TO INTERPRET, PUT IN PLAINER TERMS...

"the dream I am about to relate illustrates the inadequacy of words...If I could draw or paint or better still, if I had a camera..." William S. Burroughs

An interpreter translates the speech or text of one language into another to facilitate understanding. In fact any system of messages or signs, symbols, codes, dreams, religious, philosophical and dramatic texts, musical scores, paintings and even natural phenomena, can be interpreted by any one of us.

Codes like morse or semaphore have a fixed set of meanings, shared between sender and receiver. But many image systems are open to a range of interpretations; gestures, icons and graphics can imply different things in different contexts, times or cultures.

The images which appear in our dreams and the narratives they appear to create, can be interpreted in ways which reveal the inner workings of our mind, our fears and desires. For many cultures they also explain beliefs, unravel the past and fortell the future. The Surrealist and Dada movements were fascinated by these ideas and by Sigmund Freud's work on dreams and the unconscious.

Susan Hiller, an American artist who has lived and worked in Britain for several years, has made many pieces which explore the unconscious and the meanings of dreams. Her piece 'Dream Screens' is a site specific work made for the Internet, containing numerous colour screens with a soundtrack in 6 languages (plus additional texts.) A woman's voice apparently recounting dream narratives mixes with other sounds (which are explained) as we click at will through blank coloured screens. In fact the stories we hear are not dreams but recollections of films with 'dream' in the title. Onto this background we can project whatever images and interpretations spring to mind...

Susan Hiller - "Dream Screens", 1996. (1)

[This page links directly to the Dream Screens Website. See the reference page for more links to Hiller's work]

• Could you invent a secret code system for text messaging?
• What facial expressions and gestures do you use or recognise?
• In what ways could you articulate your dreams?
• What if each person in the class were to recall an event which you all experienced. How might these versions differ?
• How could you find out the aesthetic preferences of a particular group?

DISCUSS

RESEARCH

BRAINSTORM

DESCRIBE

COMPARE

Komar and Melamid - 'Kenya's Most Wanted Painting', 1986 (1)

[This page links directly to the Most Wanted Painting Website]

"A single event can have infinitely many interpretations." Jenny Holzer

Colours are sometimes said to signify certain things - red for danger, yellow for happiness -but these can be contradictory. For instance green could evoke the newness of spring but might also suggest age and decay and in Europe the colour of mourning is black while in Japan it is white.

Interpretation can be just the expression of one point of view. A subjective opinion. Analysis is one way in which we try to make objective sense of things by breaking them down into their basic elements.

Komar and Melamid are Russian artists working together in America. Their project 'Most Wanted Paintings' took the principles of market research and applied them to art appreciation. They used professional opinion polls to question the kind of art people in different countries liked and didn't like. By interpreting the resulting data, they produced a series of 'most wanted' and 'least wanted' paintings. On one level this was an absurd and playful exercise, but the process also questions notions of taste and judgement.