The Wandering Mind

Does the Earth dream? Can our dreams mesh? In The Wandering Mind, the pervasive sensing, fiber and neural networks covering our planet meet us in our sleep, drawing source material from vast online stores of field recordings and sensor data. For this year’s festival, we ask our AI to dream in the sounds of water and currents, retelling the myth of Tiamat, the sea mother whose life takes a tragic turn when her rebellious children seek power. The story mirrors our modern relationship with Earth’s oceans.

The Wandering Mind

In dreams, we become free of the unrelenting coherence waking life imposes; free to sink into the swamps of planetary perception. The Freudian dream-work finds its match in a class of self-supervised AIs, neural networks tasked to learn concise representations of raw data, and whose operation hinges on a kind of iterative, suffusing imagination.

For this year’s festival, we paint a dream with sounds of water and currents: a retelling of the myth of Tiamat, the sea mother whose life takes a tragic turn when her rebellious children seek power. The story mirrors our modern relationship with Earth’s oceans.

The listening experience is shared online. Though we may remain confined to our homes, our minds are always free to wander. We recommend settling into a darkened, comfy corner. Consider synchronizing your nap with a distant friend to share the dream.