MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

While the human mind has perplexed us humans for millennia, two recent production designs reconsider its functioning in the contemporary world: the Simon Stephen play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the Pixar film Inside Out. These pieces uniquely present the mind as a designed place in an attempt to visualize thought, emotion, and memory, creating specialized environments of each protagonist’s psyche. In the play Curious Incident…, the simple cube of a stage is transformed by elements of light and sound to manifest the thoughts and emotions of 15-year-old Christopher as he attempts to rectify the misattribution of a neighborhood crime. Through design, the audience is invited into his mind and taken on a journey through his perception of the world beyond words, physical presence, and behavior, sharing a provocative articulation of Christopher’s experience. In the film Inside Out, the human brain becomes a landscape, literally, for the emotional tale of a young girl as experienced through five emotions. In the design of her mind, architectural structures evoke biological forms and abstract processes are envisioned as characters or objects. The audience is compelled to explore the depths and processes of a human mind, and in doing so consider the functioning of their own. What does this visualization of the mind’s process in entertainment media reveal? These productions utilize design to draw the universal into the individual, but presented in forums that are still relatable communally. At a time when information about seemingly anything is available everyday through the Internet, these productions expose new levels at which design and narrative help us express our experience as humanity. Through these two productions, we can consider contemporary society’s obsession with the “self” in contrast with our continued quest for universally understood communication of thought and emotion.