You Were In My Dream is an interactive installation created by Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine. It premiered at Experimenta Utopia Now, Feb 2010 in Melbourne, Australia.
The work takes a live video feed of your face and combines it into a beautiful stop motion dream world. You enter into a utopian geography and navigate a path through a jungle of forest animals where survival of the fittest reigns supreme.
The work tours Australia through 2010 and 2011. It won the 2010 Premier of Queensland's National New Media Art Award, Australia's most significant prize for new media art.
You Were In My Dream is an Experimenta commission.
installation view
Artists' Statement
The germ of the idea for You Were In My Dream began with the idea of putting a viewer's head onto an animated character via a live video feed. We were struck by the strange feeling you get from watching your disembodied head transformed into another universe.
The work was commissioned by Experimenta as part of their 2010 Biennial with the theme of 'Utopia'. We developed the work very much with the theme in mind.
We were aware of the fact that it's so much easier to turn utopia upside-down and create distopic views of things and we were trying hard to find a way around being too cynical or making something gloomy.
We thought about evolution and transformation and how wonderful it is that over time species adapt to their environments and develop different body parts to streamline them for whatever it is they do best.
We came up with a character whose body and nature transforms to fulfil the requirements of the forest. Instead of trying to bend the forest to your will, you change to suit the forest.
We wanted to use utopic imagery, and paradise is often portrayed as beautiful untouched nature where the balance of life is in harmony. There was something about imagining yourself into children's stories that played a part in the concept as well. This is the motivation behind using an image of the viewer's face as part of the animation. This we hope gives you a strange out-of-body experience and make you feel like you're in a dream.
