Margaret Penney, despite having the most British name on the planet, is
a NYC based new media artist. Her work is nonlinear narrative, based on
the psychological analysis of dreams.

Drawing from the iconography of Jung and Campbell, her work could be
seen as an attempt to recreate a dream state on the web. The classical
maze layout, found on sites like redsmoke and superbad, is used here,
but achieves a new meaning in its context. You navigate this site with a
kind of dream logic, finding secrets the deeper you are willing to go.

I talked to Margaret while she was stranded in Madrid. Any discrepancies
in punctuation result from the use of a Spanish Keyboard, and were kept
intact for their charm.

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Eryk Salvaggio: When did you start dream7?

Margaret Penney: The first version of dream7 in 1998. I experimented
with mixing my stories with my photography and illustration. One
subproject I did then, which is still online, was Prima Materia. I would
say Prima Materia was the start of the dream7 as it is now. Prima
Materia is an alchemic method of turning base metals into gold, or
metaphorically the idea of taking base aspects and turning them into
something of value. Prima Materia then was supposed to be a
representation of the base materials of myself, transformed.

ES: What inspired you to start including the use of sound?

MP: I work with two sound designers from London, Duodecimo. Their sound
comes from everyday objects and experience, but kind of pulled and
remixed into these incredibly otherworldly tracks. So there's a sense of
reality and then, all of a sudden, unreality in their sound, which works
really well with dream7.

Sound is the most conductive and pure creative form. Sound travels
farther, faster, and has a much more accurate aim for the soul. You can
get carried away by sound… Visuals make us observers, and to a degree
always keep us outside the picture. Mixing sound and visuals allows the
visuals to connect more closely with the viewer: sound travels outside
the computer, and is like the thread which connects the audience with
the visuals on the screen.

ES: So- why the web?

MP: The fact that a medium came into existence which is capable of
linking a large portion of the world population together, in an
atmosphere where the most harmful thing that can happen to you is your
email gets distributed, or you get a virus, is a wonderful medium. The
web is many-to-many, not one-to-many.

ES: What was your training coming into this project?

MP: I had studied fine arts and media studies as a concentration, and my
major was creative writing. I exhibited my paintings and dolls (which
were called alter-ego dolls) while I was in college. I went to Johns
Hopkins University undergrad, where I was surrounded for the most part
by budding biophysicists, cog-sci geeks, and engineers. My mother liked
to say I had a Renaissance style education. "You're a Renaissance Woman,
Marg." "Ahh, I see, okay." After JHU I went to Columbia University for
graduate school, I took steel sculpture there, which was not really my
oeuvre. I am somewhat of a dainty person, but I must say melding steel
up in a converted factory in Harlem was a good initiation to New York
City.

ES: How has your background in writing colored the way you make visual
art?

MP: I would say its an even mix of writing and art. I always rode the
similarities between the two. Writing uses imagery, and narratives have
shapes. Margaret Atwood and her hawks, Kiki Smith and her nightbirds.
Borges and his labyrinths and triangles, Robert Morris and labyrinths
realized for gleeful museum-goers. When you combine elements in a
meaningful way, you are in some senses telling a story, or at least
giving the impression that a story lies beneath.

I decided I wanted to make visual narratives in dream7 in part, because
I had the urge to cut down stories to their core aspects. So in dream7 I
extract would be story elements, like symbol and metaphor, and scramble
them around in these primarily image-based web pages – the effect then
becomes more like visual poetry. I do this to see whether something can
be communicated as a story without the words attached overtly. Those
crux images are the imagery, signs, archetypes, that people tend to
understand somewhere inside, like the way you understand poetry, or
dreams- with a kind of vague intuition.

Certain parts of dream7 are zones, the pieces tend to inter- relate in a
vague, subliminal way. So, I create novel connections between the pieces
by linking them unusually: an image links to a phrase, in combination
they have another meaning. It's like a strange kind of poetry and a
montage as well, a montage with depth.

ES: You've said that dream7 has a lot to do with dreams and dream
imagery. Are these from your own dreams?

MP: Yes, dream7 is some of my dream imagery, but for the most part I use
common dream symbols and actions like teeth, flying, falling, flowers,
birds, and dark figures – images that are stored in most people's
internal symbol library.

I also try and create hypnagogic images through moire, geometric shapes,
and repetitive animations. The latter are more like the images you see
as you are falling asleep, and are believed to be what you would focus
on when going to sleep in order to gain lucidity from within a dream.

I have always been an avid dreamer, and hold the belief that dreams are
like the source code for creativity. I am interested in them as a source
of content because I feel they are important, and are something which
people share in common.

ES: Do you find a lot of people relate these images to their own dreams?

MP: I get a lot of dreams from people through the site, I am constantly
surprised by how similar we dream to one another. I just think
sometimes, that if people realized that their nightmare, which they
hate, is shared by millions of other people in the world, it might give
them a sense of restfulness. How many people out there have dreams of
elevators or office buildings, eh? People they've lost coming back to to
reconcile? Teeth falling out? Robbers in the night? Driving so fast you
crash? Boats, ships, and trains? Ladies, ever dream your boyfriend was
messing around, or you were and he caught you? Men, ever dream about
that perfect girl, embodied by Jewel or some other celebrity? C'mon,
fess up.

