What roles do sleep/dreams play in shaping our society and relationships, and how are new technologies changing our relationship to sleep? We starting from the idea of sleep/dream experience as a shared resource at risk of degradation in a modern world of light pollution, screens, and other stressors. In addition to reviewing recent research and technology developments, we compared diverse media arts projects and artistic practices relating to dreams (everyone in our group being an artist). We examined various mainstream attitudes toward dreaming, and worked to identify collective, social, and surreal alternative frameworks for dream experience. The group became especially relevant as we navigated a pandemic, sharing our own virus dreams and comparing them to other historical instances of social dreaming - in contrast to mainstream portrayals of dreams as an essentially individual, internal experience. We practiced collective associative writing, journaling, and discussion, and began developing an online interactive project to express a collective dream experience. The group is continuing to meet to develop the project, along with a web archive of research, to be completed by end of summer 2020.

Organized by Sara Suárez | saravsuarez.com | @metempsychosis

Documentation / Resources

Group members

Sara Suárez, Mary Marxen, Hop Nguyen, Talia Shea Levin and Alice Yuan Zhang

Microgrant

This ASSEMBLY group used their microgrant ($225) to cover ongoing project production costs.