Dream Painter

2021 Interactive robotic art installation

Photo by Tabakalera

Dream Painter is an interactive robotic art installation that turns the audience's dreams into a collective painting. Tell your dream that you saw last night to a robot and the machine will paint it! The artwork consists of multiple parts: interaction station, painting robot, a kinetic and animated mechanism that moves the paper roll when one drawing is finished, and creative coding that transforms a spoken word to art on the canvas (we use machine learning (AI) for that). The robot paints with 8 colors. We all dream. Some dreams we remember in the morning, some are just gone. Often, the ones we record we hardly understand until the end. Well-known psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud has dedicated a lot of effort in understanding the human unconscious through analysing dreams. Freud was convinced in the power of the dreamworld when understanding the human mind. In his famous book Interpretation of Dreams he states the following: “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” (Sigmund Freud, 1899) The artwork poses several important questions, like: can machine understand our unconscious? What happens if algorithms will be able to make sense of our dreams, understand us better than we do? Is there a limit of trust when it comes to the relationship between humanity and technology? Dream Painter was commissioned by and co-produced with Tabakalera and Tekniker. Supported by Cultural Endowment of Estonia.