Installation of The Wandering Mind at Athens, supported by Onassis Foundation
You start to wonder
whether it’s a dream
The Wandering Mind is an AI-powered performance platform for shaping dreams with the sounds of our world. Sampling and recomposing tiny fragments of sound from tens of thousands of global field recordings found online, the system generates a winding sound journey for sleeping and meditating audiences.
In our curated performances, group naps and guided mind-wanderings, dream guides convene a collective action of sleeping together. We respond to the past years, in which stay-at-home orders have torn old social fabrics and mass uprisings have constituted new ones. Both digital and physical public spaces have played a pivotal and transformative role.
In micro-sampled sound baths, we travel through parks and public spaces across the world, paying tribute to human habitats of social distance and safe gathering, makeshift shelter and tenuous refuge, mass uprising and fresh air. We invite you to affirm public space and everyone who occupies it by drifting to sleep wherever you find yourself.
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2023 - “Plásmata II/ Ioannina”, Onassis Stegi, Athens, Greece
2021 - “You and AI: Through the Algorithmic Lens”, Pedion Areos Park in Athens, with guest artist Xiao Xiao (US)
2021 Software v2 Launch; In-person performance with local musicians’ improvisation - MAXlive: The Neuroverse, New York Live Arts
2020 Three-day online streaming program with Ars Electronica
Latent space data projection on 2-D space
Our Research
Collective dream and non-anthropocentric storytelling
Dream-making is world-making. Like many other lucid dream practitioners, the artist sees our subconsciousness with the ability to comprehend far more complex, indecipherable meanings and experiences than our waking minds. A collective dream, in which we become water, carrying memories of the Earth to the current day, is an embodied ecological experience. It is a ritual, an imagination and a meditation on ecosystem, environment and planetary health.
Dream-work and AI-learning
In the past few years, the artist’s studio has investigated how planetary-scale sensing and AI is becoming our collective peripheral nervous system, an externalized sensory processor through which worlds of sensor data fold into conscious and subconscious life. Though a person who is awake might not be able to comprehend its scale and complexity, the dream-work itself has an extraordinary counterpart in a class of state-of-the-art AI techniques for digesting and organizing massive global data. Sampling tiny fragments of sound from tens of thousands of recordings, our unique soundscape platform The Wandering Mind generates a winding sonic journey for sleeping and meditating audiences.
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2021 NIME2021 Publication - The Wandering Mind: Planetary Scale Dreaming in Latent Spaces
2021 Research Residency: at DVIC, Paris, with the support of Pôle Leonard de Vinci.
2019 Research Residency: Ars Electronica & The European ARTificial Intelligence Lab (AILab)
a sonic, subconscious dream experience
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a sonic, subconscious dream experience 〰️
The performer navigates through a sonic latent space map while the sleeper lies on a mat for 30-40 minutes, dozing off. The performer balances the sleeper’s trajectory into sleep, allowing quiet periods to lull the sleeper into hypnagogia and moving through louder areas to stir the sleeper awake again.
The audience is invited to lie down simultaneously and allow themselves to drift off.
Data visualization of our soundscape
Our Team
The Wandering Mind was first supported by the Ars Electronica and the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab (AILab), which granted the artist’s studio, slow immediate LLC, a residency in 2019, as well as from the Onassis Foundation and MAXMachina. The studio performed various times with the platforms using different data sites since 2020, from online streaming (Ars Electronica, 2020), public installation (“You and AI: Through the Algorithmic Lens”, Pedion Areos Park in Athens, 2021) to in-person events with local musicians’ improvisation ( MAXlive: 2021 The Neuroverse, New York Live Arts, 2021). The academic research and technical development on the Wandering Mind platform have been supported by MUNTREF Arte-Ciencia in Buenos Aires and DVIC in Pôle Leonard de Vinci, Paris.
Meanwhile, the lead artist works closely with dream researchers and neuroscientists from MIT - including the Engineering Dreams Workshop, Harvard, and Stanford to ensure both the feasibility and the ethics of induced dream journeys.