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.
Credits
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.
The early prototype of the Wandering Mind is a production of slow immediate and our collaborators Nan Zhao and Nick Gillian.
Special thanks to our Buenos Aires residency host and mentor, Mariano Sardón and the MUNTREF Art and Science Center team in Buenos Aires, particularly Rocío Pilar.
Thanks to Philippe Esling of IRCAM for his advice and guidance in the summer of 2020. Thanks to Enzo Tagliazucchi, our expert advisor on the science of dreams, and Marcos Trevisan.
Thanks to Jessica Galirow and Veronika Liebl for their continuing guidance through the process.