ES: So, lets talk about Jung. You say in the rhizome artbase: "Dream7
uses the medium of the web because on one level the web is a metaphor
for the brain, and even, the collective unconscious." In a way, the web
IS the collective unconscious. Beyond metaphor even. Or is that too
hokey?

MP: The web is like the collective unconscious, yes. The idea of a new
media being like the collective unconscious is not a new notion though,
McLuhan parsed this out in 1964 with our new media "extensions of man."
So, I'm a collective unconscious hack.

I think there's a lot to explore with ideas which are A.K.A.– hokey.
For instance, I think creative thinking, sentimentalism, magic, and
poetry are aspects of ourselves that our contemporary culture has
dismissed for no good reason. If you sense that the world wide web is
something more than just a group of networked computers then I feel, as
artists, it's our societal duty to explore these thoughts, even if at
the end, our conclusions, perchance, end up bunk.

ES: So what would you say to someone who called your work "Psychedelic?"
Do you think maybe there's a kinship with other hallucinatory work, like
Dextro, for example?

MP: The work is psychedelic because of the hypnagogic imagery, yes. The
state before going to sleep, the sleep/wake state is similar to states
people feel on certain drugs.

I think I create works on dream7, to a degree, in order to channel
certain creative (but not altered) states inside me. The reverie and
flow from these states is something I want to communicate online. The
web has been a receptive conductor, per se, for these exercises.. maybe
because it is 4 a.m., or maybe because there is something special with
the quiet webspace. I think Dextro transmits states too, and uses the
FLOW. My feeling is, creatives try and get flow in whatever way works
for them. May the flow be with you, Luke.

ES: Its a kind of forgotten element of the net these days- it seems like
this whole "Global Village" concept, and these tribalist ways, would
have a more active "shamanistic" element. What's your take on that, do
you see in any relevance these days in that kind of thinking?

MP: About 8 years back, when I was dreaming almost religiously and read
Castaneda, I had a dream I was walking through a forest, and an
aggressive old woman came up to me and told me I had to walk along the
tree tops or I would never get where I was needed. It was my duty, and I
should be honored. I was frightened, how could I walk along the tree
tops? I am afraid of heights. Somewhere inside I remembered what I had
read in Castaneda, that what Shamans do is turn the thing they are
frightened by into something else, to see it as another form, in order
to combat it. I was above the tree tops now, and I changed the
perspective and turned their green furry treetops into moss under my
feet. It was easy to walk with that perspective. But then I reached a
certain tree, and I fell into it, and was caught on a plank high above
the ground, all at once I was scared again. A Mexican boy stood at the
base and told me to calm down or I would never pass the test. I calmed,
and he threw up two things to me. An empty white plate and a pencil. The
boy told me these were my tools. I screamed, tired of the game, and
upset these were my only things to work with. I saw them as pointless
and incongruous, but at the same time too advanced for me to connect. He
looked at me as if disappointed, I threw the plate down and it smashed
into a million pieces. I woke up with a feeling I had failed something.
For some reason I had felt for many years that that was an important
dream.

ES: But do you think it was a mystical intervention? I seem to remember
a lot of this stuff at the beginning of the rave/ internet scenes, back
when people thought we would all be farming with laptops and bongos in a
new post-everything nomadic paradise, that we would all be back in touch
with our mystical sides and living off the earth…

MP: Yeah, I was into that idea when I graduated from college. A couple
of my friends and I even had plans to buy a farm, and do the whole
subsistence farming route, living off the land, doing art, singing,
dancing, trying for paradise. But of course we never did that, we all
just got 9 to 5 jobs. I think I decided living on a farm would be pretty
boring, and a little bit of real life chaos never hurt anybody. So yeah,
I liked the idea, but I think mystical and/or idealist style living
should always be tempered with a little bit of hardcore reality. So
that's why I ended up in New York City, into my dreams, an urban mystic
I suppose, ha ha. There's a fine line between being mystical and being a
flake, you know? I think the Rave scene, nomadic paradise, tribal
culture, rainbow gathering scene died out for the same reasons most
notions like that do, entropy, and the fact that people are like animals
as much as they are like soulful children. We all want bones in addition
to wanting some kind of spirit aspect. Don't forget the bones!! Planet
of the Apes meets Logan's Run…

I have a real dual consciousness towards my thoughts and feelings for
the more mystic aspects of life. I don't believe in Miss Cleo on
television, and I think that Castaneda might in fact be just a very
imaginative writer. [But] like Joseph Campbell believes, we have life
myths, these individual tales we weave around ourselves, that in our
dreams are broadcast to us as incredible, nonsensical dramas. The dream
above then is just my personal myth.

Dream7 though, seems both mystical and psychological, I would have to
say. I am a fan of magic and mysticism, whether I am a total believer or
not, so in addition to using archetypes and symbols, I allow dream7 to
have a mystical feel to it. I feel it takes the project to a place which
feels less restrained, and more hopeful.

ES: What's your latest project?

MP: I