The Pozu Santa Bárbara (PZSB) is the first mining shaft declared with the highest category of heritage protection in Spain, being listed since 2008 as an Asset of Cultural Interest, BIC. Located in La Rebaldana, Turón, in the council of Mieres, in 2021 it began its transformation to become a reference centre for contemporary artistic interventions, having hosted since that year local and international artists of the stature of Anthony McCall, Herminio, Regine Schumann and, recently, also curated by L.E.V., Andy Thomas and his project Visual Bird Sounds.
Now, curated by L.E.V. (Laboratory of Visual Electronics), the PZSB presents the latest project by the Italian art studio fuse*: Onirica (). This audiovisual work explores the dimension of dreams, interpreting through synthetic languages the creative capacity of the human mind while sleeping. Through the use of algorithms capable of translating texts into images, the installation brings our nocturnal narratives into the realm of the visible, posing new reflections on the relationship between human beings and machines, between the tool and the creator.
The work transforms the dreams of the volunteers who participated in the previous research sessions at the University of Bologna and the University of California Santa Cruz into a collective experience. Selected from a database of 28,748 dreams, the plots of this piece flow into each other like a series of short films, tracing the actual cadence of dreams present throughout a night in their different REM and NREM phases. The visual sequences are artificially generated by a machine learning system that translates the dream descriptions into a series of subsequent visual hallucinations that bring the characters, objects and landscapes to life.
This continuous flow of synthetic consciousness finds its final aesthetic through the close collaboration between human beings and artificial intelligence: although the machine proposes infinite possible translations of stories in images and voices, it does not possess any kind of decision-making capacity.
The audiovisual installation Onirica () accentuates the tension created by the interpretation and translation of a purely human experience, the dream, through the eyes of new technologies. Situated within an increasingly relevant ethical debate, the work aims to address from an unprecedented and exploratory point of view the relationship between strictly human sensitivity and the creative capacity of artificial intelligence systems, seeking to discover their potential and limitations, and to generate in the spectator a critical and conscious thought about the possible impact of these technologies on society and on the perception of ourselves.
SABEK collaborates with Silence to promote its new concept and campaign ‘The City in On Mode’.
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