiliarization into practice. By deliberately damaging digital files, I could force familiar images out of their habitual form and encounter them again as images — and as data. I used sonification, Processing scripts and direct file manipulation to dismantle images connected to my experience and everyday digital life.

Repeated manipulation changed my relationship with them. Familiar photographs became strange; previously insignificant images accumulated meaning. The resulting glitches became a new breed of memorabilia.

03 / Crystallization

The Dream

The investigation eventually crystallized physically and digitally as Neon Dream: an archive and image-manipulation interface written in Processing, inspired by my Windows 7 desktop, late-90s interface design and vaporwave aesthetics.

Images, text and folders open in movable windows and can be distorted through glitch-emulating filters. It became both a container for the materials I had gathered and a tool for continuing to manipulate them.

04 / Artefact

Machina Somniandi

The Neon Dream exhibit was a replica of my usual workstation, displaying my tools and memorabilia for visitors to explore.

I had originally imagined a more stylized installation. Using my own keyboard, mouse and desk lamp initially seemed like a compromise, but proved more faithful: a reconstruction of the private environment in which Neon Dream had been conceived and used, temporarily placed on public display.

05 / Additional media