Onirica () is an audiovisual work that explores the dimension of dreams, interpreting through synthetic languages the creative ability of the human mind during sleep. Through the use of algorithms capable of translating textual content into images, Onirica () brings tales of night visions back into the domain of the visible, proposing novel reflections on the relationship between human and machine, between tool and creator.

Dreams are experiences that have united and fascinated humanity since its origins. During sleep, our window to reality closes and gives way to a particular state of consciousness where thoughts and sometimes bizarre dream narratives follow one another, projected in our minds like cinematic sequences that are at times vivid and extremely defined. The stuff of dreams comes almost entirely from perceptions of the external world during wakefulness and exploits a reorganisation of memories that integrates experiences with fantasies, desires and more or less recurrent thoughts.

An increasingly common protagonist of scientific research, dreams are the subject of studies that have the goal of understanding their features and characteristics. It is precisely thanks to the collaboration with two dream banks, the first from the University of Bologna and the second from the University of California Santa Cruz, that Onirica () came to life: through meetings with researchers, data were transformed into narrative elements, stories into visions, elaborating a project that would relate the scientific method to the fluidity and creative mutability of oneiric activity.

The work transforms into a collective experience the dreams of volunteers who participated in research sessions at the two universities. Selected from a base of 28,748 dreams, the plots flow one into the other as a series of short films, tracing the actual cadence of NREM and REM dreams present over the course of a night's sleep. The sequences are artificially generated by a machine learning system that translates the text of dreams into a series of subsequent hallucinations that bring to life the characters, object, and landscapes described.

‍Onirica () is a site-specific audiovisual installation produced by fuse* with the support of INOTA Festival and Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo.