So hmmm…. I’ve decided to have a special weekly post on every Thursday to showcase the things I really love. It’s not gonna be some sappy shit. I’m talking websites, photographs, people, news, ideas, concepts…just something random I come across that I really really dig. I think part of the reason we have blogs is to let our inner emotions, thoughts and philosophies out. But we should take the time to focus on our external inspirations as well… I dont know bout you, but I feel my Things I Love Thursday posts will remind me to do that, to think about what inspires me from the outside, from other people’s creativity, from things surrounding me… from life itself.. I will also count down the Thursdays each week… with 53 Thursdays in 2009 we are currently on the 25th Thursday of the year, so… I thought I would start my first Thursday post discussing a website i really loved.. I came across it a week or two ago. Since my field is internet marketing I come across a lot of interesting stuff every once in a while.
It’s called Dream Grove…
This is their homepage. http://www.dreamgrove.org You must be wondering how I found a homepage with a picture of the mud in a garden with an open pomegranate fallen down appeals to me? Well…here’s how it works.
Dream Grove is an interactive website where you can visit to record your dreams. Like an online portal that records anyone’s dream from across the world. You click on the pomegranate and it will whisk you to their database of dreams which you can browse through… It looks pretty cool and you can read what other people have recorded. In this portal you can record an actual dream you had or something which you dream of as in wish for, desire…. Here’s how all the dreams look… pretty neat huh? If you click on the hole to the left of the tree stump that’s where you can record your dream. clicking on the tree stump takes you to a little writeup about the garden itself and the details involving the actual garden itself (I will explain more later on…) If you click on the worm to the right (I thought it was so cute how it wiggles and sways when you hover your mouse over it..!) that will show you information about the project and the concept itself… Once you get on the website… its soo amazing… and surprises you how pretty the mud looks (they’ve used some animation to make the soil sparkle!)
This is the page you come to when you click on the pomegranate. Each dot represent someone who has visited this website and recorded their dream. Each dream is categorized by color of dot, mood, date, name, and number. The black toolbox on the left is how you can search for dreams. But honestly, I think if I had to mention something negative…needs to work on their search mechanism because when I tried to search for the dream I had recorded on here a couple weeks ago I couldn’t find it when I searched for my name. but its still interesting to see what others had written.. Here’s Dream 199 just to give you an example:
Now you’re probably thinking, this is it? cooollll…. no it’s not over yet…. !! Now what happens next is simply colossal!!! Now these dreams that everyone can record online are sent to a database in Greece I think it is… where there’s a garden… a pomegrante garden. Like a realll garden… The garden is built in with strategically placed hidden speakers where these dreams are whispered out along with garden sounds… And people in Greece can actually visit the garden and if they listen carefully and quietly… they can walk around and listen to the dreams of people from across the world. How pretty is that?? According to the creator he defines the purpose of Dream Grove as the following:
“Dream Grove is about writing, then speaking, one’s innermost emotion, wish, or instinct; it makes public private memories that can never be fully owned. Using technologies of exposure and representation it generates a surreal break in reality, and gives back to speaking, writing and drifting some of their long-lost aura.”
I also found the site to be very humbling as the creator of this concept listed all his inspirations to do this project… and let me tell you it was not just a couple… It was a huge list of things… here they are… (Reading that Aristotle was one of his inspirations, took me back to my highschool days when I was studying Aristotle in a Humanities course I was doing. I really loved that class…
Inspirations of Dream Grove:
Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence
Aristotle, On Dreams
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Polyphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: a Plant’s Eye View of the World
Petros Babasikas is the creator of this concept Dimitris Doukas who helped engineer the concept and Lambros Pigounis was the sound artist.
As of the time being this concept is a temporary exhibition at a Athens Byzantine Museum but the creators are looking for a permanent location where they can continue to run Dream Grove…
If you decide to visit Dream Grove I’d love to hear what you thought of it (good or bad, I like unbiased opinions), and have you found any interesting websites that inspired you lately? this light is turned off.
Currently listening to
Misery Is a Butterfly
By Blonde Redhead
