Mirek “Amendant” Hardiker, author of Zaum Gadget, cult videogame/maze for Hypercard and former researcher at SRU (Stanford), has built a huge Dream Report Dataset (DRD), covering a time span of about 21 years on a daily basis. His monumental work is the base for the creation of a human-labelled dataset. Neural networks are trained on this dataset to generate a novel — that serves as a script — in which characters seems to come alive and materialize as archetypes from a synthetic underworld. The projects furtherly inspects the strange relationship between emotions and algorithms (already explored in Adversarial Feelings), through the lens of James Hillman’s work on archetypes and oneiric narratives.

Co-commissioned by Elevate Festival (Re-Imagine Europe), Superbudda and Re:Humanism.