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 ...view middle of the document...
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 use of metaphor and paradoxes that locate us within the context of a mind travelling towards inspiration. The setting and context is created through the image of the "pleasure-dome" and Alph the "sacred river", where the inverted syntax creates a lack of control and represents the unknown. The power of the composer's imagination is revealed through the word pace, and words such as "savage demon-lover" and "forced" reveal the paradoxical nature of the art of imagination to perceive and apprehend what is both attractive and destructive. The poet employs the image of the mental eruption of the "mighty fountain" as a metaphor for inspiration. However, the "shadow of the dome of pleasure" reveals that once beyond inspiration, the persona charts unfamiliar territory again. Hence we realise that a journey into the composer's imagination leads to a moment of inspiration and creation, and through this poem, experience the exhilaration of inspiration and the unfamiliar aspect of the imagination.Thus, an imaginative journey is an experience of the unknown motivated in the art, in this case by the colours of electronic image and the imagery of poetry.490 words
