The 2018 Mindwise Poster

The Story of the Mindwise Poster

Last year, after many months of design and development work, Mindwise released its first poster, titled Journey Into Inner Space, which you can download and read about here (and see on the right of this paragraph). These posters (yes, we plan on releasing one every year!) are intended to stimulate a sense of wonder about the beauty of Psychology and the workings of the human mind, manifest this wonder in an image that is worth placing on your own wall, and promote a community of local artists.

For the first poster, our focus was on the microscopic, on the neural underpinnings of human behaviour and the poster saw social scientists as explorers of the mind. As astronauts explore outer space, so do psychologists explore inner space. This year, the focus of the poster is on the illusory nature of our perception of reality.

Trip Your Mind

It is tempting to think that the world is the way we perceive it to be, but it is not so. Reality is filtered through our senses and what we understand as reality is in fact merely our interpretation of those filtered sensations. Our perception is not reality, but for all practical purposes, it’s a good enough approximation. This simple concept is easier to understand when we trick our senses to perceive the world in a way that we know is incorrect, which is to say, to trick our sense with illusions. The 2018 Mindwise poster is titled Trip Your Mind, is inspired by the colourful, trippy posters of the 1960s, and features a number of hidden illusions or references to illusions. Can you spot them all?

The Artist and the Process

Douwe Dijkstra is a graduate of the Minerva Academy of Visual Arts in Groningen. His focus lies on music illustration and telling visual stories by making books and zines. His inspiration comes from everything around him and all the things and books he collects. Douwe is also one of the members of the Vera Artdivision of the famous Vera Club Groningen where he creates screen-printed gig posters for various bands by hand (check out his work on his Instagram page, follow him on Facebook, and buy his prints on Etsy).

Screen printing (zeefdruk in Dutch) is a printing technique first developed about a thousand years ago and involves forcing ink onto paper (or other substrate) through a screen of fine mesh (think tiny tiny holes) using a squeegee. The screen itself, usually made of polyester, has the negative of each colour layer printed on it with a photo-sensitive resist. The resist is so called because it does not allow the ink to flow through, thus creating a pattern for each of the layers. Each layer is printed separately and allowed to dry before the next layer is printed over it, after carefully registering (aligning) the paper underneath the screen. The video below shows the printing of the first layer. At the bottom of this page, you can see a short series of photos from the process of hand-printing the 2018 Mindwise poster in the attic of Vera, in July 2018.

The 2018 Mindwise poster is a limited edition of 110 copies, hand-printed in four colour layers by Douwe on July 23rd, 2018 and you can get a copy for your wall by emailing us at mindwise@rug.nl while we still have a few copies available. Even if we run out, however, fear not! Click on the buttons below to download free hi-res versions of these jpegs to use as backgrounds on your computers and phones, or to print out for your own use.

– Tassos Sarampalis

September 25th, 2018