An imaginative journey is characterised by engagement with the unfamiliar, which transports responders into a new context and represents an experience that challenges old perspectives and endorses new ones about the world and themselves. In the electronic image "I want to fly", we engage with the presentation of colour and symbolism, and allow ourselves to be displaced in order to become the character in the image. Initially we are attracted to the unfamiliar setting with all its splendour of electronic colour and the blue aura of the flowers. The pink and orange fluorescent road gives a sense of mysteriousness as we see no ending, and the intricate road sign pointing in an upward direction at the stretch of colour above the black sky indicate the journey is actually directly overhead, an open runway for self flight. Colour is employed to portray a heightened sense of foreignness.
We engage with the dilemma of the girl's desire to fly, by identifying with her character, transcending time and place to another realm.
English: Draft of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem K...
English: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at age 42. Franç...
English: Titlepage of Kubla Khan.The persona precariously holds onto a heavy luggage, symbolizing her burdens and restrictions of life that she must abandon in order to achieve self fulfilment and take spiritual flight to this new world. The bright fluorescence of the bordered sky illustrates faith in the utopian nature of this imaginary world we desire to escape to. In the distance, the reddish tint of the shooting star, a visual metaphor for hope and desire, ties in with the persona's struggle to abandon her burden and fly without restraint.
This understanding also applies to us, as the responder. Don't we ALL sometimes wish for a place of escape, to forget our burdens?
In contrast, the unfamiliar aspect of imaginary journeys is represented through imagery in Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. We engage with the...