“Artistic Dialogues” with the Unconscious: A Model-Method (IMPreC) for Painting Melodies for Voiceless Songs

In this article, we develop a theoretical and methodological framework for investigating the relationship between the unconscious and the "upconscious" through intersemiotic translation across artistic modalities. Extending the Inter-Modal Pre-Construction method (IMPreC) and grounding it in the four-level model of dynamic semiosis, we propose that affective fields can travel across non-verbal modalities – from painting to music and back – via a bypass of categorical verbal expressions. We situate this process within an expanded account of intersemiotic translation, reconceived as multidirectional, emergent, and heuristic rather than unidirectional and representational. Towards these, a novel three-stage model-method process was applied and explored: (1) Academics selected paintings that elicited personal unconscious affect; (2) New participants verbally described their emotional experience of a painting while guiding a musician's live improvisation; (3) Further participants listened to the resulting improvisation and attempted to identify, from among four paintings, the one for which it was composed – with all individuals selecting correctly. We discuss the success of this model of creative conductivity and vulnerability identifying five structurally distinct moments at which the unconscious process of meaning creation can or cannot be disrupted. We suggest that certain affective properties of experience can function as stable attractors within the intermodal translation landscape, persisting across radical changes in semiotic mediums, and that the boundaries between modalities could constitute the sites of the greatest theoretical and practical interest for accessing artistic communication in general, and unconscious cross-modal artistic communication in specifically.