A Beautiful Mind

Another film that I thought of that deals with the issue of knowledge versus imagination is Michel Gondry's  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In the film, "a couple undergo a procedure to erase each other from their memories when their relationship turns sour, but it is only through the process of loss that they discover what they had to begin with." (Eternal Sunshine)

While some people develop elaborate diseases blurring, as Dr. Katherine Taylor calls it, “the line between realistic and melodramatic portraits" of life, others wish to simply eliminate this "line" separating the two worlds altogether.  As this film proves, however, imagination--here, the memory of their lover--proves to override knowledge--the fact of knowing their relationship has failed--and the procedure fails as their dreams of reality begin to take over.

Interestingly enough, research has been conducted that, in fact, this type of procedure could become reality: Eternal Sunshine Study.  Memories and/or elaborations of imagination could be completely erased when it comes to the things people wish to elimate from their minds, leaving only 'good' cases of imagination and memory.


Do you think it is safe for a procedure such as this to take place?  Should science take over to force knowledge to be more important that imagination, memory, and hope that a imaginings of yesterday could become realities of today?
 

Effective dialogue

In his blog, Brycen states, “...art has the ability to communicate emotions, feelings, and ideas to people or groups of people. To look at this from another angle, one can see that dialogue is vital in this expression. Dialogue makes something complete by conveying what the artist was feeling or felt to the people or the audience through their work of art...The artist can tell their deepest darkest fear to their most craziest dream through their work of art. This is important because some think that art being able to create ideas for the people viewing it creates dialogue between it and the audience because it causes them to think.”

On a recent trip to Gallery 51, I was also intrigued by this question of dialogue.  About a dozen different works were displayed throughout the gallery and, without the small three-by-five descriptions of them (whether they be from the artist of the gallery curators) I would have had either a completely different thought/emotion/feeling than the artist intended or absolutely no clue what I was viewing.   

This led me to question whether or not written words were necessary to a work in order to create not only a dialogue between artist and viewer, but an effective dialogue.  Looking at a sculpture that looked to me as if it could have simply been purchased in the home decor section at Target, I found out (upon reading the description) was actually supposed to communicate the play of light and shadow through the holes in the ironwork, just as ants playing in the sun...clearly NOWHERE near what I would think when I viewed it. 

Continuing around the gallery, I would try to come up with my own interpretation of the work; reading the three-by-fives, however, I found that I was not once in line with what the artist was trying to communicate.

My little art visit experiment here seems to have proven our point that art almost always requires some kind of verbal or written description of words in order to effectively spark a dialogue in which artists create and viewers interpret. Do you agree this is almost always the case?

Imagination vs. delusion: Shutter Island

After reading Dr. Katherine Taylor's article and the few films she mentioned, I was provoked to think of more films that related to the topic of imagination vs. reality when it comes to psychological disorders.

First to come up was Scorcese's Shutter Island. "Psychology Today" journalist Jeremy Clyman discusses the movie and disillusion in his article, "Reel Today:  Unraveling the mind through film":
(Shutter Island: Separating Fact from Fiction). Throughout the entirety of the film we think Teddy is trying to figure out a crime and then is held in the institution against his will. It's not only until the last scene of the film we are told that he actually suffers from a psychotic disease and murdered his wife upon finding out she killed their three children. As Dr. Taylor states in her essay, "

“One might say...knowledge: it must derive from experience...[but] Imagination is a private thing, the leap of a single brain from established fact to exciting novelty.”  At the end of the film, we begin to question, Did Teddy hold this "knowledge" that he was a murderer all along derived from his experiences of living through his traumatic familial affairs? Or, did his imagination really take over (as a way to suppress those traumatic lived experiences, to "leap" from the fact that he was a killer to the more "exciting novelty" that his wife had died and he was actually the hero of his story trying to solve a crime?  

This film made me wonder, when one suffers such a traumatic experience as Teddy did, does imagination take over knowledge to suppress horrific memories and replace them with our own "private thing" in which happier thoughts prevail?