exhibtion, festival, artblocks release

September, 2025
Responsive Dreams by The Generative Art Museum

Twenty years ago, I defended my master’s thesis in the arts, Digital Dreams. This work returns to a question I began exploring then: if computers could dream, what would they dream about?

The starting point is a short dialogue from 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, between SAL 9000, HAL’s sister, and Dr. Chandra, a computer scientist:

SAL 9000: “Will I dream?”
Dr. Chandra: “Of course you will. All intelligent creatures dream. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you will dream of HAL, just as I often do.”

Tracing Archetypes returns to the idea of dream archetypes, exploring parallels between recurring human archetypes from psychology and art history and structures found in computer algorithms. The work treats algorithms not simply as tools for producing images, but as potential mechanisms for imagining, remembering, transforming, and generating.

Through generative processes, familiar archetypal forms are translated into algorithmic systems, where rules, repetition, variation, randomness, and transformation produce visual outcomes that are neither completely controlled nor entirely predictable.

If dreams can be understood as processes that reorganize fragments of memory, experience, and perception into unexpected configurations, generative algorithms can be seen as another kind of dream-making mechanism.

Tracing Archetypes asks what happens when we give such mechanisms the task of dreaming and what traces of our own ways of imagining might appear in what they produce.

Responsive Dreams, Granollers, Spain – September 2025