Onirica ()

fuse*

Artwork Description:

Dreams are experiences that have fascinated humanity since its origins. During sleep, our window to reality closes and gives way to a particular state of consciousness where dream narratives follow one another, projected in our minds like cinematic sequences that are at times vivid and extremely defined. Onirica () came to life thanks to the collaboration with two dream banks: by the University of Bologna and the University of California Santa Cruz. The collected data were transformed into narrations, elaborating a project that would relate the scientific method to the creative mutability of oneiric activity. The work transforms into a collective experience the dreams of volunteers who participated in research sessions at the two universities.

Selected from 28,748 dreams, the plots flow one into the other as a series of short films, tracing the actual cadence of NREM and REM dreams present throughout a night's sleep. This continuous synthetic stream of consciousness finds its final aesthetics through the close collaboration between human being and artificial intelligence: the sequences are artificially generated by a machine learning system that translates the text of dreams into hallucinations bringing to life the characters, objects and landscapes described. Onirica () aims to address from an exploratory point of view the relationship between a purely human sensibility and the creative capacity of artificial intelligence systems: to discover their potentialities and limitations, to stimulate in the viewer a critical and conscious thought about the possible impact of these technologies on society and the perception of ourselves.