DreamHouse is meant to be a manifestation of my subconscious, the purest form of human creation.  Based on a series of dreams and visions kept in a meditation and dream journal for a period of 6 months, then processed through surrealist techniques such as automatic writing and drawing, as well as non objective experimental modeling, the Spaces in this work are reflective of a dream, nonsensical and illogically scattered. As dreams are meant to be an abstraction of the real and much like surrealism, the objects have a sense of reality to them and yet nothing fits together in the space.

 

            This piece is an extension of a larger continuing exploration of the ordered chaos of computers and how volatile and particular their construction is. This ordered chaos is in turn built upon the logical biases of a computer programmer, and due to humans inherently being creatures of error, thus the glitch is born. Glitches are considered “random” occurrences in the machine world when really they are the results of human error programmed into a computer. Glitches are a reflection of a human’s logical fallacies. We often hold computers in high regard as perfect and calculated machines, when they are in reality incredibly unstable, where one misread number potentially resulting in swaths of data loss and corruption. In my fine art work I exploit this logical error, exposing these glitches in the machine and letting viewers question the constructs of the world around them. It is the feeling of this distortion that I wished to bring into DreamHouse, a sense of uncertainty, hectic chaos and unclear views that are also associated with dream-like states.

 

            In researching the bases for this project I looked into Freud's research on the subconscious, which lead me to Carl Jung’s theories about dream interpretation, and symbolism, which he derived from Freud's findings and expounded upon. I learned surrealist techniques for manifesting subconscious thought the surrealist manifesto and the work of Andre Breton and other surrealist artists of the early 1920s. I was also fortunate enough to take a class with Michelle Rothwell of the game art department, focusing on what she calls holistic creativity, the theory that through holism and meditation we can become more creative people. This class taught me meditation practices that not only helped put me in a better flow state, but also allowed me visionary moments where I could picture environments in incredible detail. Using these spaces as inspiration for my thesis, then refining them through automatic drawing and writing allowed me to imprint my subconscious onto a walkable world, letting others walk through a representation of my dreams in a Meta space. This Meta space taps into others’ subconsciousness as they take in and experience mine, imprinting on them the things that I subconsciously created.

 

            According to Carl Jung’s theories, we absorb information through all of our senses and the data is stored subconsciously, manifesting themselves as symbols in your brain. I took these symbols and processed them through surrealist automatism to create an immersive experience in a Meta space that allows others to experience my representation of my subconscious imprinting, allowing them to form a representation of the subconscious experience; a kind of subconscious interfacing.  

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The subconscious interface I seek to create follows this design:

 

1.Take in subconscious data

2.Turn into symbols

3.Experience in dreams

4.Reconstruct through conscious thought

5.Expose others through emersion to these subconscious ideas,

6.Allowing them in turn to experience these subconscious experiences and

    create their own interpretations through their own subconscious imprinting into

    their dreams.

 

Along with research, I did pipeline development for the first semester of this year, finding ways to implement nonstandard tools into the Unity pipeline. Specifically in this project I used a generative 3d fractal program called Mandelbulb 3d to generate fractals. I then bulb traced and converted these fractals into point cloud data, which is a set of points in 3D space sampled from the surfaces of objects in that space. From there I import this data into a meshing program, and through a series of refinements and point reductions am able to get a low poly mesh from the point cloud, and project the details into it. This method yielded some problems as the point clouds were often over ten million vertices and getting the right combination of reduction algorithms to work together to create a workable low res mesh was a long period of trial and error that took up most of this first semester.

Another process that I've worked into the Unity pipeline is motion graphics animation from Cinema 4d, including point cloud importation, which is not standard in the Unity engine, meaning I had to work with a special importing program.

As for the rest of the modeling and texturing pipeline, I modeled and UV'd everything in Maya, animated in Cinema 4d, exported as FBX to Substance Painter to paint the textures on the models, then finally exported these in 4k and importing everything into Unity.

This project follows a long exploration into the inner workings of my own subconscious and the use of new technology to express and present them.

 

 

 ~Austin Latshaw

Sound design by Jeffry Glenn and Zac Chalbi

Models borrowed from Matt Renzulli (shelves, door, desk lamp), John Swift (dinosaur skeleton),

Cg society- laptop, statue of liberty