Output details

Jubilee line customer daydream survey

As part of a series of artworks commissioned for the Jubilee line by Art on the Underground in collaboration with the Freud Museum, Daria Martin undertook a survey to discover passengers' daydreams as they travel on the London Underground. The commission represented an extension of the artist's interest in psychological space, dreams, and projections. Using a questionnaire designed in the 1970s by Auke Tellegen and adapted for her project, Martin and a team of volunteers conducted face-to-face surveys with 800 passengers at ten different Jubilee line stations during 2011 in order to uncover their susceptibility to 'absorption' i.e. to getting wrapped up in their own inner world or their subjective perceptions as a distraction from the reality of being underground. Martin also visited the Freud Museum, which is usually accessed via the Jubilee line, and took photographic images of the objects on Freud's desk, which were arguably vehicles for his own reveries. A selection of the varied responses to the questionnaire and to Martin’s simple question ‘What have you been daydreaming about on the Tube?’ were combined with the images of Freud's objects to make a series of poster-based artworks, which were presented across the Tube network during 2010-11. Thousands of fliers featuring carefully selected and arranged responses to the survey were also distributed to the public in Jubilee line stations.