What if we could see what other people are dreaming? What if we could see what thousands of people dream?

Onirica () is an audiovisual work that explores the dimension of dreams, interpreting through synthetic languages the creative ability of the human mind during sleep. Through the use of algorithms capable of translating textual content into images, Onirica () brings descriptions of dreams back into the domain of the visible.

The work transforms into a collective experience the dreams of volunteers who participated in the research at the University of Bologna and the University of California Santa Cruz. Selected from 28,748 dreams, the plots flow one into the other as a series of short stories, tracing the actual cadence of NREM and REM dreams present over the course of a night’s sleep. This continuous synthetic stream of dreams finds its final aesthetics through the close collaboration between human and artificial intelligence: the sequences are artificially generated by a machine learning system that translates the text of dreams into a series of subsequent hallucinations that bring to life the characters, objects and landscapes described.
Onirica () accentuates the tension created by the interpretation and translation of a purely human experience, the dream, through the eyes of new technologies. Inserting itself within an increasingly relevant ethical debate, the work aims to address from an unprecedented and 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 idea about the possible impact of these technologies on society and on the perception of ourselves.

Borbála Szalai