type
Mixed media interactive installation
year
2025
description
DreamAtlas is a participatory web platform and artwork that transforms the intimate act of dream-sharing into an exploration of a collective subconscious.
On the platform users are invited to anonymously contribute their dreams, which are analyzed through natural language processing to detect emotional tones, recurring symbols, and thematic resonances. Instead of categorizing them, the system lets connections emerge organically, positioning each dream as a node within an ever-growing constellation. In this map, dreams that share emotions or imagery (such as falling, flying, losing teeth, or encountering the unknown) gravitate toward one another, revealing subtle threads that bind individual subconscious experiences into a shared landscape.
The experience is intentionally simple and all the submissions are anonymous. There are no profiles, no comments, no metrics: only quiet proximity, and above all, no surveillance. No personal data are collected, and the platform deliberately avoids the use of cookies and tracking tools such as Google Analytics.
Alongside the online platform, DreamAtlas also exists as an installation that reimagines the telescope, a tool traditionally used to gaze outward into space, as an interface for navigating the dream constellation. Visitors can look through a real repurposed telescope, modified and equipped with electronics by the artists, and explore the same generative map in an embodied, tactile way.
Next to the telescope, in addition, a screen shows live updates of the constellation. Visitors are encouraged to contribute to the constellation via the online platform. When a new dream is submitted, it’s added in real time to the constellation and shown on the screen. Along it are shown the most similar dreams, and a brief description of how is the last dream relates to the rest of the constellation is being generated.
This physical installation has been already shown at the Da Fest 10, in Sofia (Bulgaria), and at the Ars Electronica Festival 2025 in Linz (Austria), where it was also granted an honorary mention from the Campus Award.
DreamAtlas began as a collaborative practice of dream journaling among artists and friends, gradually evolving into a digital space for collective reflection. As the constellation grows, DreamAtlas also becomes a living archive of collective imagination, offering potential for artistic, psychological, and linguistic research. By rendering dreams as interconnected stars in a shared sky, it invites us to wonder not only what our dreams mean, but how they might mean together.
You can check it at dreamatlas.cloud
exhibitions
Ars Electronica Festival 2025 (AT)
DA Fest 2025 (BG)
awards
Honorary Mention - Ars Electronica Campus Award 2025
