The Wandering Mind: You start to wonder whether it's a dream

You start to wonder...

Here, under the blue sky, pink patterns filter through trees. Out there, the sounds of children playing, a bicycle squeak, a city churning.

...whether it's a dream.

Here, under yellow light, the dead of night. Out there, a heavy chill, an electric hum, an owl’s sharp shrill, a city suspended.

Rest at ease. This is not a park. It is a portal to all the parks in the world.

“The Wandering Mind” is an AI system for dream states. Sampling and recomposing tiny fragments of sound from thousands of global field recordings it finds online, the system generates a winding dream journey for sleeping audiences. In this Athens edition, we enter at Pedion tou Areos, a site where public sleep has had many faces. We respond to this year, in which stay-at-home orders have torn old social fabrics and mass uprisings have constituted new ones, and in which public parks have played a pivotal and transformative role.

We convene a collective action of sleeping together. Through a daily sound bath at sundown, we travel through parks and urban 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.

Title: The Wandering Mind: You start to wonder whether it's a dream

Medium: online listening experience

Artist: slow immediate

Year: 2020

Location: online daily at 20:00 in "You and AI"

Credits

The artists acknowledge the generous support of Ars Electronica Linz and the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab, which granted the artists a residency in 2019. "The Wandering Mind" was produced with engineering support from Nicholas Gillian and Nan Zhao / Nayo. Research and development on the AI platform is underway at DVIC, Paris, with the support of Pôle Leonard de Vinci.

Glossary: Artificial Intelligence (AI)