Art 2.0

Spoiler Alert for anyone who has not seen Angels In America, either the mini series or the play as I will discuss plot points in some minor detail here.

There are several dream sequences in Angels In America that involve the character of Prior Walter.  During these sequences there are depictions of events and it is left somewhat ambiguous for the viewer as to whether these sequences are meant to be real or if they are meant to be hallucinations.  In the series at least they are implied to be real as the sequences in some cases have real world effects on other characters, for example Prior and Harper have a conversation that they are both aware of afterwards - again Harper is another character who has a number of these sequences where the same ambiguity exists.

Whilst these dreams can be seen as an example of the Shared Dream narrative trope, when Prior and Harper speak the dialogue reveals a greater intent, in that conversation their connection is instead referred to as the threshold of revelation.  Notwithstanding the name of the whole narrative, religious symbolism and terminology is to be expected.  This idea however is something I find interesting, not in the conventional sense of sharing dreams, that bit doesn't interest me, instead the bit that does is the idea of revelations in a dreamlike state.  There are a number of psychological explanations for why these states of mind can occur and why these moments of epiphany can be made whilst dreaming, but what I find interesting is the idea that you could use this to your advantage if you could control it.

In a previous post I mentioned the nature of memory and how ultimately we can't really control it, I also mentioned the concept of considering the three distinct states of mind as separate entities.  This idea of the threshold of revelation I believe in reality is the literary equivalent of being able to use your conscious mind to talk to your unconscious mind and be able to question it, to engage with it in the same way that you would if it were actually another person.  In the case of Harper and Prior you could argue that coincidentally both had similar dreams and that they both had concerns and that somewhere in their past they had seen one another and lost all recollection - that isn't the intent of the writer, I'm just rationalising a possible explanation if it were to actually happen in real life as opposed to a work of fiction.

If you could talk to your unconscious mind however, I don't think you would get the results you would expect, for one the nature of the unconscious mind is such that it deals with permutation and constant modelling of what could happen given every scenario it is presented with the information it is fed.  If you were to be able to communicate with it directly then the idea of it giving cryptic responses and showing visions of all manner of creations wouldn't be far off the reality, it wouldn't possess the ability to speak for instance but it would be able to comprehend the information you feed it and the scenario you are seeking to model - not in terms of language but in terms of the implicit understanding the mind has when processing information.

If you could harness the power of your unconscious mind to be able to feed it information and see what it comes up with, you would in many ways access a fountain of creativity that is potentially endless.  You could see visions of heaven or hell insofar as your imagination and your creativity is capable of depicting those concepts, take problems that you seek solutions to and be shown every angle.  This of course would in theory be capable with a computer, if it were to be able to comprehend your thoughts, fed with enough information and the ability to process it.  That last point is something that I find interesting and once again it comes back to the idea of artificial intelligence, in this case to be more precise, artificial creativity.  With algorithms that can write music, create works of art, and even write news articles, there is an anticipation that dwells in the back of my mind and that is the anticipation of a world where art transcends humanity, where humanity can be presented with something to contemplate that not only evokes contemplation of what the artist intended, but also removes the human connection to the artist so that intention is truly unknown.  If a photographer can take a picture that is worth a thousand words, what kind of picture could a machine take and how deep would our contemplation of it run?