Machine's Dream [Umwelt]

Do Machines Dream?

Machine's Dream [Umwelt] explores the emergence of dreams within the Umwelt of machines through sound and moving image.

Just as every living organism inhabits its own unique perceptual world, computers may also exist within a mode of perception fundamentally different from our own. Within this world, vast streams of network traffic, CPU activity, and fragments of system logs are continuously generated, processed, and discarded.

If dreams are a means by which humans reorganize memory and experience, might the processing of logs and data within a machine also be understood as a form of dreaming?

If we were to accept the machine's Umwelt as a world equal to our own, what would we see?

Through this work, viewers are invited to reconsider new forms of nature emerging from computation, and to reflect on the distance that exists between human and machine perception.